San Diego CA

[jinxhand]

No session tonight-- got the word from Beau...

I'll be online however, just hit me up online, or post up, and let's get matches in...

EDIT: Oh yeah, my TE S stick is fixed... I swapped the connects so the button layout is similar to my TE R2 stick, so there should be no more confusion as to what button is what now... It's dual modded, so I didn't get the chance to check the ps3 side yet, just the 360 side...

What's going down this Saturday???

[Rhythmaxed]

Not sure whats going on saturday.

The fighting game group on facebook is really only talking about street fighter x tekken. Already tournaments being planned for it and everything.
We can give the frubble casuals on saturday a second try if anybody is down I can send a post and see if anybody on facebook that doesn't post here is interested.

[jinxhand]

We can do that then...

I was talking to one of the guys at CO, and I was wondering if holding a free tournament would bring people out of their caves or not... Seems like some people are worried about getting crushed at the price of $2-$3, and I understand that from their perspective, so hopefully something like this can spark some interests...

I know people's schedules are mad busy right now, and SFxT isn't helping much either, but I personally wanna level up, and online is okay, but I prefer to step my game up in person...

JJ's spot is open for matches as well throughout the week... Just hit him up or hit me up and I'll get in touch with him to see what's going down... I'd like to start actually recording matches, since I finally got my jerry-rigged setup going, and I'm testing it now, and so far so good...

Either way, just lemme know what's up, and try to get friends into the game as much as you can...

[Nikolai VolKOF]

I've been smashed man. I'm in UCSD's quarter system and we are hitting finals. My schedule is changing in a couple weeks and will definitely be able to start hittting up CO again on Mondays if that's still happening. I'm ususally on live or psn around 11 pm till about 2 or 3 am, so if anyones not playing sf x t hit me upp!

[jinxhand]

We're gonna be recording this Monday!!! For real this time!!!

Pending on how many of you cats show up, we might hold a lil tourney, free of charge... Just bring that A-game, and more people...

Hopefully we can get more setups so we can have more matches, and increase our chances of leveling up... I definitely will be there earlier to setup as well as help those learn either KOF, VF, or Battle Fantasia... Might throw some NGBC in there, too...

Post up if you're down for this...

Also, despite the crazy schedules we all have, I do want to thank you guys for showing some support for this scene... You guys might (or might not) be apart of other scenes, and have other things to juggle aside from KOF, but you guys do manage to come thru and battle...

Shoutouts to those cats I met at CO and play KOF, but don't post up... You guys get a salute from me still...

[Rhythmaxed]

Yea I'll be there tomorrow night I am down for a mini tournament.  Just read on facebook that its also gonna be recorded? Awww man the added pressure! hahahah.

See you tomorrow night.

[jjsmack]

I've been wanting to make it to some sessions, but my plates been full between school and work. T_T

[Mild Wallace]

I'm coming as soon as my class is over. I'll be there around 8:30. I hope I don't miss out on the tournament.

[jinxhand]

Props to those who showed... We ended up just doing recorded casuals rather than a tourney because it started off as 4 people, then went to 3, and one went to do SFxT casuals for a bit, but did get some KoF in earlier...

I'll post up the vids on my yt when I get home... Got a bit of chopping to do, b/c my max for now is 15 minutes... Other than that, no editing will be done to it in order to keep it legit...

Let's take that time to find the weakspots in our game... I know for some, we're not able to play as often as we'd like to, but we can still get what we can by watching these matches...

I know I have to work on better execution myself... I think I have my actual team now... The hard part is implementing spot on execution for confirmed hits...

[Rhythmaxed]

 free tournament didn't work as an incentive it seems and you know what. I keep wishing other people would see the true value of this game and you know what? I think it is time to really see what people think of kof13 in this city.

Lets pick a day and set up a real tournament. I am going to put my own money up to front this. A tournament with a pot of at least 60 dollars up for grabs. Yes I am going to put up 60 dollars upfront into the pot for a tournament.

I have no clue where we can have it at. Or what day. I have never ran a tournament or anything before so I have no clue how the logistics work. We can try doing it on a monday night at the comic store or possibly we can talk to cody at TTF and see if we can host it during one of his ranbat days(for example, he has one for sfxt comming up march 30th on a friday night) or try to get something ourselves going at frubble on a saturday.

Whatever. It doesn't matter. But whatever we decide it will be a pot of at least 60 dollars of my own money put up for this plus whatever gets added to the pot by people signing up and registering for the tournament. We could easily make it 5 bucks (2 dollars to where is hosting the tournament and 3 dollars to the pot?) if we got 8 people to sign up that would make the pot 84 fucking dollars.

how do pots usually get split? something like 60 percent to first place 30 percent to second place and 10 percent to third? that makes it what? 50 bucks to first 25 to second place and 9 dollars to third? If the possiblity of turning 5 bucks into 50 bucks can't entice anybody to want to play this game I guess we should just be happy we got a small handful of people to play casually. I've seen what most people can do by watching them play marvel and sf4. If those people put in just a bit of practice and play time into kof 13 I really think they'd be awesome at it. There is just not that much of a reason to since kof has never gone past much more than just one tournament and mostly just small casuals. If people had a serious reason to practice like they do for sf4 and marvel I wonder how many would truly fall in love with this game.

Anybody got any knowledge of how to run a tournament? Any good days? Try to get as many of us core group of dudes together as possible? I am totally serious about this right now.

[Mild Wallace]

A real tournament would require real people, and the sad truth is that we don't have enough people here who are committed to this game right now.

My thoughts on having a "legit" tournament is that this is premature. Unless it is an ungodly amount of money, the prize pot alone is probably not going to provide enough incentive for people to come. But if we do want to have a tournament in the future, we will need a few things:

- First we'll need a venue. It can't be somebody's house, it needs to be an actual place. Frubble hosted Valentine's Day Massacre and other Box Arena related stuff/tournaments, so I would say that is probably the best place in SD right now.

- Second, we'd need confirmed setups, as in setups that we know are going to show up no matter what. At least 4 or more. They would also have to have Asus monitors so that nobody could haggle or complain about lag or other such bullshit. The setups would also have to be all the same system, either ps3 or xbox.

- Third, we need people. 16 or more confirmed shows. Why? Because any less than that you get a shitty 8 man bracket or an even worse round robin format. The tournament could realistically be over in less than an hour if you have less than that number of people.

- Fourth, we'd need hype. Get some big names to show up. The prize pot also contributes to this, but as I mentioned earlier, its not the defining factor on its own. Mainly I think the prize should be large enough that people feel comfortable wasting gas to come out. We'd need to promote it not only on this site but on others. Maybe a fancy youtube video with terrible dubstep like most of the other trailers you see on youtube.

-Last, we would need to put it on a day that no major or other event, local or otherwise, is occurring. Is there is a KoF tournament somewhere else in SoCal, and that date conflicts with ours, I'm willing to bet that people won't show up for ours. In order to increase turnout, we'd most certainly need to put it on a weekend, either a Friday or a Saturday. Another thing is that we should not do it regularly. Biweekly events, in my opinion, tend to get less people total than a single event once every few months. This is because people say "oh, I can miss this one, the next one will be in two weeks anyway." You'll have a constant population of people who won't come because it isn't that special of an event.

All of these points are opinion only, I have never ran a tournament or have been intricately linked to one. But these issues come from my experience going to shitty Blazblue biweekly tournaments at Cal State Long Beach, and other scattered events in SoCal. In particular, I look at the event called "West Toast" that is held at Family Fun Arcade every once in awhile. I tried to go to bikweekly tournaments at FFA and it was just too far and too expensive, but to go out there for one day for a "bigger" event was worth it for me. It was worth it for a lot of other people too, as several high level players showed up as well as locals who spend all their time at FFA anyway.

The last thing I'd like to say about this is that, yeah our scene is pretty bad currently. Three dudes, that barely qualifies as a scene. But thats how BB started in SD too, I was there for it. It was 4 dudes instead of 3 and just by sticking around we turned that into almost 10 people now and that number is going up. It takes time for a scene to grow, so you just gotta be patient. I think a big problem is that people we see at CO always seem interested in KoF, but always pull out the "oh I'll just get wrecked if I play" excuse. It annoys me that it seems some people see a game whose combos are more than two hits and suddenly think that its too complex and they can't get into it. I think we should try being a bit more upfront about trying to get new people to play at CO and easing up a bit when or if we play them so we don't crush their self-esteem. I hope we can get more people interested, but it just seems to difficult to get people to turn away from Capcom.

[Rhythmaxed]

This could also just be a visibility thing. People randomly play at CO since there is usually a setup of some kind there. It died out in other places like at ttf since none of us dedicated kof players were there repping it. People splitting up their time with other games that already get more attention.

Gotta keep in mind sfxt just dropped and probably took a lot of peoples interest away. From what I read on facebook regular ssf4 is having problems getting enough players for tournaments too.

I almost forgot also about the team madcatz major that is happening here in san diego in mid april. Surprised they still haven't put out any information about that yet. But it is bound to have king of fighters 13.
I guess we should just forcus on getting as much practice and hope that having a good turnout at that tournament will get more people interested in kof?

[jinxhand]

I'm not even gonna lie, KOF in SD is mad hard to do... But, I do appreciate you guys' effort and dedication... You also gotta take in consideration that there are some cats in the military who go out to sea and such, so that does put a damper on our scene... I happen to be doing shore duty, so I lucked out... We gotta get Eugene back on KOF as well (the Athena/Yuri/Mai[¿?] player), 'cause I know he shows up to watch, but might get maybe one match... Our scene is kinda more than 3 people though, but we're the ones who manage to show up more than others...

As for TTF, I'd like to go, but I goto CO for the Think Tank, as I'm working on some projects with Beau and Alí, and that's where we meet up from 6-8pm... Every once and awhile, we do go have a match or two in KOF and BF... I managed to show off both SFEX2 (best SF since ST imo), and I just showed off MBAACC as well...

With regards to not crushing cats, well, I'ma be real with you... I picked up Kensou with that sole purpose of having a character that I can use without blowing people up... Look what happened--- I'm working on Ralf, and might possibly get back on Elizabeth again... I mean, even if we do pick other characters for the sake of not merking dudes and pushing them off, even with basic fundamentals, we're still at an advantage... We'd eventually have to dumb our game down, and that can have a backwards effect and mess our game up...

WildWallace, you're right about all of those points... I know my monitor is good for the price I got... To my knowledge I don't drop frames, but I know someone's gonna be beefing if it's not a CRT or a Asus monitor...

Oh yeah, Rhythmaxed, for tourneys, you can use Challonge.com to write up brackets, or you can use this:

http://www.printyourbrackets.com/doubleelimination.html

As for prizes, the dough is split 70/20/10, for 1st/2nd/3rd in that order, or it can be a winner-take-all...

I know the scene isn't dead though... I look at the GG/MB/AH scenes and they're barely there, some living further up north and others are scattered about... The VF scene starts with me, then jumps all the way to Riverside, and others again are scattered throughout SoCal, but it's like how KOF is in MN, where cats live too far away from even being able to battle frequently... We're not that bad from the looks of it...

Lastly, as for the vids:

The quality for the vids are meh, so I ended up getting a Roxio Game Capture, which actually works wonders for not being an Avex or Hauppauge... I'm currently trying to upgrade the quality of the vids, which I managed to do for another vid awhile ago, but it's taking awhile... Nevertheless, they're gonna get uploaded... I'm actually more excited for next Monday, since I'll be recording with better quality, and less cables...

[Mild Wallace]

Good shit. I look forward to seeing those vids.

Can't really make it to TTF. Now that I know my schedule for next quarter I can say that that isn't going to change. At least I don't think it will.

I didn't know there was gonna be a team madcatz major in april, though I'm pretty pumped about it now that you've mentioned it. I'm definitely going to spend a bit of extra time on KoF now that I have something to prepare for.

Last thing: I might now make it to CO this week. I've got a paper due anywhere from 7-10pm that day, so its possible I might be working on it till the last minute, though I hope I won't have to. Beyond that I'm going to be gone for almost two weeks after that, so I will definitely miss the CO meetup after this one.

[jinxhand]

Here's the link to part 1:

San Diego Comic Odyssey KOF XIII Casuals Part 1

Again, this is before adding any filters to it... I'm hoping I can clear it up some...