Speaking from behind the scenes as the guy running the "player vision" cameras and generally doing everything in my power to help make this event work like clockwork, Ron it was an absolute pleasure working with you and your team. Thanks for the brief mention as well in your initial post, greatly appreciated.

I know that EVERY member of this team has a great passion for ensuring that eSports is successful and perhaps the best decision that IGN made was hiring people straight from the TL.net community. It was an absolute pleasure working with other StarCraft fanatics from all over because we all had a vested interest in ensuring that this event was a success because we all want even bigger events in the future.

For those that were asking about why we didn't have a direct feed for the "player vision" cameras, the reason for that was mostly technical in my understanding. The "player vision" computers, for the purposes of delivering a stream and live viewing experience that was up the level of quality that IPL was desiring required very specific in-game settings to deliver the quality that was received. Now as we all know, players have their own individual resolution, graphics, and other settings that they choose to play at, and as such it was the decision of IPL to go with this setup to ensure that players could setup their computers with whatever settings they desired. Having run Justin.tv Invitational 1 and 2, I couldn't have agreed more with this decision because first and foremost, the concerns of players should be of the highest priority for any event, because without them there is NO event and none of these great things would be possible.

Thanks to all the IPL3 staff for making this the best experience in eSports I've had to date, looking forward to working with you all in the future and perhaps, if all goes according to plan, coming through on some of the things we discussed while I was on site for future events!

Regardless, keep giving us all feedback, these guys will take it and use it for the future!

AnarchySC2

United States5 Posts

October 13 2011 18:18 GMT

#103

Ron, thanks for the shout out. It was a pleasure working for you and I almost felt cheated that you worked the night shift on the final day. Sam turned out to be a good replacement but hes no DarkRabbi...

Thanks again,
Steve the PA

hatespam

Romania161 Posts

October 14 2011 12:02 GMT

#104

my opinion:

- explosion transitions, as stupid as they ended up being, have great potential, but some better "hype" transitions need to be made I guess
- talking about hype, feed anna some sugar or something, when she was calling in the players for handshakes... she needs to get a crowd going or somthng, right?
- about handshakes, I like the element, makes the games seem a lot more official and professional. reminds me of footbal players exchangig team flags
- post game interviews are nice, just keep them short imo
- downtime content can be repetitive (as from one event to another). Ex: make a video of who is a player and where he comes from, it's quite generic.
- I LOVED hearing the keyboard clicks during the first minutes of the game, it just got me going :D

i think there's more, but this is all that comes to mind at this time
hope you read this

and best of luck, i believe IPL has great potential to make it HUGE

p.s.: no pop band concerts please

hatespam

Romania161 Posts

October 14 2011 12:13 GMT

#105

On October 12 2011 18:47 nepeta wrote:
Great event, idk much about producing stuff, nice to be able to read about this part of the show as well.

One thing you really lacked though was a celebration at then end. The winner hops out of his booth and onto the stage, and there's nothing there for him to do but grin at the audience. You seriously need an OSL kind of setup: Coaches/team mates rushing the stage, champagne, people tossing the new champion in the air (and catching him after), the anouncer booming in a deep dark voice something like "ALL HAIL THE IPL SEASON 3 CHAMPION, MA - JAE - YOON NAMIDA!!!" all the while an epic tune is playing, confetti, stargirls, pyro stuff, the lot. For example:

YESYESYESYESYESYES

HDstarcraft

United States577 Posts

October 15 2011 10:51 GMT

#106

Ron you are a G for this

drumsetjunky

United States136 Posts

October 15 2011 21:43 GMT

#107

Thanks for the Live-U shout out!
BEAST CREW!

mostevil

United Kingdom611 Posts

October 17 2011 23:17 GMT

#108

Awesome to read, IPL's production, even after being hit with a series of tech disasters made MLG look very amateurish. I don't think many held being screwed over by battlenet or careless truck drivers against you.
The girls as MC's were excellent, the post match interviews were a great touch but often were a little too long and some of the questions a bit too vauge and confusing or overlapping previous questions.
The player panel was excellent, it would be great to get more of that sort of thing going in downtime if possible.
The extra backstage streams were great too to give something to watch between games/during matches I wasn't interested in. Again the presenters made that though, bring in orange guy from MLG into that role and that quickly becomes terrible.
Filler content interviews etc were generally excellent, but it always pays to have more of it if possible.

Something I'd like to get community opinions on is this - after a big epic battle or a player is surprsied by something how would you guys feel about cutting away from gameplay for a 2-3 second full screen camera shot of the player?

I think enlarging the player to ~quarter screen may be better as even 2-3 seconds can feel like a long time and make you anxious as a spectator if you can't see that nothing importants happening. But take a look at what they did with the korean WCG stuff, most liked that (its on GomTV). I guess its something you have to try out and practice to get right in real time.

The LoL thing however was a truly horrible thing to do to 30k starcraft fans, though it is great to see it acknowledged as a mistake. I can only assume Riot paid handsomely to have that happen but it wasn't good for either Riot or IPL, a lot of starcraft fans opinion of LoL has gone from indifferent to hatred as a consequence. It was like forcing a grandmaster chess tournemant audience to watch a really really long game of snakes and ladders, because hey, they're all board games right? A lot of people in the LR thread discovered devastations SFIV coverage though which in contrast to LoL was a suprisingly entertaining watch (there was actual tension, lots of action it looked cool and there were dancing hippos in the background!). Not that you should put anything but starcraft on the SC2 stream if you want to keep your audience.