In terms of the Seton's tourney, said organiser barely asked for any help, made a lot of things last minute, and blamed us for not helping. I just think it should be mentioned as its a good example for the sub rule aswell.
Okay let's go over this just to clear things up and give my perspective on things.
Syndicus has been criticized a lot for his tournament management, and I feel like most of what I have read on Discord and the forums so far has not been entirely fair. First of all, as we all know, there were massive connection problems for the entire duration of the tourney (two days). This obviously made managing the tourney much harder, more annoying, and exponentially increased the amount of time he had to sink into organizational tasks. Were mistakes made along the way? I wholeheartedly agree - e. g. the management of the Challonge was suboptimal. But considering the circumstances, the connection problems were 90% of the reason the tourney ended up being scuffed, and most subsequent issues (like the substitution controversy, which I will touch on later) were also caused by them.
In my interactions with him, he always responded quickly to my requests and was generally easy to talk to. This is about as much as anyone can expect from a TD, given the constant inflow of information he had to deal with from two tourneys. Perhaps the King and Price tourneys could be held on different weekends in the future. This would also make tournament coverage by Twitch streamers more thorough as a side benefit.
Another thing that did not make things easier was the trolling in the Discord channels. I personally don't care about players making fun of each other, but reporting false results to the TD is, in my opinion, not acceptable. Managing two tourneys is difficult enough already, let's not make it even more difficult for the person with the most thankless job in the tourney, right?
The recent King of Setons 2025 tournament had an issue that we'd evaluate as "lacking competitive integrity", at the least.
Let's go over this one last time and provide some more context.
The first substitute for my team was Protect, who replaced PANTS because he was not available on Sunday. Protect was lower rated than PANTS at the time of the tourney and had barely played in 2025, so I think he was an acceptable replacement. They are very similar players in terms of skill level in any case. Since the tourney on Sunday also lasted hours longer than usual, Protect had to leave as well because he had a flight to catch. Naturally, this was very unfortunate, and there was a debate about who should replace him. For the sake of fairness, and since the rules were ambiguous, I gave our opponents the option to choose our substitute for us. I am not entirely sure anymore if this is exactly how it happened, but what is certain is that my team let the opposing team (Team Rival) choose our substituting player, which I think is very forthcoming. The other team ended up choosing Terarii over VIP because they thought Terarii would play badly. Team Rival ended up losing the two final games in very close matches.
Was everything about this optimal? No. But given that we even let our opponents choose a substituting player for us (something I've never heard of happening before), I think calling it "lacking competitive integrity" isn't fair either.
