EPTThere is also an elevated platform with enough room for 2 matches at a time which is held away from the main player area. This is the side stage, where some open bracket matches are highlighted and lots of people gather around after being frustrated by their inability to crowd into a good viewing angle for some of the matches in the regular player area. Eventually this too becomes too crowded to see much in.
Well this is all quite bad for amateur teams to get their name out there, since so few open bracket matches can get a good audience, and yet there are actually quite a number of good up and coming but relatively unknown players who participate. You might have heard about a Suppy or an Eifer, or in the WCS about Kitty or Daisuki.
But how to get be able to watch their games more, and those of others like snixsnipe who gave a good showing but who do not appear to be any more visible than they were before the event.
The easiest thing to do, which I didn't notice at providence, perhaps it was in place at Anaheim, but I wasn't there, is to make sure games involving a known player and a lesser known but very good player are played on those computers which are at the edges. Often I would only see 1 maybe 2 games at a time of interest at stations which were easily viewable. We can do better. This would require no infrastructure changes, just a person who is very familiar with the north American amateur scene (hint hint ^^).
So, better player placement is one easily implementable option. Of course we would also have to show pro vs pro open bracket games, but I'm sure there is a way to work all that out.
As far as adding infrastructure goes, I think even just one more side station would be sufficient for most cases. It doesn't even need to be as big and flashy as the current side station. Even something like a table with larger monitors above it would be sufficient, in some area of the player area's border where the tables are normally perpendicular to the border, so it is rather impossible to see much of the players' monitors. In fact we could do this using the existing table setup in the player area. This would increase the viewable area quite a lot while only requiring a few extra monitors as far as additional infrastructure goes.
Any other ideas for improving the view ability of the open bracket? The specific emphasis I have been focusing on is better visibility for amateurs and their teams, with additional emphasis on those changes which would require the least additional infrastructure.
Edit- also, less depth more length in terms of the setup of the player area would seem like a good thing, if there is room on the ground to set it up like that.
) Just like you i'm one of the few people that is very knowledgable about the lesser known teams since I cast them week in and week out in multiple team leagues. I think it is important to get casters that are knowledgable about the pro scene but you also need casters who are knowledgable about both scense IMO
