27 replies to this topic

[AlphaZealot]

Hello Professors and Pokémon Fans!

My name is Chris Brown and recently I started work with The Pokémon Company International in the position of Video Game Tournament Planner. I know I have some big shoes to fill with Mike Liesik turning his attention to new things—his passion and work with this fantastic community has thus far been indispensable. With the help of the great people at TPCi and within the Pokémon community I look forward to pushing competitive Pokémon to new heights, as well as aggressively working to grow the Pokémon VGC events and community.

I have been a fan of Pokémon since the US Red/Blue release in 1998. Like many, catching the original 151 was a thrill and highlight of childhood. Over the years I managed to work through at least one game in each generation and often played through the games on family road trips. Pokémon played a pivotal role developing my love and passion for video games.

While attending The Ohio State University I was fortunate enough to work part time with Major League Gaming. There, I worked with several different communities to implement the largest competitive video game tournaments in North America. In addition to my professional gaming work, I also worked closely with the grassroots Super Smash Brothers community as a website administrator, ladder director, writer, and live tournament organizer.

I look forward to working with the Pokémon community online and at live events. The Pokémon community is one of the strongest in gaming and that is in large part due to the hard work and dedication of the many grassroots tournament organizers, players, and enthusiasts. In the coming days and weeks I will make myself available for input and discussion about the future of the Pokémon Video Game Championships and the Play! Pokémon program.

Thanks,
Chris

[Scott]

Appreciate the post here, and good luck with the position.

Let us know if there's anything we can do to make life easier for you. Somewhat obviously, we have pretty easy access to all of the hardcore types in North America and a good chunk from Europe as well, and can pretty easily get a hold of anyone, so if it's ever useful to you to get feedback from the community about anything or get information out to it we're always around to do what we can.

[plaid]

Hey Chris,

Welcome to our community and thanks for introducing yourself and making yourself available to the community. Over the years, Mike and then David and Dan have made sure that each year's tournament is better than the year before, and I'm looking forward to continuing that positive trajectory with you. The already announced rule changes are encouraging, and I hope we can also work together to fix the things that aren't working quite so well. Our resources are always available, and I'm very happy you've chosen to become a part of the community to help alleviate any misconceptions or communications that might occur.

Congrats on the job (sorry, Rushan)! I hope you enjoy these tournaments (and the community) as much as we do.

[makiri]

I want to echo what the others said, thank you for introducing yourself and congrats for getting the position. I've been with VGC since the beginning and I've seen it grow, hopefully you can help continue the progress we've seen over the past few years. If there is ever anything we can do to help, we are all very willing and able to. Thanks Chris!

[Firestorm]

Wanted to congratulate you again on the position! It was pretty cool to see a name I'd seen so often shaping the competitive Smash Bros. community get this role. The Video Game Championships have been improving in format year after year and I only expect it to get better under your care. I hope to see you either at US Nationals or, if I can't make that, the World Championships!

Congrats on the job (sorry, Rushan)!

It's ok. Best of 3. If I lose out of the Social Media Manager job too I'll just blame external factors and refuse to recognize my shortcomings. I'll call it canada hax or something.

[theamericandream38]

On topic, congratulations on getting the job! It's nice to know that we have someone who at least has a lot of experience in the competitive gaming scene filling the big shoes left by Mike/Dave. Like the others have said, I hope you enjoy the community and these tournaments as much as we do and that we may have a long and prosperous relationship together!

[Team Rocket Elite]

Congrats on your new job! Thanks for taking the time to introduce yourself to our community.

[Eiganjo]

That's quite the resume, congrats on the job. Looking forward to see the VGC scene grow even more and hopefully we get to talk at worlds or something, just to get acqainted. Also, Dutch Nationals would be awesome

[Gonzo]

Congrats on the job, I'm happy you've decided to join nuggetbridge! I hope you'll be able to help us players with developing the scene and events.

ps. Slavic countries beg for VGC events.

[shinryu]

Welcome! Nice to see more involvement from TCPi on the fan sites.

[RubeNCB]

Welcomeee!! and congrats! good luck!

[Havak]

Post is much appreciate, I hope things go well for you in your new role (and thus well for us)!

[Aoam Bojail]

Congratulations on the job Chris! I look forward to meeting you, whether at a regional stop or at Nationals next summer.

[Roz]

Congrats on getting the job! I look forward to see what you do to help the community grow.

[feathers]

another congrats comment right here. it's always nice to have someone notice us and pay attention! steps in the right direction (canada wants more events wink wink)

[dtrain]

Congrats on the job Chris! I look forward to any changes you might make to the VGC and whatever ideas you have in store for us.

[Flash]

I'd like to congratulate you too. We always appreciate more personal involvement, we get the feeling our petitions are listened. I'm not saying they weren't before but it's always nice to remind us how you care about us. I hope you can make the vgc scene better and particulary the Europe side. We always get the improvements and news later than the rest of the participating countries/regions. We don't know nothing until January when in the US you already have the first regionals happening right now.

Well, congrats again and I really hope you to be an active member of this community and let's us know if you need help or want to hear our thoughts!!

[AlphaZealot]

Thank you all for the warm welcome. If you happen to be at the upcoming VGC Philadelphia Regional do not hesitate to introduce yourself and I would love to exchange ideas about the future of Pokémon!

[Cybertron]

Thank you all for the warm welcome. If you happen to be at the upcoming VGC Philadelphia Regional do not hesitate to introduce yourself and I would love to exchange ideas about the future of Pokémon!

Super excited that you'll be at Philly... see you next month!

[Amarillo]

Hi, I'm Andy, and I represent The Ohio State University Pokemon League. If you are in the Columbus area you should come to our League at the new Ohio Union.

Edited by Amarillo, 26 September 2012 - 08:23 AM.

[ultimatedra]

Thank you all for the warm welcome. If you happen to be at the upcoming VGC Philadelphia Regional do not hesitate to introduce yourself and I would love to exchange ideas about the future of Pokémon!

You should TOTALLY go to Salem,OR for winter & Salt Lake City,UT for spring
It would be nice to put a face to the username!

[TheGr8]

Super excited that you'll be at Philly... see you next month!

Going to agree with Cybertron! I will be really nice to meer you in 2 weeks or so and Welcome to our community!

[Dracoeye]

Welcome and congratulations! I am rather new around here too but, from my experience, I can tell you that there will always be someone willing to help, if you need it.
Also, I’m representing the Portuguese VGC community. Since we don’t have official competition in Portugal yet, we would immensely appreciate any kind of attention towards that matter.
Thank you and congratulations again!

[Firestorm]

Guys, I'm pretty sure TPCi can't answer you on it but asking for more VGC events in Europe is really not going to bring more at this point. For the past several years, you've had very easy to access National competitions to attend. Spain's National in Madrid was closer to Lisbon than many American and Canadian participants' Regional or National competitions. France's National in Paris and Amsterdam. It's not all about borders. You had events close to you and accessible for a cheaper cost than for most Americans and Canadians.

That said, please keep in mind the new European format. With two regionals and a qualifer, you're definitely not going to see further countries added. There are going to be two fewer events now. The only real chance that smaller countries like Portugal and the Netherlands are going to get events is if the Video Game is added to the current TCG tournaments like it was in North America. Whether that's something you'd want or not can be discussed in a new thread - there are definitely both advantages and disadvantages to it from a player perspective.

[drug duck]

Trying to not push the wrong buttons - but information on basically everything would be very much appreciated at this point in time. It's less than two months until the supposedly next set of US Regionals and it's still unclear which format will be used there.

For Europe it's even worse. I'm not whining and I don't wanna start another EU vs US argument but you gotta admit the late August news of Europe's circuit changing in some way / "getting trimmed slightly" in 2013 was a lot more confusing than it was enlightening. I'm mostly asking for a clarification on how the circuit changes and on how the tournament format will change because people in Europe are increasingly growing tired of Single Elimination Best-of-1 tournaments.

tl;dr Chris I hope you don't mind giving us information on:
- the format itself (National Pokedex or Unova2 Pokedex)
- the tournament structure in Europe that's supposedly changing according to the August P!P news
- the tournament format in Europe (swiss? KO? Bo1? Bo3)

Thank you Mr Brown for your efforts

[Mean]

[font=open sans', helvetica, arial, sans-serif]Guys, I'm pretty sure TPCi can't answer you on it but asking for more VGC events in Europe is really not going to bring more at this point. For the past several years, you've had very easy to access National competitions to attend. Spain's National in Madrid was closer to Lisbon than many American and Canadian participants' Regional or National competitions. France's National in Paris and Amsterdam. It's not all about borders. You had events close to you and accessible for a cheaper cost than for most Americans and Canadians.[/font]

I actually don't think anybody in Europe complains about the low number of events or bad distribution (for obv reasons).
We just don't like the direct single elimination.. it often prevents top players to attend worlds lowering our medium level, as you could have seen this year..

Edited by Mean, 23 November 2012 - 09:54 AM.

[Cybertron]

Agreeing with everything drug duck has mentioned. I'm pretty surprised information on the rest of the season for both America and Europe has not been released yet. The original article noting all the changes for this season was taken down for whatever reason, leading me to believe they still have to finalize some information.

Anyway, the sooner we get the information, the better. The main thing I'd like to know is whether Championship Points will come into effect for invites in America this year, because my decision to attend winter regionals will be based off that. Rules wouldn't hurt too... there's no harm in releasing them earlier, right?

[Scott]

For what it's worth, we had evan send him an e-mail about a week ago since we noticed people had gotten anxious as well. We pretty much got a Soon™, so I guess we just have to hope they'll get on with it when they can. At least for the next set of American Regionals it is already definitely cutting into practice time/metagame development and increasing people's flight costs pretty substantially for anyone who isn't making a call until we get more information on format.

I imagine with them breaking Mr. Brown it's probably kind of a strange time for them to be establishing a year's ruleset since it's probably the first major decision that the community will see the impact of he'll have to help make, but he has seemed to be the type of guy who cares about the competitiveness of the game a lot so hopefully TPCI will see the importance of getting this sort of thing done as quickly as they can and get information out soon. Not much we can do for now but wait and be ready for whatever we get, I guess. I'm sure they'll get info out as soon as they're able.