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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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You guys did a damn good job from what I saw on stream.
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That may sound too euro focused, but I would have love to see few invites to have a good balance between EU / NA.
But good job, the atmosphere of the tournament was really great.
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I already typed out a short review right after the event @ http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/sc2-tournaments/493186-hell-its-aboot-time-day-3?page=30#600
but here's some comments on the costcutting questions;
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.
I'm probably the only one that thinks this, but I personally love the open brackets usually more than the later rounds, because I like fresh blood being showcased in possibly exciting games. But sure, if it doesn't get viewed much, and production costs can be cut by it, I guess economically it's the right choice. Though you could, and perhaps even should, consider letting other channels do the coverage that don't have that kind of overhead.
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.
I'm glad people say so because of their #passion, but I would really stick to supply and demand in this case. There's no need to scare away potential visitors or players by creating a hurdle that will leave tournament seats empty and deprived of new/young/broke players that might produce great games.
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How much of the materials purchased were saved and can be reused for a future HIAT edition? Obviously not stuff like pizza and ice cream, but scrims, backdrops, audio and video equipment, etc? Also, if you're doing a small event at which only a hundred or so people are expected to attend, how much use would a vendor really expect to get out of setting up a booth? My impression was that they'd save their booth juice for events with larger in-person crowds.
Sorry about the ZG <3 stuff.
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United States7483 Posts
Thanks for the comments, the financial information is quite interesting and most likely very useful for other potential organizers going forwards.
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On September 01 2015 07:58 JimmyJRaynor wrote:Show nested quote +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. Show nested quote +
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...
I think if you're relying on actual ticket sales to cover the costs, there's not really anywhere on Earth that would be viable, let alone in Canada.
You really need the money from sponsorships and developers as well.
In the case of this event, there's the fixed costs of a venue and production etc... and the large variable of the prize pool was mostly what increased, the original goal I think was 5k, getting a lot more went mostly into the prize pool.
I do think though that tickets to this type of thing aren't very elastic though, Raising ticket prices would obviously deter some people, but for things like WCS and HIAT people came from hours away, got hotels, took flights in, a guy from England flew in to watch... And for many people in the city, it's a big social event, after 4-5 years anyone in Toronto who plays SC2 much basically knows each other as well as a lot of people from out of town. I think you'd find many of those people wouldn't really care about the price within reason.
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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.
Other than that though, awesome event, awesome players, awesome casting, and I can't wait for my portrait!
I doubt this happened.
Hoofit: Thanks so much for the feedback!
lost_patrol: The problem with being on camera instead of the wait screen is a couple of things. One, it's a lot more taxing to do a live event, especially as the main hosts. The softbox lights alone made being on camera for more than 10 minutes uncomfortable. We had other stuff to do running around, and barely had enough time as-is to mingle with the crowd. Additionally, much of the downtime was to fix things that would've made the banter awkward - "hey remember that joke- wait a minute, we need to restart the stream" or "hahah real funn- oh what was that production? Be quiet for a while? Okay" etc etc. We obviously appreciate the online crowd and were built from it, but I think for live events we have no choice but to focus on the offline crowd more. And that's okay for once or twice every year.
The next event date and time is far in the future and already being considered.
Ppjack: Maybe, but it's feedback we'll consider. 
Partouf: The thing is, people that are coming won't be scared away because it's $40 for spectators instead of $27 for the weekend (hypothetically), we're guessing. Most already planned their work around it and bought flights and hotels. The only people who would be on the fence for a slight increase in ticket price would be the people who are local and only going for one or two days (which would still have the day passes available at a lower cost).
Pontius Pirate The merch booth is a fair point, but a lot of pitches in SC2 right now feel like 'we're small, but we're older and richer and want to be more supportive of people we like than other e-sports'. While a t-shirt company would probably have better luck with as many people as possible (who can spare $30 on a whim), an expensive watch or chair company might have better luck appealing directly to limited people. We'll think more on this.
As far as re-usable stuff, unfortunately not a lot. The carbot backdrops can be re-used, but we're guessing our future tournaments will be in the US and hopefully with more sponsors (so the banners would be out of date). Headsets and webcams (for players) are what I can think of.
Thanks for all the comments/feedback everyone! Keep it coming if you have any ideas.
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Fuckin' ticket counter. He can go suck a dick.
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On September 01 2015 10:09 EnderSword wrote:Show nested quote +On September 01 2015 07:58 JimmyJRaynor wrote: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... I think if you're relying on actual ticket sales to cover the costs, there's not really anywhere on Earth that would be viable, let alone in Canada. You really need the money from sponsorships and developers as well. In the case of this event, there's the fixed costs of a venue and production etc... and the large variable of the prize pool was mostly what increased, the original goal I think was 5k, getting a lot more went mostly into the prize pool. I do think though that tickets to this type of thing aren't very elastic though, Raising ticket prices would obviously deter some people, but for things like WCS and HIAT people came from hours away, got hotels, took flights in, a guy from England flew in to watch... And for many people in the city, it's a big social event, after 4-5 years anyone in Toronto who plays SC2 much basically knows each other as well as a lot of people from out of town. I think you'd find many of those people wouldn't really care about the price within reason.
combine this with the fact that many travelled to be there.. and it shows that toronto is just another possible venue and not some "epicenter" of sc2 esports activity.
so little cash was made from ticket sales off of locals and there really isn't much to lose by trying some place other than TO.
On September 01 2015 11:28 ninazerg wrote:
Fuckin' ticket counter. He can go suck a dick.
the poor innocent , but honest , maybe too honest, ticket-counter-guy is taking an awful beating.
i think someone made 5 alt reddit accounts in order to trash the poor guy.
when Vince Mcmahon Jr. first took over the WWF his solution to crappy crowds was to really darken the arena and it gave the wresting ring .. this sort of ominous, almost foreboding feel... and you couldn't tell the arena was only 30% full.
maybe for BTTV's next event they can really darken the audience area aka 1970s and early 1980s WWF.
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It's interesting to read all the different things that go into these events. The ice cream truck was a great idea! I hope I can make it to your next event.
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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.
From a viewer's perspective, open bracket stream is vital so I can be hyped about a dark horse that might make a great run to the round of 8 who should've been knocked out in day one. Without it, the only story is the foreigners losing on day 2, predictable wins on day 3. Day 1 gives us hope and chaos.
It sounds to me like the biggest issue is that the two of you are production, event organizers, *and* casters. My solution would have been to let livibee, crank, tempo, and feardragon do all of day 1 casting. Or even better - casters who aren't there. Nate/Rotti/ToD might have been convinced to cast if they could do it from home and just get olimoley to invite them to the games. Stream that in both their streams and basetrade.
TL;DR We need *a* stream of day one open brackets - but it doesn't have to be a live stream from the event
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Thanks for writing your thoughts in such length. It's rare to see the organizer's point of view and have them respond to the feedback directly.
I'd suggest that you release a rough schedule way earlier. Now I believe the schedule was first released 3 days before the event. Having at least the starting times and estimated end times for each day 3-4 weeks in advance would be great. Early schedule lets people plan better for themselves and organize stuff like barcrafts and other screenings. Optimal case would be to release a rough schedule at the same time as the event is released, so each news site can include it as well and spread the info.
About the format, I also agree that an open bracket is a really nice addition. If you have the resources (PCs, space, time) to do it, then go for it.
Thanks for doing HIAT and I'm looking forward to your next offline event which surely will be even better.
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I am reposting what I wrote in the day 3 LR thread for HIAT:
"So a few quick reflections on the tournament. It wasn't exactly what I had hoped for in terms of viewers, attendees, play and so on. There were many good and cool things though, it never felt contrived, the BasetradeTV silliness went over well in a live studio, the giveaways and dancing were never awkward but pretty fun and in general it was nice to see that what is BTTV worked well. It was good that no big community figures came in and stole the show for example but that it was Crank and Livibee who aided with casting.
I think the slight disappointment I felt was due to two factors, a) the relative decrease in SC2 popularity. Really, really few tournaments have an actual decent offline crowd. The IAT crowd was really not bad but if you're just like 30 people or so you can never really get that crowd feel. B) Lack of hype players. Jaedong is a big favorite and I suppose Huk is pretty cool for the hometown audience but the tournament lacked it's Kespa heroes. Not that I know how to specifically deal with that but it's obviously part of why it only broke 10k viewers at the end and this thread is only 30 pages. TL could also have done it's share with a preview writeup (but I realize that writers have lots of stuff to do).
Anyway, this felt like a step in the right direction but it's not quite there yet. It was good but not excellent."
My comment on star players might not be entirely accurate, after all the MSI had plenty of those but their viewership was still below that of a big premier tournament. So perhaps its a matter of branding or caster personalities? Who knows.
I think for the printing that you mentioned there are a few ways to cut those costs. Perhaps it's not too necessary now that you have a backdrop and whatnot for HIAT but it's quite possible to make a sketch in photoshop and then project it onto a fabric and first sketch the outlines with a pen and then paint it the old fashioned way. Then the costs are just the costs of fabric and paint, that can be done for flags, banners and similar. It's basically what (self respecting) football fans around the world do. Why not have a competition for the best photoshop image and then paint it yourselves? It could also be quite cool to have more flags and banners hanging around the venue, akin to how the International looks.
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I would probably have enjoyed the event more if I could stomach Rifkin.
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Bisutopia19200 Posts
ZG, you are kicking ass. Keep what you're doing and success will continue to find you.
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On September 01 2015 18:44 Heartland wrote:
I think the slight disappointment I felt was due to two factors, a) the relative decrease in SC2 popularity. Really, really few tournaments have an actual decent offline crowd. The IAT crowd was really not bad but if you're just like 30 people or so you can never really get that crowd feel. B) Lack of hype players. Jaedong is a big favorite and I suppose Huk is pretty cool for the hometown audience but the tournament lacked it's Kespa heroes.
HuK just standing around at the Eaton Centre at Yonge and Dundas in downtown TO in XMas 2010 drew a much bigger crowd than HIAT.
Toronto was really good 2+ years ago for SC2 esports.. now its just another place.
hopefully, HuK monetized his fame and has a few hundred grand stashed away... he is a hellava great guy ... and a good CoH player
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combine this with the fact that many travelled to be there.. and it shows that toronto is just another possible venue and not some "epicenter" of sc2 esports activity.
so little cash was made from ticket sales off of locals and there really isn't much to lose by trying some place other than TO.
But the point is it IS an epicentre, 4 of Canada's top 15 cities are within 90 minutes, Canada's 2nd and 4th largest city are several hours away, New York, Buffalo Detroit, Boston etc... are fairly close too.
Part of the reason it's been popular is because it Is in the middle of a population cluster. That's the same reason Columbus gets chosen in the US. There's obviously some other locations in the US similar, but not in Canada.
I think again you're somehow stuck on the idea of this event trying to be run by ticket money, it wasn't. WCS the month before got a large portion of its revenue from tickets, but that was never the intention when an internet cafe was chosen as the venue for HIAT.
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On September 02 2015 06:50 EnderSword wrote:
I think again you're somehow stuck on the idea of this event trying to be run by ticket money, it wasn't. WCS the month before got a large portion of its revenue from tickets, but that was never the intention when an internet cafe was chosen as the venue for HIAT.
then why do they even bring up the possibility of raising ticket prices in the OP? why discuss the money issue through the entire post? why excuse away MODs because they aer only "volunteers"?
whether its UFC 129, Wrestlemania, or the Toronto Blue Jays... they're here for the cash. and i got no problem with that. everyone has to make money considering the time and energy they are spending... unfortunately, toronto has dried up for the UFC, WWE, and SC2 eSports.
the HIAT crew works hard and they deserve to get paid man.
i think you do good work as well. i hope you get some cash to man.. because your time is worth something.
and if there is no cash to be made from holding an event here then its just another random place... i hope HIAT follows the money... where ever that may be.
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Really enjoyed reading this, its something I'd like to try throwing, on a much, much smaller scale sometime after my years in school. Thanks for showing off all your work and at least rough estimates on numbers dude.
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My responses are mostly to the posts as I was away for nearly the entire weekend this was going on, and was a little annoyed to miss it.
- Start the Open Bracket "main" broadcast at either the Ro8 or Ro4.
- Have community streams a few rounds before, but it's probably not hugely important.
- Have someone keep an eye on the "interesting" games played in the Open Bracket. Then cut a quick highlight video and have someone blind-cast the highlights. There is much room for hilariousness, if you have someone that can churn out quick highlight reels.
- Add one of a stretch goals/donation goal/subscriber goal for "no Ads". (The rise of so much Flash/advertising beacons on websites has made AdBlock pretty necessary most of the time.) It could raise more money, probably.
- Basic corporate sponsors can go pretty easy, if you have the contacts. I'm sure Redbull would send you some cases for pretty minimal exposure. Considering the size of their advertising budgets, it's really about having contacts with the companies. (If you're holding the next one in the USA, figure out a Pizza company and try them as well.)
- The next incarnation should go better, since you have both experience and some name recognition. The first Homestory Cups weren't massive, but got really hype very quickly. There's the whole "brand building" aspect. Just randomly having a tournament has rarely gotten a big viewer counts.
The other thing is that, while there are fan favorites, I'm not sure there's anyone that's truly a huge, huge personality to draw people. This isn't during the ascendancy stage of the game, so it's about finding players that will bring good games. Or will talk a lot of trash. Both work.
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The main reason I didnt watch much was, a bit the FPS issues but mostly the player pool. Only 2-3 zergs were of a high enough tier. Dont know if theres much you can do about that.
Also if you want more ad revenue, along with other streamers, pressure twitch to finish that damn flash player removal...
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ZombieGrub is smart and very cute. If I met her in RL I would ask her to join me for a cup of coffee. Just wanted to say that, also I enjoyed watching HIAT. =)
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I absolutely loved watching the event, Loved the overall feel and had fun in the twitch chat during the bit of downtime. I imagine the crowd had fun as well I don't see ANY other tournaments going for such a VIP experience as you 2 pulled off and was so jealous I wasn't there!
For future open brackets, I like the idea of starting the casting at the ro8 or so and have community casters do the initial phase. Highlight clips of some of the earlier games would then be cool if its possible to pull off. I do love watching the open brackets, but I can understand the cost factor and that seems like a good compromise.
As far as some of the people complaining about over-moderation. I mean meh... BTTV has created, imo, the absolute best twitch community and I've been saying it for more than a year now(love my partouf coin <3). Occasionally I think its difficult to decipher whether someone is being sincere or trolling, its the internet and you cant tell the manner in which someone is talking..typing.. whatever.. But either way, I mean,c'mon.. a comment being deleted.. big deal, some seem to take it so personally..Hell everyone can un-delete it. As far as people being banned, I haven't seen one that wasn't justified. How many other channels can you find that aren't full of people talking crap or saying ridiculous garbage just for shock value or to get a reaction? Can get enough of that in CS:GO lol..
Thank you so much Rif & ZG and everyone else for putting on an awesome event and cant wait for the next one!
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On September 02 2015 07:10 JimmyJRaynor wrote:Show nested quote +On September 02 2015 06:50 EnderSword wrote:
I think again you're somehow stuck on the idea of this event trying to be run by ticket money, it wasn't. WCS the month before got a large portion of its revenue from tickets, but that was never the intention when an internet cafe was chosen as the venue for HIAT.
then why do they even bring up the possibility of raising ticket prices in the OP? why discuss the money issue through the entire post? why excuse away MODs because they aer only "volunteers"? whether its UFC 129, Wrestlemania, or the Toronto Blue Jays... they're here for the cash. and i got no problem with that. everyone has to make money considering the time and energy they are spending... unfortunately, toronto has dried up for the UFC, WWE, and SC2 eSports. the HIAT crew works hard and they deserve to get paid man. i think you do good work as well. i hope you get some cash to man.. because your time is worth something. and if there is no cash to be made from holding an event here then its just another random place... i hope HIAT follows the money... where ever that may be.
Money can be exchanged for goods and services. The typical model for an event would be tickets + sponsorships + Stream revenues etc... you wouldn't just say 'this revenue stream doesn't cover all the costs, so I won't care about it at all'
Not everyone is in it for cash, in fact the vast majority of people who do these things are not, most of the money paid to the crew doing production and stuff just went back into a non-profit esports company to hold more tournaments and stuff. Most of us have...jobs, like we're adults with careers and stuff, we do it and take vacation time to do it because it's fun to do.
It just doesn't make sense to look at this type of community funded as some attempt to make money, that's just so out of touch with any reality.
Toronto is still the biggest SC2 hub in Canada.... period. It might be better if they were able to do it in like, Berlin or Seoul... but given that it's a Canadian event, that a whole tournament streaming and production crew lives in Toronto, that like 8 GMs live in the city with about 20 more within a 4-5 hour drive, and the largest population of any region in Canada...where the fuck else would you do it? Everywhere else would just lower attendance and add to the cost.
This idea of 'follow the money' for what is for most people involved a volunteer hobby is just plain childish, and you don't seem to have any viable alternative to doing it exactly where it was done.
Money is discussed because it was a crowd funded event, they're accountable for the money and how it was used, they're reporting the financial outcome to be transparent to the donors.
I can't even figure out what you're ultimately getting at, you don't make any sense, you're speaking insanely vaguely and mostly saying things that apply world wide... UFC and WWE viewership is just down period, UFC peaked in 2008-2009, and WWE rating have been falling about 15% a year for the past 3 years...you can say 'viewership in this city is lower'...it's lower everywhere, you face the exact same results in any other city. You offer no alternatives, and it sounds like even if you did, the same issue would apply to another city, but cost more to do.
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lets be honest - Gina was banning people left and right for NOTHING. I don't ever say anything in chat, but it was a disgusting display of abuse of power.
<3 ZG
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EPT
