After the success of Mirai.osu! Summer Tournament and the demand for a sequel I started working on a seasonal setup of tournaments called "Mirai. Tournaments". I had envisioned Mirai. Tournaments to be a multi-game tournament subset of Mirai. I wanted it to expand to games like Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and League of Legends. However, considering the amount of work I had personally creating and managing the first tournament I decided to keep those plans for later.
Let's get to the actual story behind the tournaments.
Mirai.osu! Summer Tournament
It's quite funny how Mirai. Tournaments came to be a thing. A good discord friend of mine needed assistance on another tournament called Espalza's Anchorfall. They needed a streamer for a few matches because all his staff members were offline. I was completely oblivious to the fact that osu! tournaments were a thing. My friend proceeds to explain what my job is and I did really well actually. In fact, I loved to do it. So I streamed more and more to the point I claimed the spot to stream the finals for that tournament. I also made a few friends over there and I became a self-proclaimed high-quality streamer.
In May I decided to create my own series of tournaments out of curiosity. I was going to call it Mirai.osu! Summer Tournament. I made it a tournament for people in the range of 100.000 and 200.000 with no cap on the number of teams signed up. It was played in duos, so that means 2 versus 2. You can find all the details of the tournament in the original forum post, right here. I was really nervous and excited at the same time because I would be managing so many players and I had to trust my staff for doing their job properly.
So we kicked off the tournament on the 28th of July 2017 and it actually went pretty well! I had lots of complaints after the tournament finished, but let's start with the good stuff first. I had lots of support from players as well as friends who were also staff members. They steered me in the right direction so that the tournament wouldn't fail. Everyone was mostly nice to each other and we all had fun commentating and doing our jobs!
My complaints, however, were the following: I hired multiple streamers, but only one other streamer besides me streamed; I had to referee all the last matches myself while also streaming them. It was mentally taxing and I got really tired of it.
Overall though, I loved the experience of hosting a tournament and I have learned quite a few things from the people I worked it and by myself as well. For example, players don't read (if you're a player and you're reading this, you've read more than the average player does on my tournament), you will have a lot of default wins in lower ranked tournaments and players don't read.
Preparing for Mirai.osu! Winter Tournament
I started working on the initial setup of this tournament in the gap between the third place and the finals of the summer tournament. I wanted it to be an actual sequel to the summer tournament, but bigger and better! (and holy did it become big!)
I wanted it to be the same at its core. So 2v2 standard style in scorev2. I shifted up the range a bit to 150.000 - 50.000 to attract some more skilled players and I reduced the player maximum per team to 4. I also hired more staff so I wouldn't get all the heavy load on me. And lastly, I wanted to get rid of spreadsheets.
I will be going into the full details of how it all went till the kick-off in another blog post!
