OHN11 Results

[Gamogo]

(This one's a bit overdue. I wrapped up my OHN contributions only to go straight into a couple of live shows in the days after, then back to a hellish week of work. No rest for the free. Thankfully Tomahawk kicked ass on Tuesday!)

Thanks to all of you who made the pilgrimage to Sydney this year to support OHN 11. We trust you all had fun, got a bunch of matches in, laughed, swore, got salty, won some, lost some, supported your favourite players, gave your rivals a hard time and perhaps made some new ones.

To those of you who were new to this chaos, we look forward to hopefully seeing you again at OHN 12 and at other majors scattered around the country as the year rolls on. Next on the tournament calendar is BAM (in Melbourne) which you will learn more about soon. Other events are in the pipe-line which I'm sure the respective organisers will announce soon (Shadowloo Showdown, ACL?) also.

Salute to all the players for a bunch of great matches both won and lost in a variety of games and thanks also for remaining orderly in what at times was a floorspace perhaps a little lacking. It was awesome to see every state ramp up their support of players leading into Sunday's finals and especially cool to see the chorus of cheers as the final matches were played out. Extra cool for me this year was seeing all states represented strongly in various games be it KOF, Tekken, SF, Marvel or VF. I felt this OHN had an interesting state-spread of champions which was pleasing.

Cheers to the OHN mob of Ziggy, Spencer, brother Youssef and Daniel for being a great bunch of folks to work with again, alongside our band of volunteers, hardware contributors, sponsors, judges, commentators and anybody who chipped in to make OHN possible. Thanks to Kientan and Sol for both snapping a bunch of great photos of the event and sharing them with everyone too. We should all thank Glassy for stepping up to handle some impromptu financial obligations over the weekend too!

Special thanks to JB of LanSmash for running the stream for us over the three days and also to our collection of dedicated commentators lead by Sean and Mike.

Sadly I was again a little too busy this year to properly catch up with and speak to a lot of you, which is often the case at OHN for me. We usually only have time to stop and breathe once everyone has headed home. In the next few days the guilty parties will sit down and review what we feel worked, what didn't and what could perhaps be built upon for OHN 12. Any feedback is welcome be it positive or negative so we can work towards patching up problems or retaining formulas that are working. Open messages here or private messages to myself, Spencer or Ziggy are more than welcome if you have anything you'd like to raise or mention.

Lastly, thanks again to all of you for coming to OHN or even sitting at home checking in on the stream. Its great to see OHN's continued support after such a long time running by a community of truly kick ass people.

[Tom]

since there isn't a feedback thread I would also like to say the top 4 on the finals day worked pretty well, although i think there was time for top 6 in each game.

Would still prefer a top 8 if possible but top 4 still did the job.

[Gamogo]

since there isn't a feedback thread I would also like to say the top 4 on the finals day worked pretty well, although i think there was time for top 6 in each game.

Would still prefer a top 8 if possible but top 4 still did the job.

Yep, agreed. We erred on caution this year due to last year's rushed top eight (and prize give outs) hence top 4 for each game only. Additionally we anticipated some time blow outs due to the extra games being played officially (Tekken, KOF, VF, AE, MVC - particularly with KOF due it being potentially very lengthy if matches alternate a lot).

The flip side to this is that we had some 'spare' time on both Saturday and Sunday which allowed us to run some of the exhibitions we couldn't properly cram in last year combined with folks having the time to play a bunch of casuals on Sunday which I understand was a welcomed change also.

The main goal was to have OHN wrap up without the hasty pacing of last year and I think we achieved that. I was personally a little bummed out that we couldn't see top 8's also (particularly AE for me) as I understand the whittling down to top four yielded a bunch of great clashes that didn't get the air and audience time they deserved. These decisions were also predicated on the restrictive operating hours we had with the venue. I did feel that top 4 for each game had a bit more urgency and intensity to what we did see - it was short and sweet so to speak. Marvel was especially fun in that respect.

Next year we'll revisit this again to see what kind of middle ground can be found, though we are already hatching a few ideas to achieve this.

I'm glad those who came had fun, on the whole the feedback has been mostly positive though the event certainly wasn't without it's faults as per usual. We'd like to think other tournament organisers (BAM, Shadowloo, ACL, SA, et al) can take something from the successful (and unsuccessful!) choices we made at OHN and run with them for their own tournaments while adding their own changes also. Running larger tournaments is an evolving science, especially as the spread of games grows along with the number of participants.

Personally I'm really liking the casual Friday thing. When we implemented this last year we were a little apprehensive about people turning up to it and were worried it may be a bit of a budget blow out (as we effectively have to rent the venue for an additional day). It's proven to be quite successful however which is cool. It allows everyone to drop in, meet and greet, talk some shit, play some casuals, fire up some fund raiser matches and build gigantic sandbag forts. Good times. I felt it also allows players to familiarise themselves with the venue and layout so that on Saturday they can hit the ground running. I think we can safely say this will be an OHN staple from here on out unless of course we find ourselves dependent upon an obscenely expensive venue in the future.

Gonna stop now. Caffienne fueled posts tend to get lengthy.

[Alexk]

The Friday thing worked wonders for me. I was able to get my nerves to the point where I didn't have to worry about doing crazy things with my execution. I had time to ease into it. Of course I was going to stuff up combos here and there but nothing more than usual, so yeah friday gave me the time to do that. I'm assuming it was a common feeling among people.