This is why..
(From Bemanistyle)
The 4th regional tournament for the official Konami US championships was held yesterday which resulted in foreseeable mistakes of both pad quality and differing from posted rules by Gameworks and tournament officials.
The day before the tournament players were already seeing the effects of poor pads. After complaining to the Gameworks technicians it was said that there was nothing more they could do and that’s the best they were going to be for the tournament.
Ryan Iyengar aka DukAmok attended all previous qualifiers, but due to Konami’s finances he was unable to make the MN regional. This is where most players knew that without the expertise of a skilled player present for each regional things would begin to fall apart. Being that Ryan was that skilled player, making sure the pads were working to the best of their abilities before the event and maintaining proper posted rules, without his help things were left in the hands of Konami’s 3rd party tournament organizers and the event turned out to be unanimously awful.
- 1st Travis K (reboman)
- 2nd Mike L (Bluemystic)
- 3rd Tim L (Cartoonhero)
- 4th Jayson M (Jay Goemon)
During the tournament the left 1P side of the pad was performing terribly for everyone and it was said that anyone who had the right 2p side was going to have a higher chance of winning. Only until a player had 18~ misses and dropped holds was the problem looked into by a GW tech. Players were offering to help fix the problem, but were then threatened to be disqualified if they touched the machine. GW came to the conclusion that they were just playing the wrong way.
Confusion then occurred with the correct songs to be played for each match and how random songs were to be selected. Mike and Tim had to redo their match after a misunderstanding after they had played songs outside of the tournament list. Players were also using the machine’s Random which makes it impossible to tell what song is about to be played, modifiers were guesses.
EvilDave saids
The songs for randoms were only supposed to be the 5 used in each rounds, they were never supposed to use machine random because there's no way to determine what song you're playing. On the final round where you can pick anything, the random comes from the group of 9s used in the tournament (which for this would have been Afronova, Brilliant RED, iFuturelist, Xepher, and Electro Tuned).
All best of 5 matches meant you were allowed 2 picks each and random on the 5th song if necessary, not 1 pick each and then random the rest.
Overall players felt that many matches could have been determined by a coin toss instead of skills due to inconstant pads. The outcome of rounds would have in all likelihood resulted differently if the correct songs and randoms would have been enforced.
To recap here are the winners from each of the four previous regionals:
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What happen in the Minneapolis Regional was uncalled for and was unfair to the Community, it's a prime example on why the more and more the hardcore players are dropping DDR in favor of other non-Konami Dance Games and stopped supporting Konami, the lack of connection between Konami and the Hardcore Playes have been a problem for years now and along with the poor DDR X release and now this, It is clear this problem is still exists and it's now harming this tournament.
Many players from Aaron in Japan agree that any tournament that will not have Duk Amok (A Person who understands the community and keep in touch with the Hardcore Players) there will suffer the same fate.