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I know looking at the title everyones cringing thinking, not another one of these female tournament competition is farce!" threads. That's actually not what this thread will be about at all. What I want to look at with this is why I think these all female tournaments have had less than stellar popularity thus far. I think it has nothing to do with the players at all. In fact I think that could be one of the major selling points for the tournaments.
I've watched the last few of these tournaments and I watch a very large amount of other sc2 tournaments as well, as I have from the very beginning of competitive play. The play is not that different from most high level tournaments, and with the recent emergence of Scarlett we've actually been able to see some extremely high level games in the later rounds of these tournaments. The top 4-8 the Iron Lady Leetgion Cup are all very competent, driven players. The fact that every wants to see some really good female players emerge should be a huge draw as well. The marketability of these games is excellent and should have a very large draw. So what's the problem?
Well I guess I wasn't entirely honest when I said I've watched the last few female sc2 cups. I mean I tuned in with every intention of watching the entire thing, honestly, but so far have yet to see one through every game and even through the finals. And I guess that's the crux of the problem. Going with the theme of big blanket terms, let's call it watchability.
So what is watchability and why do these tournaments not have it? Well for the most part it's a collection of intangibles, but we can point to a few things that a lot other successful tournaments have.
Now obviously the players are key to attracting viewers. What tournaments like IPL, MLG, GSL, et al, provide are the best of the best duking it out. They bring us the popular stars like MC, MKP, Stephano, and Naniwa. The female tournaments don't have this, but they have something else to sell, potential. A lot people who watch these games do so because they want to see these players turn into super powered gosus. They want to see Flo and Eve duke it out with MC and MKP in fiercely contested matches. People want to see girl gamers playing really really well. This isn't going to draw the droves that MLG draws, but it should still bring in a lot more than the numbers we currently see.
So what else do these tournaments have? Well they have Day9, DJWheat, Tastosis, Bitterdam, Wolf, Khaldor and many more. They have the best casters in the business. What does NESL have? Some guy in his room with a panda hanging from his ceiling and a girl who's first language is french and who's english is pretty halting. There's no comparison. Even if these two were pretty good, they still don't have any draw and are going to drive away more viewers than they're bringing in. As a testament to this they entire tournament length I viewed from yesterday I did so on mute.
Going hand in hand with this is production value. Simply put this tournament does not have any. An overlay and a commercial in a 30 minute break is not production. No one wants to watch some no name caster make hearts at chat for half an hour and talk about his panda. You're not day9, you can't get away with that garbage. There needs to be something else to fill these breaks, and if it can't be done with the casters providing some meaningful content then just play commercials for half an hour. The alternative is completely unprofessional and extremely painful to watch.
Another major watchability detriment this tournament has going against it is pace. It takes an entire day to get to some meaningful matches and once we are there we have to wait half an hour in between games for the next one to start. Even in major tournaments people are not going to hang around waiting constantly for the next watch to start, especially with such abysmal filler. I understand the sentiment of wanting to cast live, but if casting live means the tournament is going to slow to the snail's pace it did, then cast from replays. The tournament is not at the level where you're going to be losing or gaining viewers based on live-casted replays. Frankly it will also help avoid such embarrassing events that occurred during the Colagirl vs ST_Miss showmatch. You need to have some sort of pace to keep viewers interested or no one's going to watch.
The last thing is promotion. It shocks me that even after all this time there are so many horribly constructed tournament threads. The precedence for a good thread is out there so it should be a simple matter of following the formula. Now, I know Leetgion is sponsoring the event, and that a handful of the more famous female players are in the tournament, but that's all I really know. Oh and I know all about the hellion mouse. Great. But what about the tournament. Sponsors are understandably important and have to have their names all over events for it being worth their while, but this is just silly. Most of the thread is about their mouse rather than the tournament. A good thread needs to be clear and simple, promote the things that people are really interested in. Got good casters? Promote that. Got players people want to see? Promote that. I think one of the biggest stories from this event is that we finally got to see Eve play, and there is absolutely no mention of her anywhere.
Make the brackets and players more prominent, this is what you're selling after all. There's far too much clutter in the thread. A viewer with passing interest will open the thread, look at in for a minute, close it and say to themselves, "I don't know what's going on there." Assume everyone who's looking at it has the attention span of a goldfish and the deductive abilities of a fly. You have to have the most important information splashed along the top clearly and concisely. Who's playing, time, place, prize pool format. When that's out of the way fill the entire bottom of the thread with whatever junk you want to, but with the current formatting you're not informing anyone.
That's about all I can write on the subject. In closing I think the tournament has a lot of good stuff going for them and good basis to work off of. Good players, a solid structure and a decent prizepool. However the complete lack of production and the other issues surrounding the poor quality of the broadcast are sheltering these games from public viewing. People have wanted to know how good these players really are for a very long time now and would have tuned in to find out. This tournament missed the boat, but future female tournaments can learn from its mistakes and hopefully make a tournament worthy of its players and attractive to the viewing population.
 
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I feel like you're expecting a bit too much from your tournaments.
Let me clarify, IPL/GSL/MLG are driven by (fairly) deep pockets. This results in high production value, good casters (yes casters cost money), and good players drawn by large prize pools.
Surely you can't expect all up and coming tournaments (no matter the type) to suddenly be up to par with the top dogs.
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so... the problem is that female gamers isn't a big market to begin with and yet you want startup companies to invest large amounts of money, resources, and manpower to make the tournaments professional like the big Sc2 leagues. Ok... good luck with that.
Here's a better idea: petition IPL, MLG, GSL, etc to sponsor and run female tournaments.
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On April 30 2012 01:30 mizU wrote:
I feel like you're expecting a bit too much from your tournaments.
Let me clarify, IPL/GSL/MLG are driven by (fairly) deep pockets. This results in high production value, good casters (yes casters cost money), and good players drawn by large prize pools.
Surely you can't expect all up and coming tournaments (no matter the type) to suddenly be up to par with the top dogs.
No not at all, but there's a lot of improvements they can make that cost nothing as well. The thread is a simple one. And production can just be a better gameplan than talking to chat every time there's dead air time. There's a lot of simple changes they can fix. And anything would be better than someone who can't speak english as one of the two casters.
They already have the players. The prize pool is fine. The major issue is production value. The planning for the tournament seems to be play the games when we can and fill time with nothing. That seems to be just bad planning, laziness, or ignorance. Either way it's easy to fix. Just some time and effort from the people running the tournament.
It's not about being as good as those big tournaments, or pumping in huge amount of money. It's just small fixes and improvements to make the tournaments watchable. At the rate it is now, it's difficult to even watch. I don't want them to suddenly be MLG, just better than what they have now.
And it would be great to see some big outfits like IPL, MLG pick up these tournaments and run them. I think that would make a huge difference. I think people want to watch these ladies play, but they just don't know anything about the tournaments or have no interest after tuning in and seeing some of the low quality stuff I outlined in the thread.
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6/5
one of the more incisive commentary on this sticky issue in esports
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If the community held a male only tourney, there would be an uproar of epic proportions.
I mean if they went out of their way to ban females.
But when they hold one for only women people love it.
WTF sexism much?
User was temp banned for this post.
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The casting yesterday for the Iron lady tournament wasn't the worst ever, but it could have been better. I'm not sure whether or not it was beneficial to a tournament like that or detrimental. At times, the analysis wasn't as keen as it could have been, and a lot of things were overlooked.
It wasn't the worst of tournaments ever, but, then again, it wasn't the best :D
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On April 30 2012 01:46 fire_brand wrote:Show nested quote +On April 30 2012 01:30 mizU wrote:
I feel like you're expecting a bit too much from your tournaments.
Let me clarify, IPL/GSL/MLG are driven by (fairly) deep pockets. This results in high production value, good casters (yes casters cost money), and good players drawn by large prize pools.
Surely you can't expect all up and coming tournaments (no matter the type) to suddenly be up to par with the top dogs. No not at all, but there's a lot of improvements they can make that cost nothing as well. The thread is a simple one. And production can just be a better gameplan than talking to chat every time there's dead air time. There's a lot of simple changes they can fix. And anything would be better than someone who can't speak english as one of the two casters. They already have the players. The prize pool is fine. The major issue is production value. The planning for the tournament seems to be play the games when we can and fill time with nothing. That seems to be just bad planning, laziness, or ignorance. Either way it's easy to fix. Just some time and effort from the people running the tournament. It's not about being as good as those big tournaments, or pumping in huge amount of money. It's just small fixes and improvements to make the tournaments watchable. At the rate it is now, it's difficult to even watch. I don't want them to suddenly be MLG, just better than what they have now. And it would be great to see some big outfits like IPL, MLG pick up these tournaments and run them. I think that would make a huge difference. I think people want to watch these ladies play, but they just don't know anything about the tournaments or have no interest after tuning in and seeing some of the low quality stuff I outlined in the thread.
why would anyone go to the effort to put on a top quality tournament for a lack of top quality players, if they keep doing these tournaments scarlett will keep racking up the wins, it's not even a contest, every single person watching that tournament knew she was going to win from the get go, aphrodite is good but not good enough and no one else is even close
you can do whatever you want around the side, but people aren't going to tune in if the results are basically predetermined and you know the quality of the games is going to be lower then say a zotac or go4sc2 cup
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On April 30 2012 04:52 Luepert wrote:
If the community held a male only tourney, there would be an uproar of epic proportions.
I mean if they went out of their way to ban females.
But when they hold one for only women people love it.
WTF sexism much?
This is actually a very good point, very funny.
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On April 30 2012 06:29 cmen15 wrote:Show nested quote +On April 30 2012 04:52 Luepert wrote:
If the community held a male only tourney, there would be an uproar of epic proportions.
I mean if they went out of their way to ban females.
But when they hold one for only women people love it.
WTF sexism much? This is actually a very good point, very funny.
This kinda reminds me of the case with the woman cutting that one guy's penis for wanting a divorce.
+ Show Spoiler +
Check the video to see what Im talking about.
Nevertheless, nice blog and it really got me thinkin'...
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On April 30 2012 04:52 Luepert wrote:
If the community held a male only tourney, there would be an uproar of epic proportions.
I mean if they went out of their way to ban females.
But when they hold one for only women people love it.
WTF sexism much?
I think the point of female only tournaments is to promote girls playing SC2 competively, as the other tournaments just about ARE male only. If it became an issue of "men aren't worthy of playing in this female only tournament" then it might be different but I'm all for having 50% of the population promoted as a potential fan and player base. If there became equal amounts of men and women progames then it'd be a different situation.
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On April 30 2012 04:52 Luepert wrote:
If the community held a male only tourney, there would be an uproar of epic proportions.
I mean if they went out of their way to ban females.
But when they hold one for only women people love it.
WTF sexism much?
User was temp banned for this post.
Well, what you say is true, but females could really use some help when it comes to E-Sports. Would you want to watch Naniwa or even just some semi-pro guy go to a tournament with mostly females and just smash their way to the top? No, that's what I thought. Your post seems rather out of place in this blog anyway.
About the female tournys I completely agree, haven't watched anyone myself because honestly, I never even knew they were going on.
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There's a truism that pervades the entertainment industry: that girls will read/watch male-dominated discourse, but men will not read/watch female-dominated discourse. So, theoretically, girls have no qualms about reading books with a boy protagonist (one of the factors that made Harry Potter so successful), but boys resist and resent having to read about girl protagonists. Similarly, the audience for films is still considered to be largely male, so historically, the vast majority (and the most commercially successful) of films are made to appeal to men, and are written with a male protagonist; on the other hand, it seems you would be more likely to find a female protagonist on television where the demographic is largely women, though I suspect the distribution between genders in the main cast wouldn't be anything close to 50/50.
I suppose my point is that, if this is indeed what is happening to eSports, it's certainly not a positive thing, but it's not without precedent.
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On April 30 2012 06:01 Coramoor wrote:Show nested quote +On April 30 2012 01:46 fire_brand wrote:On April 30 2012 01:30 mizU wrote:
I feel like you're expecting a bit too much from your tournaments.
Let me clarify, IPL/GSL/MLG are driven by (fairly) deep pockets. This results in high production value, good casters (yes casters cost money), and good players drawn by large prize pools.
Surely you can't expect all up and coming tournaments (no matter the type) to suddenly be up to par with the top dogs. No not at all, but there's a lot of improvements they can make that cost nothing as well. The thread is a simple one. And production can just be a better gameplan than talking to chat every time there's dead air time. There's a lot of simple changes they can fix. And anything would be better than someone who can't speak english as one of the two casters. They already have the players. The prize pool is fine. The major issue is production value. The planning for the tournament seems to be play the games when we can and fill time with nothing. That seems to be just bad planning, laziness, or ignorance. Either way it's easy to fix. Just some time and effort from the people running the tournament. It's not about being as good as those big tournaments, or pumping in huge amount of money. It's just small fixes and improvements to make the tournaments watchable. At the rate it is now, it's difficult to even watch. I don't want them to suddenly be MLG, just better than what they have now. And it would be great to see some big outfits like IPL, MLG pick up these tournaments and run them. I think that would make a huge difference. I think people want to watch these ladies play, but they just don't know anything about the tournaments or have no interest after tuning in and seeing some of the low quality stuff I outlined in the thread. why would anyone go to the effort to put on a top quality tournament for a lack of top quality players, if they keep doing these tournaments scarlett will keep racking up the wins, it's not even a contest, every single person watching that tournament knew she was going to win from the get go, aphrodite is good but not good enough and no one else is even close you can do whatever you want around the side, but people aren't going to tune in if the results are basically predetermined and you know the quality of the games is going to be lower then say a zotac or go4sc2 cup
The point is that big tournaments have the support because the players are marketable. Good female players are marketable and definitely have a draw. It's not always about the end result but the journey there. I think a lot of people who endured the entire tournament weren't watching Scarlett's predictable path, but those of Flo, Eve and Aphrodite. People want to watch these players, that's the bottom line, and that means there should be more support out there for them.
And I want to thank all the people making comments about female players vs male players. That could not be farther from what this blog is about.
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Here's something that intrigues me regarding these tournaments...
I have no problem with the tournaments running at all, and I want people of all race/sex/whatever else to be accepted into the community as much as any other... but if lets say the female community wants to be accepted as just another part of the SCII community and have no prejudice or difference to them at all, then why are they holding tournaments that keeps them separate from these things?
I don't think I typed that out correctly, but for those who can understand what I'm trying to say....
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On April 30 2012 12:30 fire_brand wrote:Show nested quote +On April 30 2012 06:01 Coramoor wrote:On April 30 2012 01:46 fire_brand wrote:On April 30 2012 01:30 mizU wrote:
I feel like you're expecting a bit too much from your tournaments.
Let me clarify, IPL/GSL/MLG are driven by (fairly) deep pockets. This results in high production value, good casters (yes casters cost money), and good players drawn by large prize pools.
Surely you can't expect all up and coming tournaments (no matter the type) to suddenly be up to par with the top dogs. No not at all, but there's a lot of improvements they can make that cost nothing as well. The thread is a simple one. And production can just be a better gameplan than talking to chat every time there's dead air time. There's a lot of simple changes they can fix. And anything would be better than someone who can't speak english as one of the two casters. They already have the players. The prize pool is fine. The major issue is production value. The planning for the tournament seems to be play the games when we can and fill time with nothing. That seems to be just bad planning, laziness, or ignorance. Either way it's easy to fix. Just some time and effort from the people running the tournament. It's not about being as good as those big tournaments, or pumping in huge amount of money. It's just small fixes and improvements to make the tournaments watchable. At the rate it is now, it's difficult to even watch. I don't want them to suddenly be MLG, just better than what they have now. And it would be great to see some big outfits like IPL, MLG pick up these tournaments and run them. I think that would make a huge difference. I think people want to watch these ladies play, but they just don't know anything about the tournaments or have no interest after tuning in and seeing some of the low quality stuff I outlined in the thread. why would anyone go to the effort to put on a top quality tournament for a lack of top quality players, if they keep doing these tournaments scarlett will keep racking up the wins, it's not even a contest, every single person watching that tournament knew she was going to win from the get go, aphrodite is good but not good enough and no one else is even close you can do whatever you want around the side, but people aren't going to tune in if the results are basically predetermined and you know the quality of the games is going to be lower then say a zotac or go4sc2 cup The point is that big tournaments have the support because the players are marketable. Good female players are marketable and definitely have a draw. It's not always about the end result but the journey there. I think a lot of people who endured the entire tournament weren't watching Scarlett's predictable path, but those of Flo, Eve and Aphrodite. People want to watch these players, that's the bottom line, and that means there should be more support out there for them. And I want to thank all the people making comments about female players vs male players. That could not be farther from what this blog is about.
okay let me throw this back at you then, what is so intriguing about flo or eve or aphrodite(aside from being female), you may have a storyline with eve over the fact she was picked up by slayers in gold mainly for her looks and she has turned into a good player. aside from that, what's the big deal. Why is it worth big time production value, when you can get better games with a zotac or playhem daily or go4sc2 cup, they all run exactly the same way too, have you never watched a playhem daily or a zotac before, did you only tune in because of the women, i don't understand how this is something you want to fix in this one particular tournament but not in any others, also there really isn't a better way to run it, we play a game where games end at any time, even with a schedule you have dead air, mlg has plenty even with all the ads and stuff they have to run, i don't see you doing anything but making vague overtures at how disappointed you were about the production. Also as these are online tournaments for low prize pools and people sign up a few hours before at the earliest, maybe a couple days ahead for iron lady cause they want to verify everyone is female but still there isn't really the time for what you want and you really can't make people wait around cause everyone has lives to get to
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On April 30 2012 12:45 SunTurtle wrote:
Here's something that intrigues me regarding these tournaments...
I have no problem with the tournaments running at all, and I want people of all race/sex/whatever else to be accepted into the community as much as any other... but if lets say the female community wants to be accepted as just another part of the SCII community and have no prejudice or difference to them at all, then why are they holding tournaments that keeps them separate from these things?
I don't think I typed that out correctly, but for those who can understand what I'm trying to say....
This isn't what this blog is about. This is a topic that has beaten to death, and again and again there are people that don't understand. It's the same reason why the Collegiate Starleague or the High school starleague exists - it's to promote particular communities of a certain demographic to enjoy sc2. The point of women-only leagues isn't to fight prejudice - it should be expected that the esports community should be mature enough to not be bigoted sexists. The point is to give a generally underepresented group of players an opportunity to engage in a competitive context, among a particular community that they can identify with, in order to promote a social norm that is open and friendly to them.
On topic: I agree with both the OP and the responses to the OP. Yes, these kinds of tournaments are limited, so we shouldn't have unrealistic expectations, but here are potential areas of improvement.
1: Caster and observer improvement. As others have mentioned, the observers frequently missed things, and the casters didn't have that great of an analytic depth in their comments, nor were they that informed on general esports facts (I forget what it was, but I remember one of the casters having to ask something that seemed really common-knowledge at the time).
2: LR thread - or even any thread in the tournament section. I couldn't find the actual thread for the tournament except for the sponsored thread section, which puzzled me for a bit (and also made keeping track of results difficult for the games I didn't see).
3: Live-versus replays? This one is more of a question: whether replays would be better than streaming live, as the OP mentioned. I'll agree that there are a ton of merits of casting replays - clear scheduling, and perhaps better time-zone accommodation for korean/asia players. However, I'm not sure if that outweighs the benefit of live-streaming, which is the fact that female players can also stream the tournament as they play, giving them exposure. I remember stumbling upon msspyte's stream [which actually had higher views than the main stream], and discovering hers as an interesting stream (top masters zerg).
4: Production Value - while I admit that money is a limitation, there are definitely resources in the esports community to be tapped - I've seen a number of those offering free serves for graphic design and whatnot, and I'm sure you could at least patch together maybe a very quick hype video or interlude video for inbetween games.
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With regards to the casters I have to disagree. Although sure they weren't top notch that's also not something you can expect in these smaller tournaments. If you have casters that don't cast on a daily/weekly basis and can devote a good amount of their time into following everything in the scene you just can't expect the same things from them as the big names. Sure there was a lot of room for improvement but I for one didn't found it annoying the female caster was sometimes looking for words. This will improve with practice. Even Rotterdam still has to look for words every now and then. The main drawback in the later stages of the tournament (I didn't see anything before winners bracket semifinal) was that between the games the casters were talking about something and were mid-sentence interrupted for something from the chat.
I have to agree with several other points. The only reason why I stumbled upon this tournament was because it was listed On Air on the right and I was looking for something to watch. And I really did enjoy watching the games so no regrets there. But this shows that there is room for improvement on the promoting part.
Also introduce the players more. Tell something about them. Not only their progaming history but their personal backgrounds. You are trying to build up new stars here and people need to feel involved with the characters. If for example TLO or Idra plays a game a lengthy introduction is not necessary because they have been on the scene for such a long time we already know a lot about them. However when Scarlett was playing very well in the MLG there was immediately an TL interview with her because everybody wanted to know who this new face on the scene was. As the players in these female tournaments are all unknown to the broader public to some degree, a lot of energy has to be invested into bringing them to the spotlight. And if you incorporate this with the promotional thread it can also help drawing in new viewers.
With regards to the live vs replay discussion I think the best solution for an online cup that isn't played on a weekly basis is always a semi-live cast. Where the first rounds are casted from replays that were played a couple hours earlier to make sure 1) nothing goes wrong with a game (crashes etc.), 2) you can pick the most interesting matches from each round and 3) the cast becomes smoother because you don't have all these gaps between broadcasted matches. The later rounds can then be played live (or as live as possible i.e. immediately after a game finishes if you still want to make sure nothing goes wrong in respect to crashes etc.).
All in all I really enjoyed watching the Leetgion tournament. Is there room for improvement? Yes. Would I watch it again? Yes.
ps. Zanderfever if you read this: You should name your panda Peter Panda 
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EPT
