Last edited on 24 January 2016 - 10:39 AM by MasterGberry

Hey everyone. Yesterday was a really really long day, but this was expected. I had approximated the tournament was going to take 12 hours because there are always unforeseen issues. Sadly no one believed me xD. There are quite a few things I want to outline in this post and I want to congratulate the winners publically. Let's start with the happy part of the post then.

The Winners

Congratulations to Team Element for taking first place in the tournament and winning the $1000 USD prize! Also congratulations to Team Honey Badgers for taking second place during the tournament! The matches were awesome and it was a lot of fun shoutcasting the quarter finals and up.

Team Element: AsianPinqer, Smqcked, Tragik, Harley, zCrimsonAura, Lennox, xhockey
Team Honey Badgers: TheBestGinger9, Danteh, upriserryker, 0scavenger0, BlueDeww, xNestorio, BakedBrotatoChip

Final 32 Brackets: https://t.co/uIA8JmohKj

Once again really great gameplay from both of these guys. You can find a VOD of my broadcast here http://www.twitch.tv/mastergberry/v/37299329 (I am sorry apparently part of the VOD's audio was taken off because of music playing in the background from youtube).

Also after talking with some of the other staff members who were helping to run the tournament we felt that there really should be a second place prize due to all of the issues and how close the games were. We are therefore going to sponsor a $250 second place prize for Team Honey Badgers. We feel that this is the right thing to do. Also clarifying in the end there are no sponsors to this tournament, just Badlion. I will be contacting both teams shortly about the winnings and how they want to have them split up between the players.

What can be done better next time

Now let's move onto some other things that we should talk about in this post. This was the largest tournament hosted by Badlion, it was also to my knowledge the largest money prize tournament hosted in Minecraft ever (I believe there was a past money prize tournament with $500). For how large the tournament was I think it honestly went as well as it could have. There are always things that can be done better though, and next time I guarantee it will be much better. Let's talk about a few of them below:

1. DDoS Attacks - There were an incredible amount of DDoS attacks on the OVH BHS datacenter yesterday. Not all of them were targeted at us. Sadly there were just so many attacks hitting the data center that our servers were lagging regardless if we were being attacked or not. This interfered with gameplay here and there but overall did not become a major issue until towards the quarter finals of the tournament. We are going to investigate solutions to make sure that this is not an issue again for future tournaments.
2. Players being attacked via DDoS - During the tournament and more specifically towards the end of the Finals there were DDoS attacks targeting players to make them incapable of playing. It is important for players to properly protect their IP addresses, as this is a known issue in the professional gaming scene as well. We will be making some posts at a later time on how to properly protect your IP addresses so that for the next tournament this is not an issue.
3. Plugin Level Lag - We discovered a plugin level issue with lag related to the spectator feature on the ArenaPvP server. To be honest, this could be one of the sources of lag spikes on the main ArenaPvP servers that we have not been able to track down because we have not been able to put enough stress on it. With over 200 people watching the games we quickly realized that people dying in a party match was causing some mini-lag spikes. We are going to be looking into this issue and fixing it.
4. Dedicated Shoutcaster - So it was not originally planned to have someone shoutcasting the later part of the tournament, but due to the spectator issue above it became clear that we needed one. I helped step in since I had not been really helping with much of the tournament up until this point and filled this shoutcaster role towards the end of the tournament. In the future I think it would be a good idea to have someone filling in this role again. Probably someone with more experience than me, but once again thanks to everyone that tuned in and supported me during it.
5. A more organized tournament plugin. We are in the process of writing a more advanced tournament plugin that will have a lot of advanced features to make it easier to run these tournaments. I will have more information on that as we develop it, but I know the tournament staff definitely has some feedback of things they want for that plugin.
6. Good sportsmanship - For anyone that watches any professional gaming scene you will see at the end of matches opponents walk across the stage and shakes the hands of their opponents after. These players are all under contracts and have to be careful of what they do and say. They need to be good representatives of the community. The same is going to go for here at Badlion. Some additional requirements for participating in future tournaments and holding ranks on Badlion are going to go into effect IMMEDIATELY and some people are going to have their ranks removed (for already running their mouths off on Twitter):

- Low number of mutes/bans. The bans is an obvious, but we are not going to allow toxic members to partake in future tournaments. If you want to play in our tournaments you need to be a good sportsmanship like community member.
- Social Media abuse - We have recently enforced social media constraints on our staff team and we are going to do something similar for people who have ranks on the network. If you are found making trash talking posts against other teams, or Badlion itself you will find your ranks removed and yourself banned from our network. Anyone who knows @Archybot and myself knows that we do not stand for this kind of shit, and that we do what is always in Badlion's best interest. We do not sit around and let people run their mouths off, nor will we ever.

7. Account Sharing - Technically this was not against the rules. I'm actually surprised this wasn't caught by anyone because this has been a major issue in past tournaments here on Badlion and in other professional game scenes. In the future account sharing will be prohibited, and anyone caught doing so will earn a DQ for their team.
8. Cheating - I installed a bunch of advanced GCheat tools for this tournament. To be quite honest, the # of people cheating during the tournament was really low. I was expecting it to be much higher. The reality is also no cheat is going to outperform a well coordinated team of players. Once again congratulations to both teams for doing such a great job in the tournament.

Conclusion

I think I have covered most of the points and lessons learned above. This was a great stress test for the network. With the tournament running we almost hit 10k players (9937 was the highest). We also discovered that the ArenaPvP servers can support 1000+ players without any major issues (besides the occasional lag spike that already happens with 750 players). I want to give a big shoutout to @FloppehFeesh for taking charge of the tournament and helping to organize most of it. Him and the Tournament staff team did a great job running the tournament overall and I want to praise them for their hard work. I also want to thank all of the players who partook in the tournament. Without the players, this network would be nothing.

Also as stated by Archybot on twitter, this tournament was just the beginning. There are a lot more tournaments coming up in the future, more game modes, and more money to be made playing Minecraft. We are definitely pushing towards an E-Sports scene for Minecraft, and I hope that we can pioneer it together with our community.

Thanks again to everyone.

~MasterGberry

Last edited on 24 January 2016 - 10:40 AM by *deleted-81096

Automatically Deleted

Posted on 24 January 2016 - 10:40 AM

Automatically Deleted

Posted on 24 January 2016 - 10:41 AM

awesome!

Posted on 24 January 2016 - 10:42 AM

gg

Posted on 24 January 2016 - 10:43 AM

Automatically Deleted

Posted on 24 January 2016 - 10:43 AM

What about the chances of an EU tournament? I mean we did really well considering it was US but I feel like we need some EU tournaments too :D

Posted on 24 January 2016 - 10:44 AM

Congratulations to Team Element on winning :)

Posted on 24 January 2016 - 10:45 AM

4 and I love Gberry's voice. It's so amazing

Posted on 24 January 2016 - 10:45 AM

why did flux back out from sponsoring

Posted on 24 January 2016 - 10:46 AM

We will see what the future holds to be honest. I'm thinking that in the future we might host tournaments in both regions simultaneously, and we might take the winners of each region and force them to play a series on the other team's servers (e.g. the winner of the NA brackets fights on the EU servers and the NA servers). Something of the sort to try and make the gameplay fair for both teams. NA East is an ideal location though because there are players to the west coast of the US and central Europe that both get about the same latency to NA East.

Posted on 24 January 2016 - 10:47 AM

btw ur voice is sex af

Posted on 24 January 2016 - 10:48 AM

Automatically Deleted

Last edited on 24 January 2016 - 10:49 AM by Nicosby

Congrats Team Element!

Posted on 24 January 2016 - 10:50 AM

They said there "was too much toxicity". They didn't even participate lol.

Posted on 24 January 2016 - 10:56 AM

I went to sleep at 7am but it was worth it, gg

Posted on 24 January 2016 - 10:59 AM

Automatically Deleted

Posted on 24 January 2016 - 11:00 AM

Next time use the money for better ddos protection, all day on saturday it was lagging

Posted on 24 January 2016 - 11:01 AM

Automatically Deleted

Posted on 24 January 2016 - 11:02 AM

My team was DQ because one of my members had internet broken or DDOS, idk.

Anyway, congrats Element for winning this tournament :).