MLG

So this past weekend MLG wrapped up, for those who don’t know MLG stands for Major League Gaming. MLG events usually features games such as League of Legends, StarCraft, Dota, Call of Duty, Halo etc. you get it. This past MLG event included both smash brothers melee (SSBM) and smash brothers 4 (SSB4). Now before I talk about the event I want to give some background information. So back in the period of 2004-2006 what many people refer to as the “Golden Era” of smash, melee was a main event in MLG tournaments, In fact the MLG events or just MLG’s were THE smash tournaments to go to, hosting tournaments in a circuit fashion and having events all over the country in such places as, Orlando, Chicago, New York City, Anaheim. It was a great time to be a smasher. Sadly however in 2007 melee was dropped from the pro circuit and by 2008 dropped from MLG all together, although I don’t know the exact reasons why I assume it was because of Nintendo’s very reluctant attitude towards competitive gaming back then. Regardless, melee pressed on in its underground roots. So fast forward to 2014 in what many are referring to as the “Platinum Era” of smash and melee is all of a sudden back on the MLG main stage at MLG Anaheim, and although melee was only at that one event it was still nice to see smash being represented by Major League Gaming again. So now about a year and a couple months later smash is at yet another MLG event, this time in New Orleans. Now as cool as it is to see melee being a somewhat more consistent thing in MLG this event was very lack luster in terms of attendance, coverage, and advertisement. Now the first thing I have to say is that the smash community represents itself well these days, whenever there is a big tournament or event coming up its very well-known through the community. MLG however seemed to get no representation…. At all, I In fact only found out about it through a friend. Now while I don’t think that had a HUGE impact on the attendance it was still very strange to see. So on to the attendance and why it was so lack luster. Usually for an event of MLG’s caliber you would expect to see really big names going to these events, at least going off the big names that have attended the MLG’s in the past. This tournament however only had two of the top 6 players attending in HungryBox and Mew2King. Even when you look at the other top 10-15 players there was a low turnout with the only real notable names going being, Wizzrobe, Chillindude, and Axe, no Westballz, no PewPewU, no Shroomed, and as implied earlier no Mango, Armada, Leffen, or PPMD. Of course with such low competition there the grand finals was between HungryBox and Mew2king with HungryBox taking it. Now on to my last gripe, coverage, now it’s only been a week but MLG has posted close to nothing in terms of the matches on YouTube, they have posted the winners and losers’ finals as well as the grand finals of both singles and doubles for both smash games, but that’s it, no bracket matches, no pools matches, nothing. All in all I was pretty disappointed with pretty much everything about this tournament.

             

Now usually I talk about melee here, however that doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy the other smash games as well so I’m going to take a moment to talk about a big moment in the timeline of smash 4. Smash 4 has been dominated by a player named ZeRo pretty much from the time it was released on the Wii U last year, and when I say dominant I mean DOMINANT, as ZeRo hasn’t lost a single smash 4 tournament. That unblemished record however game to an end as he was defeated by probably his strongest rival Nairo (Nye-row) not only in one set but two back to back sets as Nairo was fighting from behind in the losers bracket. I felt I had to at least mention this in this blog as it is such a big moment for the newer game in the franchise and as much as I love melee I really do care about the smash community as a whole.

Side note: Smash tournaments or rather fighting game tournaments in general are double elimination meaning that there are two brackets, a winner’s bracket and a loser’s bracket. Grand finals is the set played between the victor of the winner’s bracket and the victor of the loser’s bracket. The person coming from the loser’s bracket has to win two sets over the player coming from the winner’s bracket. While the player from the winners bracket only needs to win one set, sets being played in a 3 out of 5 manor. This is because the person coming from the winner’s bracket needs first be knocked into the loser’s bracket, which happens when you lose a set. From there they need to be defeated again for the person coming from the loser’s bracket to take the tournament.

Here is the Smash 4 grand finals set between ZeRo and Nairo in case anyone was interested