Community Tournament Organizer Spotlight: Pride

Pride is one of several TOs that joined the community over the last year, bringing the wildly competitive PX series to North America. Pride’s tournaments, PX East and PX West, run every Friday with a stream utilizing Rivals Spectator Mode and a special East Vs West battle of champions to finish the night. We recently reached out to Pride to learn more about him and his background to give this amazing community member a well-deserved spotlight.

How did you first hear about Rivals and get into the scene as a competitor?

Pride: I heard about the game way back when it went into Early Access. My main competitive focus at the time was Melee, but I had a lot of fun playing Rivals casually with my roommates when it first came out. Back then, I mostly played Maypul because her dash attack was broken.

Later on I switched to Smash Ultimate. When the pandemic hit in 2020, I grew dissatisfied with Smash’s poor online experience and started to explore other titles. I ended up rediscovering Rivals, and was really impressed with all the improvements and new content since I’d last played it. I remember picking Elliana and thinking her hover mechanic was super cool. And the overall feel and balance of the game just felt really good. A week later I ran a tournament, and the rest is history. These days, I mostly play Ori because their dash attack is broken.

How long have you been running events? How did you get started and what motivated you to get active in the community?

Pride: When I picked up Rivals again last April, I wanted to compete. I didn’t really know much about the broader North American Rivals community back then – really all I knew were a handful of Ultimate and PM players in my region (Seattle) who also played Rivals. And our scene didn’t really have any kind of tournament. So I got 8 of us together and ran a bracket on my stream. That was PX Rivals #0. We had a blast, it was the closest I’d felt to attending a local since quarantine began.

So I ran it again next week. The week after, some Oregon players asked to join, and about a month later we added California. Back then, there weren’t a lot of other West Coast tourneys besides for WCS. So it was important to me to keep pushing PX Rivals, as a community hub and as a place for WC players to showcase their skills.

We’ve continued to run the event every week since. The scope has grown to a double-header event featuring both the East and West halves of North America. Every week I get to watch top players duke it out live while sharing the mic with some of my favorite people. I love running the series, it has and continues to introduce me to lots of awesome people in the scene.

There are very few TOs that stream tournaments in Spectator mode, what about this format entices you to stream this way?

Pride: I love watching live tournaments. Melee Top 8 streams always used to get my adrenaline pumping and fuel my passion for competing. I also love the community aspect of locals, which I didn’t want to lose in the age of COVID. So it’s always been important to me to keep PX Rivals a live experience. I want the event to capture as much of that magic as possible.

The series began months before Definitive Edition was released, so we didn’t have spectator mode at first. We made do with Steam Broadcast and grew our scene around that. Steam Broadcast and spectator mode haven’t always been the most popular decisions, but I believe they’ve gone a long way toward defining the atmosphere at PX.

People sometimes ask me why watching an event live is different from watching a replay without spoiling yourself. For me personally, there’s more than simply the suspense of not knowing what’s gonna happen. There’s also knowing that every single other person in the audience with you is experiencing that same suspense. There’s knowing that we’re all going to find out what happens at the same time. And I love how when everyone’s reactions are in sync, they amplify each other.

You have a pretty interesting format, running two region-locked (PX East and PX West) events. Why did you go this route instead of having one big North American event like other TOs run?

Pride: So, I can give my retroactive justifications for why I think it’s a good format. Splitting North America in half prevents anyone from having to play egregious cross-continent connections in tournament. It also mitigates issues introduced by time zone differences – full-NA events typically have to compromise between starting too early for West Coast and too late for East Coast.

But really, the reasons are historical. PX Rivals did not begin as a North American event but rather as a tiny Seattle-based local that grew bigger over time. Restricting long-distance connections was always a priority for the event. By PX Rivals #31, we were already starting to really push the boundary of what that meant, as our “West Coast” event now spanned from Hawaii to the Rockies. I really didn’t want to increase the region size beyond that.

Around that time, we were starting to get East Coast players in chat expressing interest in participating themselves. So I started to think, if I ran an EC event before our standard WC event, maybe EC people would wanna stick around and check out our top WC players. And maybe we’ll get WC folks tuning in for EC, and maybe this can help bring the overall community together more. So the next week we tried out the double-header format, and we’ve been running it that way ever since.

With local tournaments slowly coming back in some capacity, do you intend to host any LAN tournaments, or do you think you will stick to strictly online?

Pride: Offline events interest me, but the logistics are more complicated. Finding a venue and securing enough setups can be difficult. I’ll say that it’s not out of the question, but offline events are not my priority in the near future. Regardless of whether I host any LAN events, I definitely intend to keep running PX Rivals and want to push it as far as I can.

What are your interests outside of the gaming community?

Pride: My professional background is in artificial intelligence research. Over the last ten years I’ve been involved in a number of fields including audio analysis, gesture recognition, and game AI. Most recently I worked on chatbots and programming language analysis at Microsoft Research. AI is super cool, and I’m especially interested in AIs that reason with programmatic constructs, a young and challenging field.

I’m also passionate about making music. Folks who regularly tune into our events are probably familiar with the PX Rivals Theme. I play the bass and a number of other instruments, and my music tends to be influenced by rock and trip hop. I’ve been streaming live jam sessions lately and I’m hoping to continue doing that more!

What’s the thing you’re looking forward to most this Summer (Rivals or otherwise)?

Pride: In terms of Rivals, I can’t wait for rollback. Even with offline events returning, online is still going to be incredibly important, especially to those with small local scenes. Rollback is going to be a huge step for Rivals.

Outside of Rivals, I’m excited to finally see some live music again! I’m sure a lot of exciting acts will visit Seattle.

Is there anything you would like to say to the Rivals community reading this feature?

Pride: PX Rivals happens every Friday! Come compete, watch, commentate. Join our Discord for more information.

Big shoutouts to LilFox15, Tricki3, and everyone else who helps the series run smoothly.