Question regarding tournament turnouts from the early days of X-Wing

By Lyraeus, in X-Wing

So I am doing a research project concerning some old tournament numbers. I am looking at the first 18 months (September 2012 to February 2014) of X-Wing specifically. This would be right before wave 4 came out.

Does anyone remember how many people showed up for any tournaments in that time period?

Edited by Lyraeus

So I am doing a research project concerning some old tournament numbers. I am looking at the first 18 months of X-Wing specifically. This would be right before wave 4 came out.

Does anyone remember how many people showed up for any tournaments in that time period?

IIRC we had 60 at the Roseville Regional (May 2014 -- Wave 4 came out in June of that year) and 20 something at a tournament (Jan 2014) before that but tourneys were much less frequent then, too.

Edited by AlexW

So I am doing a research project concerning some old tournament numbers. I am looking at the first 18 months of X-Wing specifically. This would be right before wave 4 came out.

Does anyone remember how many people showed up for any tournaments in that time period?

IIRC we had 60 at the Roseville Regional and 20 something at a tournament a few weeks before that but tourneys were much less frequent then, too.

When was that? What months and year?

So I am doing a research project concerning some old tournament numbers. I am looking at the first 18 months of X-Wing specifically. This would be right before wave 4 came out.

Does anyone remember how many people showed up for any tournaments in that time period?

IIRC we had 60 at the Roseville Regional and 20 something at a tournament a few weeks before that but tourneys were much less frequent then, too.

When was that? What months and year?

I edited the above. The regional may not fall in your timeline but it was before the Wave 4 release.

So I am doing a research project concerning some old tournament numbers. I am looking at the first 18 months of X-Wing specifically. This would be right before wave 4 came out.

Does anyone remember how many people showed up for any tournaments in that time period?

IIRC we had 60 at the Roseville Regional and 20 something at a tournament a few weeks before that but tourneys were much less frequent then, too.

When was that? What months and year?

I edited the above. The regional may not fall in your timeline but it was before the Wave 4 release.

Was the amount of players in normal tournaments about 20 on average?

My Imdaar alpha tournament had 18. I remember this because it was my first tournament and I placed 18th

My Imdaar alpha tournament had 18. I remember this because it was my first tournament and I placed 18th

That was wave 3 right? Any tournaments after that? maybe within 3 months or so?

My first tournament was a regional in Louisville, Kentucky in May(?) 2013. There were about 12 people present flying only wave two things. I faced 3 versions of Han Shoots First and one Three Amigos build (Vader, Fel, Turr).

-The first "regional" tournaments were basically just glorified store championships.

-Store championships did not exist at this point in the game.

The next tournament I went to was around November (?) 2013 and had 5 people in it including my ex wife (who won). It was the first tournament after the release of wave 3 for me and I was still in the process of helping build the community with another guy outside of FT. Campbell, KY.

-this was the first time I had been able to play one of the kits and I lost due to the strength of schedule rules since MOV did not exist at that time.

-The squads were not meta at all.

I started traveling with my buddy and the guys from Murfreesboro to other tournaments when I could get time off until we finally found a store in Clarksville that ran an almost near weekly tournament for just 5 bucks. (Frontline games, you seriously rock).

After I moved to north Georgia I had a large break (almost 3 months) of not playing the game and as such my first time seeing wave 4 ships was in the Atlanta regional where I got wrecked by two phantom squads.

Those were definitely some fun times because just getting to show up to a tournament with more than 10 people was awesome.

My first tournament was a regional in Louisville, Kentucky in May(?) 2013. There were about 12 people present flying only wave two things. I faced 3 versions of Han Shoots First and one Three Amigos build (Vader, Fel, Turr).

-The first "regional" tournaments were basically just glorified store championships.

-Store championships did not exist at this point in the game.

The next tournament I went to was around November (?) 2013 and had 5 people in it including my ex wife (who won). It was the first tournament after the release of wave 3 for me and I was still in the process of helping build the community with another guy outside of FT. Campbell, KY.

-this was the first time I had been able to play one of the kits and I lost due to the strength of schedule rules since MOV did not exist at that time.

-The squads were not meta at all.

I started traveling with my buddy and the guys from Murfreesboro to other tournaments when I could get time off until we finally found a store in Clarksville that ran an almost near weekly tournament for just 5 bucks. (Frontline games, you seriously rock).

After I moved to north Georgia I had a large break (almost 3 months) of not playing the game and as such my first time seeing wave 4 ships was in the Atlanta regional where I got wrecked by two phantom squads.

Those were definitely some fun times because just getting to show up to a tournament with more than 10 people was awesome.

So It was slow going during those days? What do regular kit tournaments look like now?

Our first regionals (analogous to store championships today) in my area had a turnout of 7 people IIRC. This was Feb (I think) of 2013. The local community is now much bigger. Our first modern regionals had a very disappointing turnout of 65 players (we expected many more based on Facebook activity and out of towners that we thought would show up in higher numbers). Most tournaments in the area are 30-40 people.

So I am doing a research project concerning some old tournament numbers. I am looking at the first 18 months of X-Wing specifically. This would be right before wave 4 came out.

Does anyone remember how many people showed up for any tournaments in that time period?

IIRC we had 60 at the Roseville Regional and 20 something at a tournament a few weeks before that but tourneys were much less frequent then, too.

When was that? What months and year?

I edited the above. The regional may not fall in your timeline but it was before the Wave 4 release.

Was the amount of players in normal tournaments about 20 on average?

That seems high for the early days. Wave 1-2. Because there just wasn't enough product. If it wasn't the Starter, Slave I, or Falcon, you were lucky to see it at times. Seriously, the A-wing/Interceptor shortage was epic.

So I am doing a research project concerning some old tournament numbers. I am looking at the first 18 months of X-Wing specifically. This would be right before wave 4 came out.

Does anyone remember how many people showed up for any tournaments in that time period?

IIRC we had 60 at the Roseville Regional and 20 something at a tournament a few weeks before that but tourneys were much less frequent then, too.

When was that? What months and year?

I edited the above. The regional may not fall in your timeline but it was before the Wave 4 release.

Was the amount of players in normal tournaments about 20 on average?

That seems high for the early days. Wave 1-2. Because there just wasn't enough product. If it wasn't the Starter, Slave I, or Falcon, you were lucky to see it at times. Seriously, the A-wing/Interceptor shortage was epic.

When did it turn around?

My first tournament was a regional in Louisville, Kentucky in May(?) 2013. There were about 12 people present flying only wave two things. I faced 3 versions of Han Shoots First and one Three Amigos build (Vader, Fel, Turr).

-The first "regional" tournaments were basically just glorified store championships.

-Store championships did not exist at this point in the game.

The next tournament I went to was around November (?) 2013 and had 5 people in it including my ex wife (who won). It was the first tournament after the release of wave 3 for me and I was still in the process of helping build the community with another guy outside of FT. Campbell, KY.

-this was the first time I had been able to play one of the kits and I lost due to the strength of schedule rules since MOV did not exist at that time.

-The squads were not meta at all.

I started traveling with my buddy and the guys from Murfreesboro to other tournaments when I could get time off until we finally found a store in Clarksville that ran an almost near weekly tournament for just 5 bucks. (Frontline games, you seriously rock).

After I moved to north Georgia I had a large break (almost 3 months) of not playing the game and as such my first time seeing wave 4 ships was in the Atlanta regional where I got wrecked by two phantom squads.

Those were definitely some fun times because just getting to show up to a tournament with more than 10 people was awesome.

So It was slow going during those days? What do regular kit tournaments look like now?

The North Georgia and Atlanta area in particular have grown leaps and bounds since the release of wave 4. Most of the folks in my immediate group started only a month before I moved down in June 2014. Regular game nights generally see over 10-16 people show up at some of the dedicated stores and on some casual tournaments that only last 3 rounds, you normally see anywhere from 20-36 people show up. Store championship season is huge now with different stores working together through the Facebook group North Georgia X-wing Minis to schedule tournaments that don't overlap and three DEDICATED TOs who strive for fair and impartial rules reviews and scoring. We have our own ranking system that uses the bag tag idea from disc golf and a circuit event that has fan generated alt-art and allows for rankings to be more solidified.

Regionals here have been huge for the past three years with the largest (attendance wise) being the 2015 sweat-fest with close to 100 people (I think it was 97 before drops, can anyone confirm though?) while we couldn't secure the 2017 regional (it will be in Chattanooga) it is safe to assume that the game has been growing steadily since wave 4 and has nearly doubled in size AGAIN after the new core was released. With the massive influx of new players one of our members even created a league for new players to learn the game correctly in a semi competitive environment while focusing on the development of basic skills and employment of effects. It was so effective and fun for the entire community that a second league is starting up to help get new members up to speed before the new tournament season starts in 2017.

I don't care if it's a little bit of a biased statement, but I honestly believe that Atlanta has the best support for the game in the United States bar none.

So I am doing a research project concerning some old tournament numbers. I am looking at the first 18 months of X-Wing specifically. This would be right before wave 4 came out.

Does anyone remember how many people showed up for any tournaments in that time period?

IIRC we had 60 at the Roseville Regional and 20 something at a tournament a few weeks before that but tourneys were much less frequent then, too.

When was that? What months and year?

I edited the above. The regional may not fall in your timeline but it was before the Wave 4 release.

Was the amount of players in normal tournaments about 20 on average?

That seems high for the early days. Wave 1-2. Because there just wasn't enough product. If it wasn't the Starter, Slave I, or Falcon, you were lucky to see it at times. Seriously, the A-wing/Interceptor shortage was epic.

I don't know that supply was as big of an issue in our area and those were the only tournaments I attended at the time at all much prior to Wave 4.

My first tournament was a regional in Louisville, Kentucky in May(?) 2013. There were about 12 people present flying only wave two things. I faced 3 versions of Han Shoots First and one Three Amigos build (Vader, Fel, Turr).

-The first "regional" tournaments were basically just glorified store championships.

-Store championships did not exist at this point in the game.

The next tournament I went to was around November (?) 2013 and had 5 people in it including my ex wife (who won). It was the first tournament after the release of wave 3 for me and I was still in the process of helping build the community with another guy outside of FT. Campbell, KY.

-this was the first time I had been able to play one of the kits and I lost due to the strength of schedule rules since MOV did not exist at that time.

-The squads were not meta at all.

I started traveling with my buddy and the guys from Murfreesboro to other tournaments when I could get time off until we finally found a store in Clarksville that ran an almost near weekly tournament for just 5 bucks. (Frontline games, you seriously rock).

After I moved to north Georgia I had a large break (almost 3 months) of not playing the game and as such my first time seeing wave 4 ships was in the Atlanta regional where I got wrecked by two phantom squads.

Those were definitely some fun times because just getting to show up to a tournament with more than 10 people was awesome.

So It was slow going during those days? What do regular kit tournaments look like now?

The North Georgia and Atlanta area in particular have grown leaps and bounds since the release of wave 4. Most of the folks in my immediate group started only a month before I moved down in June 2014. Regular game nights generally see over 10-16 people show up at some of the dedicated stores and on some casual tournaments that only last 3 rounds, you normally see anywhere from 20-36 people show up. Store championship season is huge now with different stores working together through the Facebook group North Georgia X-wing Minis to schedule tournaments that don't overlap and three DEDICATED TOs who strive for fair and impartial rules reviews and scoring. We have our own ranking system that uses the bag tag idea from disc golf and a circuit event that has fan generated alt-art and allows for rankings to be more solidified.

Regionals here have been huge for the past three years with the largest (attendance wise) being the 2015 sweat-fest with close to 100 people (I think it was 97 before drops, can anyone confirm though?) while we couldn't secure the 2017 regional (it will be in Chattanooga) it is safe to assume that the game has been growing steadily since wave 4 and has nearly doubled in size AGAIN after the new core was released. With the massive influx of new players one of our members even created a league for new players to learn the game correctly in a semi competitive environment while focusing on the development of basic skills and employment of effects. It was so effective and fun for the entire community that a second league is starting up to help get new members up to speed before the new tournament season starts in 2017.

I don't care if it's a little bit of a biased statement, but I honestly believe that Atlanta has the best support for the game in the United States bar none.

Anyone else have memories to share?

I wouldn't know about the Atlanta area prior to wave 4 as I had just moved down there after it was released.

Around Denver I remember there was 12 or 14 people for the Imdaar Alpha tournament, nephew and I got 3rd and 4th. I think the 2014 Regionals in Denver had 60ish. Store champs usually had under 20 that year and there were only a few. Store Champs tournaments have grown by about double in the past couple years. The one thing I have noticed is that before there were 4 or 5 shops that all had X-Wing nights on Monday. Now there's a few on Monday and Tue-Thurs is covered as well so you can almost play it nightly! There's even a couple Saturday day/nights that crop up. Its definitely growning and very well. League nights have 10+ pretty regularly at the bigger shops.

The dark times...before Cryodex...before ListJuggler. Gathering data was much more difficult back then.

Some jerk bought me a core set the summer of 2013 and I played my first tournament in fall that year. We had about 8 people that we played one game per week in a store that only had 2 tables. You could do 4 games if you were elbow to elbow.

Found another store in January and played a local tournament there. Pretty sure we had exactly 8 people. That was my first tournament win. It was pretty awesome. At that event, I met a guy named Chad Hoefle. Nice charismatic guy.

A short time after that he got me and a couple others together to discuss running a charity tournament. Yeah sure, sounds great. Chad had some grand aspirations to run it in a crazy custom format. Unfortunately none of the software available those days would run his format. They barely ran regular X-Wing events anywhere close to the correct rules. "I'm a software engineer, I could just write something for us." ...and that was the statement that was equivalent to a little kid tossing a snowball off the peak of a mountain.

Over the next month I wrote a pathetic excuse for a program that would run the event as long as you did everything right. Heaven forbid you do something wrong. I contacted the TO for a store championship in Portage indiana. He agreed to let my software run the event as a practice. We got there an hour early (because timezones are dumb) and I was still coding changes to make the interface more user friendly. I think we had 16 people at that store championship. There were some minor bugs in the software. Mainly trying to work out who should play who based on score and SoS and MoV. It wasn't random back then. My friend and I made top 8 so we got those fancy green range rulers.

A few weeks later was the first Campaign Against Cancer in South Bend. I think that original event had 48ish people. We had 6 pods of 8. There were some late adds and duplicate pairing issues. Thanksfully Chad printed every round's results because we had to reinput everything after lunch. Something wacky happened. Remember when I said you had to do everything right? Well we didn't. I ended up coming in 6th out of 48 players. That felt really good.

Got a lot of compliments on the software as well as a lot of suggestions of how to improve it. Improve it...what are you talking about? The event is over. Not for my fledgling software. I had quite a few people encouraging me to refine it and make it a product to distribute to everyone. That month I had knee surgery so I decided screw it, I'll see what I can do. Working with Roy of AFewManeuvers.com and Sean Dorcy, I got a much better product working and finally started distributing it to people running regionals events. Roy decided it needed a fancy name and suggested Cryodex. I had some crazy acronym I wanted so we put it to a vote. Cryodex won by a landslide.

Went to my first regionals in Chicago that year (2014). Pretty sure there were 64ish people there. Then I heard they were using my software. My god! My x-wing performance was suddenly not important. Everything went pretty smooth. I had to fix one issue at the cut because of user error, but that was it. I ended up going 3-3. I flew a falcon because I figured there was a lot of potential and was underrated. That day I faced 6 falcon lists. I think I was the only one without C-3PO. I was happy with my performance, but I was estatic with my software's performance.

Shortly after that, Sozin created ListJuggler and the rest is well documented history. Cryodex spread like wildfire and I was getting feature requests from Australia, Germany, Brazil, and everywhere else I could think of. It's been a good 3 years. Here's to many more!

You asked for memories...there ya go!

I can say that Waves 1-2 were small in Charlotte, NC. We had maybe 10-12 people per tournament at that time. It picked up after Wave 2 came out and we had maybe 20 people in tournaments? It got to be about 25 peak around Wave 3? I dropped out about the time Wave 4 came out for almost a year.

This data is from where I lived at the time, Dallas, TX.

Most store tournaments between wave 1 and wave 3 had typically 12-20 people. The early regionals were like store championships, so those numbers are about accurate. The Kessel run had something like 25 people and the Imdaar Alpha event (we had apparently largest in the US) with 28 people. The first regional I went to was 2014 in Dallas, largest in the US with 75 players; I couldn't make it to the regionals held before that because I had a newborn but friends have told me they were typically 30-40 players. I ran a few small events before 2014, mostly 12 or fewer attendees.

The Battle Reports section has 52 pages going back to Sept 2012. If I was looking for that information, that's where i would start.

The Battle Reports section has 52 pages going back to Sept 2012. If I was looking for that information, that's where i would start.

Absolutely, but then I would not get such great personal stories!

Keep it all coming! You are helping this research project a lot!