Hey everyone! Hopefully you all had/are having a wonderful holiday season!

In about 2 weeks, Fresh Faces 2 will kick off with qualifiers. I want to remind everyone about the structure and setup as well as provide a few new resources that we have been working on. (All the links are at the end of this update.)

First and foremost, PLEASE ensure you are properly installed prior to the event start. The TO team will not be handling installation errors/troubles while trying to setup qualifiers. It is recommended to get installed and practice at least 1 seed a few days before the qualifier to ensure no technical difficulties will arise. Please see the Racer Checklist page to double check that you have done all the relevant steps. Please use our wonderful #help text channel in the KH2FM Randomizer discord if you run into any issues.

Regarding qualifiers, I want to reiterate that RSVPing is helpful, but not required. Every entrant is allowed to participate in 2 qualifiers for a chance to either automatically advance to bracket (if they finish in the top 3) or the chopping block (if they finish in the top 50%). You do not have to sign up for any qualifier in particular. As long as you join the racetime on time and are ready to go, you can play in that qualifier. The dates and times of every qualifier are visible in our Schedule tab. It's meant to be flexible since I know many of our racers have varying work schedules and are located all over the globe. Results of each qualifier will be posted to this webpage as soon as possible.

Next, RyuuRush has been working VERY hard on the player trailer to showcase everyone who agreed to participate the event. The first drafts have looked incredible, but we need a few more clips. If you are someone who signed up to be in the trailer, but don't have publicly available vods of your KH2 rando gameplay, please DM roro a clip you'd like to be shared in the trailer if you want video inclusion. Those who don't provide clips will simply have their names featured as text.

It has been super exciting to see all of the Fresh Faces practicing seeds. To help with this process the community has started to provide some tutorials. DoubleADewi has graciously created 2 tutorials so far: general KH2 rando knowledge we typically take for granted and 'How to Beat the Freaking Experiment'. Additionally, ZakTheRobot has created a playlist of example seeds where he talks through his reasoning for routing and boss fights. Both resources are incredibly helpful and I encourage entrants aiming to improve to watch these videos.

Lastly, it has been incredible to see all the DMs and comments about people wanting to commentate. It's my hope to get as many unique commentators as possible to let our viewers meet and engage with as much of the community as possible. That being said, we want to ensure our commentators are aware of the tournament format. Just like Spring 2023 League, we have decided to attach a form for interested commentators to fill out with 3 questions about Fresh Faces that should be very easy to answer. Getting all 3 questions correct is required to commentate, but you can use any resources or ask anyone for the answers. I just want to ensure that our commentators are not completely clueless when in the commentary booth. Should you pass, we will add you to the Fresh Faces II Organization server where scheduling will take place.

Thank you all so much for the support so far. I can't wait to get this show on the road. Be on the lookout for the official donation link in the next week or two as well.

Slava Ukraini,

roro...

Happy December everyone! What a ride this has been so far. Already, we're approaching 75 sign ups and are just barely over a month away from Fresh Faces 2 actually happening. In light of this tournament rapidly approaching, I would like to provide some additional relevant information about Fresh Faces 2.

You may have noticed we have 6 qualifiers this time around spaced out to be as accommodating as possible for our non-US based racers. Because of this additional effort that the tournament organization (TO) team is providing, we have made the difficult decision to NOT allow asyncs during the qualifiers barring EXTREMELY exceptional circumstances. We feel we have made the FF2 qualifier stage among the most accessible of the KH2 randomizer qualifiers. As a result, we want to make sure the TOs have adequate time to provide support for the live qualifiers and get appropriate breaks between qualifiers. The Chopping Block, however, falls during AGDQ and will definitely have async support. We appreciate your understanding.

We have also received many questions regarding eligibility for entering Fresh Faces 2. The only hard cutoffs we will enforce are:

The above represent the hard cutoffs we will enforce regarding FF2 participation. There is a soft clause that is along the lines of: 'Do not join if you are confident you could qualify or come close to qualifying in a critical difficulty KH2 Randomizer qualifier.' The intention of the event is to let newcomers feel like they are not going to be dominated by those of us who regularly compete at high levels. I will make myself clear if I see someone join that I believe should not, but will ultimately leave the decision up to the potential entrant.

Next up, I have received a few inquiries from interested people on how to help with the event. I say with no exaggeration that the BEST way to support the event is to find people you would want to see play in the event and have them RSVP. RSVPing for the event goes a LONG way in helping us negotiate sponsorships and plan for the event accordingly. It helps as a bonus that referrers are eligible for prizes from our gracious sponsors and supporters. If you are looking for a more direct involvement in the organization of Fresh Faces 2, we are still looking for a few tournament organizers and German speaking randomizer players that could assist with German commentary, so please reach out if you are interested in helping out.

Lastly, I am happy to announce that community nights are returning! Community nights will start on 12/3 and will run until the start of the event. From 5-11 EST, we will have Q&As, help sessions, and community seeds run by our amazing TO team to get everyone set up, more active, and more involved. I (roro) will likely be in the #help channel from 5-9 while the rest of our TO team will be getting in the mix of seeds that run from 5-11. We will be using the Active Racer role to ping for when seeds are happening so please sign up for the Active Racer role in #roles in the KH2 Randomizer server if you are interested in participating. We hope to get a chance to interact with all of you during these community nights this event is nothing without its people.

Slava Ukraini,

roro...

Welcome to the unveiling of the Fresh Faces 2 website! This will be the home base for all things Fresh Faces 2 alongside the #tournament-announcements text channel in the Kingdom Hearts 2 randomizer discord.

We have included additional information about the tournament such as the structure of the tournament, the rules of the tournament, the racer checklist, and how many people have RSVP'd to play in Fresh Faces 2!

I want to also briefly address The Completionist's charity scandal because I think it may impact the willingness of people to donate to charity streams going forward. I have checked the 990 forms personally of Project Hope and can confirm they have donated tens of millions of dollars in medical equipment worldwide, and over eight million to Ukraine alone. I am nothing other than an event organizer for this wonderful cause and do not have ANY access to funds donated. If you have any reservations or concerns about donating, please feel free to reach out to us because we have Project Hope staff working alongside us to make this an incredible and generous endeavor.

Lastly, I would like to emphasize and remind all of you about rules 5 and 6 of the KH2FM Randomizer community: 5. Please be kind and respectful of others. This rule applies to text channels, voice channels, and streams. 6. If you are asked to refrain from certain behaviour, please do. This applies to requests from admins/mods and other members. If you feel a request is unreasonable, let us know and we can decide.

If you are found in violation of these rules, I reserve the right to ban you from participating. Be courteous, please; I promise it is not that hard.

Slava Ukraini,

roro...

1) This event will be restreamed on roromaniac8's channel (English) as well as RandoBrasil (Portuguese), SpeedrunsEspanol (Spanish), SpeedGamingFrancais (French), and SpeedGamingDeutsch (German). We're actively looking for rando people who are fluent in these languages, so please reach out if you'd like to commentate (especially if not in English).

2) Square Enix is graciously sponsoring the event again with more than double the amount of 1.5/2.5 PC copies: 30 to be exact.

3) Aside from this message, I plan to create a blog type website with future tournament updates so as not to clutter this text channel with a million messages. This way, there will only ever be 1 message in the #tourney-announcements channel that will have the latest update and all previous message will be visible on the website. I'll also try to keep player important messages brief and in one place so that it's very easy to understand the format and what needs to be done prior to racing.

4) I have attached an interest list form just like last time that is non-committal. I would appreciate that you only fill this out if you actually plan on participating. Registration is NOT required, but helps with organizing promotional material and accommodating all of our players. Additionally, we have prizes from roromaniac, Project Hope, Square Enix, and THE PAOPUKOMI for our top referrers, so please let us know who recommended you to join the tournament so we can give them a proper thank you should they be a top contender.

5) I have attached the preset for your perusal. To see the settings in a UI friendly format, move this preset into your generators preset folder and then open the generator. Load a seed from that preset and you can peruse the settings in a UI friendly way.

6) Please direct immediate questions either to #tourney-discussions or to roromaniac's DMs directly.

More info to come in the future, but just wanted to get something out there to secure the dates. Future info will include the structure, exact tourney stage dates, and all things logistics.

Thanks everyone! I'm very excited to get this show on the road.