The following are words I have to say about "The Nightwing Invitationals - Season 1", a tournament utilizing Nightwing's Blader's Kingdom 5v5 format, with a Swiss 6 round first stage and a double elimination final stage.
I recommend the following music for reading the report. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YROqDnOibHU . Sorry I'm not more hype for this, it was a bit of a struggle all day.
- We had about 24 people pre-register, and eventually had 24 people participate. Having an odd or even number of bladers would have been a fairly major issue, considering the magnitude of this tournament, and I believe that led to Unbalanced_Type's participation to avoid having byes.
- The weather was a catastrophe. It's summer. It's hot outside. We're talking 89 degrees farenheit or higher, made hotter by the inside of Nightwing's gaming loft. It was Truly Terrible weatherwise. There was free water, yes, and paid snacks and frozen treats, yes, and one room that actually felt cool when the door was closed. But overall, the main tournament space was just unbearably hot. I will bring a plug-in fan next time. And a portable fan for just me. I'm very much in pain from all the heat. I didn't stay the entire time, I had to leave after the first stage. It was just too danged hot. This isn't feasible currently.
- Now Sonic Can Be Heatstroke Sonic. Heatstroke Sonic is just like Sonic except he is lying down and He Is Not Moving.
- A non-participant thought it'd be fun to play Fortnite with the volume on while people were blading. No. Nightwing refictified the situation with headphones instead of a mute button, but later those headphones were removed. Seriously, reconsider having these gaming machines on while a tournament is underway.
- I brought 3 beystadiums. I forgot to bring them home with me. I hope they will still be there next weekend, in good condition.
- Before the tournament began, Saturday in fact, there was some discussion about how the first stage was going to be conducted. Mike.Nightwing originally wanted bladers to get as much blading as possible while still having organized matchups instead of the coin challenge system for first stage, and was originally thinking 2 group round robin. But I ran the numbers for how many matches that would be, and the answer is 132 for 24 bladers. A single round robin group will have (#Bladers * #Bladers-1) / 2 matches, which would be 66. Times 2, 132. That's too many matches. I explained to Nightwing that a 5 round Swiss would be 60 matches, and a 6 round Swiss would be 72. He ended up doing a 6 round swiss.
- The first stage took 4 hours to conduct. 6 stadiums usually running, no judges... 5v5 matches: 4 Hours. That's a Very Long Time in a Very Hot Building. I was honestly Thankful that I did not make it to the finals.
- Here's the thing about the invitational: it was advertised in the previous 8 BK tournaments that invitational invites would go to the top 3 bladers. In the event that those bladers already have invites, invitations would go to others in the finals bracket. But apparently people who placed in the top 3 multiple times were allowed to invite people to the tournament. So although participants should only have been selected from this list, https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1...edit#gid=0 , which I am counting 13 who were here today, today's tournament featured attendence from several bladers who had been to a BK tournament and never made it to finals, and more frustratingly it looks like 5 who had not participated in a single BK tournament before but had an invite. And three of those people made it to the top 8 finals. Which... I'm going to be honest, that vexes me. A lot. It's not my tournament, and it's going to be run how Nightwing wants it run, but I honestly would've preferred it be a quieter 13 person event consisting only of bladers who'd made it to BK Finals before.
- There were some issues with Challonge match results entry today. At least three times I'm aware of, a match was entered incorrectly, temporarily. Worse yet, one of these was the last match of a round, so although it was corrected, the matches for the following round were determined incorrectly by Challonge, having an unknowable ripple effect through the remaining rounds. We need more care to be taken in match results being entered. This happened way too many times today.
- The acoustics today generally weren't as bad as the heat, although I'm sure it didn't help.
- So, 24 blader 6 round swiss. Problem being, 5 people did not have ANY BK experience, and a further 6 had participated and posessed no BK ranking. To seed according to the BK ranks would have been a little absurd, it would mean including 3 of the top bladers on the east coast as "unranked", completely skewing and screwing up the seeding for first round Swiss. Swiss is a format that really does need to be properly seeded. So, ended up with random seeding. And honestly, looking at the matchups Challonge picked, I'd say about 4 of those were total mis-seeds, random does that, but at least it wasn't an intentional mis-seed. I guess random's just as bad as unranked. Or, hear me out, just don't invite anyone to the invitational who isn't BK ranked.
- The matches were self-judged by the participants. In a tournament like the invitational where a lot is on the line, I do not agree with this decision at all. Especially since there were so many ties other people needed to judge anyway. We ran 6 stadiums at a time, and did not save a significant amount of time at all from self-judging. There were actually a couple disagreements on calls, and I'm not going to speak for anyone else but to a certain degree there is a lack of trust in some bladers ability to judge fairly for others or self-judge fairly in matches where they are participating. We're getting sportsmanship issues. It's getting to be a problem in the mid-Atlantic area, there are at least a couple people who I would not consider allowing to be judge because of bias, or previous incidents. And having this cloud of doubt and suspicion leads to problems and resentment. Bladers, please conduct yourselves with honesty and integrity, no matter who is involved in a match.
- I went 3-3 in the first stage, but that's incredibly misleading. I went 0-3 in the first 3 rounds, and some of those losses were legitimately surprising to me. But 5v5 is funny sometimes. Depending on how you and your opponent shuffle your deck, you can just get absolutely crushed by the ordering, even completely shut out. It's happened to me before, and it happened again today. And hey, those losses, I lost, my opponents beat me fair and square. They did better than me at Beyblade.
- My round 3 matchup was CrisisCrusher07, also with an 0-2 record. Beyblade was mean to us today. But he has an outstanding record against me in 5v5 and today was no different.
- By the 4th round I was making better driver decisions for the beystadiums, and also I was facing other people with 0-3, 1-3, and 2-3 records, so I starting having a little bit more success.
- The stadiums for each of the 6 rounds was decided by die roll, coin, or elimination. We started in Dash, went to Haspro for the following round, and then went to DB for the third. At round 4 we rolled Haspro, DB in the following, and I think Dash was last. Changing stadiums every round in a Swiss actually makes my headache a lot worse. Did I mention I have a headache? I have a headache. Actually, if I'm being totally honest, I am sick to death of non-B-09 beystadiums. We ran only B-09s for years, and it got boring, especially once DB made opposite spin a hellworld. And now that I have attended 5 BK tournaments where B-09s are a rarity, I've come to the conclusion that I am sick to death of these goofy beystadiums. They're Goofy. Many drivers that are as mainstay of competitive burst standard nowadays are mostly infeasible in these beystadiums. Drift is VERY unsafe in all 3 of these, and I paid dearly in the first 2 matches for that. Morbius, I know is unsafe. I tried Metal Universe in the first two and I certainly lost for it. By the later rounds I was specifically avoiding any drivers with even the slightest bit of angled wideness.
- Nightwing always uses pocket wall bounce as KO rules. But he decided today that the 2 narrow pockets in Dash wouldn't count as an instant KO, and by general vote the 4th pocket in Haspro, without as much of a pit, that wall would also count as a KO. I don't think this made a huge difference in Haspro, but it certainly did for Dash.
- My beys varied a bit based on what stadium was in use that round. Dynamite and Vanish and World, I always used. Prominence, a couple times. Guilty and Chain I would swap out based on the beystadium. Lately I've been running Belial2 on Chain in opposite spin, and it seems to work okay. I'm using the Kerbeus chip on Prominence, it seems like a good candidate for metal drivers. And I'm learning the painful lesson between this and the team tournament that I need to be using high mode more in opposite spin.
- By my 3rd loss I was way too hot and way too tired. Some days are just a bad fit for Beyblade for me, and this was one of them. I resolved to leave after first stage was concluded. Sorry, I know you all want detailed reports of the finals too, but, this tournament was a bit of a difficulty all around; I have to work tomorrow, after all, and I had a headache.
- I didn't make it to the finals... thankfully. I wanted to win that big champion belt, sure, but I was definitely feeling unwell by 3 rounds in, and winning the following 3 rounds meant there was still a very small chance I might make it to finals, so I had to stick around for the entirety of the 6th round.
- I was not present for the finals. I have heard bits and pieces. Apparently it wasn't all smooth sailing. Personally, I was rooting for MamaBey2122 to win it all, to include defeating her son LJ-Blader, I'm on their team in the team league. But, she made it to 4th place apparently, quite good as always, and LJ is currently in the finals match against JCMakeEmBurst. Sorry I didn't put up a better showing today, team! I hope to be in better condition for next week's tournament.
- The top 4 from the finals appear to be Mamabey in 4th, Godly_Requiem in 3rd, LJ-Blader in 2nd, and JCMakeEmBurst in 1st.
- I think the second season of individual Bladers Kingdom tournaments, if they happen, need a bit of a rules rework, some better public announcements of the policies and tournament structure ahead of time (BK8 Bounties and the invitational system definitely come to mind), and perhaps less of a spur-of-the-moment quality to organizational decisions. And considering the problems with self-judging that have apparently been happening for several tournaments now but the judging and sportsmanship issues are starting towards a boil, I think you're going to need to revise things.
I hope everyone who attended had fun today. I did not personally witness the finals, so if anyone wants to contribute details on that, go ahead.
I recommend the following music for reading the report. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YROqDnOibHU . Sorry I'm not more hype for this, it was a bit of a struggle all day.
- We had about 24 people pre-register, and eventually had 24 people participate. Having an odd or even number of bladers would have been a fairly major issue, considering the magnitude of this tournament, and I believe that led to Unbalanced_Type's participation to avoid having byes.
- The weather was a catastrophe. It's summer. It's hot outside. We're talking 89 degrees farenheit or higher, made hotter by the inside of Nightwing's gaming loft. It was Truly Terrible weatherwise. There was free water, yes, and paid snacks and frozen treats, yes, and one room that actually felt cool when the door was closed. But overall, the main tournament space was just unbearably hot. I will bring a plug-in fan next time. And a portable fan for just me. I'm very much in pain from all the heat. I didn't stay the entire time, I had to leave after the first stage. It was just too danged hot. This isn't feasible currently.
- Now Sonic Can Be Heatstroke Sonic. Heatstroke Sonic is just like Sonic except he is lying down and He Is Not Moving.
- A non-participant thought it'd be fun to play Fortnite with the volume on while people were blading. No. Nightwing refictified the situation with headphones instead of a mute button, but later those headphones were removed. Seriously, reconsider having these gaming machines on while a tournament is underway.
- I brought 3 beystadiums. I forgot to bring them home with me. I hope they will still be there next weekend, in good condition.
- Before the tournament began, Saturday in fact, there was some discussion about how the first stage was going to be conducted. Mike.Nightwing originally wanted bladers to get as much blading as possible while still having organized matchups instead of the coin challenge system for first stage, and was originally thinking 2 group round robin. But I ran the numbers for how many matches that would be, and the answer is 132 for 24 bladers. A single round robin group will have (#Bladers * #Bladers-1) / 2 matches, which would be 66. Times 2, 132. That's too many matches. I explained to Nightwing that a 5 round Swiss would be 60 matches, and a 6 round Swiss would be 72. He ended up doing a 6 round swiss.
- The first stage took 4 hours to conduct. 6 stadiums usually running, no judges... 5v5 matches: 4 Hours. That's a Very Long Time in a Very Hot Building. I was honestly Thankful that I did not make it to the finals.
- Here's the thing about the invitational: it was advertised in the previous 8 BK tournaments that invitational invites would go to the top 3 bladers. In the event that those bladers already have invites, invitations would go to others in the finals bracket. But apparently people who placed in the top 3 multiple times were allowed to invite people to the tournament. So although participants should only have been selected from this list, https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1...edit#gid=0 , which I am counting 13 who were here today, today's tournament featured attendence from several bladers who had been to a BK tournament and never made it to finals, and more frustratingly it looks like 5 who had not participated in a single BK tournament before but had an invite. And three of those people made it to the top 8 finals. Which... I'm going to be honest, that vexes me. A lot. It's not my tournament, and it's going to be run how Nightwing wants it run, but I honestly would've preferred it be a quieter 13 person event consisting only of bladers who'd made it to BK Finals before.
- There were some issues with Challonge match results entry today. At least three times I'm aware of, a match was entered incorrectly, temporarily. Worse yet, one of these was the last match of a round, so although it was corrected, the matches for the following round were determined incorrectly by Challonge, having an unknowable ripple effect through the remaining rounds. We need more care to be taken in match results being entered. This happened way too many times today.
- The acoustics today generally weren't as bad as the heat, although I'm sure it didn't help.
- So, 24 blader 6 round swiss. Problem being, 5 people did not have ANY BK experience, and a further 6 had participated and posessed no BK ranking. To seed according to the BK ranks would have been a little absurd, it would mean including 3 of the top bladers on the east coast as "unranked", completely skewing and screwing up the seeding for first round Swiss. Swiss is a format that really does need to be properly seeded. So, ended up with random seeding. And honestly, looking at the matchups Challonge picked, I'd say about 4 of those were total mis-seeds, random does that, but at least it wasn't an intentional mis-seed. I guess random's just as bad as unranked. Or, hear me out, just don't invite anyone to the invitational who isn't BK ranked.
- The matches were self-judged by the participants. In a tournament like the invitational where a lot is on the line, I do not agree with this decision at all. Especially since there were so many ties other people needed to judge anyway. We ran 6 stadiums at a time, and did not save a significant amount of time at all from self-judging. There were actually a couple disagreements on calls, and I'm not going to speak for anyone else but to a certain degree there is a lack of trust in some bladers ability to judge fairly for others or self-judge fairly in matches where they are participating. We're getting sportsmanship issues. It's getting to be a problem in the mid-Atlantic area, there are at least a couple people who I would not consider allowing to be judge because of bias, or previous incidents. And having this cloud of doubt and suspicion leads to problems and resentment. Bladers, please conduct yourselves with honesty and integrity, no matter who is involved in a match.
- I went 3-3 in the first stage, but that's incredibly misleading. I went 0-3 in the first 3 rounds, and some of those losses were legitimately surprising to me. But 5v5 is funny sometimes. Depending on how you and your opponent shuffle your deck, you can just get absolutely crushed by the ordering, even completely shut out. It's happened to me before, and it happened again today. And hey, those losses, I lost, my opponents beat me fair and square. They did better than me at Beyblade.
- My round 3 matchup was CrisisCrusher07, also with an 0-2 record. Beyblade was mean to us today. But he has an outstanding record against me in 5v5 and today was no different.
- By the 4th round I was making better driver decisions for the beystadiums, and also I was facing other people with 0-3, 1-3, and 2-3 records, so I starting having a little bit more success.
- The stadiums for each of the 6 rounds was decided by die roll, coin, or elimination. We started in Dash, went to Haspro for the following round, and then went to DB for the third. At round 4 we rolled Haspro, DB in the following, and I think Dash was last. Changing stadiums every round in a Swiss actually makes my headache a lot worse. Did I mention I have a headache? I have a headache. Actually, if I'm being totally honest, I am sick to death of non-B-09 beystadiums. We ran only B-09s for years, and it got boring, especially once DB made opposite spin a hellworld. And now that I have attended 5 BK tournaments where B-09s are a rarity, I've come to the conclusion that I am sick to death of these goofy beystadiums. They're Goofy. Many drivers that are as mainstay of competitive burst standard nowadays are mostly infeasible in these beystadiums. Drift is VERY unsafe in all 3 of these, and I paid dearly in the first 2 matches for that. Morbius, I know is unsafe. I tried Metal Universe in the first two and I certainly lost for it. By the later rounds I was specifically avoiding any drivers with even the slightest bit of angled wideness.
- Nightwing always uses pocket wall bounce as KO rules. But he decided today that the 2 narrow pockets in Dash wouldn't count as an instant KO, and by general vote the 4th pocket in Haspro, without as much of a pit, that wall would also count as a KO. I don't think this made a huge difference in Haspro, but it certainly did for Dash.
- My beys varied a bit based on what stadium was in use that round. Dynamite and Vanish and World, I always used. Prominence, a couple times. Guilty and Chain I would swap out based on the beystadium. Lately I've been running Belial2 on Chain in opposite spin, and it seems to work okay. I'm using the Kerbeus chip on Prominence, it seems like a good candidate for metal drivers. And I'm learning the painful lesson between this and the team tournament that I need to be using high mode more in opposite spin.
- By my 3rd loss I was way too hot and way too tired. Some days are just a bad fit for Beyblade for me, and this was one of them. I resolved to leave after first stage was concluded. Sorry, I know you all want detailed reports of the finals too, but, this tournament was a bit of a difficulty all around; I have to work tomorrow, after all, and I had a headache.
- I didn't make it to the finals... thankfully. I wanted to win that big champion belt, sure, but I was definitely feeling unwell by 3 rounds in, and winning the following 3 rounds meant there was still a very small chance I might make it to finals, so I had to stick around for the entirety of the 6th round.
- I was not present for the finals. I have heard bits and pieces. Apparently it wasn't all smooth sailing. Personally, I was rooting for MamaBey2122 to win it all, to include defeating her son LJ-Blader, I'm on their team in the team league. But, she made it to 4th place apparently, quite good as always, and LJ is currently in the finals match against JCMakeEmBurst. Sorry I didn't put up a better showing today, team! I hope to be in better condition for next week's tournament.
- The top 4 from the finals appear to be Mamabey in 4th, Godly_Requiem in 3rd, LJ-Blader in 2nd, and JCMakeEmBurst in 1st.
- I think the second season of individual Bladers Kingdom tournaments, if they happen, need a bit of a rules rework, some better public announcements of the policies and tournament structure ahead of time (BK8 Bounties and the invitational system definitely come to mind), and perhaps less of a spur-of-the-moment quality to organizational decisions. And considering the problems with self-judging that have apparently been happening for several tournaments now but the judging and sportsmanship issues are starting towards a boil, I think you're going to need to revise things.
I hope everyone who attended had fun today. I did not personally witness the finals, so if anyone wants to contribute details on that, go ahead.
![[Image: 4iz876.gif]](https://i.imgflip.com/4iz876.gif)
