Hidenotora

And then what, you all sit down with the scalper and watch sumo with the guy who just ripped you off for a ticket? Or the guy goes home? A scalper would really had to have made some serious money to go all the way to the Royal Albert Hall with his photo ID to let people in. It hardly seems worth the trouble unless someone has paid an astronomical sum for the tickets, and they weren't cheap to begin with; seems like too risky a gamble to hope you'll make a big profit off £350 tickets, which is what the venue want of course. I doubt the average ticket tout knows how popular sumo is and would take that gamble. But I suppose you never know and people will do anything for money these days.

Hah fair enough then, honestly I've never bought a ticket to something as big as this before outside of music festivals. And I've been to thousands of gigs but they were before buying tickets just became about being in a queue for eleven years to see some generic pop star. I'm not sure, but the T&Cs on the email confirmation ticket say: "The name of the lead booker will be printed on each ticket. The lead booker must attend the concert and photo ID in its original format (no photocopies) will be required to gain entry to the venue. There will be no exceptions to this rule. Photo ID can be any formal, recognisable form of ID such as a passport, driving licence, bus pass, work pass etc. The name cannot be changed once the booking has been made. If you are booking more than one ticket your guests must enter the venue at the same time as you. Failure to do so will result in the guests being turned away. Only the lead booker can collect tickets from the box office; you cannot leave tickets to be collected by your guests." So sounds like they're going to be taking it seriously. The only way to get in with a scalper's ticket would be to have the same name as them in that case.

I don't understand how the tickets are appearing on scalper sites because the tickets are attached to the name on the card that was used to purchase them and they're checking photo ID on entry. There was mention of an official reselling service but they seem to have taken all reference to that off the page now. (Just found it, it was Twickets.live, but no sumo tickets available there yet.) I also didn't think it was THAT bad, I managed to get an arena seat ("ringside" but not right in front of the dohyo) for Thursday and a seat in the upper circle for Friday. Once my place in the queue came up, I was able to just refresh the page and as I did, tickets appeared or disappeared depending on when they got released from people's baskets or whatever. I waited until stuff I wanted appeared and then added it to my basket and that was that. Then once I'd bought for Thursday I just started the whole process from the beginning and I was still at the front of the queue or whatever because of cookies, so I bought one for Friday as well.

Yeah I can confirm that's not Natto. There's also someone on Rumble posting his videos, again it isn't him, just another reposter. Reposting is fine as long as they're not using it as an excuse to try and make some money (not that there's anything we could do about it anyway).

Hi guys, I'm the admin in Natto's Discord and was responsible for his Telegram channel. I'll quickly go over what happened and what is happening. At the beginning of December, myself and some others in his Discord server were actually getting copyright strikes WITHIN Discord for posts that contained links to Natto's videos. My account got muted for 24 hours and then eventually the Discord just wasn't there anymore. They didn't give us a chance to remove to links or anything, just gone. They also took down Natto's personal website by contacting his webhost directly. This was all done by a company who specialised in protecting Japanese companies IP overseas, who NHK have obviously hired to chase him down. So over December we decided that the only option going forward was to switch to Abema footage, and to (at least initially) drastically reduce the number of people who had access to his videos in the hopes of shaking off this company. Hopefully both of these things combined will allow us to regroup a little and see how things go. There's just so much noise around his videos usually it's impossible to run any sort of experiments like this. So: - Natto's Discord is back, but it's semi-private for now. The only way you can get Discord to remove individual posts for copyright is a manual process via email and involves quoting to them the unique ID of a post. This means someone had to come in the server, find the posts and email them to DIscord's copyright reporting process. So for now, we're keeping membership limited to keep people like that out to the best of our abilities. - Natto is making videos, but they're being distributed on a limited scale while we try out what we can get away with. I'm not even going to fully say how we're distributing the videos, to keep some air of secrecy. Someone else is then taking the videos and putting them on their own Telegram channel (the SumoCuts Telegram channel Akinomaki mentioned above), which we're aware of, and then someone has taken the videos from there and is doing their own Russian commentary over them. Neither of them are Natto himself though. Anyone pretending to be Natto on Youtube and especially Facebook are scammers trying to solicit donations in his name. There's a guy seemingly from Vietnam who has been doing this for years now, but Natto is NOT on Youtube and NOT on Facebook. If you get to watch the videos that's great but don't give anyone any money unless you're getting it from the legit source. If you don't know the legit source, then simply do not donate. Natto isn't really that concerned with people reuploading his videos (especially since it means it's other Telegram channels and Youtube channels in the firing line and not him) but the people trying to make money off others under false pretences are certainly nothing to do with him. Reddit is absolutely swamped with people asking for the videos but I'm sorry, unless we know who you are you'll have to miss this one out. The Reddit discourse is just a clusterfuck and anything I said in there would be buried but hopefully here I can get something across. I highly suggest joining the SumoCuts Telegram channel if you're that desperate for Natto, if not you're stuck with the official sources. Sorry to post this diatribe but hopefully it clarifies things. If things don't calm down then maybe Natto will never go "public" again, but NHK's actions are forcing our hand.

Where'd you get that impression?

I think the drop in your views might be because a lot of people don't know that you're still going; your Mord Dresner channel doesn't come up if you search Kintamayama, and what even IS a Mord Dresner anyway? People don't realise it's you. NHK basically have someone full time blocking Natto's videos at this point, someone seems to sit down at his desk at 9am JST and then sends out the daily takedown notices. He's decided to unlist his videos and only post the links in his Discord server now to see if that works, which will lead to a significant hit in views just because people won't know and give up. He has Rumble/Odysee/Telegram/BiliBili channels to as backups, but people just don't use those websites unless they have to. It's becoming very tedious dealing with Youtube at this point. But yeah for yourself, people don't realise you're still going, hence the "you're back" comments because to them you vanished when the old channel went down. It's pretty hard to address the rabble of western sumo fans because there's no one place where they all hang out.

I count 200 on the entry list, though some may be duplicates...

I was going to post in this thread saying that the search function wasn't good, because there was no ability to exclude certain subforums from a search, which meant almost every search was flooded with results from the game forum and made finding anything useful a total chore. But, someone in thread said that the advanced search allowed you to do this, but I've never seen the option for it anywhere at all. So I messed around and found out how to get the option: you have to select "Topics" under "Content type", and ONLY then does this option appear. Why that isn't the default is beyond me, though I guess the real question is why the default "All content" option doesn't let you do this (probably because "status updates" and "events" can't be filtered this way, but these things aren't used on this forum so they're irrelevant and would be better off removed). Just knowing you can do this makes the search infinitely better and I never knew about it until now. The fact that by default this almost essential option was hidden is probably worth me mentioning it here in case other people didn't know this! As an aside, something I have noticed is that this forum can't be searched with Google; I simply get no results when I limit results to site:sumoforum.net. Has this been done intentionally? (meta tags and robots.txt or whatever it is these days) I can get results if I use Bing, but no one uses Bing and it would be helpful to use Google to search the forum. Seems pointless to block Google but then not Bing and various other search engines.

Is this a totally new game, or is it a reboot of something you did previously? I'll be entering this time as well anyway

54 here I think, highest score I've heard so far is 65. Interested to see how things break down this time.

How would someone feed the links to NHK? They must get a lot of emails and correspondence, seems incredibly efficient of them to action these emails about people from outside Japan uploading sumo highlights on Youtube. Feels like it's more likely someone is being paid to find the links and do the takedowns. Just seems like this will be the new normal when you upload on Youtube, Natto is putting his videos on some of the other video sites but all of them have problems in some way, alongside the fact nobody uses them comparatively. Feels like no matter how much you try to make people aware of these other places, you're still gonna get threads on Reddit called "Natto Gone?!?!?" by people who haven't gotten the message at all. Can see how it feels like a losing battle sometimes.

Sorry to hear about the troll. I entered today, but I don't see myself with the rest of the entries yet; however if it can take up to 24 hours then I guess it just hasn't updated yet. My team is in my account page so I guess you have it. A few people's team name seems to be just their email; I can't imagine that was intentional, maybe some people wouldn't want their email being exposed like that? Something to look at maybe going forward.

Nice! I'll have a go and spread the word about the site. I like games that are easy to play like this, just set and forget. Since you can't change your guess I'll wait until closer to the time for my entry.

59 here I think, I got the same things wrong everyone did, but hearing other people's scores it seems like I'll have done alright.