If you didn't know, there was a HUGE DRAMA BOMB regarding the legitimacy of this gaming tournament. Rumors were being thrown back and forth, which concluded with the demise of the GAMME event. If you'd like to see more details, just search the shoryuken.com forums and you'll find it.
If you care to know my stance on the situation, it's simple.
ALWAYS KEEP THE PLAYERS INFORMED. He made a HUGE mistake in not notifying everyone in regards to a DATE CHANGE. The community should always be your highest priority. A lesson learned.
I am posting this below on behalf of GPX Gaming. This was their side of the story, which was posted on Facebook Notes:
Quote:
So here we are at Midwest Championships we are proud to be here and be a part of Keits first Major and see it come together for him. We are providing equipment and screens, materials and pretty much whatever he needs.
It makes me happy, eventhough I am coughing every few minutes and I feel pretty sick.
I wanted to list the current state of issues from start to finish leading up to this weekend.
We had an agreement with a person claiming to be from Major League of Gaming, his name was Micheal Perry he sent us emails from mperry@mlgpro.com - we spoke with him a few times starting the end of February. I had met multiple folks from MLG before this time and met in the community, enjoyed events where many of their representatives have also partaken and of course talked about GAMME and what we were planning as far back as I can remember would be meeting Gran_Calc back around October of 2009 - nice guy.
So when we received communication from a representative or someone with an MLGpro.com email we figured its legitimate.
We as a company have the oppurtunity to work with this large organization and build a relationship. the request was to move the event date back a bit so we won't compete for top level competitors which we were attracting from all over the world.
I at first thought, they knew about us, why even use that date - but of course its so difficult nowadays to schedule an event, no matter when or where, there is almost always something going on somewhere else in the US.
After much deliberation I asked my hotel and they said only if we cover the cancellation fees and if they rebook the space they will refund the fees or the difference. So we emailed this Mperry back and said we would be willing to do this if they can cover those fees directly to the hotel, and that we had other event groups that could use the space in that weekend so we could probably get all the fees waived.
we got correspondance that this would be agreeable. I got an MLG letterhead - which we believed to be authentic (we know now it was not). and it was an agreement from us to make the date change and once we signed it they would be working with our venue to cover those fees and recover lost fees if they fill the space with another event (as was in our contract originally).
I made this announcement on the SRK board.
The community was not happy...
I had a team of people in St Louis while I was in a different location when this happened. in other words. I made the post and then got on a flight...
Keits when I arrived at my next stop sent me a text message that I pissed off the community and I will need to make some type of statement before it gets out of control. I got a similar text from Kurasa our Tourney Ops director.
I asked Keits to make a post for me until I was able to get online, I was unable to reach my VPO which was working in St. Louis and a group of my staff was driving to Indianapolis to pick up a DDR Extreme Cabinet they had purchased to bring it back to St Louis to restore before we left for Chicago.
So I had a few options to put something online at that moment.
I made a few calls before my next flight and spoke with my hotel and asked if after I told them to switch my date and got them to agree to the date change if I could humbly get it back.
They were happier to hold the original date.
I informed them that I pissed off the community with a dumb decision.
I sent another text out to Keits and said I guess we are going up against the big dog, I had not sent in the agreement and then again we are no chihuahua.
So I figured the relationship with MLG which I would like to have will have to built another way and I need to keep my date since the kids are not happy with this decision.
I definitely made this mistake to not include them in the decision to poll them. We just had our site pretty much ready to launch after painstaking months of being unhappy with the designs and product sent to us by three different people, one of them being a person that just dropped from the face of the earth.
Without the site the record labels we were working with will not promote the concerts we were setting up and they required our site to be integrated to certain databases and this is what caused the problem.
at the moment there are two beta sites for GAMME and the main site with a splash page
http://www.gamm-expo.com
http://www.dcapro.com/client/GAMME/index.php
http://www.spazbunny.com/GAMME
So essentially we took forever to get our site up. I paid 3 different designers the standard package for the site up front and each flaked...the third one was almost completed by October and then dissappeared with the DCApro beta site...frustrating
We were making a deal we would find out the hard way was with someone that does not work with MLG.
We then of course made the bad decision to move the date to work with MLG.
Once I logged in myself to state we are not changing and we are keeping the date and moving forward there was a feeding frenzy of controversy since a few members of MLG stated on this forum that they were not working with us and there was no deal on the table.
People of course naturally start to assume...did GPX lie? did GPX just come up with a fake excuse to move the date...they must have...that means they dont have what they need there is an issue...etc etc...
I came online and stated that I wanted to get to the bottom of this problem because our intentions were good not because we wanted to stop the event or had issues.
Timing...
I had a tough weekend ahead of me...there was no reason for my staff or myself to be checking the forums because I had commented about getting everything we had to MLG to show them what we got and I would be attending a funeral that Saturday.
My friend and Mentor Carl Macek passed away and I was honored to be invited to the memorial in LA. I made sure I was there to show my support and respects to his family.
Sunday I flew back to Miami, first time in months...because what is now known to many others that I have kept quiet for some time is that I have Cancer.
I kept that to myself even though I have been touring and working hard at each and every event. A select few close to me knew about this. But I always wanted it to be discrete because people start to baby you or they worry about everything and treat you different when your sick.
I know its pride, but I dont like looking weak...I want to get to the event, do my job and make sure everyone is happy. Sick or not I am still me.
I never use excuses and I never back out of obligations over something like being sick.
I get dozens of emails when I get to my laptop. My staff have been working on other projects and taking care of other things. SRK is not the most important item on our to do list.
but of course the pot stirring was going on all weekend and people that we have never met starting creating accounts and posting random information and steering people away from our event.
I log into SRK and I find a few PM's to me that were helpful like Ponder who was very polite in trying to help the situation and then I see a PM from Inkblot that states the shutdown of our event and how we are placed on the promoters and venues to avoid...??? Our thread got locked...???
Last I posted was we were working on getting all our information to MLG to resolve the issue. But apparently that was not enough.
I had over a hundred cancellations of our attendance pre-registration stating we cancelled the show...
I of course logged in and said I never cancelled the show...I tried to explain, but a lot of slanderous information was placed online by new accounts and random people.
My thought process...how can this community that we work so hard in, support, provide for and sponsor in many ways be this easily swayed against us.
We have been working with them for so long and yet people were seemingly so eager to tear down our name and our event.
more so, the amount of time I spend away from my daughters working and not watching them grow up. People can keep business and family separate but when you entrench yourself so deeply with a community and they turn their backs on you or do not come out and speak up in your name it makes you think about these things...why bother doing this for them.
Why lose all that time with my daughters for nothing. I love my work but I have learned a lot of lessons this weekend.
after all the issues and even explaining very carefully our side of the issue we ended up having to refund hundreds of registrations. Making me consider the future of the event.
I hate having to deal with these things in such manners but I have taken all of this into account and submitted it to my lawyers. Tortious Interference is the term we are looking for and I am quite furious over the entire incident. I apologize to MLG for all of this hopefully one day we will be able to work together.
I ended up having to cancel GAMME for the June date and I am rebuilding the event for a new date and refocusing the convention into more Anime, Manga and Musica based content, the gaming will be as large as it was planned but I will not concern ourselves with tournaments, the community will be able to do that for themselves if they so choose and I will put the money we had for the pots toward more guests.
GPX was built for the purpose of creating and building memories and bringing the community more of what it loves. There are still people out there that love to tear down something they cant build for themselves. It has soured my taste for working with people on the shoryuken.com board and how we recruit people to work for us like folks from the Smash community that we trusted.
No one is perfect we all make mistakes, we will be working to be a better company and step up our planning and organization to prevent something like this ever happening again.
We are here at Midwest Championships and we will make sure it goes without a hitch, we have a lot of events this year. While I will be personally taking a step back to take care of my condition, I will still be here working my butt off for the community I will do it a little differently thought, I will have a 3 year old and a 2 year old at my side.
I won't sacrifice their time anymore.
I hope some of you read this and truly look into what has occurred this week and understand and learn from our experiences.
Moving on...as always, growing stronger with each healed wound and never repeating the mistakes of yesteday.
GPX_LIVE 
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