Last weekend was Western Canada’s largest Super Smash Bros tournament.

With over 650 entrants (and tons of invited players!) and $7500 worth of pot bonuses, Battle of BC 2 had both Melee and Smash for Wii U (Smash 4) singles and doubles events.

This was not my first Smash Bros tournament, but it was definitely the biggest one I’ve ever attended. Up until this, the largest one I attend would’ve been Rain City Smash which happened last year. Even though I am a bit used to the energy level of a Smash Bros event, Battle of BC 2 (BoBC2) surprised me.

Here’s a small gallery of some of our invited guests! I’ve captioned who each person in the photo is, so it’s easier to tell. It was great to see a large number of them show up!

It was ran by the UBC eSports Association, and mainly organized by Kevin Dhir and the rest of the Smash Bros team. I’m part of the League of Legends team, but the event was so big that all of us from other divisions were called down to help. Not that it would have changed my attendance, since I had registered for the tournament way back in December. All that meant was that I had more to do than just sit around and play friendlies (non-tournament games). 

It has been a while since I shot anything indoors, and I guess it showed in the photos.

Determining the best shutter speed for a given light situation was tough, especially if I wanted the colours to look natural – not too light and not too dark.

It was also hard trying to frame things to get something meaningful. Everyone is facing towards a screen (monitor or CRT TV) and really close together. It’s almost impossible to get a photo of their faces because behind the screen they are playing on is another screen that other people are playing on. There’s also so many people all over the place, and not a lot of space to move.

But the worst of all is that the players all look the same when they play.

Everyone has the same face of concentration, looking intensely at the screen.

The only thing that moves is their fingers. The rest of the action is in their mind, being shown on the screen.

 

Smash (and most if not all fighting games) are about mind-games. At a certain position, your character can do one of a fixed number of options. Each option has an opposing option that can beat it (to differing degrees), so it is up to the players to correctly read what their opponent is going to do, and perform the correct option to beat it.

There’s also an aspect of mental strength, since an incorrect option read could result in a lot of damage to you. Being mentally strong to not get flustered after making some poor choices, during a tense moment, or when the opponent completely outplays you is important as well.

It’s hard to get a photo of these things. Especially when they don’t show it on their face!

I’ve been looking at some professional photographers’ work at Smash events, and it seems that the best photos are of the players when they are not playing the game.

Either it’s excitement from winning, anguish from losing, reactions from something weird happening, crowd reactions, in-person interactions, and the like.

So I tried.

Though since BoBC2 was a 2 day event, and I was helping out with it, I didn’t exactly have much energy to try and take pictures. Just playing friendly games with people I’ve never met (and way better than me) was exhausting. Since my main experience with the game is still just my 2-3 friends that want to play Smash (for Wii U), and all of us aren’t really good at the game, playing people from outside of my circle and outside of my province was a learning experience. I learned so much, but how much of that have I actually retained? I won’t really know until I play at a tournament again.

On the topic of playing at a tournament, the environment is so much different from playing at home. I mentioned mental strength before, and having that is key when playing in new environments. My tournament games were in the morning at 10am, when the venue had just opened up. The environment was new, the loud noises were new, the lack of game sound was new, the viewing angle was new. So many small things added up to a large amount of discomfort, and it really affected my ability to play. It was easy to get flustered in the environment, and even easier to lose. I guess this is what people call “tournament nerves”.

Back on the topic of photography, I think the key take-away from this tournament was ISO.

If you haven’t noticed it already, there are a ton of photos (almost all of them) are very noisy. Doing one more quick review of my photos, most of the ISOs were over 4000, and a large amount of them were 6400.

I guess the lighting wasn’t good enough. I guess it shouldn’t come as any surprise since it was an indoor place, and most of the photos were taken in the afternoon (was busy registering people in the morning!). My eyes always thought the lighting was fine, but what my eyes see is not what my camera sees. I guess I’ve shyed away from indoor photography for too long, I don’t have an eye for this. I guess that’s another thing to practice.

I’ve left ISO on auto for the entire event, and now I’m wondering if I should’ve set them differently. I’m not too experienced with choosing a good ISO, and most of the time when I do set ISO (rarely), it’s always the extremes (100 and 6400), because I was either looking for the sharpness 100 gives, or desperate to capture low-light things with 6400.

I guess this is why people update their cameras. I’ve seen some newer cameras take amazing photos in low-light situations. Newer sensors are better with low-light shots after all. It does make me curious about getting a new camera body, but I think that can wait until I’m much better at the medium. After all, the 60D is a great camera, and any deficiencies in my photos can be fixed by some adjustments on my side.

 

I guess since this is a UBC eSports related post, I should shout out the sponsors for the event. Thanks to Akshon Esports, BenQ, Twitch, Microsoft, and Zenox for making the event possible. Also thanks to Red Bull for the crazy amount of them there was (I’ve consumed more of those in those 2 days than probably the last 4 months). Finally, give props to Kevin Dhir & the Smash department of UBC eSports for planning this crazy weekend.

 

There’s only one edited image this time. I didn’t make another one because I didn’t have any idea of how to edit it. The only thing I edited this time was to make it brighter, because the original was too dark.

I played the guy (his tag is Diamond) for an hour or so. I say played, but he won literally every game (except for the one time he suicides both stocks by accident) and none of them were close. He almost took out Locus (BC’s most known Smash 4 player, also a UBC eSports member) in pools. Here’s the VOD for the game, it was really close!

Until next time.