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On December 19 2013 06:02 MaxiTB wrote:
Wow, I just noticed the population to viewers ratio when it comes to Austria (200ppm compared to US 150ppm).
Seems like we are actually one of those countries with the highest cynical proportion :-).
I'm surprised about the low US ROI tho; for a NA-only event I was expecting a lot more US viewers and not an EU majority.
However I think day1 did it's part in overall lower numbers for day2.
Let's be honest (and TB said it already), day1 was mostly an entertainment disaster. And I wouldn't be surprised if it resulted in lower day2 viewer numbers because of that (day2 should always be higher, because there are people not watching group/brackets but rarely the other way around).
I can point out three major issues why:
1) Forfeits. Yes, they can happen, but in this case it was extreme. twitter folk were kidding about the ratio of player who actually made it into the next round by winning their matches. I think this new rule should help out with that issue.
2) Map pool. Ladder maps are okay, but let's be honest, they are generally the most boring to watch. It is way more entertaining to see players out of their comfort-zone instead of watching stuff you experience while playing ladder. For example I really missed the Lava map, simply because it was my favorite map at the RedBull Battlegrounds tournament. Having only Fruit in the pool resulted in a veto of the more interesting one to watch.
3) Character. This time around, the tournament felt lifeless - I can't put my finger down to it, but I had the impression most players didn't care at all. The executions looked sloppy and unmotivated. Maybe everyone just had a bad day.
In other words while the casting was fine, the source material seem to be a bit lacking. But ofc this is only my personal impression.
One thing:
People in chat were posting "pls play sponsor ad" every break without an ad. I think you could have played it every break without any negative feedback, because the ad itself was very tasteful.
I agree for the most part, but your second point would need further consideration. The point of this tournament is for exposure to those American players who are not Scarlett and being sent to every tournament. For them, the only practice they're getting is ladder play. I think it would be a bit out of the ordinary to on one hand say "here is a tournament for you ladder warriors" and then in the same breath say "but........... we're not playing ladder maps".
I think for this type of tournament, we have to stomach the ladder maps. Or you know, Blizzard needs to be a bit more proactive about rotating maps in and out of the lineup. But this is something they said they planned on doing in one of the recent reports they published.
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On December 19 2013 08:11 mprs wrote:Show nested quote +On December 19 2013 06:02 MaxiTB wrote:
Wow, I just noticed the population to viewers ratio when it comes to Austria (200ppm compared to US 150ppm).
Seems like we are actually one of those countries with the highest cynical proportion :-).
I'm surprised about the low US ROI tho; for a NA-only event I was expecting a lot more US viewers and not an EU majority.
However I think day1 did it's part in overall lower numbers for day2.
Let's be honest (and TB said it already), day1 was mostly an entertainment disaster. And I wouldn't be surprised if it resulted in lower day2 viewer numbers because of that (day2 should always be higher, because there are people not watching group/brackets but rarely the other way around).
I can point out three major issues why:
1) Forfeits. Yes, they can happen, but in this case it was extreme. twitter folk were kidding about the ratio of player who actually made it into the next round by winning their matches. I think this new rule should help out with that issue.
2) Map pool. Ladder maps are okay, but let's be honest, they are generally the most boring to watch. It is way more entertaining to see players out of their comfort-zone instead of watching stuff you experience while playing ladder. For example I really missed the Lava map, simply because it was my favorite map at the RedBull Battlegrounds tournament. Having only Fruit in the pool resulted in a veto of the more interesting one to watch.
3) Character. This time around, the tournament felt lifeless - I can't put my finger down to it, but I had the impression most players didn't care at all. The executions looked sloppy and unmotivated. Maybe everyone just had a bad day.
In other words while the casting was fine, the source material seem to be a bit lacking. But ofc this is only my personal impression.
One thing:
People in chat were posting "pls play sponsor ad" every break without an ad. I think you could have played it every break without any negative feedback, because the ad itself was very tasteful. I agree for the most part, but your second point would need further consideration. The point of this tournament is for exposure to those American players who are not Scarlett and being sent to every tournament. For them, the only practice they're getting is ladder play. I think it would be a bit out of the ordinary to on one hand say "here is a tournament for you ladder warriors" and then in the same breath say "but........... we're not playing ladder maps". I think for this type of tournament, we have to stomach the ladder maps. Or you know, Blizzard needs to be a bit more proactive about rotating maps in and out of the lineup. But this is something they said they planned on doing in one of the recent reports they published.
I'm not sure about that point.
I wasn't talking about using only Korean tournament maps, but maps that are actually barely played in any tournament. I'm pretty sure professional players will feel more uncomfortable with those than ladder players or at least on the same level.
OTOH it would spice things up on the entertainment side (aka for viewers), because uncomfortable players result generally in non-standard situation, which is less boring to watch than build A versus build B. It's like watching a movie and half way through you know how the story will unfold.
Buuut maybe I was watching too much SC and clinch to any excitement beyond the ordinary. In fact I now prefer watching stuff like Huskies Bronze League because it's less predictable and more dynamic.
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United States97276 Posts
Hey TB. Thanks for writing this and really enjoyed the tournament.
I noticed you said high tier foreigners fighting top koreans is still the top draw, which is true. How familiar are you with the format of the Little League World Series? I'm sure other events have used a format like this but this is just the first thing that comes to mind. In the little league world series, teams are broken up into 2 halves: Teams from the USA and Teams from the rest of the world. Then the winner of each bracket meets in the finals (USA Champ vs World Champ).
I was wondering if it sounds feasible to kind of adapt this to SHOUTCraft. Instead of USA vs the World like little league baseball you could maybe do Koreans vs World or Koreans vs Americas even. You could maybe still have the same qualification process where you make everyone play on the NA server or whatever and take the top players. Maybe even for the Koreans you could use that bracket as like an in house tournament with Axiom, Acer, and TheStC or whatever. idk. I haven't thought that whole part through yet. But then you get a good mix of Korean vs Korean games as well as having a bracket of foreigner vs foreigner games. There could be a separate prize for winning each bracket and then kind of like a showmatch/grand final type thing for Korean winner vs Foreigner winner.
I feel like if this could somehow get tweaked you could kind of hit all the points of viewership people are looking for while still helping the degree of difficulty of the ladder in NA increase and support those players. Obviously a problem will be that it would make the tournament longer and probably cost more money, so I am not sure how that would be circumvented yet, but I was just wondering if something like that sounded feasible?
I know your trying to develop the foreign scene so the korean part of the tournament sounds kind of outside the scope of the tournament's objective, but I was thinking maybe it could be used as something to help draw unsure people in. Just want to say thanks again for running this tournament!
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Great post, TB  Loving the transparency, and your three new rules are certainly more than justified. Good luck with these in the future!
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TB could you comment on having more than 1 sponsor and how that effects marketability. Ohh and could you also link us some tip jar numbers? Ohh I'd also recommend making tip jar slightly more available U watched the stream a bit and you barely mentioned compared to SCA where you made it into a really big deal.
Thanks!
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Really fun tourney, to bad demuslim wimped out like that  People get sick but common we all know that no Korean would ever withdraw halfway through a series like that
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Very interesting read.
I think crowd funding would be very interesting to try. And, obviously, shoutcraft europe again (if I'm not mistaken, the last one was the one that had Thorzain and Stephano in the finals)
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On December 19 2013 09:45 Ace Frehley wrote:
Very interesting read.
I think crowd funding would be very interesting to try. And, obviously, shoutcraft europe again (if I'm not mistaken, the last one was the one that had Thorzain and Stephano in the finals)
I don't think any European has a decent shot at beating Naniwa in a bo5 at the moment though. Perhaps in PvP with some tricky play.
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On December 19 2013 09:35 thezanursic wrote:
TB could you comment on having more than 1 sponsor and how that effects marketability. Ohh and could you also link us some tip jar numbers? Ohh I'd also recommend making tip jar slightly more available U watched the stream a bit and you barely mentioned compared to SCA where you made it into a really big deal.
Thanks!
It became impossible to track tipjars when Chipin shut down. We've yet to find a service to replace it.
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On December 19 2013 09:52 Valikyr wrote:Show nested quote +On December 19 2013 09:45 Ace Frehley wrote:
Very interesting read.
I think crowd funding would be very interesting to try. And, obviously, shoutcraft europe again (if I'm not mistaken, the last one was the one that had Thorzain and Stephano in the finals) I don't think any European has a decent shot at beating Naniwa in a bo5 at the moment though. Perhaps in PvP with some tricky play.
lmao
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Brilliant post, excellent tournament. May I ask what do you mean when you say that you "could have promoted them better"? In my opinion Ting had a big presence in SCA and was presented in a positive light, all viewers knew who the sponsor of the event was without getting annoyed about the amount of ads.
Anyway, a big thank you to you John, and to Genna. Also you guys at Ting are fricking awesome!
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During the ShoutCraft event, I thought the quantity of Ting placements was great, however, I think that the quality of promotional content could be improved upon. At the beginning of Saturday’s broadcast, you provided great insight into our service and how we’re different from other carriers, but I don’t think you went into any similar detail over the rest of the weekend (I could be mistaken, though, I missed a few minutes here and there). While the prerecorded ads between games brought considerable traffic to our site, we received >200 concurrent visitors (almost double compared to any other point in the weekend) when you spoke live about our service. What’s also interesting, is that this live read was during the ASUS ROG North Con Scarlett/Jaedong final when we had around 14,000~ viewers. Would be interesting to see the amount of visitors on shoutcraft.ting.com if a detailed live read would have happened during Sunday’s viewership. The Twitch conversations seemed positive around Ting, as did reddit and Team Liquid conversations, so I don’t think slightly longer live reads would be a problem for the audience.
I think there is a thing that is very important to add to this point, and that is to start shifting what the viewers think of when we start talking about supporting esports/the tourney etc. Currently there's a lot of views that this means to unconditionally donate money, thank the sponsors on reddit/TL or buy the product that the sponsor is offering cause #savingesports or whatever.
Instead I feel it would be very beneficial for TB in this case, while doing these more detailed sponsor talks, to tell the viewers something like this: If you want to support the tournament, please take the time to actually check out our sponsor at this link and spend a couple of minutes of your time to check if what they offer is of interest to you. Check if you can save money by switching to Ting, and if you will save money then seriously consider making the switch. If their offer is not going to work for you, then instead you can thank them for sponsoring the event on forums/social media.
If viewers can get in the habbit of making a little bit of an effort to look at the product/service offered, and only then consider buying if the offer makes sense to them, that would be a lot better than the attitude of buying the sponsor-product/service is reserved as some form of charity to "save esports", and if you don't have money to donate you ignore it.
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On December 19 2013 08:11 mprs wrote:
...American players who are not Scarlett and being sent to every tournament.
Technically Scarlett earned the right to be sent out to a lot of those tournaments though. I wouldn't put Scarlett in the same category as guys like MC (heck, they don't even have a similar sponsorship deal). All about staying relevant.
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this is the first piece youve written that didnt make me hate you. kudos.
User was banned for this post.
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I missed SHOUTcraft? fuck didn't even know it was on
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Mmm. Learning.
Is there some way to institute a semi-crowd-funded prize pool like Dota 2? I know SC2 doesn't have in-game viewing or tickets but perhaps a Twitch subscription for only that tournament where 10-15% of the fee goes to the prize pool?
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On December 19 2013 06:02 MaxiTB wrote:
Wow, I just noticed the population to viewers ratio when it comes to Austria (200ppm compared to US 150ppm).
Seems like we are actually one of those countries with the highest cynical proportion :-).
Not bad, but I think we Finnish still beat you to it with our whopping 585ppm viewership :D
But commenting on the original post, I enjoyed watching the tournament, tuning in for most of the show. I missed pretty much no games, although I was jumping between ASUS ROG Northcon and SCA:W during the finals. And I think I fell asleep for a couple of games during Day 1 as well, as the stream terminated I think somewhere around 2 a.m. for me. Fortunately, you had scheduled Day 2 to be more friendly to us Europeans as far as schedules went
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Thanks for the write-up! Concerning international sponsors, how about GOG.com?
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On December 19 2013 11:54 GraFx wrote:
this is the first piece youve written that didnt make me hate you. kudos.
If it makes you feel any better about that I think you're a little shit :x
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wow, what a great report!
Awesome job TB
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EPT
