EPT
It's obviously been a loooong time since we've done SC2, (the last time was in 2011, when we did Sunday Night Fights, which is still one of my all time favorite productions) so everyone was a little nervous. We were absolutely confident in our ability to put on a good show with solid production, but our history with the SC2 community is complicated, and even though everyone seemed to enjoy the event, I considered the majority of the tournament a 6/10 - slightly above my personal minimum expectations. Things did improve today with the graphs, but we were really hoping to get them operational by the weekend of the main tournament, which was 2 weeks ago.
Just going to mention, in case anyone is confused about the graphs. We created custom software for our graphs (and other stuff! But that's coming later) that helps with many aspects of the rest of our production. The Gameheart graph stuff that was announced recently is separate (and not out yet for public use) and we're looking forward to seeing what we can do with it to supplement what we're using now.
The biggest goal in my mind, whenever we do an event, is to put on a good show. Ideally, that means showing something new, that nobody else has really done before. That's not always possible, due to lack of time/man-hours, technology, and indeed, creativity. We're constantly seeking to push the limits of the current production, and I feel like we did that with this event. We're generally our hardest critics, ignoring reddit trolls, and I probably feel guilty for more than I should. If there's ever something wrong that I could have possibly prevented, or immediately fixed, or dodged completely, I feel like it's my fault. Most of the time, this is a series of minor things from every aspect of our event. Ender's Game was no different, and I now have several goals for SC2 production so we can prevent the small mistakes we made during the tournament.
There were a few other things that made today particularly stressful. First, adding in Starbow is an obvious risk, although it went about as well as I expected. It was originally my idea to add it in, and I'm satisfied with how things went. Second, I didn't realize we were "competing" with WCS EU until this morning, which although unfortunate, is not a huge deal for me. If I cared so much about viewership, I wouldn't have done Starbow in the first place. Last, and most importantly, we were operating on a skeleton crew. Only two people were on hand to run the event and stream today (myself and Kegwen, who is our head streamer guy). Although it's arguable that we are the two most important people in WP in this particular event, losing people who normally handle Twitter, Twitch chat, other promotion, and other stream production turns our normally moderately difficult jobs into much more work.
But, things went well. As they usually do when I'm overly pessimistic (I'm very rarely not overly pessimistic). In fact, over the entire event, things went the best I ever remember, in terms of organization and production. Doing an SC2 event after a year of League was a breath of pure oxygen. The players are (generally) more professional. With 1/5th of the players needed in each game, it's so much easier to get lobbies set up. The most important thing to me was going to a game that was so different than League, which was getting tiring.
Nathanias is a boss. 10/10 would esports again with him.
As I'm pretty sure (it's been a long day) I tweeted from our official twitter, we do have some more plans for SC2 this year, including at least one pretty major event that you should be hearing about in the next month or so.
