On October 25 at 11:00 in Japan (Saturday evening for most of the Americas), Gigguk went live on Twitch and played QuiJutsu with his chat. It was the first World Anime Tournament and the biggest day the game has had by a long way. I spent the whole stream in chat answering questions, so this is the recap from where I was sitting.
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The warm-up
Gigguk started the way he usually does, talking to chat, and then explained what the plan was: he was going to play a quiz game, and chat was going to play against him and against each other. Chat got excited quickly. A lot of people had clearly been waiting for the chance to beat Gigguk at anime trivia in front of everyone.
He explained the game the best way there is, by playing a match. Then he walked through how the tournament would work, opened the News and Announcements page and went through each post on it. Somewhere in there chat started saying that this could become an esports tournament one day. That was very nice to read, because it is exactly where I want this to go.
He played one more Casual match before the tournament and won it, barely. Meanwhile chat was asking questions faster than I could type. The one I remember best was how many questions there are in total. I said around 5,700, which is right: just over 4,700 text questions and around 970 visual ones. Someone immediately told me to stop at 6,969. I have made no promises.
The tournament
Then the tournament opened. Casual and Ranked closed for everyone, every player started at the same 1200 tournament rating, and the queue filled up almost instantly. Gigguk played in it like everyone else, against whoever the queue gave him.
It turns out ten seconds is not much time when you are also reading the question out loud to thousands of people. Gigguk struggled to get through the questions in time, and to be fair, so did his opponents. So he came up with a strategy. Since some of his opponents were obviously watching the stream while playing, he started saying the wrong answer out loud, confidently, to throw them off. Funnily enough, it worked.
He won some rounds and lost some, and finished with 8 wins and 5 losses. Between matches he kept opening the leaderboard to give shoutouts to the players at the top.
GiggukDestroyer
A few rounds in, a player called GiggukDestroyer appeared in tenth place on the leaderboard. Gigguk saw the name, laughed, and asked chat to push them back down. Chat did not manage it. The joke played itself: by the time the tournament closed, GiggukDestroyer had climbed to second place, with 16 wins and 3 losses. I could not have scripted it better.
The final top three were:
- 1st: Monke, 18 wins and 2 losses, the first World Anime Tournament champion
- 2nd: GiggukDestroyer, 16 wins and 3 losses
- 3rd: Caelthus, 14 wins and 2 losses
Congratulations to all three, and to everyone else in the top ten, which was decided by a handful of rating points.
The numbers
The tournament ran for forty minutes. In that time 1,269 players entered and between them finished 4,881 matches and gave 75,105 answers, and 62% of those answers were right. That is more than a match every second, for forty minutes straight, which is far more than QuiJutsu had ever handled before. And the servers held up.
The ending
At the end Gigguk congratulated the top players and showed the tournament cards. Then he asked chat to support the developers and gave us a shoutout. Chat clapped and filled up with encouraging messages, and then the stream moved on to its next topic.
Reading that chat meant a lot. Thank you to Gigguk for having us, to everyone who played, and to everyone in chat who asked a question, cracked a joke or typed something kind.
What comes next
This was the first World Anime Tournament, not the last. If you played and want to keep going, Casual and Ranked are open again. If you are new, the Guide explains the rules, and how matchmaking works explains how opponents and questions are chosen. Then jump into a match. GiggukDestroyer is probably still out there.