EPTInformation
The good:
- Replays were up very quickly.
- Group play and playoff pages included all necessary information in an efficient format.
The bad:
- No information on map selection.
- Not easy to find out who was playing when.
- Very difficult to find information on the rules (best of 3/5, etc)
Advertising/Sponsors
The good:
- Intel and Razer are the perfect sponsors for this kind of tournament. Respected companies around those who would be watching.
The bad:
- German movie ads in the stream.
- Infomercial-type ads for other games in the middle of a series.
Event/Games
The good:
- Sean Plott is an amazing commentator, bringing him was a highlight.
- Pretty good job at getting most of the best players to the event.
- The floor guy / interviewer speaking German, then the poor English interviews... Carmac would have been a much better choice for that job.
The bad:
- Stream quality was awfu.
- Charging for a premium stream that was still awful and didn't remove ads.
- "Alternate" stream having much higher quality video looks really bad for the ESL.
- The NaDa fiasco should not have happened, and could have been prevented.
- Not starting series on time due to a raffle.
- Randomly switching the Starcraft 2 and Quake Live times one day, the drastically different start times made it hard for people to keep up with it.
- Octoshape.
Any tournament with top level players will bring in the viewers that just want to see high level SC2, but I know for a fact that some people with less than 100% interested in pro SC2 didn't watch due to some of these major bad points. When you say a match is going to start at 5:50 and then there are still raffles going on at 6:00, people are going to not watch. When you need to download a buggy plugin like Octoshape that just didn't work for a number of people (I had to restart my browser and re-install the plugin multiple times myself), people will turn away. When people pay for a premium stream and then get that quality, they're going to feel ripped off and lose respect for your organization.
I enjoy watching Starcraft 2, but it is not yet popular among the masses. I really think that the game is interesting and intricate enough to draw in a bigger audience than other games have previously, but if the events aren't handled better, it's not going to grow quickly.
This was the first really big live Starcraft 2 event, and although it went well, it had some big flaws. I hope other tournament organizers can learn from what they witnessed at IEM, both good and bad points, and improve upon it.
If anyone wishes to add their opinion or disagrees with me on something, I'll gladly respond. Thanks for reading.
