GGPO Vampire Savior 2v2 - Tournament #50 is this Saturday, August 2nd 2014 @ 8pm PDT/11pm EDT!

*IMPORTANT*! Please read this *ENTIRE* post as the rules are completely different for this tournament!

Stream: http://www.twitch.tv/rotanibor

Please, if at all possible, get on GGPO *EARLY*. This tournament will take more time than usual to set up, and I'll end signups directly at 8pm PDT/11pm EDT. I also will need to explain the rules once again to everybody there.

For our 50th tournament, we'll be doing things a bit differently so please the following carefully. It will be a 2v2 Waseda Style Tournament with Random Teams. What does this mean you ask?

• 2v2 Waseda Style is a format where both teams have a "Player A" and a "Player B". The teams will then fight each other, with "Player A from Team 1" fighting "Player A from Team 2" and "Player B from Team 1" fighting "Player B from Team 2". If both Players from Team 1 win their matches, great, they move on to the next battle and Team 2 goes to losers. But if "Player A from Team 1" wins their match, and "Player B from Team 2" wins their match, they will fight it out in a "Player A Team 1" vs "Player B Team 2" match to decide the winner.

• The bracket will be ran as "1 match" / "double elimination". So we will have a winners bracket and a losers bracket just like usual, but the fight between the teams will be completed in a single match. For Winners Finals, Losers Finals and Grand Finals, we may do 2 out of 3.

• Random Team Selection is basically putting everybody's name in a hat, and picking out two random names for every team. But I won't be using a hat... It will be a randomizer program on the internet

• I'll be turning on Challonge's "Match Voting" option for this tournament. For something as volatile as a single match 2v2, pretty much anything can happen and voting who may win should add to the excitement. You'll need to have a Challonge account for this, make one if you don't yet have one. You can see a sample bracket of what its like here: http://ggpovampire.challonge.com/Sample. Please note, that this is only a sample, and teams will look nothing like this.

Its pretty amazing, and a little hard for me to believe, but we've been doing these for very close to two years now! It will be 50 Tournaments + 6 Vambats. Our first tournament was all the way back on September 2nd 2012! Thank you everyone who has helped keep these going for long!

First off, thank you for everybody that entered the tournament, watched the stream or the replays. It’s kind of crazy the community we can have over this 17 year old game, but you all made it happen!

EVO2014 is done, Vampire Savior was more or less a success, and I’m still tired as hell. This year more than any other previous year, my EVO was focused entirely on Vampire Savior – and that’s great. I can most definitely say the community is growing, and it’s incredibly exciting. As far as I can tell, this was the biggest North American tournament we’ve ever had, and the potential for growth is still there! I am expecting the coming year to be very interesting. I’m going to detail it in a later post, but I will need significant HELP coming up, and I’ll be letting you guys know exactly what it is I need. What I have been doing so far is now beyond what I am capable of handling myself!

On that note, there was PLENTY this time around I could not handle myself, and in turn had to recruit our unsuspecting player-base to save me. The weekend was a bit of a blur and I was barely hanging on at times, so I apologize if I missed anyone here…

Undamned – The MVP. The tournament literally would not have happened if it was not for him supplying two UD-CPS2 units for us to use (for the entire weekend at that!). The size of the tournament was far beyond what I could handle on my single setup, and I thank him deeply for his assistance… But it didn’t stop there! He provided a fun prize to all of Top 8, and even on top of that, offered up a UD-CPS2 with a Vampire Savior board for the winner! Please if you can, send him a word of thanks @therealundamned, he really-REALLY deserves it.

Arkadeum / Kuroppi – Thank you Kuroppi for getting me in touch with Karl from Arkadeum, who along with Ryan (aka Blast City) who both went through a hell of a lot on Saturday to get the Vampire Savior stream set up. The original plan ended up having some issues but they stuck through it and got it going for everybody that wanted to watch. They went well beyond their own game and interests to support ours, so send some appreciation their way!

KFL / Nooneyouknow – These two guys sacrificed their own time to watch the stations while we went and played Top 8 over at the Super Turbo area, which ended up taking much longer than expected. I’m very sorry we took so long and I really appreciate you both sticking through it.

Noble Cactus / Jason D – Our commentary team, and an excellent one at that. I made a very good choice when I selected them. Jason even missed his Arcana pools to commentate Vampire Savior Top 8. Sorry I goaded you into it Jason!!

Xanoz – Xanoz ends up usually being my drink/food delivery when I am too busy with the tournament to pick something up myself. She really saved me this time actually…

Miloyoyo – Dude was a trooper the whole weekend. I forced him to watch and be and charge when I had to step away more than others, plus he had the most trips of CRT lugging racked up.

Falken – Frequently made him watch everything, but more importantly than that... Congrats on the two EVO 1st place wins!

Maestro – Cool guy, kept trying to even help when and where he could without me even asking. Totally respect that.

Numakie – He had his own stuff going on, but still found moments to be helpful as usual!

Nostalgic – Brought his CRT TV all the way down to Vegas for the tournament. Without this we'd only have had 2 setups! It was a HUGE contribution, and a ton of work.

Diar – Loaned me his CRT TV to bring down. Good stuff Diar.

Dara – I only found out that Dara would attend EVO a couple weeks in advance, and it was a pretty great surprise. Despite the language barrier, he was a lot of fun to have around and you could tell he had a great sense of humor. You could really feel his love for Vampire Savior as he even came up for room casuals on Saturday night and played with us for nearly 4 hours! Even more, he came bearing gifts to the western VSav scene in the form of the 30 copies of the disc version of “All About Darkstalkers Combination Cup” and with 3 sets of the actual book copies which were given to the top 3 Western placers (Hopefully I understood his intentions correctly when I distributed them like this… lol). I have a ton of questions I want to ask and things I want to talk about with him, so hopefully I can find a Japanese translator soon!

Haitani – Dominated once again, and now the champion 3 years running… Simply too strong. I will make sure I am 100% ready for the challenge next year, Haitani!

CRT Carrying Strongmen – Falken, Juno, Nostalgic, Miloyoyo, Noble Cactus, Nooneyouknow. Moving around CRTs sucks. These guys did it a whole bunch of times. Miloyoyo probably transported one back and forth the most. Sorry guys! I’ll buy some little carts to transport them on for next year!!

Communities –Super Turbo, Skullgirls, Meltyblood… Vampire Savior gets a lot of support from these communities and their players. I really hope I have the chances to give back to them in the future. If anybody from them needs help I can provide, just let me know.

------------

I guess thats about it for now. I met a lot of new people, and saw people I only get to see once a year, EVO sure is great!

Soon I will make some posts detailing plans for the future and lessons learned so far, so look forward to that!