OCF recap thoughts

my subjective opinion: Great torny. Big thanks for Coh2.org and all the people involved. Ami is a great project manager but a bad caster, he honestly has no idea. Did not enjoy his awkward jokes or inability to sync and be confortable with his co-caster guests.

Luckily though CoH2 has a tiny community and literally no following apart from maybe 200 serious people so casting quality isn't a big deal. The torny was mostly view bots but we had atleast 400+ people watching which was nice.

Anyone care to PM me on here or Twitch/steam with the interesting posts that got banned?

Posts are getting banned in this thread?

I'm aware that this thread exists, and plan to read every post as soon as I get a chance. Just been too busy and too exhausted these last few days, but I will get to it. I appreciate the feedback, good and bad. Constructive criticism will help us make better tourneys in the future.

I'll post again once I get a chance to read through everything and respond to the major points.

Posts are getting banned in this thread?

Yes, you have heavy handed admin and mods now, and have for awhile...you may want to look into this. I can tell you, there is quite the disconnect between what a couple of your mods and admin say and do here, and what they say and do in twitch streams as well. Maybe an internal meeting of the minds is in order, as it were. Just a suggestion.

Ok so I read through this thread yesterday. It was a bummer to read all the flaming, but oh well. There were some good criticisms about the format, as well as concerns about the invites, and plenty of feedback about my casting. I'll address the concerns about the format first, them move on to some of the other stuff.

1) 6 Rounds on Open Quali Sunday was too much

Yep, it sure was. It was my mistake thinking that we could get away with a completely open Quali in one day. We never anticipated OCF would become so big. We never imagined we could raise a $5k prize pool, and we never imagined that Relic would come through with in-game banner support, and we never imagined that we would get almost 600 sign-ups.

Before we knew any of this, we announced that the Open Quali would have no limits. If you signed up and showed up, you'd play. We did this because it's a beautiful thing! We take all comers. No limits. But it makes planning much more difficult, as you have a big variable -- you don't know how many players you will get, so you don't know how many rounds you will need, so you don't know how much time it will take.

In hindsight, we know how many players checked-in: 276. That's 20 more than will fit in a 256-man bracket, requiring 6 rounds instead of 5. Bummer! Perhaps we should have capped the event at 256, but then 20 people would not have gotten to play, so that's a big compromise and one that is maybe a bigger bummer than a long tourney day. So how to resolve this? You have two main options:

A) Make the open quali a 2-day event. For OCF, this was not an option. Planning an extra tourney day must be done weeks in advance and announced to everybody. Both staff and players need to plan their schedules. If we do it again, this option will be considered.

B) Shorten the amount of games played necessary to complete the day in a reasonable time window. The way to do this is more Best-of-1's. This is also a bummer compromise! Nobody likes Best-of-1s, so we resist them as much as possible as organizers. We had already announced that the Ro128 and beyond would be Best-of-3, and we didn't want to go back on that commitment. In the future, I would leave the round format TBA. If a day has to have six rounds, maybe the first four rounds should be Best-of-1, and only the last two rounds should be Best-of-3. This would have better imo, but then we would see the complaints about "I lost cause it was best-of-1." I remember seeing 1024 player events on ESL SC2, all conducted in one day, all best-of-1. They were still crazy marathons, but they got the job done and remained open to all comers.

2) Inviting 4 players straight into The Main Event was unfair

The Main Event was structured to be a 3-day double-elimination event, where no player would be asked to play more than 3 Best-of-3 matches in a single day. This was the priority. To achieve this, we could only take 12 players in the main event. If we had taken 16, there would be too many matches, and some players would be forced to play more than 3 Best-of-3 matches in a single day, which we did not want.

The beauty of a double-elimination event is that no matter how you seed it, the best two players will fight in the finals. This was plainly shown by OCF. Of the four invited players, one reached the finals, two placed in the money, and one placed entirely out of the money. A player from the Open Quali won the whole thing. Without thinking about who did what, this is a pretty perfect result from a tourney organizers perspective.

Many of you think there should not be invites at all. I have to respectfully disagree. We invited players straight into The Main Event for these reasons:

A) We can promote the players and promote the event. Announcing the 4 seeded players and making cool fight cards with their portraits all blinged-out is good for the players, good for the event, and good for the fans. The way that you engage fans in eSports is by introducing them to the real human beings that are behind the computer screen, hidden away on the internet. As a promoter of an event, this is the bread and butter. Nothing brings people to an event like fight cards that feature photos of the best players in the world. The only way to do all of this is to do it early.

B) Removing 4 of the best players in the world (based on past Tournament performance) actually makes the Open Qualifier Tournament more competitive. By removing top players that would have probably cruised through all of the competition in the Open Quali, you encourage the next tier to step up. Players don't have to worry about an unlucky draw where they face the best player in the world in Round 2. Instead of 4 possible Round-of-16 blowouts, you get closer match-ups. Fatigued or not, the Round-of-16 in the OCF Quali tournament provided some of the best games of the entire event. Who will ever forget Siberian vs. KoreanArmy? HelpingHans vs. VindicareX? Symbiosis vs. CaptainSPrice?

3) Ami sucks at casting, misses all the action, etc.

Some of you hate zooms, hate stories about houses, hate stories about anything non-game related. That's fine, fair enough. But plenty of you really enjoy that stuff. Plenty of you, like me, would find the whole experience of being stuck inside a video game for 8 hours pretty damn dry without it. Sometimes naming stuff or naming houses even helps shoutcasters be more clear about what they are describing! They don't have to stumble over vague descriptions like "the Grens garrison the house on the left, you know, the brown one, the one northwest of the church" etc. They can just say "the Grens garrison Ami's house." But I heard you guys. If you look at The Main Event, you'll see that I did less zooms and told less stories than normal.

I can't stress enough how we are desperately in need of quality observers/senders that can actually broadcast these kinds of marquee events. When I was allowed to focus purely on observing (and not casting), I was able to do a much better job. I perfectly captured three countersnipes in one game! I study the way SC2 and DOTA2 observers move their cameras and highlight important events, builds, and units. I try to always move the camera smoothly and do it in a rhythm that makes it easy for the viewer to follow the flow of the game. Yes, I missed the jagdpanzer falling in the Sib vs. KA game, which I will forever regret! But all in all, I would argue that my observing was second-to-none in this scene. Are you better? Show me. We need more dedicated observers. Not only must you capture all of the action, but you must also nail your scene transitions, perfect your overlays/scoreboard, and provide a *perfect* audio mix between multiple caster voices, music, in-game sound audio, and any external sound effects (long live the SNF bells!). If you think you can handle all of this, show us! Your skills are desperately needed.

feedback ftw

We listen to feedback and will continue to endeavor to improve our events on all fronts -- from the tourney format, to promotion, to player support, to stream & cast quality. Thanks for taking the time to give your feedback in this thread, it is greatly appreciated.

Check.
I appreciate that the tourney was kept totally open so that average players like myself had the opportunity to participate. It was fun to be a part of (despite an agonising 500-0 defeat :/ Damned MG spam that I hadn't encountered before), but I realise that for practical purposes it may be necessary to limit the # of participants in future tourneys.

AFAIR in some of the previous tourneys a history of no-shows was a disqualifier. Maybe that could be used to cut the number of sign-ups NeXT time?

snip

Sorry but I don't think player cards is in anyway a valid argument for inviting four players. The "favorites" could easily have had player cards made pre-qualifiers in order to advertise.

I also think you're HUGELY overstating their importance by claiming to structure the tournament around them.

Your second point of making the qualifiers more competitive is also pretty weak. Yes, the early games with the invited four would have been walk overs. Would you claim the early games for Sib/Hans/KA were any less so?
The games you reference as unforgettable are from later stages of the qualifiers due to seeding, they would have all more then likely still been played or similar highly competitive games would have been played in their place.

@Ami
I love dem stories. Ive been in the scene since 2013 and gotta say stories are pretty cool. But pls dont tell them when KA is doing a dual flank

Stories: when the action is low to mid high.

Havin a caster that knows the behind the scenes stuff of boxers would be awsome right? right?

GG WP

Many of you think there should not be invites at all. I have to respectfully disagree. We invited players straight into The Main Event for these reasons:

A) We can promote the players and promote the event. Announcing the 4 seeded players and making cool fight cards with their portraits all blinged-out is good for the players, good for the event, and good for the fans. The way that you engage fans in eSports is by introducing them to the real human beings that are behind the computer screen, hidden away on the internet. As a promoter of an event, this is the bread and butter. Nothing brings people to an event like fight cards that feature photos of the best players in the world. The only way to do all of this is to do it early.

We didn`t donate to OCF so they could be promoted. We contributed to see all of them struggle to climb to the top and be "equally" exhausted and see who can withstand it and win.
Nobody cared about how shinny their portraits are, yes they are nice but that is not important to anyone and an even shouldn`t be based around shiny portraits...

B) Removing 4 of the best players in the world (based on past Tournament performance) actually makes the Open Qualifier Tournament more competitive. By removing top players that would have probably cruised through all of the competition in the Open Quali, you encourage the next tier to step up. Players don't have to worry about an unlucky draw where they face the best player in the world in Round 2. Instead of 4 possible Round-of-16 blowouts, you get closer match-ups. Fatigued or not, the Round-of-16 in the OCF Quali tournament provided some of the best games of the entire event. Who will ever forget Siberian vs. KoreanArmy? HelpingHans vs. VindicareX? Symbiosis vs. CaptainSPrice?

Sib, Von, KA and HHans roflstomped their own opponents... So I guess you should invite all of the top 10 in the ladders next time?

This is not an excuse, just be truthful and say you wanted to promote certain people because they are VCoh veterans and you wanted them to be in the main event just because nostalgia kicked in.

You have to balance fairness and the main event bling bling show of spectacular games.
Another bad reason to invite people to the main event is the 5 min RQ that we saw, that wasn`t so spectacular now was it?

great tournement!

my main poit of critic: it was held while i was on vaccation!
i cought up with more than a couple of matches now and was really impressed by some exellent games.

if anybody would put a thread together with the most exiting matches/ series with links to the streams/ casts i guess that would really come in handy.

i think ami is one of the greatest casters for this game!!! all the critique of his casting in this thread hold true to some extent though. but he overcompensates those flaws with his enthusiams and great showmanship.

i wished he had a dedicated camaraguy for the tourney though. while he really is great with his camerawork i imagine that doing both camera and casting is what makes one loose some concentration and makes for missing some key elements of the matches.

anyway great touney i will be happy to contribute again to the next event (romeo - where is your donate button for the scc?)

This is not an excuse, just be truthful and say you wanted to promote certain people because they are VCoh veterans and you wanted them to be in the main event just because nostalgia kicked in.

I can be truthful in saying that you have no clue what you are talking about. We invited 4 players based on past tourney performance, primarily Dr. Wachs event from Dec. 2014.

1) Jesulin -- Dr. Wachs #1 (not vCoh vet)
2) Luvnest -- Dr. Wachs #2 (not vCoh vet)
3) OMGPOP -- Dr. Wachs #4 (not vCoh vet)
4) Aimstrong -- Dr. Wachs #5 (hey look, a vcoh vet!)

Cruzz (Dr. Wachs #3, not vCoh vet) was invited first but declined. Aimstrong was invited after Cruzz declined. Now I feel like I am repeating myself. This is all public knowledge.

snip snip

Hey there. First of all, congratulations on the tourney. I watched a few games, and the performance of the players was "bravo"! I think that, for better or worse, an event that spawns a 150+ posts thread has reached at least one big objective, that is making people talk about the game and events. Like Wilde said, talking about it is what matters.

About inviting: I understand people's arguments about why should there be no invites or less invites, as well as your arguments about why inviting is so important. I think the less flaming arguments from the former make sense, but, considering that we want to expand the player base and make them excited about the matchs, yours are more convincing. The invites were well placed, I couldn't care less about them being or not vCoH veterans. Hell, I'd love to see some games with complexity or razor, if they'd care about it. I'm sure forgetting others, but u get the point.

As someone from Brazil, a country with multiple tv channels and radio stations that cover soccer (btw, haha 7x1 neverforget, I'm ahead of u all), it's perfectly fine to not like some caster. Just go and watch the game without casting, or watch someone else do the cast, if there's the option. I think you do a great job, and it's your style, damn it. Maybe don't lose some important moments, but I can say that much more often than not, your casting is great and you should keep improving moving your way. I miss IpKayFung though. You made a great team.

Ami is right in a way: Invitees didn't have anything to prove to the community to be there.
They are good, we all know that. Now where it is not all right is the fairness in their selection. But I guess with a special event like that, you can't have everything all right.

The next even probably need qualification and next final series where invitees are heading.

I'm also agreeing Ami wasn't that great at casting some matchs. Telling stories and entertaining spectators is great and make a big part of the show, but it hasn't been done correctly. Probably a lake of experience on the matter. We all hope further editions of the event, so more time to improve it!

I like OFC decal.players who contributed after 18th didn't recieve the the decal activity was over. So please distribute the decal again just like the Valentine's Day Activity

Cruzz (Dr. Wachs #3, not vCoh vet) was invited first but declined. Aimstrong was invited after Cruzz declined. Now I feel like I am repeating myself. This is all public knowledge.

And he is the only hero we need

We didn`t donate to OCF so they could be promoted. We contributed to see all of them struggle to climb to the top and be "equally" exhausted and see who can withstand it and win.
Nobody cared about how shinny their portraits are, yes they are nice but that is not important to anyone and an even shouldn`t be based around shiny portraits...

Please, speak for your self or tell us who you are representing. Thank you.

I like OFC decal.players who contributed after 18th didn't recieve the the decal activity was over. So please distribute the decal again just like the Valentine's Day Activity

This is Relic's responsibility, not coh2.org.

Please, speak for your self or tell us who you are representing. Thank you.

If you care about a shinny portrait, then what can I say....

We didn`t donate to OCF so they could be promoted. We contributed to see all of them struggle to climb to the top and be "equally" exhausted and see who can withstand it and win.

Having a marathon where you have to play the game for near 12 hours straight clearly favors people based on how willing they are to sit at the computer all day, not how good they are. Nobody should have to do that in the future, but saying that player X is worse than player Y based on not playing for so many hours straight is silly.

edit: In the future nobody should have to do that, invited and non-invited alike

Having a marathon where you have to play the game for near 12 hours straight clearly favors people based on how willing they are to sit at the computer all day, not how good they are. Nobody should have to do that in the future, but saying that player X is worse than player Y based on not playing for so many hours straight is silly.

edit: In the future nobody should have to do that, invited and non-invited alike

No one said player X is worse than player Y because he didn`t play so many hours. And I am all against playing 12 hours in a single day non-stop unless you yourself want to do that.
Still that exhaustion plays a big role in the tournament.
It`s more of an equal grounds talk. If player X played 2 hours during the whole day while player Y played 6 hours who is more worn out and who has the advantage?