Results from the VGC ’15 Netherlands Regional Championship
The first ever Regional Championship in Europe took place this weekend in Arnhem alongside the European Challenge Cup and we’ve got the results! Players from all over the continent attended in what should be a very important event for the season. No other event currently exists on the same Best Finish Limit. There were 102 Masters division players, 15 Senior division players, and 6 Junior division players in attendance.
Masters Division
1. [UK] Barry Anderson (Baz Anderson)
2. [IRL] Kelly Mercier-White (KellsterCartier)
3. [UK] Christopher Arthur (Koryo)
4. [DE] Eloy Hahn (Dragoran5)
5. [DE] Matthias Suchodolsky (Lega)
6. [DE] Baris Akcos (Billa)
7. [AT] Noah Fuchs (Daydreaming Ninja)
8. [NL] Jip Snoek (Keonspy)
Senior Division
1. Mark McQuillan (woopaking)
2. Ahren Bundy
???
3. Batuhan Can
4. Kevin Salvetto
About the Author
Firestorm is one of the co-founders of Nugget Bridge and the Community Manager for eSports Tournament Platform Battlefy. He has been playing Pokémon since 1999, competitively since 2007, and attending tournaments since 2010. He lives in Vancouver, Canada with a degree in Interactive Art & Technology + Communications. You can follow him on Twitter at @rushanshekar.
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52 Responses to Results from the VGC ’15 Netherlands Regional Championship
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Mega Metagross in second place again! And Scizor in first! Good to see the steel types reigning so hard.
So, came back from Arnhem with 30CP and a respective 23rd place and 4-3 result in the swiss. In fairness, I was hoping to have a slightly better record (was aiming 5-2) but two matches I lost very comprehensively, and the final round of swiss I overlooked a critical detail in the final turns which meant my thought process was flawed (but did bring about an interesting situation with my Landy-T survived a spread Icy Wind from a +2 Milotic, which with 0 investment Bold is like a 31% KO chance and if it was 0 investment Modest would have been only a 6.2% shot to survive!). That said, I my schedule through swiss was pretty high with all my opponents from rounds 3-7 all going at least 5-2 or better, so I’m happy to at least say I gave a solid show of myself against stiff opposition, and I got to meet a lot more players along the way!
Secondly, congrats to Barry and the rest of those who top cut this weekend. It was nice to see the UK players really power home to the top three ranking spots, and we saw quite the interesting mix of teams being ran in the top cut. I’m hoping I will get a chance to write a what we learned article if they feel I’m up to the challenge (it might incorporate the US events to get a greater insight), so I may be looking for more team info beyond the top 8, so don’t be too surprised guys if I come asking for info in due course!
I felt the event ran reasonably well from my perspective, based upon my experience from UK Nats last year. However, it has obviously been noted that there were some issues that arose with other players from the event that have been very well highlighted by a number of people. I don’t want to get drawn into the argument about it, but I do want to stress that with every event there are inconsistencies in decision-making and communication can be very poor. If we, as a community, can offer constructive criticism based upon how the events are run in the hope that they will be improved upon in the future, then the struggles that we have in events gone by will be minimized in those held in tournaments to come.
I also want us as a community to support these new ventures into regionals wherever possible as well. We have a golden opportunity to really help expand our season beyond the Nationals circus for the four week period it occurs as well as the PCs which bring in a small local playerbase to bring it closer to what the US currently enjoy. If we fully put our weight behind it and support the cause, we can enjoy the benefits of frequent events. It’s always a great occasion for players to come together for a weekend and enjoy the battling and the company, get to know new people as well as catch up with those you’ve met before. I feel like even though I’ve only attended two proper events, I’ve integrated into the community so much and writing the preview article was also such a good way of getting recognized when I introduced myself for the first time. There is talk, pulling it back to the supporting regionals issue that has been widely circulated right now, that there is potentially a second regional event in the UK sometime in the vicinity of the Easter Weekend. From what we know, a venue is booked, but its currently in the pipeline. It may end up being a double premier challenge setup, but if it does take on the form of a regional, it would definitely be good the see the same, if not greater support that attended in Arnhem this past weekend.
I might edit this with more later, but I think this covers the general gist of what I wanted to talk about.
Didn’t quote the entire thing because I had heard about the Daflo situation and can understand the anger about something like that happening, but this senctence irked me. I seriously hope I’m just misinterpreting it but it sounds like you’re downplaying the top 8 as them just being lucky with their pairings and stuff to get there and not having anything to do with their skill level and teams. I fought 2 of them and their teams and skill were definetly the caliber you’d expect of the top 8 so I very much doubt luck had anything to do with them performing so well, especially with so many big names being present ensuring you’d have to fight atleast 1-3 big names if you did well. Downplaying other people’s successes… not cool…
There’s more I want to say regarding this matter, but then this would turn into a flamewar and I’m not in the mood for that so I’ll leave it at this.
Congrats to the top 8 for their stellar performance and team creativity and may all Regionals/Nationals have this kind of creativity coz I’ll take these kind of “bs” teams anytime, anyday over the “Kangaskhan Top 16” we had to endure for most of the VGC’14 season
okay so two things about this: While I think we can agree that the organizers of this event did not have enough knowledge about the Video Game and about how a tournament like this should be run, let’s not forget how bad TPCi handled this regional:
Players expressed doubts about the idea of this regional on twitter and on the forums, but we didn’t get any reply despite tagging Chris B. While I know that he might be a busy guy and so on, I think it is very poor management that they could not support their case for letting these organizers hold a tournament of this importance, yet not even bother trying to get them the tournament software. From what I’ve heard, someone from TPCi would have had to fly out there to make this possible, which wasn’t “necessary” apparently? Oh another point I might want to add is that, while I asked two times, I could not even get an official confirmation about the time rules that would be applied at the regional. Players were left in the dark about this issue until the very end and as a somewhat competitive player I can ensure you that there is a significant difference between having a proper timer, having a certain timeframe per round or having no timer at all. While I was not there in person, but afterwards people told me they cannot believe that this tournament gave out that many championship points and they said it felt a lot more like a premier challenge than what it was supposed to be.
If you cannot provide proper tournaments, please do not let them be organized in the future, thank you.
This also adresses the rumours about a potential regional in the UK. Did I hear that right? they booked a venue already but don’t even have the confirmation whether they’ll be able to host a regionals or not? That reminds me of my 7-years old self, that wanted to get the GameBoy Advance for his birthday and cleverly bought a copy of Pokemon Silver beforehand (which I could not play due to the lack of a GBA lol).
This really does not imply professionalism and even though I don’t know who that is, I think that having another regional would sap the value of the circuit big times, as it would be another opportunity for championship points a great amount of the player base will have no access to. Being forced to travel to three Nationals is a condition I am okay with since I get to visit other countries and hang out with players from all around Europe, but having such a small number of Regionals that have a best finish limit of 3 (!!) is just disproportionate and unacceptable.
While I hope that we can step forward to having a good system with regionals in europe, I think this first test definitely failed in the players’ perception.
If someone knows a better place to drop constructive critism, please let it be known as I know several players who would like to express their indispositions about how the tournament was run, but have no proper adress to go to.
^this
+ Chris are you Alive? Could we get any Statement from TCPi
I enjoyed the event! Got a lot of work done!
Thanks guys!!
A lack of the official tournament system is unfortunate, and from what I hear happened with DaFlo – that is unfortunate and pretty bad management too.
But aside from these and communication before the event, I think this is getting blown a bit far out of proportion.
Knowledge of if the timer would be 45 seconds or 90 seconds isn’t really going to make you change your team, or decide if you attend the event or not, is it?
Although the event didn’t run perfectly smoothly, I think the quality of players as shown here is more than worth of the boosted CP for Regional over PC.
This upcoming UK event has not officially been announced either, for good reason. This is just what we have been told “off the record”. It’ll probably be either two Premier Challenges or a Regional. The UK has had hardly any CP bearing events, so this is most definitely welcome here and I am sure we appreciate the effort to provide us more events. You could argue though that it would also be nice to have available a list of planned events at the beginning of each season so players can make informed decisions about where they travel.
I just feel sorry for DaFlo (and in turn drug duck with that pairing) here. But really, the tournament was a level playing field otherwise and the responsibility is on each player to beat the opponent sitting opposite.
Baz by talking about the Timer, the issue is whether we have a 15/20/30 min Time Limit for each Match or if we could even use the full 60 Min, which would allow defensive strategies, which people would not choose if they have to fear a 15/20/30 min time limit.
We both, as Players who Topcut and earn a lot of Championship Points by beating a lot of strong opponents, couldn’t really complain, but this is still “serious” buisness and neither having a tournament software nor anybody from TCPi who really feels responsible for this european Regionals aren’t steps in the right direction.
Having a regional in Europe was still nice though. I dont want people to think we are not happy about more offline Events besides Nationals, but we need to keep it professionell, especially if we are talking about a Regional!
no rotom-w in cut: WHAT IS THIS
The ECC was the first attempt this season at the operation of VG Regionals in an “untethered” manner. Up until about a year ago, when we first piloted Premier Challenges, the conventional thinking was that all VG tournaments would require our special operation equipment that can lock Battle Boxes. This is a huge restriction on the program as the equipment may only be operated with either TPCi or Nintendo employees present and also requires significant prep time in order to prepare the data. The result of this restriction was that globally, there could never be more than 20-30 tournaments per year.
Operation of untethered tournaments is new, there will be some learning required on both the player end and the organizer end. The organizer network is expanding and sharing information with each other on best practices so that these events can improve system-wide and operate smoothly. The key to expanding the VGC is organizers learning to operate these events, and players cooperating with organizers and the event staff/judges to help ensure things are smooth. This includes opening up some of the larger Premier Events (such as Regionals) to untethered status.
Specifically regarding the ECC: the event is operated by a very experienced group of staff and organizers who do their best to operate a smooth event for players. It is the best choice for the operation of the first-ever (untethered) VGC Regional in Europe. Like all events, they wish to give a great experience for all involved, though sometimes things don’t go as planned (for example: some of their staff were prevented from attending due to extreme weather canceling flights). The feedback appears mostly geared toward individual issues with the exception of rulings on timing. Individual issues with specific events should be reported through the customer service portal by the person who experienced them.
Allowing additional Regional point level events in Europe and other Rating Zones is currently being explored (the feedback from this event is a consideration in expansion, for example). Most potential new Regional level tournaments will only be able to occur in an untethered manner.
No event should be considered confirmed until it has reached approved sanctioning status on pokemon.com. Twitter is not the place to ask regarding information of an unconfirmed event.
As always, the Pokémon community as a whole continues to impress – constructive feedback is always welcome. Please consider that organizers go into events with the intention of providing the best possible play experience for all involved. Pokémon events have additional hurdles not seen elsewhere (3 TCG tournaments, 3 VG tournaments, operated concurrently) and the operation of any open-entry, live event also poses challenges.
Finally: a two-day format for the VG is being developed but do not expect implementation until around Nationals time. This should help address some of the issues brought up here. This specific issue is outside the Organizers control and is instead based on TPCi’s guidelines.
Thanks Chris for your response!
Anyways it would be really nice to have those information in advance to this regional.
To be quite honest, i see myself by far more experienced than most of the tournament stuff guys. I played 10 Nationals, 2 WCS and several Premier Challenges, was always interested in the organizing aspects of those tournaments and since i am also organizing Premier Challenges, i am familiar with most of the problems, that could occure during such tournaments. Knowing that european Regionals are going to be “untethered” Events, would have led to other expectations!
But i’m pretty sure we can also have fun and play serious tournaments with “untethered” events, as long as we got all those important information in advance. And we should build connections between Regional Tournament Stuff and “experienced” Players.
Back to the main Problem: European Circuit with unknown number of Regionals?!
I don’t like the idea of regionals without knowing how many of them will be there this season. It’s not like me or any other VG Players are complaining about getting more tournaments besides Nationals, we are really happy about that , but with the European qualification System, it’s really important to know how to get your points together.
I will give you an example.
I have 232 Cp right now (172 from premier Challenges +60 Cp from reaching Top8 in Arnheim) While my 172 CP from PCs aren’t worth that much, cause every Player is able to earn his own Cps from Pcs during the Omega Series, which will be a lot of easier cause more and more Players will stop Playing Pcs cause they got enough points from them, so the Pcs themself are going to be easier and easier.
BUT Those extra 60 CP from Arnhem are exclusive. Players who didnt play at Arnheim, won’t get their chance again to play for those Regionals Championsship Points, which are so important cause they have their own Best Finish Limit.
So we dont want to have exact details about upcomind unconfirmed Events, but we would love to know, whether more Regionals are planned or not!
~Billa
Does someone know who the Tournament organizer was? Because I won 60 CP with my top 8 finish in Arnhem, and I can’t find my name on the list with all the people who does have points. I don’t know what went wrong but I would like to figure that out!
Hopefully someone can help me!
Two ways you could try:
1 – mail info@pokemon-organizedplay.eu
2 – try to private message Pikachuhuman on nugget bridge
Not sure which is the fastest one, but at least it’s something to guide you in the right way.
The ECC tournament as a whole was organised by HaPé Wagner. Head judge for the VGC part of the event was Gawein Wagner (nb: Pikachuman). Since there are currently only three active TOs in the BeNeLux region (all of them with more experience in TCG than VGC) there actual judges at the event were a very mixed bunch from a lot of countries.
In my experience the tournament went very smoothly as a whole. Talking to the VGC head judge afterwards about – among others – the DaFlo situation it seemed to mostly have been a case of communication breakdown; the judges were under the impression that it was very clear everyone was to remain seated until the tally was done, whereas a lot of players didn’t really seem to know what was going on (due in part to the intercom not being as audible as it could’ve been). Of course, DaFlo leaving his table when everyone else was still seated and without announcing it to any of the judges was perhaps not the smartest thing to do and the judges might not have been as lenient as they could’ve been, but the way I see it this was mostly an issue of miscommunication. What with this being the very first event of its kind, there’s a lot of room for improvement and I’m sure that if another Regional Championship is planned for next year the TOs will put some thought into ways to better communicate the procedure toward the players, leaving less room for mishaps of this kind.
As for the the fact that the TOs didn’t want to change the pairings again for the first round, yet did so for the 5th round seems easy to explain: as organisers you don’t want to mess around with your time schedule too much at the start of the tournament until it becomes clear how smoothly everything is going to proceed. When the input error was recognised in the 5th round of swiss and it was noticed that there was plenty of wiggle room on the schedule they rightfully decided on a repairing; I can only applaud that decision, even if it meant for us, the players, that we had to sit there waiting for ten extra minutes or so.
As for the ‘european cartridge with japanese language’ issue… that is just plain silly. That’s the only thing I heard about the tournament so far where I’d say the TOs dropped the ball: it’s very important for all staff to be fully aware of the tournament rules to a letter.
Congratulations again to the winners! Too bad I badly underperformed during this tournament. Some extra pressure to make up for it at Nats.
I’m going to guess at what may have happened with the repairs.
R1: The timing of when the error was reported affects what can be done. Once under way the only safe way to enter a player without a R1 loss is to re-enter the whole tournament from scratch. I don’t know of any organiser at a large event who will do this without it being an error that affects many/most/all players. Before R1 has been started, there is more that can be done in the tournament software but the late tag cannot be avoided. Again the safe way to remove the late tag from late entered players is to re-enter the whole tournament.
R5: Incorrect match results from the previous round can be changed and the software automatically offers the re-pair.
These are not equivalent processes. The re-entry of a whole tournament takes a lot more time than a re-pair which typically affects two or three tables.
In the case of the R5 repair if the incorrect result was in R3 or earlier then the software will not allow the change to be made.
I hope this provides some insight into what can be accommodated easily and what can not. Round one is not like any other round.
except that he told them.
Let’s just hope something like this doesn’t happen again, I guess.
Not going to discuss the Netherlands Regional as I wasn’t there, but I can assure everyone that there is no confirmed Regional in the UK yet and there has not been a venue booked in advance in the off chance that a UK Regional gets approved.
All rumours / wrong information from whoever has brought this up.
I won’t comment on everything, as it is the TO job for some things and I’m actually needing to get to work however there are a few things I like to say:
NoPoke is correct about the repair and r1 situations as in the r1 situation it already was to late known about the situation. If Daflo realized this earlier we could have tried to fix this but because of the timing we couldn’t anymore as far as I know. As head judge I was contacted after the starting signal of round 1.
As what Wyrms Eye said:
This is the first real regional in Europe. We need the feedback of players to improve. To ensure we will make better and greater and more smooth tournaments. We already are using some of the feedback but a lot of feedback isn’t communicated to us yet. We find a lot on community but we appreciate it if you send feedback to the support or directly to info@pokemon-organizedplay.eu of you can pm me as I will pass it on to the TO.
In the staff I am the only one who knows the data from the game and the community (I also have a record to show that). Thats why I was asked to be judge because Lorenzo couldn’t be there who would otherwise be the judge.
That said the TO is a known TO for a lot of grand tournaments. We did have a few problems however I do think they were properly handled. All feedback is welcomed to make sure it will be more smooth next time.
Also I would like to thank the players and staff for a great tournament overall. I do like the diversety of all the teams that were used. I even saw really cool ideas to try and work with and really enjoyed seeing so many players at once.
I will reply again later but I really have to go now. Hope this clears a few things up ;P
Ask me to judge next time if you’re looking for players with video game experience
Yeah Barry, such an easy thing to say if you haven’t been affected at all. You’d better be firing those shots in my direction because I did indeed choke away a win against jira (although I definitely also had a difficult match up to say the least) but you cannot even imagine what it’s like to start with a round 1 loss based on tardiness that definitely wasn’t even your fault to begin with because if they assign you a r1 loss based on tardiness, TOM always puts you last after every other player with the same record. This basically meant that daflo was playing a Single Elimination tournament starting from his very first round and you do maybe remember what VGC 2012 was like for you.
@NinjaSyao metagame / saltyness stuff:
I am indeed downplaying them!
Honestly though, nowadays thanks to ressources such as NB, Eggy, BattleSpot and PS!, it’s easy for any given player to get a firm grasp of how the game needs to be played and it’s even easier to just throw something together either by stealing or by massively “trial and error”-ing it. There were easily 20-30 players who could just as easily have made top cut the tournament, just look at how many players even were nominated by Wyrm’s Eye in his article who ended up at 5-2 but not making cut because of tiebreakers or even 6-1. You need to understand that from a certain level it’s not only about “skill” and “teams” anymore. “Skill” in our context only means playing consistently, not choking away stuff you normally should be able to win and team building skill is just overrated since trying to “metagame” something might just as well lead you to never battling what you intended to counter and instead end up with 3 useless mons because you face a guy with 3 steel types. As a result, tournament results are determined by who chokes the least (“skill”) and who gets the best matchups across the board OR avoids facing their bad match ups long enough. Makes sense to me but I’m kinda living in my own world and I’m probably just a salty loser who needs to understand that his time is long over
Read the sentence he said before that. He explicitly excluded DaFlo’s situation and your situation with how you had to play DaFlo after that.
There are so many easy and/or witty remarks I can make about this sentence but I won’t coz I like a challenge
On-topic: it’s nice to have clarification about the Daflo R1 debacle. It sucks for Daflo ofcourse, but it sounds like it’s one of those “grimer happens” moments in life.
Can’t really thing of anything to say that hasn’t already been said so I’ll excuse myself from this topic. *leaves*
Hello AlphaZealot,
As Indonesia PTO, I concern about the CP competition in Asia Pasific region.
As we all knew the TPCi will give invites and travel awards to the top players (base on CP) on each region.
Furthermore the CP difference between PC and Regs and Nats are a HUGE difference (1 times regional champion = 3 times PC champion).
I will just straight forward to my thoughts.
My country Indonesia is in Asia Pasific region with Australia who already got regional and nats and bunch of PC.(I know best 5 limit for PC, but still more PC = more chance to get full 200CP from PC itself)
Meanwhile Indonesia only got 8 PC approved so far. Base on my explanation above about the CP there is no chance of player outside Australia will get the travel award and invites to WCS at Boston this year.
I just want to have a fair and square competition for CP.
If TPCi approved the regionals or nats for this year for Indonesia, I can totally understand this might not planned in the beginning of the season and TPCi does not have the budget for regionals prize support outside the USA.
Indonesia does not demand the prize support because I can find and work together with sponsors in Indonesia.
As for record, one of our PC got 117 attendance and I think one of the biggest PC reported.
Regarding the battle box locking features, I know those are specialized for Nintendo and TPCi “software”. I am suggesting:
1. Educated the community well for the rules and remind the penalty if the players violate the rules from TPCi
2. Wi-fi hack check at the beginning of registration
3. Random check at middle of tournament if necessary.
4. Top cut team check again with the original team that the player submitted at the beginning of registration.
Thank you I hope my opinion and suggestion can give you inspirations. Looking forward to work with you in events bigger than PC.
Michael