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TL;DR: We learned a lot about creating a tourney and have some ideas to throw around to make the potential next one a better, less costly venture. Overall our feelings are good/great on HIAT, especially when it came to the live crowd, and will be looking to replicate that ‘VIP’ live experience in the future.
Learning
Tournament Format
Day one was pretty haphazard. The online crowd certainly saw it (constant delays, lag, etc), but the offline crowd did too. The projector didn’t work for the first half of the day and the stream wouldn’t work above medium, as it wasn’t a live feed. We also experienced a lot of stress, as Thursday was supposed to be our prep day but was instead taken up entirely by setup. My thoughts about the tournament format are -
Is an open bracket stream even necessary? What if we just made it offline, and used Friday as an additional setup day? Simply adding Wednesday to the days we rent the venue is far too costly, and it’s not like open bracket day gets that much hype, especially when it’s obvious who will get out.
Is an open bracket in general even necessary? I want to say yes to this question, simply because we like having people tell us ‘you support the NA scene’ and getting the ‘foreign hope’ is always fun. Plus, having people like Intense give fantastic interviews is something that probably won’t happen without an open bracket. Oh, and on top of all that, the open bracket is one last chance for guys like Hydra to enter into our tournament. I can certainly see why some tournaments are only two days and only start at the RO16/8, but I’m not sure it would be worth giving up all the pros I just listed.
Was the venue a good choice? For those that don’t know, the venue was a fairly large LAN center. This type of venue should guarantee proper internet for the players/streaming, as well as proper equipment for the players. Any other type of venue (like a hotel or convention center) and we would have to rent out a lot of equipment, make sure their internet can handle it, and hope they have a good wire setup for production. The drawbacks to doing it in a LAN center is that it was fairly out of the way, and finding another LAN center as big as that would be difficult, if we planned to move locations for the next tournament.
Attendees
Venue/ticket timing: We had quite a few people say ‘if only I knew the exact location/ticket price, I would’ve been able to come!’. And even a few more say ‘if only I knew the exact dates sooner, I would’ve been able to come!’ So, obviously, we need to have the venue/tickets locked down waaaay sooner. That’s something we can certainly do, as we didn’t plan on this venue being as ‘iffy’ for as long as it was.
Ticket Counter: inb4 trolls say ‘haha got em’. Yes, we saw both the legitimate concerns as well as troll posters about the tickets left unsold. What do I have to say to that? Fuck the ticket counter. Maybe not the most mature response, sure, but we don’t want that killing hype before the event even begins. WCS Toronto’s crowd was not very big, if you couldn’t tell online, and not as many people seemed to care, probably because they didn’t have a counter saying ‘oh we have 500 tickets left to sell, whoops’.
Tournament Schedule: Basically, was starting at 10am EST a good thing? Most people don’t want to get up that early unless something big is going down (which is obviously not guaranteed on open bracket/ RO16, or hell, even finals day), but it impacts the hype at the start. Is it bad a crowd isn’t there immediately, or even three hours later? Do we sacrifice the online EU crowd to start it later, and end later? This is one I don’t really have an answer for.
Additional Cost
(So this is the section a lot of budding tournament organizers might want to read, as this will basically be a cost-cutting/we-fucked-up-don’t-do-as-we-did section.)
First and foremost, we had some people complain about where the money was being used, even though it was clearly stated in the Kickstarter. Stuff like pizza and ice cream, or the photo booth! I just want to say to anyone who thought that was a bad use of funds...it really, really wasn’t. It was fucking cool, and almost essential to the VIP experience we wanted our live crowd to get.
With that out of the way, let’s talk about surprise expenses. First, currency conversion. If you plan on having an event where it is not USD, either clearly state the prize pool is in ___ currency, or expect to deal with currency conversion. It might help, or it might really, really hurt. Second, budget for taxes. On everything. Third, keep in mind the ‘misc’ expenses that are almost guaranteed to pop up. I wish I had a ‘budget x percentage into this’, but I don’t. I’ll just say, think of stuff like water/Redbull for players, tables for organizing, cables that the venue/production might not have but desperately need, emergency runs to Walmart for food/supplies, providing food to hard-working people because you’re a nice event organizer, having to pay for taxis even if you thought you had someone picking up a player, confetti poppers for a nice ceremony, etc etc. Fourth, packaging and shipping stuff is so expensive, and you are almost guaranteed to have to ship something or another, and they probably won’t be very small or easy to ship. I’m talking like, at least $600 for this, as we easily spent a lot more than that (but some of it was just cool stuff, not important).
Let’s talk about good money surprises. We forgot we would actually make money from ticket sales. That’s basically our only good money surprise. Don’t expect many of those. Actually, after we considered we’d make money off of them, combined with 99% of people saying the tickets were too cheap, we plan on increasing the tickets for the next potential tournament.
Oh, and get an app or save every receipt for everything you buy. Business expenses.
Overall Impression On Our First Live Event
Crowd
The crowd was amazing and made the event 1000x easier to cast, and honestly, if any of you are reading, you’re easily one of the reasons we really want to do another one. A hundred people or so would be the perfect VIP experience that’s in between Homestory Cup and a bigger event like WCS, and that number is what we’ll be shooting for when we potentially look at venues. We loved the boomsticks and think the crowd did too. The crowd-player-caster interaction had to have been at an all-time high with the trading cards, photo booth, and casters right next to the crowd. We consider this interaction a must-have and will be looking to incorporate similar elements and are open to suggestions.
Player Accommodation
(Any player that reads this, feel free to message Rifkin or I on your feelings, good or bad, especially if coupled with suggestions.)
Safe Space: We tried to give the players a ‘safe space’, and we think we did a good job of it. They basically had an entire section of the building dedicated to just players, and further back they had a couch/water/sockets to charge their phone. As the event went on, we tried to move out the open bracket players to allow even more exclusivity.
Player-Fan Interaction: Some players don’t appreciate fan interaction and no one should judge them on that. However, we felt justified in asking the bare minimum, which was walking through the crowd once or twice and handing out their personal player cards to anyone who asked. We will continue to make that the bare minimum for future events.
Gophers & Volunteers: We had specific ‘gophers’ and thought it worked out well. However, there was still miscommunication on airport pickups, and we’ll try to iron those out in the future.
Online Viewer Count
We successfully avoided other Starcraft events on the same weekend! But then we clashed with CS:GO, LoL, and Pokemon, whoopsie. Unfortunately, there’s not much we can do about that, so while we will honestly state we were disappointed with viewer numbers, there’s an uplifting thought of ‘well, we had everything going against us, so actually not that bad’. We had downtime, we had lag, we had ZvZ finals, we had no ‘star power’ casters, we had limited Twitch front page time that got overshadowed by everything else going on that weekend...I mean really, all that considered, we’re okay and maybe even happy with the numbers overall.
Ad revenue was a total bust for this event, for anyone wondering. Yay ad-block?
Cost Cutting Ideas
Merchant booths. We’re optimistic that sponsors will want to have merchant booths, and that people will want to buy from said merchant booths.
Two day event instead of three. Whether this means an open bracket but no stream, or no open bracket, or what, we’re not 100% sure. Give us your opinions.
Ticket pricing. Everyone, players and spectators, told us our tickets were too low-priced. We had no problem with that for this, as this was the ‘once in a lifetime blowout event so everyone should be welcome!!’, but if we’re looking toward future, sustainable events...we’re going to increase the prices. Not by so much it’s unfair! Just a little.
Cold Hard Numbers
* Dips from technical problems/restarts can be seen on fuzic graphs
*This is Rifkin writing~
Day 1: Peak viewership(Personal) 6628. 9079 across all streams http://www.fuzic.nl/events/5930-hell-its-aboot-time/
Unique visitors: 42920
Day 2: Peak viewership(Personal) 9885. 12387 across all streams http://www.fuzic.nl/events/5935-hell-its-aboot-time/
Unique visitors: 56040
Day 3: Peak viewership(Personal)11,584. 13713 across all streams
http://www.fuzic.nl/events/5938-hell-its-aboot-time/
Unique visitors: 56020
We can’t give exact ad revenue numbers, but we can tell you that less than $250 was made all 3 days combined! We left to Toronto with 813 subscribers and came back to 815 (Currently sitting at 798 at the time of writing this). All streamers know that any time you take off streaming means bleeding out subscribers, and since we took nearly a week off (not including streaming the actual event itself) that depressingly small amount of subscribers gained vs lost is actually quite impressive.
Costs:
Sadly there is a confidentiality agreement I signed with the media crew so we can’t discuss exact costs of things, but I’ll write down a ballpark so folks know whereabouts things cost us. Again, these are not accurate numbers, but within the ballpark
Venue costs: $1500 - $2500 per day (included PC rentals for the whole LAN center)
Staging costs: $1500 - $3000 per week. This includes things like risers, back drops, basically anything building a nice looking stage requires.
Staffing costs: $1500 - $3000 per event. We hired a production team (Producer, Camera man, Stream director, audio technician), a dedicated observer, several admins, a camera man and several volunteers. One thing I was shocked to learn about is that it’s apparently not ‘normal’ for event organizers to pay for the meals of the staff. We were more than happy to do this, and we even surprised everyone with PopEye’s chicken for dinner during set up day (guys, we bought enough chicken to feed 25+ people, think about that for a second).
THE MOST EXPENSIVE - Printing: $2,000-$4000 For our event we really did try to take it above and beyond and create some extra things like the backdrops for the photo booth, extra large banner to cover the windows etc. You could probably get by with a 70% cost of what we did for this, but then again it did look fantastic (not to mention how great the Carbot murals looked on the easels behind the players)
Misc Costs: $1000+
The ice cream truck rental was $600 for 6 hours (Allowed us to hand out free ice cream, much cheaper if they are selling it themselves) we spent nearly $400 on pizza, and some generous souls bought nearly the same amount for the days we didn’t as well. We spent nearly $300 on silly things as well such as props for the photo booth, packaging for the VIP’s etc. Close to $400 (unbudgeted, whoops) was spent on Red Bull & Water for the players/staff/sneaky spectators that tricked staff into giving them some.
Insurance: $350 - $1000 I wasn’t sure if this was a misc cost or not, because it’s something you need to have in order for Blizzard to white list your event (regardless of whether it’s Blizzard assisted or not)
There’s a lot of other costs such as the camera rentals, purchasing cables and headsets etc that all added up to be very costly, but the reason I’m not including those here is because it’s not something I think every event is going to have to deal with. In fact, I know that these are some of the most variable costs (others I didn’t list above). The above expenses were the bare bones of what it required to run this event well.
Hope this was an interesting read, at the very least. Thanks to everyone who supported the tournament!
 
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Norway839 Posts
nice ![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/OBOnffZ.png)
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All in all I thought it was a fun event. Sure there were many problems with the stream, but it's not like other events don't have them *cough* Dreamhack *cough*. The only thing I was really disappointed in was the way to strict chat moderation. I mean getting a time out for writing zg <3 ? I don't think tahts is neccessary.
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So the overall budget of the tournament was about 25'000$. And you made around 250$ in Ad revenue, or 1% of the overall budget.
=> Maybe drop the ads completely and hope people will donate 1% more for an ad-free event?
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As someone who was able to go to the live event, it was a blast. The intimate atmosphere allowing interactions between fans and players/casters made this a lot more fun (and memorable) for me as an attendee compared to other esports events I've attended. It was a small thing, but Rifkin coming and sitting beside me when I was showing my cheerful on stream was really cool
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On September 01 2015 02:12 xdevilx2 wrote:
All in all I thought it was a fun event. Sure there were many problems with the stream, but it's not like other events don't have them *cough* Dreamhack *cough*. The only thing I was really disappointed in was the way to strict chat moderation. I mean getting a time out for writing zg <3 ? I don't think tahts is neccessary.
We've had about 3 or 4 complaints of similar nature. All I can say is we trust our mods and Partouf is the head mod in charge of determining abuse of power. Excessive zg <3 from the same person, or spamming of the nature, can be really fuckin weird, and I've had plenty of people be really weird and use the excuse 'but it was just a compliment!' or the like.
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I got banned for saying "Grom hype!" and I saw a ridiculous amount of people getting timed out for stuff that didn't really make sense. Messaged Partouf and got told to fuck off but a rogue mod unbanned me (won't be named) because he agreed there was no justification to the ban.
Other than that though, awesome event, awesome players, awesome casting, and I can't wait for my portrait!
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I agree on the fact that maybe the Open Bracket doesn't really need to be streamed, but I had a lot of fun playing in the Open Bracket. Removing it would be ( in my opinion ) pretty sad.
The venue was good for the event, I mean, you got a LAN center, what do you want more? The only problem was the Internet, I felt like the internet of the LAN center wasn't good enough for the number of computers in the place.
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I understand the need for rehearsals and being able to prep but to completly remove the open bracket(broadcast or actual OB) seems unnecesary. You guys could start the open bracket at 10am, open the doors for spectator at noon and start streaming/broadcasting the matches at noon giving you a 2-4 hour window to test out the stage and all that.
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On September 01 2015 03:12 desRow wrote:
I understand the need for rehearsals and being able to prep but to completly remove the open bracket(broadcast or actual OB) seems unnecesary. You guys could start the open bracket at 10am, open the doors for spectator at noon and start streaming/broadcasting the matches at noon giving you a 2-4 hour window to test out the stage and all that.
Maybe that would be a good compromise, but the open bracket really doesn't have a lot of hype, and a full day for production could be a big relief. It's more than just rehearsal and prep.
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Apologies for length, didn't mean to write this much-
TLDR- Room for improvement, but cause for optimism. Would love to see a second event.
Tournament Format
Format- I like having an open bracket and I definitely think you should keep it, I also am not keen on tournaments that invite lots of their players based on their popularity. Having said that I would have liked a system where there were a few invites but based on how well they had done in qualifiers. So if someone loses in the finals of one of the qualifiers and does well in another they might get an invite. Perhaps by removing some of the qualifier spots from the open bracket?
Whether you keep them offline depends on whether you want to nurture local talent so to speak. I don't mind that as long as there are invites based on merit. This maybe my Euro bias but the list of people that qualified was underwhelming to me. This is by no means a slight to those that qualified both through qualifiers and open bracket (Pengwin's games and interviews were great). It's just I had less enthusiasm to watch all the group stages especially and some of the knock out games. As an aside despite it being a Z v Z final, I really enjoyed it.
Venue, pricing, Crowd etc
The venue itself seemed pretty good to me, enough space and seating for people. I imagine its a lot less hassle to do it a LAN centre and would have been my choice for a first time event. Whilst there may have been tickets left certainly by the weekend the crowd looked enough for the event and were into it. I can't comment on price, I don't think WCS Cologne is very expensive either but people would likely pay more. Yours isn't the first tournament to not advertise tickets/venue very early and I think you have a far better reason than some of the others. The atmosphere seemed great btw.
Casters, Host
I as always really enjoyed the ZG + Rifkin combo, there's not much else to say on that  I enjoy crank when he casts as part of Olimoleague especially but thought he was a little nervous. Mal got better as the event went on. There's not much else to say as I know that you were forced to change the line up.
Viewership and Ad's
The viewership wasn't stellar but it was nothing to be distraught over either. Hitting 10,000 for a crowd funded SC2 stream, is not shabby at all. With a second event with the experience you will have gained and perhaps bigger names in the tourny I reckon you could grow your viewership. That Ad money is pitiful but seems to mirror other twitch/youtube reports I have seen. As a non adblocker I don't mind ads in the breaks but I would love it if the pre-roll's could be turned off.
Mod's
I've seen a couple of comments (mainly on reddit) about over-moderation of BTTV. I find it surprising that not being allowed to make comments well meaning or not about female casters would diminish your viewing experience. I can understand that perhaps compared to other channels there are things moderated that wouldn't be elsewhere, sometimes perhaps unnecessarily so. It's refreshing to have a channel which is arguably over-moderated than under-moderated and people say some pretty unnecessary stuff about women players/casters.
Closing Thoughts
I was wary of making this post as it might appear to be just a lot of criticism. This isn't the case and I enjoyed the tournament especially after the first day hiccups. I'd really like to see a second one and I think it could be even better, you have the core of something really good there.
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Very transparent and detailed write-up, future organizers take notice. While things didn't go 100% flawless it was a first attempt and it recovered well enough I would say. It was fairly unfortunate you had to compete against some big tournaments (e.g. ESL One for CS:GO and a major Pokemon tournament) but I did feel there could have been more promotion to really kick it into high gear even in competition. Either way, congratulations on hosting your first LAN and seeing it succeed makes me happy as you evolved from a small community stream for DreamHack to a full-fledged SC2 household name. Hope to see a new event soon!
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thanks for taking the time to do this detailed coverage.
Ticket pricing. Everyone, players and spectators, told us our tickets were too low-priced. We had no problem with that for this, as this was the ‘once in a lifetime blowout event so everyone should be welcome!!’, but if we’re looking toward future, sustainable events...we’re going to increase the prices. Not by so much it’s unfair! Just a little
raise the ticket prices.
On September 01 2015 02:56 Dickbutt wrote:
I got banned for saying "Grom hype!" and I saw a ridiculous amount of people getting timed out for stuff that didn't really make sense. Messaged Partouf and got told to fuck off but a rogue mod unbanned me (won't be named) because he agreed there was no justification to the ban.
On September 01 2015 02:51 ZombieGrub wrote:Show nested quote +On September 01 2015 02:12 xdevilx2 wrote:
All in all I thought it was a fun event. Sure there were many problems with the stream, but it's not like other events don't have them *cough* Dreamhack *cough*. The only thing I was really disappointed in was the way to strict chat moderation. I mean getting a time out for writing zg <3 ? I don't think tahts is neccessary. We've had about 3 or 4 complaints of similar nature. All I can say is we trust our mods and Partouf is the head mod in charge of determining abuse of power. Excessive zg <3 from the same person, or spamming of the nature, can be really fuckin weird, and I've had plenty of people be really weird and use the excuse 'but it was just a compliment!' or the like.
i think your MODs are too strict so i stopped my basetradetv twitch.tv subscription.
it is the clearest and most direct method of communication.
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I watched all three days and I liked the event. The location looked nice, and the printed banners and artwork had a professional feel to it. The venue looked a lot more spacious and clean than any internet cafe I've ever seen.
Casting
Rifkin and ZG were awesome in their casts, and their casting got better as we got deeper into the brackets. Rifkin was good at letting his co-caster finish their points, something he has improved a ton since the beginning of the year. I however felt that Crank detracted from the cast. He is a good player and has good insights, but with his lack of confidence in his language, he stops the flow of the cast so that the co-caster has to build up the energy level over and over again. I know that he can make great reads of the game, but I don't feel like his points were communicated to the viewer in a way that added to the cast.
The loss of Nathanias was unfortunate. Nate has two abilities that make him invaluable as an offline caster. He can talk for days about the game without losing the viewers interest, which really helps during technical difficulties or when there is a lull in the action. He is also a master at setting up his co-caster in ways that lets the other guy present his points without pressure and makes him look smart at the same time. I feel that his experience would have brought lots of extra eyeballs to the event as well.
Livibee was fine, and I enjoyed her casts with ZG. When ZG casts with Rifkin she relaxes a bit because she knows that Rifkin will keep talking no matter what, but when she casts with Livibee its fun to see ZG effortlessly switch from analyst to play by play. Something she doesn't get to show off very often.
Viewership
The crowd looked like they had lots of fun. I expected so much cringe from the Catallena dance that I was ready to hide under a big pillow, but everyone enjoyed it so it turned into goofy more than cringey. I think the size of the audience was fine, remember that Red Bull and Gfinity doesn't exactly draw record crowds these days either. Only WCS seems to have the power to draw big crowds these days.
One criticism from me would be that the event seemed to be geared more towards the offline crowd than the online one. I think this is a departure from what Basetrade is really built on. Since the start, Basetrade built its following on the endless hours of casting where Rifkin and ZG would sit and banter while waiting for the tournament games to start. The main streams would go to a holding screen, but Basetrade would have Rifkin telling bad jokes and ZG ripping him for.. well.. everything, which made the wait between games much more fun than the official streams. I would rather see Rifkin and ZG banter or play an archon mode game during downtimes, than see a crowdshot for 45 minutes.
The offline numbers were a bit disappointing of course, but I think that is partly because of Teamliquid doing nothing to help publicize the event. No featured threads, nothing about Liquid´Ret playing, no analysis or interviews. I think next time you guys gotta grease the wheels with TL a bit, throw them an invite to the event and gently remind them that they were once grassroots as well.
Players
Desrow vs. Penguin and JD vs Hyun were so much fun to watch. I think a few more invites would be a good idea for the next event. It doesn't detract from the Basetrade model in my opinion.
Next event
I think the audience is exhausted from the 4 months of Kickstarter assault :p Perhaps by springtime is a good time, when LOTV has stabilized? California perhaps?
Conclusions
I think this event did amazing things for the existing BTTV audience. I don't think it attracted a lot of new viewers, but I feel like the BTTV viewers have really started to build a little dysfunctional fanclub family with you guys. Destiny spoke about creating level 1, level 2 and level 3 type viewers. I think you guys gained a lot of level 1 type fans with this event -- fans who will watch Basetrade no matter what you stream. Fans who will follow you to whatever lies beyond Starcraft.
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i do not think SC2 based live events are financially viable in the "Greater Toronto Area" any longer. put your next event some place else. things in toronto have dropped off big time since that first NASL event in Mississauga/Toronto.
i didn't think Toronto was a good idea , right from the get go... but hey.. what do i know.. i only live here.
On September 01 2015 01:50 ZombieGrub wrote:
Venue/ticket timing: We had quite a few people say ‘if only I knew the exact location/ticket price, I would’ve been able to come!’. And even a few more say ‘if only I knew the exact dates sooner, I would’ve been able to come!’ So, obviously, we need to have the venue/tickets locked down waaaay sooner. That’s something we can certainly do, as we didn’t plan on this venue being as ‘iffy’ for as long as it was.
don't fall for these excuses. don't make the rookie marketing mistake of valuing words over actions. basically, don't listen to these excuse makers. all that matters is how much money u can extract not how many kind words you get. there will be a million new excuses for your next event.
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Thank you for free sc2 web/worldwide hiat
ty for awesome filler content and "staff" professionalism and especially thanks for free chat!
<3
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Hey guys, as a player who loved the open bracket, I'd suggest keeping it and getting community streams to pick up the slack. This will let you guys have the open bracket streamed, build a bit of a story, and use the extra day to setup.
GL HF, and I loved the event.
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Really enjoyed the event, the casting and feel of the tournament was really fun. I found the games to be a bit on the boring side with it basically being a three way zvz fest between Hydra, jeadong and hyun. But I suppose that is not really something under your control.
Great job overall, I really hope we get another one of these events!
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On September 01 2015 04:33 JimmyJRaynor wrote:
i do not think SC2 based live events are financially viable in the "Greater Toronto Area" any longer. put your next event some place else. things in toronto have dropped off big time since that first NASL event in Mississauga/Toronto.
i didn't think Toronto was a good idea , right from the get go... but hey.. what do i know.. i only live here.
Where else would you go? As long as you're looking to do it in Canada, Toronto and Montreal are basically your two choices, and the Montreal guys tend to come to Toronto events and Toronto tends to go to Montreal events.
But with Blizzard involved i believe there's some legal issues with Quebec still, so I'm not sure how that factors in.
There's nothing really in Vancouver, Calgary or Edmonton in terms of an SC2 crowd.
Over 25% of Canada's population is within a 2 hour drive from Toronto, with Montreal and Ottawa close too. If you can't do it there, you really just can't anywhere.
With that said...they Did do it...and it turned out it was financially viable, Toronto's hosted 4 Premier tournaments now, if it wasn't working out they'd have stopped by now.
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On September 01 2015 07:22 EnderSword wrote:
Where else would you go? As long as you're looking to do it in Canada, Toronto and Montreal are basically your two choices, and the Montreal guys tend to come to Toronto events and Toronto tends to go to Montreal events.
But with Blizzard involved i believe there's some legal issues with Quebec still, so I'm not sure how that factors in.
good points, maybe no where in Canada is viable.
With that said...they Did do it...and it turned out it was financially viable, Toronto's hosted 4 Premier tournaments now, if it wasn't working out they'd have stopped by now.
we've seen a steady decline over time though.
was it "viable" because of the kickstarter campaign? or was it viable because 300 people paid $80 a ticket to watch the event? ticket sales did not bring in much cash.
there was talk in the OP about raising ticket prices. if prices go up and the event is held in the greater toronto area i think attendance will go down. and no real increase in ticket revenue will occur.
there might be no where in canada that you can bring in 10K or more in ticket sales...
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EPT
