This was the most deflating tournament ive ever played in taiko so far.
- extremely terrible map choices that was quite dubious at best
- refusing to fix a stupidly difficult semi finals mappool because of a particular map selector's lazyness that went on to commit sodoku and completely ditch the tournament ENTIRELY
- a lack of basic staff such as refs
- not even a single match was streamed (which normally i wouldnt complain about however when compared to last year's A!TT which had at least 75% streamed+commentated by yours truely, quite disappointing)
These are just some of the factors that lead to everything that a bad tournament has: ZERO hype amongst players. When that happens, nobody cared and didnt bother practicing (which i couldnt blame them considering the tournament circumstances). Which turned the tournament as a whole into a drag that also carried over an extra week than intended. Shoutout to Jaye who was suppose to be dead/commentator at best that committed himself to temporarily coming back, taking control and acting as the knight in shining armor and saving the tournament to the best of his ability.
For a tournament that has over the past 4 years grown to be
THE tournament the Australian/NZ taiko community happily participated to showoff some of best talent that the small community has to offer. Allowing the Malaysian community who we are friendly with to jump in and add more competition really helped to create the fun, competitive environment that i saw firsthand back in A!TT 2017. Now that this complete mess happened, i honestly don't know if we will ever get something like that again especially in the AUS/NZ community and it makes me mad. It makes me mad that
THIS was how the best of the Australian/NZ community was displayed and it's demoralizing that this tournament has now contributed to the growing grim future of the AUS and NZ taiko communities. Even though i joined 18 months ago and may not currently be a top player (or a mediocre player to some people's standards), I put a lot of time and effort to try not only to be a better player but also be a better person and meet amazing people along the way.
As a result of my frustrations with how this tournament ended up and what it could spell for our communities as a whole,
I'm announcing to that in December I'll be opening up registrations to my very first taiko tournament that will take place starting in January 2019. I only came up with the idea a week ago and it's still a WIP, however it will be an restricted open tournament that will hopefully provide the ideal competitive environment with a twist that will do what A!TT didnt and showoff the best the AUS/NZ community has to offer. If anyone is interested in watching the progression of the development of my tournament, I'll be leaving a discord link here and on my profile so come December 1st, you will know exactly when to register. I'll be writing my own separate forum post on December 1st when everything from a staff and organisational end is organised. I'm hoping to get some well known staff members onboard to help create this fantastic tournament that will have a prize at least So stay tuned for that.
https://discord.gg/rHFpVTt
And even if this doesn't actually work out the way things are planned...aloda has set the bar so low i think it'll be very hard to fail