The following are all words I have to say about "The School BELL is Ringing!", a burst standard tournament that took place during pre-Guilty DB
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- It drizzled off and on all day. It was humid and wet. There was a large gazebo and we somehow fit 50 people under it, mostly. It was a bit crowded. Summer tournaments are not good for me. Apparently the Mid-Atlantic region is the new Seattle.
- We had a 24 person 5 round swiss. We only ran 3 beystadiums and they were not always running matches. It ran late, especially when there were only two matches left in a round, and the judge for one of the matches also had a match of their own left to do. This happened in numerous rounds. We're sorry, bladers and parents, sometimes these things run longer than we expect! Although, at this point, this is par for the course in Standard format.
- The gazebo had One Entrance. Sometime in the past few days a giant 80 foot tree had fallen over the paved path to the gazebo. Its level accessway, blocked. As a result people could only mostly enter through the one open side (8 sided gazebo). That pathway was not kept clear. There were people sitting in chairs on both sides of the entryway, and a table had been set up mostly blocking the entrance. Please, in the future, we must do better to ensure easy access to entering and leaving the tournament area.
- I was originally going to either not judge or be a backup judge. But we had an incident in the first round where one of the judges had to stop judging, so I stepped in to help judge. I judged a bunch of matches, and almost all of them were Bearing vs Bearing on opposite spin. Folks, we've got a Bearing problem.
- This tournament operated on the Burst Standard choose one play one format in the first stage. The ties (There were MANY ties) felt especially time consuming. I should know, I had a lot of them. We had matches last well over 15 minutes with multiple people staring at phone recorded matches. We even had to redo some of them. Ties. Ties ties ties. Nonstop ties. Ties for days. Ties until the end of ties.
- By 11:40 only 4 people had shown up. By the 1:00 start time, 24 people had shown up.
- We had a bathroom situation; there were no bathrooms. I was lucky, I remembered to go before I left home. The nearby library was completely closed. Couldn't use the bathrooms. Anyone who had to go had to go across the street to a store to use theirs. Can't hold a tournament here again on a day the library is closed!
- Most of the rounds ended with one or two matches taking forever at the end because of ties.
- No one in the finals was really a surprise. We had a bunch of names I expected to see. Geetster99 and froztz didn't make it this time, but came close.
- AJL Blader took first place at last. That's got to be a weight off his shoulders. I'm not surprised, he did well. LJ-Blader second, I was third. Broyeeto made it to the finals, and we had a close match. He got 4th.
- I went 3-2 in the first round. My combos relied heavily on Bearing, which is STILL COMPLETELY SAFE TO USE on Dynamite and Roar and Vanish. I didn't use Roar today. Bearing is just too safe. And in some situations even Bearing can beat same spin. All of the matches were very close ties. Misery inducing ties. I ran Vanish Fafnir Over Bearing-6 and Dynamite Belial+F Over Bearing-10 somewhat randomly. No matter what I picked I seemed to wind up in an opposite spin nightmare.
- I mostly stopped using attack types in deck format. I replaced my Rage Longinus in deck with a Tempest Solomon on Ignition'. My first two opponents in deck format brought out Dynamite Bearing, which my combo isn't great against, I discovered. Fed up with having a deck bey I wasn't using, I replaced it with Rage Longinus X' 3A for the final match. Which was a mistake, I self-KOed the one time I tried it (after 4 self-KO test launches) and he brought Dynamite on Drift, which my Solomon combo would've been better against. Well, that'll teach me for changing my deck.
- My deck was not too creative. Dynamite Belial+F Over Drift-10, Vanish Fafnir Giga Bearing-6, Tempest Solomon (MCC) Ignition' 1S. Same as last time, except for the final match. I forgot that I either have A Good Drift or a launch that makes Drift good. And instead of using it in the first round, I went full Bearing. I have some regrets about that, even though it got me to the finals. My Dynamite Drift did quite well in the finals, as did the Vanish.
- I believe it was Broyeeto or possibly LJ-Blader who used Rage against my Dynamite Drift combo. It did not succeed all that well. Rage is mostly outclassed, and even on Bearing I don't think it doesn't always give the easy knockout you think it would.
- We had an incident with my first match. I was using Vanish Over Bearing, my opponent was using Dynamite Over Bearing (or maybe the opposite, I can't quite remember now). I'm going to leave out the names. Judge A was calling the matches, and he wasn't using a phone to record in slow motion. Not everyone has one, you know; must we gatekeep judging with technical requirements caused by a stagnating meta? He ended up calling all the points for my bey. I did not disagree with his assessments; from where I was sitting, it looked to me that my bey managed to squeak out a little more movement than my opponents in each match. But I have a policy of not trying to influence the judge one way or the other when I am one of the participants. I might think it went one way, but I'm biased, and the judge has the best view, it's best not to say anything and let the judge make their call. The first round continued, and I was marked as the winner. Later on in the first round, I was called back to look at something. Apparently my opponent's parent recorded the matches, and from his angle on his phone (I don't know if it was recorded in slow motion or not), he disagreed with some of the rulings. He showed it to Judge B and the organizer. And then Judge B tried to show it to me, and insisted that one of the matches should've been called as a tie, and the other should've been called for my opponent. I have issues with trusting the footage of biased non-participants, the way I see it, if someone who isn't directly connected to the match shows me footage, sure. But a parent or blader themselves, potentially not in slow motion? That's not ideal. In the interest of satisfying these lingering concerns, I offered to redo that entire match since we were still midway through round 1. The resulting matches were still 3-0 for my bey and I won the redo, recorded this time in slow motion. Judge A was removed from judging duties for lack of a phone, and having a slow motion recording phone myself, I became Judge C. I'm not really happy with how any of that went down.
- The Burst Standard meta is terrible. It verges on being boring. I don't like it and I'm starting to see why some people have stopped going to Burst Standard tournaments. The ties take forever. Drift and Bearing and Zone'+Z are a curse. This tournament made me miss 3v3 so much. If Guilty doesn't solve the Bearing problem with maximum violence, we need to talk about bans. DB beys just don't burst much. Bearing is too powerful on DB layers. At the very least put Bearing on the Burst Standard Watchlist which needs to exist. Once long ago they banned all variants of Sr3 and G3. It's time to think about a ban for a tip. Normally, Bearing has a major weakness, weak spring strength. Drift at least has its chaos spin which can do more harm than good. But in DB, Bearing is mostly unstoppable. It's great on same spin (How???) and excellent on opposite spin. We can't ban an entire season of layers; it's gotta be Bearing if anything. I hope Guilty will sufficiently nuke other DB layers so we don't have to do that.
- Here's the problem with ties: depending on where you're sitting, your angle, they can be called 3 different ways. 3 different people could watch an opposite spin match with 3 different phones and 3 different filming angles in slow motion, and come up with 3 completely different answers about who got the point or tie. It's terrible. This is sapping the fun out of Beyblade. TT has done us a hilarious disservice in turning the tournament playstyle once again into a high defense staimna LAD heck hole. I absolutely do not agree with the idea that a slow motion finish close match should be repeated up to three times; It's Boring. Boring Boring Boring. I am of the opinion that once is enough. I know other people see it other ways, but I do not, and that will not change.
I got 3rd, I had fun... but we're well past the point where action needs to be taken against the stagnating meta. If Guilty doesn't solve it, we have to fix it with bans or format changes. This can't go on.
---
- It drizzled off and on all day. It was humid and wet. There was a large gazebo and we somehow fit 50 people under it, mostly. It was a bit crowded. Summer tournaments are not good for me. Apparently the Mid-Atlantic region is the new Seattle.
- We had a 24 person 5 round swiss. We only ran 3 beystadiums and they were not always running matches. It ran late, especially when there were only two matches left in a round, and the judge for one of the matches also had a match of their own left to do. This happened in numerous rounds. We're sorry, bladers and parents, sometimes these things run longer than we expect! Although, at this point, this is par for the course in Standard format.
- The gazebo had One Entrance. Sometime in the past few days a giant 80 foot tree had fallen over the paved path to the gazebo. Its level accessway, blocked. As a result people could only mostly enter through the one open side (8 sided gazebo). That pathway was not kept clear. There were people sitting in chairs on both sides of the entryway, and a table had been set up mostly blocking the entrance. Please, in the future, we must do better to ensure easy access to entering and leaving the tournament area.
- I was originally going to either not judge or be a backup judge. But we had an incident in the first round where one of the judges had to stop judging, so I stepped in to help judge. I judged a bunch of matches, and almost all of them were Bearing vs Bearing on opposite spin. Folks, we've got a Bearing problem.
- This tournament operated on the Burst Standard choose one play one format in the first stage. The ties (There were MANY ties) felt especially time consuming. I should know, I had a lot of them. We had matches last well over 15 minutes with multiple people staring at phone recorded matches. We even had to redo some of them. Ties. Ties ties ties. Nonstop ties. Ties for days. Ties until the end of ties.
- By 11:40 only 4 people had shown up. By the 1:00 start time, 24 people had shown up.
- We had a bathroom situation; there were no bathrooms. I was lucky, I remembered to go before I left home. The nearby library was completely closed. Couldn't use the bathrooms. Anyone who had to go had to go across the street to a store to use theirs. Can't hold a tournament here again on a day the library is closed!
- Most of the rounds ended with one or two matches taking forever at the end because of ties.
- No one in the finals was really a surprise. We had a bunch of names I expected to see. Geetster99 and froztz didn't make it this time, but came close.
- AJL Blader took first place at last. That's got to be a weight off his shoulders. I'm not surprised, he did well. LJ-Blader second, I was third. Broyeeto made it to the finals, and we had a close match. He got 4th.
- I went 3-2 in the first round. My combos relied heavily on Bearing, which is STILL COMPLETELY SAFE TO USE on Dynamite and Roar and Vanish. I didn't use Roar today. Bearing is just too safe. And in some situations even Bearing can beat same spin. All of the matches were very close ties. Misery inducing ties. I ran Vanish Fafnir Over Bearing-6 and Dynamite Belial+F Over Bearing-10 somewhat randomly. No matter what I picked I seemed to wind up in an opposite spin nightmare.
- I mostly stopped using attack types in deck format. I replaced my Rage Longinus in deck with a Tempest Solomon on Ignition'. My first two opponents in deck format brought out Dynamite Bearing, which my combo isn't great against, I discovered. Fed up with having a deck bey I wasn't using, I replaced it with Rage Longinus X' 3A for the final match. Which was a mistake, I self-KOed the one time I tried it (after 4 self-KO test launches) and he brought Dynamite on Drift, which my Solomon combo would've been better against. Well, that'll teach me for changing my deck.
- My deck was not too creative. Dynamite Belial+F Over Drift-10, Vanish Fafnir Giga Bearing-6, Tempest Solomon (MCC) Ignition' 1S. Same as last time, except for the final match. I forgot that I either have A Good Drift or a launch that makes Drift good. And instead of using it in the first round, I went full Bearing. I have some regrets about that, even though it got me to the finals. My Dynamite Drift did quite well in the finals, as did the Vanish.
- I believe it was Broyeeto or possibly LJ-Blader who used Rage against my Dynamite Drift combo. It did not succeed all that well. Rage is mostly outclassed, and even on Bearing I don't think it doesn't always give the easy knockout you think it would.
- We had an incident with my first match. I was using Vanish Over Bearing, my opponent was using Dynamite Over Bearing (or maybe the opposite, I can't quite remember now). I'm going to leave out the names. Judge A was calling the matches, and he wasn't using a phone to record in slow motion. Not everyone has one, you know; must we gatekeep judging with technical requirements caused by a stagnating meta? He ended up calling all the points for my bey. I did not disagree with his assessments; from where I was sitting, it looked to me that my bey managed to squeak out a little more movement than my opponents in each match. But I have a policy of not trying to influence the judge one way or the other when I am one of the participants. I might think it went one way, but I'm biased, and the judge has the best view, it's best not to say anything and let the judge make their call. The first round continued, and I was marked as the winner. Later on in the first round, I was called back to look at something. Apparently my opponent's parent recorded the matches, and from his angle on his phone (I don't know if it was recorded in slow motion or not), he disagreed with some of the rulings. He showed it to Judge B and the organizer. And then Judge B tried to show it to me, and insisted that one of the matches should've been called as a tie, and the other should've been called for my opponent. I have issues with trusting the footage of biased non-participants, the way I see it, if someone who isn't directly connected to the match shows me footage, sure. But a parent or blader themselves, potentially not in slow motion? That's not ideal. In the interest of satisfying these lingering concerns, I offered to redo that entire match since we were still midway through round 1. The resulting matches were still 3-0 for my bey and I won the redo, recorded this time in slow motion. Judge A was removed from judging duties for lack of a phone, and having a slow motion recording phone myself, I became Judge C. I'm not really happy with how any of that went down.
- The Burst Standard meta is terrible. It verges on being boring. I don't like it and I'm starting to see why some people have stopped going to Burst Standard tournaments. The ties take forever. Drift and Bearing and Zone'+Z are a curse. This tournament made me miss 3v3 so much. If Guilty doesn't solve the Bearing problem with maximum violence, we need to talk about bans. DB beys just don't burst much. Bearing is too powerful on DB layers. At the very least put Bearing on the Burst Standard Watchlist which needs to exist. Once long ago they banned all variants of Sr3 and G3. It's time to think about a ban for a tip. Normally, Bearing has a major weakness, weak spring strength. Drift at least has its chaos spin which can do more harm than good. But in DB, Bearing is mostly unstoppable. It's great on same spin (How???) and excellent on opposite spin. We can't ban an entire season of layers; it's gotta be Bearing if anything. I hope Guilty will sufficiently nuke other DB layers so we don't have to do that.
- Here's the problem with ties: depending on where you're sitting, your angle, they can be called 3 different ways. 3 different people could watch an opposite spin match with 3 different phones and 3 different filming angles in slow motion, and come up with 3 completely different answers about who got the point or tie. It's terrible. This is sapping the fun out of Beyblade. TT has done us a hilarious disservice in turning the tournament playstyle once again into a high defense staimna LAD heck hole. I absolutely do not agree with the idea that a slow motion finish close match should be repeated up to three times; It's Boring. Boring Boring Boring. I am of the opinion that once is enough. I know other people see it other ways, but I do not, and that will not change.
I got 3rd, I had fun... but we're well past the point where action needs to be taken against the stagnating meta. If Guilty doesn't solve it, we have to fix it with bans or format changes. This can't go on.
![[Image: 49mdl9.gif]](https://i.imgflip.com/49mdl9.gif)
![[Image: badnewsbearings_sig.png]](https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/260956812768051210/567384942934229002/badnewsbearings_sig.png)
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