Breakout Invitational Reflection #1

The Breakout Invitational - A Blog Post for Reflection and Feedback - Post #1

Hello. My name is feardragon.

I recently held The Breakout Invitational for North American Starcraft 2 players. This was a follow up invitational from the show I did called, Breaking Out, where I spent 1 week highlighting an up & coming North American player. I'll start by saying if you want to watch/check out the video for the event, it take place over the course of 3 days and the vods can be found via the following links:

Day 1 - Day 2 - Day 3

First and foremost(after the links), I want to highly encourage everyone and anyone to give feedback on the show, the event, the tournament, my casting, the ideas discussed in the blog, or basically anything I am involved in. I am still trying hard to improve as a content producer so any and all feedback would be highly appreciated.

So this post going to be a reflection on the event in whole, as well as . Feel free to skip to certain sections as this will likely be a lengthy post. I'm using this as an opportunity to keep track of my own thoughts, as well as create a soapbox with which to explain the decisions made that some seem to question. I've always appreciated the honest and open attitude many organizations have taken so I'm going to be very open with some of the more intricate details of my thought process. With that said, let's get this started.

The Inspiration

So first let's talk about why I started this whole business. The Bain family, a.k.a. John "TotalBiscuit" and Genna "Intricacy" Bain, announced that there would likely be no more Shoutcraft due to Genna taking her leave from esports. While this announcement seems somewhat silly in light of the recent Shoutcraft America announcement, keep in mind that I use the word "announcement" lightly, as TotalBiscuit has said multiple times not to take anything said on his twitter too seriously/officially. So while I'm happy there's now another Shoutcraft America going on, we rewind to a point where it was believed that the prospect of another was looking grim to say the least. American and Candian Starcraft players were vocalizing their lack of interest in trying to improve and various top level players were starting to expressing their desire to retire. As someone who really enjoyed events like Shoutcraft NA and loved players like Huk, Scarlett, Sasquatch, QXC, etc. this was extremely disappointing news.

But I couldn't blame them that much. There was little incentive to practice unless you were certain you could make the leap from "high master/low gm" to "capable of beating koreans". From top tier events to low tier ones, Koreans were entering and snatching away a lot of the prize incentives that would ordinarily encourage lower tier players to get better for. I had been commentating for a lot of semi-pro/lower level Team Leagues(URTL, UASL, AHGL, etc.) and thought if existing North American pro's were having trouble, it must be even harder to find reason to continue the pursuit of the Starcraft 2 dream as someone who has yet to break out. As much as I love some of the more well known North Americans, I've found when an old, existing NA pro does well, it's pretty highly celebrated. However, when a no-name randomly beats a fantastic player(or a korean?), it is sometimes hardly noticed at all.

So what if there was some way to give players with a lot of potential to do well a bit larger of a stage, while also giving those aspiring semi-pro's a reason to keep practicing hard? A way to encourage and reward practice at an intermediate level so building your skill wasn't simply only rewarded upon being able to beat some mid/high tier korean?

Well, shit, I can do that.

Goodness of my heart? Not entirely...
+ Show Spoiler +

I cannot lie though, as I am an aspiring commentator. I couldn't help but hear the echoing words of Day[9] as I thought about this situation. Don't wait for someone to make opportunities for you to fill, create your own opportunities and then fill them(or something to that effect)! I've been commentating for nearly 3 years now, ever since I decided my school's local Collegiate Starleague commentator(<3 Kurtis) deserved a shitty co-caster. By creating the event, I could guarantee my involvement in the important aspects of the process, as well as giving myself an opportunity to promote myself and make some connections.

I was already familiar a large number of the good semi-pro scenes in the scene, but making connections with some of the managers was another huge goal for me. As silly as it seems, I am a caster that started on youtube and casted a lot of games from replays. That, in and of itself, should not seem silly, but saying that my least favorite part of casting was finding good replays to cast might be. I really disliked recasting replays from big events because usually I'd rather others just watch the original event so there's a sense of a shared experience among the viewers. I hoped that with the contacts I made doing an event promoting these up & coming players, that I could lazily make contacts with players/managers and have good replays sent to me! No more randomly picking replays from various replay archive websites and hoping they weren't terrible!

Koreans vs Foreigners

I started to think, how would I format this whole endeavor? I decided I wanted to either highlight up and coming teams, or up and coming players. There was always going to be the ever growing elephant in the room....the Koreans. It makes sense that our community is so obsessed with the Foreigner vs Korean story-line. It's exciting, it's consistently there with at least one or two foreigners that make it into a tournament, and it's told a lot. I mean A LOT. On the other hand, how many foreigner vs foreigner relationship stories are told? It happens from time to time(Lucifron vs Vortix from 2012, Huk vs Idra) and they were actually pretty exciting when they were told! But I found they were still few and far between.

Beyond the few foreigners that had truly big breakout performances or outstanding personalities on various podcasts/shows, there was not a lot of room for foreigners to let the audience know what kind of person they were. If I was going to do this, I had to give people a reason to watch these players who, quite frankly, were not at the same level as the Koreans. Not only that, but these would be players many would not have heard of at all. I had to make sure I gave people reasons to instinctively gravitate toward players with certain personalities or styles of play to cheer for. Every player had to have something about them advertised as a reason why they were going to be someone worth looking out for not just the time I spent highlighting them, but for the future as well!

Breaking Out - The Show

Eventually, I came up with a format revolving around the points discussed above. I wanted to showcase each player's personality in an online tournament, something normally unseen due to the lack of pre/post game interviews in online tournaments. For this, I decided to simply do an interview resembling itmejp's Real Talk, but with a much shorter format. Of course, what most people would be seeing of these players would be their play, so I knew I needed to at least cover each of the 3 matchups. Finally, I decided I wanted to give players an opportunity to show something awesome that wasn't necessarily a good representative of their playstyle as a whole. Just, a great game that would be exciting for viewers to watch. Thus, I had a base format. An interview, 3 replays for each matchup to be casted, and 1 generally awesome game. 5 bits of content.

But wait, if you've actually read or seen anything about the show Breaking Out, you'd know it was actually 6 episodes of content. Where was the Funday episode where I made players do something weird and funky? This came into play after I had the idea for my initial concept of the show. But I didn't want to just blindly launch the show without feedback. I talked to various friends and got thoughts, improved details where I could, and used my trip to the Penny Arcade Convention in Seattle(PAX) as an opportunity to get more.

PAX - The Big Feedback

I attended PAX Prime 2013 with some friends for personal enjoyment reasons. However, as long as I was there, I wanted to use the opportunity to speak with a few experienced people in content production for feedback on the idea and the format. This is why I give a special thanks to iNcontroL, DJWheat, & TotalBiscuit in the credits of the Invitational. iNcontroL provided me a lot of feedback on my casting and various specifics of the show. DJWheat is the reason why I broadcasted each episode on twitch.tv rather than just having each episode on youtube(what was I thinking?), as well as the one that even gave me the idea of having an invitational in the first place. TotalBiscuit gave the idea of including something wacky or strange as a somewhat NASL downtime style appeal to the whole series(which I feel I could have executed better). I have to give another shoutout to these three guys(especially iNcontroL who went really in depth with me and DJWheat who let me talk his ear off for over an hour), for helping me avoid a lot of really terrible mistakes.

+ Show Spoiler +

One really big choice I made about the format after I decided to listen to DJWheat on broadcasting live to twitch.tv was to create short and easily consumed content consistently. This also harkens back to another piece of Day[9]'s advice to be consistent and "just show up". In order to avoid the nearly unavoidable WCS schedule and Day[9] Daily, I decided to create content that would be justifyable to watch in addition to the existing Starcraft overload. I aimed for 20-40 minutes of content(though I sometimes went a bit over on interviews >>) on a daily basis. This would not only be easy to justify watching, but if I could get it on the TL Calendar(and I did! Thank you BisuDagger! <3) I would have a lot of visibility for the show just thanks to being there every day of the week except Sunday.

This was going to be a bit of a problem though. Trying to find the players I wanted who would be available every week during both the interview episode and the funday episode? Not to mention being ready to broadcast 6 days a week and be on point so I didn't make shitty content? Sure, it might have been manageable if it were my only concern, but I am a full time software developer and couldn't always guarantee I would be capable of making it happen every night. For this reason, I opted for a pre-recorded video format. This let me record the casts, interview, etc. when I had free time, and all I had to do was be at my computer to cast it. It still required sacrifice(unless I could get @KurenTV or @theRealNanMan to broadcast for me <3) since I had to pass up on going out a lot of Saturday nights, etc. But it was something I'd be willing to do in order to make it work.

So it Began...

Ok, so that was all just a build up of my initial thoughts on the show. In the interest of not writing a novel to bore you all with(as well as going to bed at a reasonable hour on a weekday), I'm going to end this episode of my thoughts here. Next time I'll talk a bit more about actually running the show and what I learned/changed during the show. I'll also build into the conception of the Invitational itself.

In the meanwhile, I would love to hear any feedback! Again, I'm happy to hear any feedback on any aspect of the show, the tournament, my casting, or what I've written in my post, etc. Don't feel it only has to pertain to what I've written about here. Thanks to anyone that is reading these mammoths of posts. Again, a lot of the reason is to organize my own thoughts and reflect on the experience, while also making my reasons and decisions more public.

Cheers!
-Ravi "feardragon" Pareek

Breakout Invitational Reflection #1

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