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.
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