yeahh cali!!!

PastaCats wrote:

GO TEAM NEW JERSEY!

Also is there a set time for when the first tourney match will be streamed on the 30th, sorry if it was said Im really stupid.

The first match's time will be determined by wednesday, when i have word from captains with what times are good for their respective teams' schedules

TheBronyGames wrote:

I've always seen "group Stage" refer to the first round, so i just stick with it, if it's incorrect, then i have a habit to try to break

as I understand it, groups refer to a section of a tourney where there are a significant amount of teams grouped into sections where a round-robin is played, and then the top few teams (amount determined by the TO) are them seeded and a bracket is made.

Why are some states starting in round 2? Are they not playing the first round, or do they face winner of the two beneath them?

CALI BOYS

Match times have been posted for week 1! Captains, if these times aren't good for your schedules, LET ME KNOW ASAP!

What the... Why is this map in the no-mod pool? https://osu.ppy.sh/s/301703

Minhtam wrote:

What the... Why is this map in the no-mod pool? https://osu.ppy.sh/s/301703

easy

Minhtam wrote:

What the... Why is this map in the no-mod pool? https://osu.ppy.sh/s/301703

Uh...why not?

Minhtam wrote:

What the... Why is this map in the no-mod pool? https://osu.ppy.sh/s/301703

of all the maps in the nomod pool to gripe about....

Minhtam wrote:

What the... Why is this map in the no-mod pool? https://osu.ppy.sh/s/301703

Please explain.

Minhtam wrote:

What the... Why is this map in the no-mod pool? https://osu.ppy.sh/s/301703

I don't get what you're complaining about, https://osu.ppy.sh/s/317275 is easier, https://osu.ppy.sh/s/204453 is longer, it's mapped really well, and there are plenty of harder maps in all pools.

If you could let the captains know that their match time and date had been changed, that'd be great. Thanks.

Thank you for absolutely 0 notification that our schedule was changed, and for not getting back to me when I messaged you in game. We can't play in 3 hours.

Agree with everyone else, I don't think Colorado will be able to play today either unless it is much later tonight. schedule was moved an hour ahead atleast.

You might wanna reschedule the missed games for next weekend (or something along those lines.)

Edit: postponed, let me know the time asap, thanks

new york vs missouri 1v1 l o l
what a joke

Smoothie World wrote:

Thank you for absolutely 0 notification that our schedule was changed, and for not getting back to me when I messaged you in game. We can't play in 3 hours.

I agree with Smoothie. I never was notified that our match was switched to the 30th. You guys seriously need to msg us so we know...

is this some sort of joke

Can you please set a fixed schedule a few days before it's actually time to play? You can't just change times on a whim like that without letting teams know and expect them to comply to these changes.

Xilver wrote:

is this some sort of joke

Can you please set a fixed schedule a few days before it's actually time to play? You can't just change times on a whim like that without letting teams know and expect them to comply to these changes.

Fangzy wrote:

Smoothie World wrote:

Thank you for absolutely 0 notification that our schedule was changed, and for not getting back to me when I messaged you in game. We can't play in 3 hours.

I agree with Smoothie. I never was notified that our match was switched to the 30th. You guys seriously need to msg us so we know...

ChitogeOP wrote:

Agree with everyone else, I don't think Colorado will be able to play today either unless it is much later tonight. schedule was moved an hour ahead atleast.

You might wanna reschedule the missed games for next weekend (or something along those lines.)

Edit: postponed, let me know the time asap, thanks

I thought I sent messages out notifying of changes that occurred due to schedule conflicts with other teams, if you did not receive them, i wholeheartedly apologize, and I promise to make sure that something like this doesn't happen again

TheBronyGames wrote:

I thought I sent messages out notifying of changes that occurred due to schedule conflicts with other teams, if you did not receive them, i wholeheartedly apologize, and I promise to make sure that something like this doesn't happen again

It's still ridiculous to be changing match times with less than two days' time before the match itself. This is just not something that should be done, personal schedules will have been adjusted and it's unfair to all members involved to have such short notice leaving teams in a position that they may not be able to realistically compete with their opponents due to sudden changes. I really hope next week doesn't have this sort of behavior and that communication is orders of magnitude better than it was this week.

I also was not notified, and learned that my schedule has been changed on the day. While it is on the weekends I also have some things to do (shopping, cleaning, finishing up work, etc) that is necessary. If you could set up a definite schedule around wednesday i can actually modify my schedule to fit the tourney time. I wasted few hours warming up and waiting for match to start when i could have finished my necessities.
Also secondly while I understand this is a new thing for the staff, but waiting 5 minutes for a mappick is sort of ridiculous. If the schedule is going to be tight (an hour for a bo7 with >5min maps) it would run a lot more smoother if you are able to set time for everything. for example you could say, warmup needs to be shorter than 4mins, map should be picked with in a minute, and so on. Also there were many issues during our match (mentioned earlier 5min for mappick, wrong map chosen by staff).
Lastly stream is not going that well. The computer obviously couldnt handle the client running, and the commentating was, sorry to say, not commentating. I can see that it is hard to commentate while the client lag, but all i heard when I was looking back was "wow" "carry by *** (this person is prioritized)" etc. I did not hear things like "miss by ***! this will cost the team a lot, but the other team's acc is not helping them out point wise" or something like that, the overall excitement was missing, which was sort of disappointing knowing there are countless talents out there playing.
Hopefully Im not being too rude, but i hope my opinion matters.
I loved seeing some of the unnoticed talent, hoping to see more soon :3

Yeah, as far as my reffing is concerned. I won't deny it was pretty bad. So I won't make any excuses for it. I'll be looking to improve over the next weeks with it and I'd appreciate any feedback you guys can give me.

There are a lot of things that can and most importantly should be fixed if you plan on holding any other sort of tournament. This is especially important if you plan on running this similar to the OWC. Please note that these are strictly my opinion, so don't go bashing me for it.

Match Schedules
Most people playing are teenagers. Some have part time jobs and others don't. What this means is, you can plan a schedule only 3-4 days before a match. If you need to reschedule, not only do you have very minimal time, but then you also might have to reschedule multiple people. Schedules need to be posted at least 1 week in advance of the matches. This gives ample time to reschedule, and for teams to plan out their match. Also, if a team is not ready on the day of the match (unless of an emergency), it is 100% their fault. They should be disqualified and not be offered "get out of jail free cards" such as: "Just play 3v3 or 2v2 etc". Which brings me to my next point.

Referee Leniency
The referee for my match was way to soft towards the opposing team. My team as all accounted for at the start of our match, but the opposing team had only 3 of 5 players there. Instead of waiting for someone to show up within 10-15 minutes, they we're allowed to play, changing the game to a 3v3 format. Not only is this completely unfair, but then a 4th member of the team showed up an hour after the match. I'm not saying if a player isn't available at the start he shouldn't play. What I mean is, if your team isn't ready to play, not only should they not be able to play, but a player coming in an hour after the set match time should not be allowed to participate.

Map Pool
I don't agree with a lot of the picks in this pool mainly because of their length or difficulty. Most of the maps are very slider and stream heavy, which is understandable. The big issue with Scorev2 is the strictness of sliders. Some of these maps play way too much into that for this early on in the tournament. Algebra (which was used in the semifinals in OWC) is a fine example of this. Due to the high quantity of fast and tricky sliders, this map is very difficult to accuracy let alone full combo. The first set of maps should not be difficult to fc. They shouldn't be easy, but something that provides a fair challenge. It might be better to consult higher ranked player or mapper to evaluate your map pool before making it official.

Commentating
The commentating was just plain awful. I couldn't tell how many people were actually commentating because, for the most part, there was just dead air. Nobody was saying anything. Every now and again someone would peep up saying something about the game at hand but, if that's all you're going to do, you practically useless. With games as slow and anticlimactic as these, I can figure out who missed and who won myself. Please at least add some cheesy banter between commentators, or at least try to interact with the audience. The stream was painfully boring.

General Thoughts
For the little bit I was in this tournament I felt no sense of real urgency or seriousness. Almost as if the whole this was made and run haphazardly with nobody making sure everything was running smoothly. I see that you are trying to run everything yourself: hosting, reffing, commentating, but you need someone to supervise everything. You clearly have to much on your plate and you can't make sure everything is going to work. Try to find more people interesting in taking on these roles, rather than having the same person do everything. This means you and everyone else have more time to prepare, and ensure that everybody has a good experience.

Please remember that everything said is my general opinion on the matter. If you have anything to add or argue about, please reply so that the next time a tournament like this is made, we can make sure we wont have these issues.

Thanks for the very constructive criticism! I can't speak on the other issues, but as for the mappool:

-We decided initially to choose maps based exclusively on quality and suitability, and decided not to take length as a significant factor. We've seen that this has displeased a few people and made the tourney somewhat more difficult to run, so we'll be making length a much stricter criteria in the next mappool. Thanks for the input, the more people we have complaining, the finer we can tweak our fixes!

-The difficulty of maps was due to our own calculations of the average rank of players participating. While we recommended 5k and above, our spreadsheets showed us that the largest concentration of players were actually quite higher ranked than 5k. We based our choices around this concentration, hence the high difficulty of maps. Regardless, this is still a legitimate complaint, and I don't want to hide behind excuses: we will be sure to correct this in the next mappool.

I appreciate your detailed response <3

Map Pool

I don't agree with a lot of the picks in this pool mainly because of their length or difficulty. Most of the maps are very slider and stream heavy, which is understandable. The big issue with Scorev2 is the strictness of sliders. Some of these maps play way too much into that for this early on in the tournament. Algebra (which was used in the semifinals in OWC) is a fine example of this. Due to the high quantity of fast and tricky sliders, this map is very difficult to accuracy let alone full combo. The first set of maps should not be difficult to fc. They shouldn't be easy, but something that provides a fair challenge. It might be better to consult higher ranked player or mapper to evaluate your map pool before making it official.

Thank you for nice feedback, will make sure to rise quality of next mappool to make it more fun and balanced for all players.
Cheers!

Tfw TBG thinks I'm not setting up score v2 correctly

as far as im concerned its not the individual staff thats doing horrible but rather that there just isnt enough people to run it compared to the amount of games there are. at this competitiveness and the amount of games played, i would think there should at least be 8 or so people who are available at almost any time to reduce any issues and to have multiple matches at one time so that the schedule wouldnt be so tight. Also the amount of work the staff has to do (from experience) is pretty insane, and making the small amount of team to be under this much pressure in such short time is cruel, sorry to say. At least when i was a part of a small staff team for a tourney, i was exhausted afterwards. Doing this every weekend must be tough for them, so im not going to dis the staff member completely.

If you guys need it, once our team is out (whenever that may happen, i donno) I would not mind helping out with things such as map selection and refereeing on some occasions. Please try and do your best, and i hope this tourney ends well overall.

i have to ask, when you say that you found a substantial amount of players to be well past the 5k mark, did you do this based on raw numbers, or on who'd be competing? While a team like texas or california has their entire roster full of very strong players, there are others where the quality drops very quickly after the first two or three players. While numerically, seeing a bulk of players in a certain range may make it seem like that's going to be an active skill range, the active playerbase skill (i.e. the level at which teams will be competing) may very well be worse than that simply because certain teams are much stronger than others and have more of (for instance) the 3digit players.

0120 wrote:

as far as im concerned its not the individual staff thats doing horrible but rather that there just isnt enough people to run it compared to the amount of games there are.

Seconded, the staff is clearly trying their best and I commend that. If you guys need assistance I would be happy to help as well.

HulbeH wrote:

i have to ask, when you say that you found a substantial amount of players to be well past the 5k mark, did you do this based on raw numbers, or on who'd be competing? While a team like texas or california has their entire roster full of very strong players, there are others where the quality drops very quickly after the first two or three players. While numerically, seeing a bulk of players in a certain range may make it seem like that's going to be an active skill range, the active playerbase skill (i.e. the level at which teams will be competing) may very well be worse than that simply because certain teams are much stronger than others and have more of (for instance) the 3digit players.

We did the check based on raw numbers, yes. When we saw the spreadsheet during our initial check before we started composing the mappool, though, the majority of people who had signed up were within this high skill group, and there were very few outside of that range, so we didn't really think it through much further.

But yeah, you have a good point. We definitely can improve on the mappool in this regard. That said, my initial concern was that we'd pick maps that were too easy...at least I didn't get that wrong!

Well, here's another thing in regards to feedback: If a team (or in this case, state) has less than 4 players, the team shouldn't even be allowed to play. Allowing a player from one state to have a 4x multiplier just because he's the only person that can represent that state will be seen as unfair to the Twitch viewers watching the tournament, which causes some terrible PR.

Also, you need to consider that since half the player base are high school teenagers, you probably don't want to hold a tournament in the middle of February when they have school to worry about.

As it is, my honest suggestion would be to cancel the tournament as it is, go back to the drawing board, figure out what you need to improve on in all sides. Then announce a new United States Cup in April, with the matches to be held in June/July/August. You want to hold multiple rounds of registration as well to ensure that each state has a team to represent (example, Person A lives in California but attended the University of Connecticut in college. Person A could register for Connecticut after the first round of registration after finding out that California is full)

(and for the record, given the quality of some of the teams that participated in the first round, your initial mappool was too hard. there was a reason I withdrew Connecticut from the tournament)

Honestly I would just scrap the whole idea of having a player's score multiplied by 4 if he's the only one playing and just disqualify him or put him in another state. I'd easily win the whole thing if I was allowed to play alone for Texas because as a captain it is much easier to worry about your own score than the scores of 3 other people playing with you. This method of scoring is really illogical and unbalanced and I wouldn't be surprised if one-man states would go very far up in the tournament because of how easy they have it for them.

Xilver wrote:

Honestly I would just scrap the whole idea of having a player's score multiplied by 4 if he's the only one playing and just disqualify him or put him in another state. I'd easily win the whole thing if I was allowed to play alone for Texas because as a captain it is much easier to worry about your own score than the scores of 3 other people playing with you. This method of scoring is really illogical and unbalanced and I wouldn't be surprised if one-man states would go very far up in the tournament because of how easy they have it for them.

I agree, and setting up 1v1/2v2 matches wouldn't be a good idea because it's meant to be a full team based tournament, like owc.

mappool reveal at showcase question mark
??

Mahogany wrote:

-The difficulty of maps was due to our own calculations of the average rank of players participating. While we recommended 5k and above, our spreadsheets showed us that the largest concentration of players were actually quite higher ranked than 5k. We based our choices around this concentration, hence the high difficulty of maps. Regardless, this is still a legitimate complaint, and I don't want to hide behind excuses: we will be sure to correct this in the next mappool.

This is still a major failing as far as the map pool goes. Regardless of what your spreadsheet says, if the recommended cutoff is 5k then the first round map pool better be targeting 5k. Each map pool specifically should target a certain rank that gradually increases.

Also, there seems to be great inconsistencies in the difficulty levels of the maps. Gimmick maps are fine but you should at least make sure they are consistent in difficulty with the non gimmick maps. Algebra and Rally go Round are both around the same star rating with one being a gimmick map and the other being a super straight forward consistency map. They should not be in the same pool. It's similar to consistency in mapping when people bitch about random cross screen jumps in an otherwise 4* map.

The map pool just seems all over the fucking place but since I'm not playing anyways I didn't bother to comment until now.

I rather call them "Technical" maps instead of "Gimmick" maps

No mappool showcase this week? I see week 2 mappool already out, or did I miss the stream?

So some countries did infact get a free ticker to round 2? I know you said something about challonge not being able to list so many teams but i still find that unfair, you could of manually made a bracket.

Mahogany wrote:

I rather call them "Technical" maps instead of "Gimmick" maps

Same difference. Point remains that you should choose those maps from a star rating significantly lower than that of your basic easy to read consistency checks. Even the people who have really good reading will stuggle to play those maps at the same star level as the harder easy to read maps they can play.

bad mappool. you took a huge step back in difficulty from the first map pool (which was too hard for the first round anyways). if anything, the maps should be at around the same difficulty as the previous maps. just my input on things