Editor’s note: The views expressed in this article are solely those of the writer, and do not reflect Shoryuken.com as a whole.
Last time out, I talked about all the things we needed to put in place before we could get Manila Cup 2016 running. However, there was one more important thing that I didn’t talk about that is necessary for any event: people. No matter what has already laid out for the event, whether it be sponsors, a sick venue, large prize pool, etc., if I didn’t have people I could trust to do their jobs well, then Manila Cup would have been a massive failure from the get go.
Here’s the kicker though, the kind of trust and confidence that is necessary for running an event as large as Manila Cup isn’t something you build overnight. The tournament organization team at Imperium, as well as the volunteer staff that we brought in, are all people who I’ve worked with organizing and running events long before the first Manila Cup. In fact, most of the tournament team at Imperium had been running events–with and without me–long before Imperium was even formed.
Having an experienced tournament team means that we could keep our organization as flat as possible. This means that less the people involved spend less time having to confer with “higher up” when issues come up, since they’re pretty much all aware of the proper ways to deal with these issues.
This of course applies not only to the tournament itself, but also to the days leading up to the tournament, when the team is busy preparing for it. In our case, this meant that we were doing one of two things, either working to make sure all our consoles had the necessary software and updates to run the games, or running off to talk to sponsors, suppliers, and the like.
Now, while we’d like to focus on getting the consoles ready, having to talk to sponsors, suppliers, and press (Sports Illustrated eSports Philippines was doing a massive amount of coverage for the event) during the lead-up to the event is a necessary evil that takes up time from the former. This is especially true in our case, where we’re still a relatively small team and everyone has to pitch in, even Imperium CEO IPT.Prime was busy updating the consoles to be used for the event. Happily, the rest of the team knew to step in and share the load. Instead of having all the work done at Imperium’s main gaming house, we split the work, with the consoles being loaned to us by other players being prepped and updated by other members of the team. Even some IPT players who were competing volunteered to help out with the prep work.
Another benefit of having a good team is that people are willing to lend out stuff to help. One of our team lent us their cargo van during the Friday before to help bring gear to the venue. Other things that team members and volunteers brought along for the event without being asked to include various bits of gear including laptops, power and video cables, and even an entire recording setup. While we didn’t necessarily need all these things, we were able to find uses for most of these.
The main reason you need an experienced, trustworthy team is to deal with any issues that occur during the event itself. For Manila Cup, our biggest concern was making sure that we stuck to our schedule. Despite the jokes about all fighting game community events running on “tournament standard time,” we wanted to make sure that we ran our event as quickly and efficiently as possible. Now, this isn’t just for a sense of pride, it’s also a very practical concern. Most venues, including ours, have strict timetables that must be followed. Any delays could lead to further delays if we failed to finish each day’s schedule before the specified cut-off.
Aside from the schedule, there were two big headaches that resulted because of the venue. The first was with the air-conditioning at the event. Despite the venue having four large five-ton air-conditioning units, we couldn’t run the air conditioning early on to pre-cool the venue before we opened the gates; venue administration gave us a specific time (9:30 AM) for when we could turn them on. This meant that by the time people started coming it at around 10:00 AM, the venue wasn’t cool enough. To try and address this, we made sure that the air conditioning units were turned on full blast as early as possible on the second day, while at the same time making sure that there was plenty of water and refreshments on-hand for attendees.
The other big issue that we had to deal with that was brought on by the fact that the venue–the Acropolis Club House–was inside a gated subdivision. We chose the venue due to XSplit’s (our venue sponsor) recommendation, since the area was guaranteed to have strong internet–a must in a country known for having overpriced internet with limited bandwidth. To head off any issues with getting players in, we had already talked to the subdivision administration and security on making sure that people with the appropriate passes (which we had given out to players via email the week before) could get in. However, there were still problems with getting some of the foreign players in, due to the guards having issues with their IDs. This was defused by sending one of our team to the guard house to smooth things over with them.
Aside from those, the only other issues that came up were–as expected–things related to our schedule. The Mortal Kombat XL tournament was taking longer than expected, despite being the event with the lowest number of entrants. The BlazBlue Chronophantasma Extend tournament on the other hand was finishing much quicker. As such, we decided to switch the stream schedule around, with BlazBlue and Guilty Gear taking place first, and the Mortal Kombat XL following afterwards.
This move however did introduce another problem. One of the top 4 finalists for BlazBlue had his Street Fighter V pool at nearly the same time as the stream matches for the former were taking place. Our solution to this was to move the Street Fighter V pools around, delaying his pool matches while he was on stream. This was helped by the fact that we had decided not to give out exact times for the pools, requiring players to be at the venue as early as possible. Add to this the fact that we discovered that we had a surplus of consoles for Street Fighter V, we were able to organically adjust the pools to make sure that everything was running as close to on schedule as possible.
The only other delay was due to issues with the stream. Right in the middle of top 32 near the end of day 1, XSplit Louis “Offcast” Vigil decided to take the stream down for awhile to adjust the settings and reconnect to a different Twitch server. To keep to our schedule, we decided to move some of the matches scheduled to be on-stream to off-stream setups. We ended up prioritizing those matches with the players most stream viewers would be more familiar with, over those with less-known local players.
By day two, which only hosted the Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 top 8 and Street Fighter V top 16, most of the problems had been smoothed out. With every match now being streamed, there was less to be concerned for regarding scheduling.
The only thing were were concerned about was whether or not people would be too busy playing casuals to watch the action on stage. Originally, we had planned to shut down all the consoles on day 2. However, one of our sponsors had asked if we could leave some setups running for players to use during the second day. In the end however, this never really turned into anything big as everyone was too focused on watching the matches on stage. Even among the competitors, only a few took time out to warm up before going in for their matches.
At a little past 5:46 PM on Sunday, the final Street Fighter V match between Evil Geniuses’ Justin Wong and Zowie’s Gamerbee concluded. We had done it, we had overcome to so-called sophomore slump and put on a bigger, better Manila Cup. More importantly, we had done it on time, with about 10 or so minutes to spare on our projected 6:00 PM end time. We had done it while being able to handle the many issues that eventually pop up in any event, especially one as big as this one.
All that was left for us was to close out the event, start packing up, and run the gauntlet of players, industry partners, and press wanting to congratulate us, or in the case of the latter conduct a final round of interviews. Once all that was done, when the crowd had gone and all the setups had been packed away, the team sat around on what had been the main stage and asked ourselves “when do we start work for next year’s Manila Cup?”
Photo c/o the Imperium Pro Team
