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motbob
United States12546 Posts
A few years ago, I worked for NASL, and then I stabbed them in the back.
Sort of. It's not like what I was doing for them was critical for the success of the league. But looking back at how I conducted myself when dealing with NASL, it's obvious that I had a lot to learn about professionalism, burnout, and letting my emotions get the best of me.
In 2011, I was pretty excited about NASL's launch. Even after the ridiculously awful Clash of the Titans match[1], I was ready to get involved with the league. Xeris posted a notice on reddit looking for people to maintain Team Liquid LR threads. I decided that since I was probably going to be making a lot of the LR threads anyway, I might as well become the official guy doing it. So I sent Xeris a PM and got "hired".
The first weeks of the league were a total disaster. NASL didn't air matches live. Instead, they recorded the matches with live commentary, stored the VODs, then broadcasted those VODs during U.S. prime time. In retrospect, this was terrible in multiple ways. In general, it's better for tournaments to broadcast during EU prime. If you broadcast in the middle of the day on the west coast of of the US, both Europeans and Americans are awake. If you broadcast in the evening, half your potential audience is asleep. In addition, replays were aired WAY after they were recorded -- sometimes two weeks after. Nowadays, it's clear that matches should always be cast live, but back in the days when the hugely successful TSL 3 was wrapping up, that was less clear.
VODs were behind a paywall. They were organized haphazardly, so people who paid for them found it hard to watch them. I tried making a thread to fix the problem but I don't think anyone used it.
From the beginning, the NASL failed. Hard. In addition to the above problems, NASL streams suffered from crippling lag[2]. The sound was messed up during most of the casts. Every time a problem was fixed, another one seemed to pop up. Because of these problems, the viewership for NASL plummeted after the first casts. The LR thread for the first cast had 258 pages; the thread for Week 2 Day 1 had 181 pages; the thread for Week 6 Day 1 had 47 pages. Gretorp was REALLY bad during the first season (though of course he improved drastically later). Frankly, the NASL launched before they knew what they were doing[3].
On reddit, NASL was getting ripped to pieces during those early weeks. If I had not been so emotionally invested in making the league succeed, I probably wouldn't have defended them so vigorously. I defended the delayed broadcasts. I asked people to give NASL a chance to fix things.
But ten weeks later, at the end of the online league, I was burnt out. Viewer numbers for the daily numbers looked terrible in comparison to those for competing NA leagues (though of course this wasn't a fair comparison). The live playoffs would have been a disaster (more production issues!) had it not been for a stunning grand finals between Puma and MC. It didn't appear that the NASL was going anywhere. I told Xeris that I wouldn't do LR stuff for next season and that they'd have to find a replacement.
At least, I think I told Xeris. It shows how big of a dick I was being about NASL that I don't remember. If I didn't PM Xeris about it, he surely got the message when he saw me publicly badmouth the league I had been working for.
Thus, the title. I didn't stick with NASL when the going got rough. I wasn't strong enough to keep trying to keep afloat what looked like a sinking ship. I wasn't mature enough to keep my mouth shut in public.
The rest of the story is that the NASL got much better in later seasons, but it didn't matter. David Ting, who in retrospect did more to destroy the NA SC2 scene than any other single person, used Rupert Murdoch's money to put on million dollar tournaments that probably returned a fraction of their cost. The arms race that ensued between IPL, MLG, and other live event organizers is well known, and in that war, everyone lost -- or at least everyone in NA did. Those big expensive weekend events made NASL new-found competence look like mediocrity. WCS NA was NASL's last attempt to make SC2 work for them, and even that failed. RIP.
[1] NASL's casters used one computer to spectate replays and the observer/broadcaster used another, leading to constant desyncing. It's hard to overstate how much of a disaster the cast was.
[2] Instead of lowering the quality of their stream to try and fix the problem, NASL treated the lag as a problem on Twitch's (Justin.tv's) side. They didn't experiment with lower bitrates/resolutions. They just let the stream lag for most of their audience. If I have my facts wrong on this I'm willing to be corrected.
[3] This footnote is half the reason I'm posting this blog. During Season 1, one of the NASL's guest casters had an interesting experience. He cast a day of games over Skype with Gretorp. For one reason or another, NASL's copy of the audio with his half of the cast was lost, but Gretorp's was still in their possession. NASL sent this unnamed guest caster Gretorp's audio and asked him to re-cast the games as if they were live. He did so, using the waveform of the cast audio to see when to let Gretorp talk, and no one watching the stream noticed.
  
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On March 09 2014 10:57 motbob wrote:
[3] This footnote is half the reason I'm posting this blog. During Season 1, one of the NASL's guest casters had an interesting experience. He cast a day of games over Skype with Gretorp. For one reason or another, NASL's copy of the audio with his half of the cast was lost, but Gretorp's was still in their possession. NASL sent this unnamed guest caster Gretorp's audio and asked him to re-cast the games as if they were live. He did so, using the waveform of the cast audio to see when to let Gretorp talk, and no one watching the stream noticed.
Damn. That guy has a future in voice acting.
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1001 YEARS KESPAJAIL22272 Posts
You can get paid for doing LR threads?!?!? i am doing this wrong
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after the NASL dropped sc2 all the bad sides of the NASL popped out, I wasnt even aware of them. I mostly blame the arms race that happened though, if everyone just worked together back then maybe the NASL would have been a bust. Maybe they could have divided NA into 3 regions to help everyone get a live event. I know this has nothing to do with you but I just wanted to state that. The problem was a lot deeper than just the NASL
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Wait, how did David Ting hurt the NA scene? Did I miss something?
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Katowice25012 Posts
On March 09 2014 10:57 motbob wrote:
The live playoffs would have been a disaster (more production issues!) had it not been for a stunning grand finals between Puma and MC.
This was the tournament where we all learned that no matter how bad a tournament goes during it's regularly scheduled operations, as long as the final series had interesting game content very few will care or even remember.
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Gretorp never got better.
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United States7483 Posts
On March 09 2014 13:24 MtlGuitarist97 wrote:
Wait, how did David Ting hurt the NA scene? Did I miss something?
IPL made NASL seem lousy, when IPL was never going to be sustainable. By running only a few super tournaments like that, it made everyone disillusioned with tournaments like NASL, which by comparison, looked shitty. IPL wasn't going to be around for a long time, so it kind of nuked the scene.
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Its not like they didn't deserve some serious flame after that first season.
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On March 09 2014 12:03 WikidSik wrote:
after the NASL dropped sc2 all the bad sides of the NASL popped out, I wasnt even aware of them. I mostly blame the arms race that happened though, if everyone just worked together back then maybe the NASL would have been a bust. Maybe they could have divided NA into 3 regions to help everyone get a live event. I know this has nothing to do with you but I just wanted to state that. The problem was a lot deeper than just the NASL
Not really. There were more than enough flame/complain/blame/bitch threads at the time for various reasons.
The nearly NASL was pretty much a disaster and everyone at the time thought so, even if not all of the details came out.
Now people are thinking back to their experiences of that time.
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Aside from the title and two lines near the end, the rest of this blog post seems to be NASL sucks.
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On March 09 2014 18:48 Darkwhite wrote:
Aside from the title and two lines near the end, the rest of this blog post seems to be NASL sucks.
Well did you watch season 1? It wasn't pretty.
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Fiddler's Green42661 Posts
On March 09 2014 13:46 Heyoka wrote:Show nested quote +On March 09 2014 10:57 motbob wrote:
The live playoffs would have been a disaster (more production issues!) had it not been for a stunning grand finals between Puma and MC. This was the tournament where we all learned that no matter how bad a tournament goes during it's regularly scheduled operations, as long as the final series had interesting game content very few will care or even remember.
Pretty much, great games trump everything no matter how bad. Though depending on that holding up your tournament is like gambling.
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On March 09 2014 13:46 Heyoka wrote:Show nested quote +On March 09 2014 10:57 motbob wrote:
The live playoffs would have been a disaster (more production issues!) had it not been for a stunning grand finals between Puma and MC. This was the tournament where we all learned that no matter how bad a tournament goes during it's regularly scheduled operations, as long as the final series had interesting game content very few will care or even remember.
That's not what I'm seeing at all... Don't get me wrong, as far as I'm concerned, PuMa vs MC @ NASL 1 remains one of the best TvP series ever played in this game, and yet more people seem to remember and quote the "nasl sound guy" thing than the games themselves... :S
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On March 09 2014 18:54 Jaaaaasper wrote:Show nested quote +On March 09 2014 18:48 Darkwhite wrote:
Aside from the title and two lines near the end, the rest of this blog post seems to be NASL sucks. Well did you watch season 1? It wasn't pretty.
The point is that, if you want to apologize for something, you do it and move on - you don't dilute it with ten paragraphs about why NASL really did suck and justifying yourself. If it's really meant as an apology, it's kind of hard to tell.
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NASL was always a distaster. I don't think anyone can fault you for not believing in some of the clowns back then. It was getting better over time, but when you start very weak and then spiral down into the abyss, only inhuman amounts of struggle will get you even remotely back to where you started.
Those leagues surely had their part in destroying at least some viewership in regards to SC2. It is very demotivation as a viewer for me at least, if the only thing you hear after each broadcast is apologetic bullshit and "they will get better, they will improve, they will learn from their mistakes" and then a short while later, it's still disgusting, but a small part was improved on "WOW THE SOUND GUY WAS GREAT THIS TIME, THE REST WAS SHIT BUT YOU CAN SEE IMPROVEMENT!!". If you spend a lot of money, I cannot fathom why you would spend it amateurishly and produce sometimes basement-nerd quality level production and then afterwards have the guts to tell the fans to shut the fuck up, because they are hating out of sheer disappointment. I don't even wanna know how much of that money just disappeared mysteriously in smoke, because sometimes it was obvious, that it was not spent on the production.
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Even though IPL set horrible expectations for the future I loved the shit out of IPL 3-5, they were so good.
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On March 09 2014 19:14 Darkwhite wrote:Show nested quote +On March 09 2014 18:54 Jaaaaasper wrote:On March 09 2014 18:48 Darkwhite wrote:
Aside from the title and two lines near the end, the rest of this blog post seems to be NASL sucks. Well did you watch season 1? It wasn't pretty. The point is that, if you want to apologize for something, you do it and move on - you don't dilute it with ten paragraphs about why NASL really did suck and justifying yourself. If it's really meant as an apology, it's kind of hard to tell.
Hes talking about feeling bad for making himself one of the public faces on nasl (even a minor one) and shitting on it publicly, not apologizing for what it was.
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In the end, the NASL finals gave us something to treasure. The broadcast quality was horrible most of the time, but sometimes it is hard for less experienced people to run a successful event in this world of high standards and big expectations.
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EPT
