If you played in It's Dangerous to go Alone Season 31, you know it was one of the most chaotic seasons to date, and not due to our fault for once.
If you missed it, what happened was that start.gg wasn't working correctly, so we had to manually transfer all communications onto Discord and do some of the brackets. In the end, it worked out, which was good, but boy, did it cause some stress. Other than that, from the perspective that I saw of the tournament, matches seemed relatively even, so it looks like we might have almost hit the nail on the head regarding the ELO balancing - which is exciting! Waku waku.
Now let's dig into what feedback all of you inklings and octolings had to say on the last season of IDTGA.
Feedback Discussions
If we have a problem on the behalf of the smash.gg and the stream please just let us redo the match.
Now I'm aware of the one match where this issue occurred. To give context to those who weren't in the scenario, there was a dropout on a team, and the round progressed as a 3v4 - which is normal. But unfortunately, our streamer incorrectly assembled the teams, which you would then assume that a team would do a quick KO to end the match. However, both teams played out the game. Following this, a sub was found, who took some time to get them into the lobby. At this point, I decided that this was taking too long since there was only so much time allocated in the round. I decided to award the first game to the team that did not have the DC and communicated to the streamer to skip the first match. However, to top this all off, this was also when the start.gg issues were beginning to occur, so on top of this issue, every other ongoing match was having problems as they could not connect to the bracket platform. This led to a delay in me communicating with the streamer to skip the first match and move on to the second map. Since one team believed this was an error and not meant to occur, you would expect them to allow the other team to KO for a quick restart to fix the issue. But instead, both teams ended up playing, and because of time constraints, the game's result was final.
Essentially what allowed this to happen was errors on every front. Errors on start.gg, errors on the streamer for entering the incorrect info, mistakes on both teams for not allowing a quick KO to redo and an error on myself for slow communication. And for the streamer error and my communication error, I apologise. I've now introduced new rules that will reduce the chances of this happening again, and the streamer is aware of the issue.
I know there's not much you can do about this, but waiting a long time because there's an uneven number of teams kind of sucks.
You're right, there's not much I can do about waiting a long time because your team has a bye round, but unfortunately, this occurs in most tournaments that use a swiss or round-robin bracket. So you're aware, we've chosen a swiss-style bracket so that teams aren't out after one or two matches, particularly since this is a free agent tournament.
This was a lot of fun for me! And great work dealing with the unexpected start.gg crashes, etc. One request might be to put the poll for the next tournament in the Discord as well as the stream or announce when it will be in the server.
Thank you for the positive feedback, and we'll look into announcing the next season earlier. However, this isn't always possible because sometimes we can't confirm the dates internally until factors such as work and other IRL life plans have been resolved.
Thanks for reading and we can't wait to see you for season 32!