Traveling to Final Round 17 in Atlanta!

Later today, I will be leaving New Jersey with a car full of my gaming buddies to head over to Atlanta, Georgia for Final Round 17.  Final Round, ran by Larry “Shin Blanka” Dixon, is held every year in Atlanta and attracts international competition for a wide array of fighting games.  The event will run Friday through Sunday.  For the past couple of weeks, I have been prepping for this event, not only as a competitor but also as a volunteer, making brackets for the Soul Calibur V event and also will be running the pools of that tournament as well as capturing various matches to upload to YouTube.  This will be my second Final Round, and I can’t be more excited!

When attending my first final round last year, I saw some of the best matches I’ve ever seen in competitive fighting games.  I was also able to meet a ton of people from different states, regions, countries and even continents.  One of the more notable competitors that I was able to talk to was Xian from Singapore.  Xian at the time was sponsored by MadCatz, a company that specializes in video game accessories, most notably their high quality arcade style controllers.  Xian is known for having a positive attitude towards competition and is always trying to help others improve their overall gameplay.  While having a cigarette with him, I was able to get some insight on the fighting game community in Singapore.  The community there is much smaller, but is very strong and largely plays in internet cafes and Arcades.  In the US, people usually have sessions in at their homes or hold tournaments in any business that will allow them to.  It is also much more accepted in Singapore to be a competitive gamer.  Later that year, Xian went on to perform very well at the Evolution Championship Series, which is the biggest fighting game tournament in the world, winning Super Street Fighter 4: Arcade Edition v.2012 and placing 5th in the King of Fighters XIII.

Crowd shot during the finals day Final Round 16. Can you spot the hot dog?

Also, Final Round is known to be the “hypest” tournament on the East Coast.  Everyone in the audience while watching matches are all deeply engrossed in the matches and are always talking smack to each other, whether it is to the people they are playing or in the background supporting someone from their region or a personal friend.  Finals day at Final Round is one of the “hypest” days of the year on the East Coast for the fighting game community.  As seen int he picture above, there is a sea of people watching the top 8 placers for multiple games.  Although many of thee people look like they’re constipated, they are actually just extremely excited watching the high level play.

This year’s Final Round will be different from my experience last year, as my group Avylon is running the Soul Calibur V event.  Avylon is a venture I started with a group of friends which is to be a home for “all things gaming”, however we are starting with an emphasis on competitive gaming, since that is where most of our backgrounds are in and we are pushing for more mainstream attention in this area of gaming!  At fighting game tournaments, Avylon is usually running brackets for Soul Calibur V and sometimes will offer a hand in other games.  At the last even, Winter Brawl 8 in Philadelphia, the group ran the Soul Calibur V and Dead or Alive 5: Ultimate bracket as well as lent a hand to to run the brackets for Killer Instinct and Tekken Tag Tournament 2.  We also capture matches that do not end up being broadcasted on a live stream on twitch.tv using a product by Avermedia called the Live Gamer Portable (LGP).  The LGP allows us to record a direct feed from a console (PS3 or Xbox 360) and save directly to an SD card without the need of a computer.  This allows us to have a number of LGPs in our inventory and capture over 100 matches at every event we attend.

While prepping to run Soul Calibur V, I was involved with the generation of pools, which is always a very stressful process.  The community is always on your ass asking when pools will be posted and tell you not to put them in a difficult pools and so on.  After the 3 day process of generating pools, we submitted them to the Final Round staff, only to have them changed on us.  Players were swapped out of their pools and created several problems.  LoloMX from Mexico was swapped out of his pool for MysticBill, who was not a seeded player, so there was a pool that had 3 seeded players and another that only had 1.  Also, I was swapped into a bracket that had someone who is local to me, which is also to be avoided at all costs when someone is traveling to compete.  Nobody wants to travel down the East Coast, just to play the guy that they play at every single local event.  However, after talking with the Final Round staff, we eventually were able to have them revert to the pools we originally sent them after being pestered by the community to have them changed for 48 hours.

However, at this event, most of my competitive focus lies in Injustice.  Since the game’s release in April, I have been actively competing and have fallen short of placing into the post pools finals. At larger events, I have almost always been eliminated in the qualifying match of the losers bracket.  As of late, I have been putting in a lot of practice to hopefully get passed my competitive road block and make it out of pools!

Overall, I’m VERY excited for Final Round and have almost gotten a little too carried away with it!  I’m planning on blogging about my experiences at the event when I return!