OCF recap thoughts

Honestly, I didn't like Ami as a caster. He talks over actual commentary and interjects with his own pointless narration. His co-casters try to do play-by-plays and he literally talks over them about how cool the trees are or something. We don't care about your self-appointed houses in Arhnem checkpoint! He zones out of the action to wistfully look at some insignificant detail for way too long! He reminds me of someone who's just bored of his job and tries to pass the time by doing literally anything but his job.

I love Ami and while I wouldn't be so blunt, it is kind of true. The game where Romeo and CieZ casted was probably the most informative game from a spectator point of view, Romeo and CieZ were ontop of things quite well important events were not missed. I like Ami's enthusiasm but it's frustrating as a viewer when something game-changing is happening but he's zoomed in on a soldier standing by a fence, or telling a story during a major push.

I also feel he comes off as rude at times, not intentionally, but when he made fun of Luvnest's accent and forced him to say words he couldn't pronounce so he could rip on him, it wasn't fair to Luvnest who just wanted to co-cast CoH2 and not be publicly insulted.

I love Ami and while I wouldn't be so blunt, it is kind of true. The game where Romeo and CieZ casted was probably the most informative game from a spectator point of view, Romeo and CieZ were ontop of things quite well important events were not missed. I like Ami's enthusiasm but it's frustrating as a viewer when something game-changing is happening but he's zoomed in on a soldier standing by a fence, or telling a story during a major push.

I also feel he comes off as rude at times, not intentionally, but when he made fun of Luvnest's accent and forced him to say words he couldn't pronounce so he could rip on him, it wasn't to Luvnest who just wanted to co-cast CoH2 and not be publicly insulted.

Yeah I agree, he almost bullies his co-casters in that sense, which I don't like. They are obviously very uncomfortable with it, and I don't know if he can't pick it up or he's fueled by his own hype, but he keeps going with it unrelentingly. I feel bad for whoever co-casts with him. The finisher is, he knows his faults, but he's stubbornly refusing to change, almost to the point of saltiness. I got that feeling from him casting the grand finals when he would bemoan that he's "not allowed" to zoom in and take away from the action, but does so anyway. Okay, that's enough from me. I've already veered too off-topic as it is.

Ami is the caster that makes the exciting things more exciting.

Great job all-around. Had to make an account just to give some positive feedback to Ami and all the organizers as well competitors. Really enjoyed seeing new casters (for me) such as Ciez and Romeo, all with their own style which I like (unlike others in this thread ). Haven't played COH since basically when COH2 came out when I moved to a locale with very poor internet so was unable to play up to now. Started just watching one game on twitch and was immediately hooked, back to the automatch trenches it is for me!

Thanks again and congrats DevM

4) At the end of the tournament both Aimstrong and DevM only lost one series. If the winner of the winners bracket takes a free win heading in to the grand finale that would be a fairer format.

I'm thinking the grand finals should be (2x)BO3 too; if the one from WB wins, he wins. If the LB guy wins the first set then they are on even ground on the second set. Now basically if the LB guy does win first set, then the last set could be a BO5, but that could go on for extremely long in CoH, thus I think 2x BO3 would be optimal.

Also, you can clearly see a lot of people on automatch watched these games. Ghostsandbags are all over the place now - hope that gets adressed.

Yeah I agree, he almost bullies his co-casters in that sense, which I don't like. They are obviously very uncomfortable with it, and I don't know if he can't pick it up or he's fueled by his own hype, but he keeps going with it unrelentingly. I feel bad for whoever co-casts with him. The finisher is, he knows his faults, but he's stubbornly refusing to change, almost to the point of saltiness. I got that feeling from him casting the grand finals when he would bemoan that he's "not allowed" to zoom in and take away from the action, but does so anyway. Okay, that's enough from me. I've already veered too off-topic as it is.

^Ami, don't listen to these schmucks. Unfortunately everyone has their critics and you certainly can't please everyone.

Ami has flare, enthusiasm and a vivid style. Makes for a great watch every time. All the casters that do the play by plays are monotonous and boring (Sorry!). The zooming (which I've never noticed in a negative light) keeps a game interesting with his epic banter when there's a lull in the action.

"Bullying"? Come on... If you're gonna nitpick, don't nitpick COH2's main man.

This thread is to discuss OCF, how the tournament ran, and what to consider in the future.

First off, I'd like to say that I enjoyed the event a ton, and definitely felt I got my donations worth. The casting was great; I watched people I've never watched before, and the coordination + teams were really great. Things seemed to run smooth.

A few things to criticize:

1. I think 4 invites were too many. That was 1/3 of the players in the OCF tournament, and although I am generally OK with those 4 players, I don't think they were so good that we should take it for granted that they would've been fine in open quals. I mean the first seed Jesulin got knocked out almost immediately. At the same time, other great players like GIAP and Paula had to struggle through playing in horrible timezones, when they could have easily qualified for invites. I think limiting invites to 1 or 2 people if we have large future tournaments would be a good call, because it gives such a huge advantage.

2. I think banning elite troops, rifle company, and partisans throughout the tournament was unnecessary. Elite troops isn't the insanely OP doctrine it used to be, partisans got fixed, and that rifle company insane flamethrowers were fixed with the most recent patch.

3. I honestly think the Brits should've been banned from the start. I think that banning the croc and those 2 commanders were a good call, but that this faction is still pretty broken. I mean, the centaur tank was pretty ridiculous (not sure if it's op but it's strong). At the point where the brits had the least amount of time to get balanced compared to the other factions, it might have been worthwhile to leave it out.

4. I wish the discussion of bans and map selection was more open to the public. I understand why it's not (most player's don't know the game that well), but it would be nice to see more transparency.

5. Just a personal taste thing, I wish semoisky summer had been in the map pool.

Anyways, I'd like to support future large community tournaments, and would like to start discussing how we can improve from here.

1) +1
3) +1

I personally vote that we have no more invites like that in. Org official tournaments. A lot of good players got knocked out in the early stages and nothing is to say these players would have been at this stage for sure.

I felt like we basically offered these players a bigger chance of winning money, which I thought was wrong.

Also as we saw from Aimstrong vs Omgpop... It didnt exactly guarantee good games lol

+ 1000

Asking people to play six brackets in one day. Is absolute lunacy. The only reason we saw top players DROP out of the brackets is because they were playing for 10-14 hours. That. is. bullshit. You do NOT do that. That was the number one problem with the tourney.

+ 1000

To me it was a super Tournament but with very bad Brackets (the complete Brackets, just a mess).

I'd like to thank the organizers/moderators/referees and everyone who put time and effort into making the tournament happen, everything ran very smoothly and I definitely enjoyed watching the games.

Here are my thoughts on things that could be improved on:

Banning of commanders:
I largely agree with Antilles on this. I think banning rifles/elite armoured/partisans (after the fixes) was a huge mistake. I don't buy into the assumption that if they were allowed its all we'd see and secondly even if we saw them in 90% of the 'real' games, I don't see how this is any different from seeing the same old KV8/IS2 vs mechanized/command pz4 (i forget the commander name).
There will always be meta commanders, people will always flock to them, if you ban them they will just go to the next one on the list. I realize you're trying to increase diversity but you essentially achieved the exact opposite.

The Brits:
Again I agree with OP, I like seeing brits as much as the next guy but they're clearly in abit of an unbalanced state at the moment. They have some big flaws and they have some over performing stuff which kind of makes them workable. Without getting into it I think the second you started to cherry pick what they could and couldn't use you should have realized that involving them was a bad idea.

Exploiting:
Unfortunately Coh2 is somewhat marred with exploitable stuff and one of the most obvious ones is ghost wire/sandbags. I think at this stage its clear relic is never going to step up and fix this stuff so it falls to tournament organizers to ban players from taking advantage. This was sadly missed for OCF and did somewhat spoil a few games.

The invites:
I think invites were the biggest mistake this tournament made. Firstly, the idea of inviting to a tournament for a game with no real competitive scene is always going to be open to bias. Secondly the choice to invite Aimstrong is a pretty big kick in the teeth to active community members who have consistently pushed the game on a competitive level. No issue with the guy, he's obviously an incredibly good player but giving him an easy ride was a mistake.

Amount of games in a day:
Nothing more to add beyond what others said. The amount of games you asked players to play in a day was wayyyy over the top and it only emphasized the advantage given to invited players.


All in all non of this stopped me enjoying the games and again thank you to everyone involved, I don't think anyone could ask for any more of you guys.

^Ami, don't listen to these schmucks. Unfortunately everyone has their critics and you certainly can't please everyone.

Ami has flare, enthusiasm and a vivid style. Makes for a great watch every time. All the casters that do the play by plays are monotonous and boring (Sorry!). The zooming (which I've never noticed in a negative light) keeps a game interesting with his epic banter when there's a lull in the action.

"Bullying"? Come on... If you're gonna nitpick, don't nitpick COH2's main man.

+1

Ami did a good job making the cast much more amusing. I love his humour that make us smile, I don't really need a speaker telling me what exactly is happening in every seconds, within the whole game.

Ami correcting Luvnest English, and Luvnest showing us the correct German pronunciation, what's wrong with it?

I love Ami and while I wouldn't be so blunt, it is kind of true. The game where Romeo and CieZ casted was probably the most informative game from a spectator point of view, Romeo and CieZ were ontop of things quite well important events were not missed. I like Ami's enthusiasm but it's frustrating as a viewer when something game-changing is happening but he's zoomed in on a soldier standing by a fence, or telling a story during a major push.

I also feel he comes off as rude at times, not intentionally, but when he made fun of Luvnest's accent and forced him to say words he couldn't pronounce so he could rip on him, it wasn't fair to Luvnest who just wanted to co-cast CoH2 and not be publicly insulted.

also I absolutely agree with this. I didn't like Ami as a caster at all.

I'd like to thank the organizers/moderators/referees and everyone who put time and effort into making the tournament happen, everything ran very smoothly and I definitely enjoyed watching the games.

Here are my thoughts on things that could be improved on:

Banning of commanders:
I largely agree with Antilles on this. I think banning rifles/elite armoured/partisans (after the fixes) was a huge mistake. I don't buy into the assumption that if they were allowed its all we'd see and secondly even if we saw them in 90% of the 'real' games, I don't see how this is any different from seeing the same old KV8/IS2 vs mechanized/command pz4 (i forget the commander name).
There will always be meta commanders, people will always flock to them, if you ban them they will just go to the next one on the list. I realize you're trying to increase diversity but you essentially achieved the exact opposite.

The Brits:
Again I agree with OP, I like seeing brits as much as the next guy but they're clearly in abit of an unbalanced state at the moment. They have some big flaws and they have some over performing stuff which kind of makes them workable. Without getting into it I think the second you started to cherry pick what they could and couldn't use you should have realized that involving them was a bad idea.

Exploiting:
Unfortunately Coh2 is somewhat marred with exploitable stuff and one of the most obvious ones is ghost wire/sandbags. I think at this stage its clear relic is never going to step up and fix this stuff so it falls to tournament organizers to ban players from taking advantage. This was sadly missed for OCF and did somewhat spoil a few games.

The invites:
I think invites were the biggest mistake this tournament made. Firstly, the idea of inviting to a tournament for a game with no real competitive scene is always going to be open to bias. Secondly the choice to invite Aimstrong is a pretty big kick in the teeth to active community members who have consistently pushed the game on a competitive level. No issue with the guy, he's obviously an incredibly good player but giving him an easy ride was a mistake.

Amount of games in a day:
Nothing more to add beyond what others said. The amount of games you asked players to play in a day was wayyyy over the top and it only emphasized the advantage given to invited players.


All in all non of this stopped me enjoying the games and again thank you to everyone involved, I don't think anyone could ask for any more of you guys.

+4 for everything you said. This can't be said enough and hopefully NONE of these problems will exist for the next tournament.

Ami correcting Luvnest English, and Luvnest showing us the correct German pronunciation, what's wrong with it?

EDIT: Actually, there is little point in my little rant since I already said what I wanted to say some posts ago. There's nothing more for me to say here, except that, once again, everybody has their own opinions. I'm not going to pretend like I know luvnest's and Ami's relationship intimately either, my experience is purely from an observer's perspective.

In regards to everyone debating casting styles, here's this :

You need someone like Ami to keep the hype up, keep the game entertaining and to keep people enthousiastic. Sure you can think he "rips" on his co casters (bullying is a bit harsh) by doing what he does but have you people considered that pretty much everyone involved with this tournament/website know how Ami is? I don't think Luvnest really minded that Ami sometimes made fun of his accent or what not (the two of them met up, got drunk and had fun a while ago remember.)
When I was co casting the Opening Ceremony with Ami I was nervous as fuck. Casting games in front of 900+ people puts a certain pressure on you and it defines you as a caster how you handle this pressure. A lot of effort and preparation has gone into all these casts and if Ami is comfortable blowing steam of or getting into a zone where he can provide good information without making stuff too boring, I don't mind. It made me feel more at ease, got me more relaxed and made me enjoy casting those games a lot.

That's also the reason why there's top players like Luvnest and Ciez coupled to more entertaining guys like Romeo or Ami. It's merely impossible to combine both aspects, being both entertaining AND analytical in one person.

We also have to keep in mind that there's a lot of people watching who don't have that much knowledge of the game. We attract a varied audience of both "noobs" (excuse my words) and more knowledgable players. Sure, some people won't love the way the casts are being done but really, in the greater scheme of things, I think the combo of a hype caster talking a lot, complemented by the thoughtful insight of a good player is way more entertaining, way better advertising and makes for more enjoyable casts than a duo that sticks to raw figures and facts, only mentioning playstyles and hard counters.

Imagine watching a game of your favorite sports on television, which style would you prefer? I'd rather be entertained than to be burried in a pile of facts and data.

Your opinions may vary, absolutely but I thought I'd give my 2 cents.

There's no doubt whatsoever that this tournament was a good thing for COH2 as a game, for me that's the most important thing.

^Ami, don't listen to these schmucks. Unfortunately everyone has their critics and you certainly can't please everyone.

Ami has flare, enthusiasm and a vivid style. Makes for a great watch every time. All the casters that do the play by plays are monotonous and boring (Sorry!). The zooming (which I've never noticed in a negative light) keeps a game interesting with his epic banter when there's a lull in the action.

I would rather listen to Luvnest commentating or Romeo rather than watching Ami casting.
He looses all the good moments, doesn't even look what players are building. 99% of the times he doesn't even know what killed what and how.
He doesn't know some units and their abilities.
Zooming in on a freaking grenadier or a Centaur is not interesting at all. We have seen those models numerous times and we have seen the decal numerous times, we don`t care about it anymore.
Talking about estates on the map... are we 6 year olds or something? Can`t think of anything funnier???
The SNF casting for OCF was just a joke.

Dusty and momo did much better job at it, captured all the important moments of the game, made jokes and knew what was happening and was where players thinking most of the time.

Ami was fun at the beginning but not anymore.....

I would rather listen to Luvnest commentating or Romeo rather than watching Ami casting.
He looses all the good moments, doesn't even look what players are building. 99% of the times he doesn't even know what killed what and how.
He doesn't know some units and their abilities.
Zooming in on a freaking grenadier or a Centaur is not interesting at all. We have seen those models numerous times and we have seen the decal numerous times, we don`t care about it anymore.
Talking about estates on the map... are we 6 year olds or something? Can`t think of anything funnier???
The SNF casting for OCF was just a joke.

Dusty and momo did much better job at it, captured all the important moments of the game, made jokes and knew what was happening and was where players thinking most of the time.

Ami was fun at the beginning but not anymore.....

Now that is a bit harsh, especially if you take into account the amount of work and time Ami invested in the tournament.

I agree that his casting was sometimes lackluster and that he missed game changing moments , yet his energy and enthusiasm gave the tournament just that little more depth. I also agree that the numerous zooming in combined with the little stories were eventually getting a nuisance, they still more often than not gave me entertainment, they just need to be timed right instead of doing it during a game winning push...

What people seem to forget is that Ami listened to the feedback and actually went on to let others cast while he was only manning the camera, which he did well and always delivered us the action. People also forget that he actually did this during a triple counter snipe game and got all of these triple counter snipes on camera.

What I really liked with the casting was the triple casting in the ace game of the finals. Romeo, Ciez and Ami together were a great team and they delivered facts, fun and spot on commentary, to which Ami contributed a lot with discussing certain builds and tactics, which some again don't seem to mention.

Ami gets hyped and sometimes misses important moments because of this, but I wouldn' t want to watch a tournament without the guy if I need to be honest.

I would rather listen to Luvnest commentating or Romeo rather than watching Ami casting.
He looses all the good moments, doesn't even look what players are building. 99% of the times he doesn't even know what killed what and how.
He doesn't know some units and their abilities.
Zooming in on a freaking grenadier or a Centaur is not interesting at all. We have seen those models numerous times and we have seen the decal numerous times, we don`t care about it anymore.
Talking about estates on the map... are we 6 year olds or something? Can`t think of anything funnier???
The SNF casting for OCF was just a joke.

Dusty and momo did much better job at it, captured all the important moments of the game, made jokes and knew what was happening and was where players thinking most of the time.

Ami was fun at the beginning but not anymore.....

I watched you cast once. It was boring and kinda mundane, so I went and watched something. I didn't go whine about it on the forums.

If you find his style to be so disagreeable, turn the volume down or go watch via OBS mode. Its called freedom of choice.

To Ami and everyone else that helped, I say job well done, not perfect but good enough imo.

while id love to baby sit this thread all night. /sarcasm (i need sleep ) so just as a reminder ill leave this here.

Clicky Clicky
Show Spoiler

so far so good keep it civil folks /back on topic

Mods: if it starts to float off topic agian do what needs to be done whether that is invs, lock or whatever! guidelines criticism is allowed bashing is not.

I watched you cast once. It was boring and kinda mundane, so I went and watched something. I didn't go whine about it on the forums.

If you find his style to be so disagreeable, turn the volume down or go watch via OBS mode. Its called freedom of choice.

To Ami and everyone else that helped, I say job well done, not perfect but good enough imo.

Do I look like I compare my e-penis with Amis? I am not a caster, I play games and sometimes stream as test runs until I get the components I am lacking. The talk is about a caster who cast a game of someone`s else.

And fyi that's what I did when I was watching the Ace game I completely muted so I wouldn`t hear him. I have nothing against him as a person, but the way he casts annoys a lot of people
It sad that no one else casted the ace game. I think it would be great if there were multiple streams for the same game.