IntroductionAfter reading
this GGS tournament thread during the week, and also reading
this community building blog entry on SRK, I spent some time thinking about how things at GGS have unfolded over the last few years. Everyone knows I'm an opinionated and long-winded fellow, but I'm hesitant to talk about this topic because I've long since retired from the competitive scene as a player. Then it occurred to me I could just write it off as "my opinion" and leave everybody else to ignore it if they wished.
Disclaimer: My thoughts here are my own, based on personal experience, a bit of reading and talking to numerous people. This isn't about asking for change - I won't become a GGS regular regardless of the response to this thread, so it's absurd to think this is about making me happy. I'm just sharing my point of view, and people can dislike it or ignore it at their leisure.GGS has been a bastion for the Sydney competitive fighting scene since its opening. It provided a home for the 3S community after Playtime closed and has been at the centre of tournaments great and small ever since then, enjoying strong support with new titles such as SF4 and Tekken 6, and even expanding to provide on-site consoles for titles like SSF4 and MvC3. However video games are not the core focus of the GGS business, and their integration has not been executed in the most efficient manner. There are four aspects of the GGS fighting game situation that warrant review: the timing of gatherings, frequency of tournaments, customer service and the long-term view of the business model.
Friday NightsEverybody that visits this website knows that if you want to play fighting games with top/keen Sydney players, you should visit GGS on just about any Friday night and you'll find a challenger at the least, and often a tournament to join. What they might not know is that they'll be sharing the room with a small army of MTG players, as Friday night is when GGS runs its weekly Friday Night Magic (FNM) fixture - a mainstay of their core business.
A Friday night at GGS makes one thing abundantly clear - GGS is not an arcade or a console lounge. GGS is a gaming store of the card/miniatures/board games/etc variety. The video games are there to use up spare capacity. When you go to GGS to play fighting games, you are not the primary customer for the business.
Friday nights have been favoured because they suit the people running things and/or some of the attendees who are in the city on a Friday night anyway. These numbers are always going to be constrained because of the lack of physical space when running things alongside FNM. This has been the situation for a very long time now.
If people are serious about weekly organised gatherings at GGS, then the Friday night model cannot be sustained. It doesn't offer room for growth, it conflicts with GGS core business, and it doesn't suit the growing number of people who face a long, late night commute to even get to and from GGS on a Friday.
Walk-in casuals on a Friday make perfect sense. You can always do that in any arcade, and the forums allow people to confirm attendance in advance. It's more about convenience in that case anyway so it doesn't matter if you pop in after school/work on a Friday and nobody is there since it wasn't out of your way to begin with. But making the core local tournament/planned casual play scene revolve around a cramped Friday night is never going to work.
If people are keen then weeklies should continue, but they need to run during GGS off-peak times because doing it any other way is only hurting the people you are trying to retain.
Too Many TournamentsWeekly gatherings are definitely a good idea for a scene that is keen to play, improve and grow. They should be as regular as possible (i.e. same time and day every week) and be no more frequent than weekly to avoid dividing people's time between too many gatherings.
The weekly GGS gatherings have always revolved around tournaments. This was likely inspired by weekly RanBats in Japan and the US, where the major local scenes are very much larger than the humble, widely spread Sydney scene.
In a smaller scene like Sydney, weekly tournaments are overkill. Many people can only gather to play once a week, and if every time you gather to play it's "tournament time" then when exactly do you get your offline casual training matches? The answer for some is "you don't". That means you fail to help people level up because there's not enough time between brackets for reflection and analysis. People need a chance to just get together and try/share ideas in a relaxed setting. Tournaments are great things for measuring your progress, but they sap the will from those who are struggling to understand the game and derive fun from just sharing with other keen players.
Local tournaments should be monthly in a scene as small as Sydney, meaning the other 3 weekly meets are a chance to train and learn. By making tournaments monthly you provide a regular goal for people to target each month, and those who want to avoid tournaments can still come and play without feeling too much pressure. It also gives the organisers more time to just relax and play games themselves!
Service with a SmileSydney has a long history of being unfriendly that has nothing to do with our scene. Playing online is also a minefield of hate messages that can take the shine off what is supposed to be a fun, yet intellectual, pass-time. Not everyone in any scene is going to become best friends with everyone else, and for the most part the Sydney community has a lot of respect for each other. However at GGS the players aren't always put first. Reasonable expectations are not being met and it will continue to turn people away.
We all accept that video games are not part of the GGS core business. I believe everybody is cool with that. What's not acceptable is when our scene tries to work with GGS to minimise our impact on their core business only to be treated like we're not welcome at all.
To give a basic example, events like S3 and Saturday team tournaments were negotiated with GGS management to be held during off-peak periods. OzHadou would pay for floor space that was exclusively for video game activities over a given time frame, with the understanding that space would also be left for GGS core business that might walk in off the street. Time after time GGS has chosen to break terms and favour last-minute core business arriving in off-peak times over OzHadou. This includes Sunday morning CCG tournaments that weren't supposed to happen, and casual CCG/wargaming being run in OzHadou-allocated space when a weekend tournament was supposed to start.
This sort of disrespect for the video game customers is a major source of discontent. People work around it, but the frustration builds over time when organisers give up their personal time and travel 1+ hours just to have their (paid and booked) plans interfered with. GGS management need to realise they are going to lose the video game income (such that it is) if they treat these players like 2nd rate customers (at best). Keep making the fighting game players feel unwanted and sure enough they won't bother coming back. This extends to the GGS staff, some of whom seem to think their job doesn't extend to servicing the video game players at GGS.
In it for the Long HaulArcade games are expensive. Consoles are not as expensive, but still cost a fair bit money in large quantities, especially when monitors and sticks are thrown in. Rome wasn't built in a day, and no arcade or console lounge will pay off their investments overnight.
If business is slow, jacking up the prices isn't going to help with the bottom line. GGS' advantage lies in directly servicing the community, not undercutting the competition. People will pay if they are being given the community experience they expect, but poor conditions and/or service at premium prices isn't going to work.
GGS already offers a lot of flexibility and freedom that the city arcades can't/won't offer. But the walk-in traffic of those arcades cannot be rivaled by GGS. What GGS needs to do is leverage community features better to maximise participation during well-timed weekly gatherings. This means things like wall-mounted viewing TVs for spectators, in-house direct feed video capture equipment and live streams for monthly tournaments need to be serious priorities, not much-promised undelivered pipe-dreams. These things cost money too, but investments have already been made in these directions by GGS associates and OzHadou, and the community is able to pitch in too if given evidence that GGS will support and justify their contributions (i.e. through well run tournaments and regular gatherings).
A healthy GGS video game business with a long-term view on customer service and revenue forms the foundations for Sydney major tournaments like OHN, not to mention justifying the very existence of the OzHadou website itself. So long as long-term goals go unrealised at GGS the foundation of OHN will be undermined, and is in danger of being eroded to the point of no return.
ConclusionSince shortly after the close of Playtime, GGS has been the mecca for the Sydney competitive fighting game scene. Organised casual play and tournaments would never have existed for the current generation of fighting games - SF4, MvC3 and Tekken 6 - if not for the open support GGS has provided for the fighting game community. GGS has faced criticism on numerous occasions over the years. Support waxes and wanes not just because of what games are available or how keen the local players are, but also because of the way GGS and its partners (business and community) handle the video game component of its business.
Weekly gatherings are the best way to go if a scene of keen players exists. Since video games are non-core business for GGS, the weekly gatherings need to tie-in to fixed off-peak periods and leave the players to commit to making themselves available at that time. Without these planned meets, walk-in traffic will be all that remains, and the cabinets and consoles at GGS cannot survive on walk-in traffic. The tournament frequency needs to be scaled back to monthly so that players have more gatherings where they can just focus on education and fun rather than competition in a bracket.
The GGS staff need to show that they welcome the video gamers instead of treating them like second-class customers, with management demonstrating that they value the revenue from these people by holding to their promises on resources reserved for fighting games during off-peak hours. Growth and sustainability of the video games needs to be structured on a long-term business model where updates to new games are a matter-of-course, and upgrading services to the community (e.g. comfort, hardware, maintenance, etc) is consistently delivered over time.
There will always be room for improvement, and everyone understands that improvement takes time and money. It also takes a commitment to change and the will to see it through. Many of the things mentioned here have been static at GGS for a very long time, to the point where many would doubt that they'll ever change, or that there exists players in the wider Sydney area worth changing for. The proof will be in what comes next.
This is simply the opinion of one person who has come and gone. If you chose to read it I hope it inspired rather than offended. Don't get mad - get better.
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