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Monday, February 22, 2021

JOIN the Mario Tennis Aces North American Open February 2021!

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - At the last weekend of February.

Check it: The first Nintendo of America out-of-game online tournament (for prizes) of 2021! And it's for Mario Tennis Aces! Register now over here. Taking place February 27 at 13:00 Eastern.

Mario Tennis Aces North American Open February 2021 logo key art
For the first time, someone other than Mario gets to appear in the tournament key artwork.


If you do ever want to play Mario Tennis Aces during any other time of year, you're never going to find a random person in the free play online section. You may find someone in the in-game online tournament, but if you don't like that ruleset and want to make your own, you're out of luck, unless you look for non-random friends to play with. (And you can find a lot of people—and help/guides resources—in the Mario Tennis Aces Club Discord server.)

Mario Tennis Aces empty online waiting room 2021
Typical result when you try to find random people to play with online.
You'll see this screen until you decide to do something else with your time.


As for the tournament itself, the format is exactly the same as the November 2020 one. $310 in total prizes (given by My Nintendo Gold Points), with $40 for first place, $30 for second to fourth place, $20 for fifth to eighth place, and $10 for ninth to sixteenth place. It's a best-of-3 single elimination bracket with randomised seeding, so a lot of your performance may be luck-based.

At least the gameplay itself will have minimum luck—Marina Stadiums only, Standard ruleset (with the metre), no bracket KO, and Quick Play (tiebreaker) scoring. Though who gets to serve first is random.




You can get people disqualified for doing stuff like what the above video portrays in the actual tournament. (And of course the guy is playing at that jerk plumber Mario.) And while the tournament format is the same, there is a new part of the tournament ruleset: IV.iii.: Winner Notification for Tournament Prize. This new section, probably inspired by the tremendous controversy and pressure that KoopaTV has put on Nintendo for their slowness and lack of communication in paying out the winners of their tournaments, states that Nintendo will email the potential winners around March 5, 2021 with instructions and Release Forms, and YOU must respond within five days. (Five days happens to be a reduction from the ten days it was before.)

The rest of the section then goes into detail about how alternate winners are decided (I guess if you're ranked seventeenth to thirty-second). Basically, you'll want to win matches by 2–0s rather than 2–1s. Oddly, criteria “e”, assuming that people have the same win/loss records, will give the prize to “the player with the highest seed”, which is very odd, since the seeds are random.

I can't really tell if Nintendo's terms change is them committing to pay people out on a better schedule, or if they're trying to provide more cover for them to keep having a lazy schedule. Them giving a specific date to wait for a communication with only a five-day window is assuring it's the former, though there's a lot of Sponsor discretion contained in the document that can muck things up. I wonder if the new time-table is a preview or test of Nintendo of America sponsoring tournaments for other games this 2021... maybe a new tournament is coming for a certain fighting game that is getting new DLC in March? (...And I definitely don't mean ARMS.)



Ludwig was the very first person to sign up for the tournament. Here he is at the very top of the Participants tab. When you go to register, be sure to have your Nintendo Switch friend code available. There's currently 393 registrants... how much higher will it get, and will you help increase the number? Are you proud to be reading KoopaTV, knowing that the site's activism got a terms and conditions change?


The next official Battlefy tournament is for Splatoon 2 in July 2021.

10 comments :

  1. I wonder if they'll go all out like this for the new mario golf. I don't really like the newer tennis installments, seems like they just end up being too easy. The 3ds one could play itself. But i haven't tried this one so who knows

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. This one can't play itself.
      Especially on a competitive level.

      I don't know if you could make an online tournament around Golf or what the ruleset would be like, since you're not really directly competing against another person but competing against nature.
      Though "Speed Golf" might change that but I dunno if that's gonna be a party mode or something competitive.

      Delete
  2. Replies
    1. i just like pressing your buttons :3

      Delete
    2. I mean, it's not like I developed the game. <.<

      Delete
    3. hmmm i dunno about that
      i feel like you're behind all these Mario sports games, mister

      Delete
  3. Well, I lost in Round 3. >_>
    Beat a Boo in Round 1 and a Daisy in Round 2, and lost to Spike.

    ReplyDelete
  4. "states that Nintendo will email the potential winners around March 5, 2021 with instructions and Release Forms"

    This still hasn't happened three weeks later. >.>

    ReplyDelete

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