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Not quite the perfect tournament, almost.Article Index
While EVO was a great tournament, there were still some problems that they may need to work out in the years to come. For tournament goers, flawless gameplay is a no brainer. However, EVO was plagued by technical problems – not to the point where it destroyed the tournament, but they were factors to keep in mind. In the pools, controller use wasn't monitored closely enough; as a result, players were able to walk away with SIXAXIS controllers, still synced to a station's PS3. This led to moments where the home button was pressed or held, disrupting many matches. Sadly, the inexperienced judges did not know how to desync controllers, which only allowed these shenanigans to continue. Hopefully in the future, EVO staff will either tell judges to desync controllers by resetting a PS3's settings after any player uses a SIXAXIS or by banning personal SIXAXIS controllers.
Another problem, also brought about by PS3's, was the constant “You did not receive a trophy” glitch. Although EVO staff have not confirmed the reason for this glitch, this message appeared whenever players met the conditions to receive a trophy. Because the systems don't receive trophies, the message continues to come up whenever those same conditions, such as doing a certain amount of specials or ultras, are met. While the text box itself was not a problem, the lag it caused was a problem. Being the largest fighting game tournament in America and having spent research into buying the lagless ASUS monitors, EVO seems to have fallen short of their lagless competition expectation due to this glitch. It created losses where there should have been wins, hits where there should have been blocks, and other mistakes that may have cost many players at key moments.
On stage, the players were separated quite far from the PS3, causing the controller cable to dangle. On several instances during the semi finals on Saturday, players' controllers disconnected. The most notable instance was during John Choi and Ma's match, where Choi had to forfeit a round because his controller had disconnected, causing a pause and disruption during gameplay. It effectively took away Choi's chances to win, because Ma won the round after. At this point, nobody would have known the consequences of that match had Choi's controller not disconnected. The problem didn't occur during Top 8 Sunday, thankfully. This problem could easily be solved by placing players closer to the game system, so it should not be as big of a concern as either of the first two.
While not new to the fighting game community, delays were a big problem at EVO. On Sunday, although EVO was scheduled to begin at 9:00AM with Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike, competitors and spectators alike were waiting outside. After about ten minutes, an EVO representative came out and put up a sign saying that EVO would begin at 9:30AM. The doors, however, did not open until a little after 10:00AM. Starting at 10:00AM is not a problem; starting an hour late from the designated time is a problem. Technical difficulties continued and several more delays happened throughout the day. Understandably, this was out of EVO staff's control at times, but delays did make the event's energy die down.
