EPTI can't remember the last time I had that much fun casting Starcraft. After casting literally thousands of games, they all start to merge together. Only a few really stick out in my mind, most of them involved Axiom either winning or... more often than not, losing at a key moment. Those were the games where the passion was at its height for obvious reasons.
I think I'll remember this tournament for a while as a collage of stories and throw-caution-to-the-wind fun. I'll remember it for + Show Spoiler +
Nerchios defeat of Dear.
I'll remember it for Stephanos ridiculous run, taking out ByuN, Nerchio and herO
juggernaut of Innovation, who in a hilarious twist, was just in it to get some money for his birthday that day.
I've thought for a while that SC2 has a story problem. The changes to WCS have made that problem more obvious. Tournaments feel like islands with closed borders. You see the same players but their year long journey to the Blizzcon finals isn't something that is well told and when it is mentioned, it's often in the context of dry, sterile point values. A successful sport needs stories. It needs streaks. It needs upsets. It needs relateable characters. It needs local heroes to root for. It need villains you just love to hate. All of these things are very much in the hands of the tournament and the casters and I think as of late, we haven't been doing as well as we could on that front.
Kings was inspired by a desire to change that and in order to do that, we had to radically change the format to something that lended itself to creating all of the things listed above, in a way that was easy to understand. SC2 still has casual viewers, lots of them actually, they're just not tuning in to every event. Of course they aren't, they're casual after all. To attract casual viewers, the story needs to be accessible right off the bat and the action called in a way that's easy to understand. Traditional tournament formats have a lot going on at once. They are intimidating in that regard, difficult to track. Sometimes you might not even get to watch your favourite player because there were 8+ games going on at once and that one didn't get streamed. The experience of connecting to a player and following them can be a frustrating one. I've always liked small events and went out of my way to create them. One match at a time, simple stories that can be understood and followed. Kings really felt like we were going back to our roots of the "1-day invitational", where the action starts and finishes in one, easily digestible day, with a story that carries on logically to the next event with whomever remains King at the end.
Does BO1 mean anything?
I think the better question is. Does it mean anything even if BO1 doesn't mean anything? Does it actually matter? People love to debate over who is better. People love "what ifs?". What is + Show Spoiler +
Stephano and herO
Those aren't questions we're here to answer. It's a shame they don't get answered more often now that Koreans and foreigners rarely meet in LAN environments, but really if the goal is to create entertainment it's not really our job to answer them. BO1 has been largely reviled for its inconsistency. Anything can happen in a BO1, a better player may very well not win. Longer series tend to promote the idea that the better player wins. At least, that's what we assume at any rate. We never know if the loser is just having an off-day and no length of BO-series is gonna fix that. I think for our format, making every match mean something was a goal that we achieved. By having mystery players and nobody but myself knowing who the next player would be, we created intrigue and interest in-between matches. Rather than downtime being the necessary evil between games that all tournaments have to deal with, downtime became exciting. Viewers were eager to see who the next player was, maybe even more than seeing the match itself. It was also a great opportunity to tell the story better. Give some information about the player, that players history, why this next match mattered. The format lends itself so well to that, there's no such thing as a low-stakes match when every map pays out and one loss is all you need to leave the tournament entirely.
King of the Hill is not the messiah
Maybe I'm making it out like a KotH format is the absolute best thing. It's totally not. If every tournament was a King of the Hill it would be just awful. It's cool because it's not that common. It spices up what is otherwise a line-up of very similar tournaments with very similar players. If anything I think that's what grass-roots efforts should be focused on, creating something different.There's so much room for cool things to be done with Starcraft 2. The "optimal competitive format" has been figured out for years now and that's totally fine. When there's big money and WCS points on the line, you should create a tournament whose format and rules are setup to be as fair as possible. In our case though, we created a tournament that wasn't fair. It wasn't setup to have a margin for error, matchups weren't randomly determined, they weren't seeded. We threw players into the lions den because we could and because it was entertaining. We threw them in for the possibility of an upset and we got just that. Upsets are great stories. Streaks are great stories. If we have to manipulate who is playing who to get them, we will absolutely do that, because we can and because this is entertainment first, competition second.
A surprising lack of problems
Getting 21 players to show up at the right time is a pain in the ass, but there were surprisingly few problems on the day. We had a couple of players show up late but the way we organized it was to put the players into 5 "blocks". Each block had a call time, an estimated "show up and be available now" time so nobody would have to sit around for 6 hours waiting for a game. We exhausted one player block before moving onto the next, which is why some of the matchups ended up the way they were. Rather than picking for the pool of 20, we were actually picking from a pool of 4-5 at any given time. This still gave us some flexibility though if a player was late or AFK, we were able to switch to another player and keep downtime to a minimum. That could change for future events if there's a killer matchup that I really want to see happen and the players are in different blocks but both online at the time. The blocks are really just for player convenience, they're not set in stone.
We did have 2 players "on the bench" who were promised slots for next time in return for sitting there for 6 hours being "available" just in case, simply because we feared there would be a no-show or two. There wasn't, so perhaps our fears were unjustified. It does mean that next month we will have a couple of underdogs in the mix, Root`SoLo and Pandabearme. Whether or not they will be fed to King Innovation remains to be seen. Who knows what can happen in a Bo1? Seems like a great opportunity to make a name for oneself. I'm not sure if we'll have anyone on the bench for the next event. Worst comes to worst and we get a no-show, I think just going to my B.net list and dragging someone in last minute will not actually be that hard. The number of players that want a shot at this event seems to be larger than those that don't at this point.
Numbers?
Not much to complain about on that front. According to Fuzic.nl we peaked at 31,985 concurrent viewers with 161,839 viewer hours over the 8 hour broadcast. Twitch stats reveal that we had just over 85,000 unique viewers during the event. We were the #2 ranked event in July, just behind the Dreamhack finals. For an online only tournament to be that competitive with big offline events is massive for us, not to mention very humbling indeed. Once the VoDs are out that will no doubt put the event on the map for a lot more people too, which will give us some nice momentum moving into next month.
What to expect next month?
More of that, basically. There's not much I think we need to change. Would be nice to get a cooler "player unveiling" animation than the one we have. Some cooler intro music. Make sure we keep getting awesome players. Make sure we dodge Proleague so we can get those awesome players. Convince KT to come play this time (they were busy prepping Proleague). Get some more foreigners in the mix. I'd love to have a "stats guy" feeding us cool information to augment the stories of what's going on. A system like The International used to use with stats pop-ups is not impossible. Tricky considering I do all the production while also trying to cast, but not impossible to rig up. Otherwise, it's really just a case of trying to ride the momentum from this event into the next one and try to make it even bigger and cooler than before. We have funding for 5 more of these. God I'd love to do one live at some point... with like... ring intros and stuff.. That'd be nuts. One step at a time.
Thanks to
CranK who shouldered way more of the burden for this event than he should have. He cast the Korean stream and he was the main liason with most of the Korean players.
Nathanias for excellent co-casting, stepping in for Geoff at the last minute.
Olivia for handling the admin of the entire event without a single problem. As always, clean, efficient and quick, which is exactly what an event like this needs to keep its momentum going.
Genna for keeping me sane and liasing with a few of the foreign players. Also for that Chicken Pad See-ew at the end because I was bloody hungry.
O'Gaming for the french commentary
Alicia for co-commentating the Korean stream.
Stephen from KeSPA for being instrument in the involvement of many of the Proleague teams.
Cara from Blizzard for doing a HELL of a lot of paperwork to put this whole thing together.
Amy, Tim, Christopher, Adrian, David and Andrew from Blizzard for all their help facilitating it.
All of the players for putting on some great matches.
All of you for showing up to watch, making our event one of the most successful online tournaments of all time.
![[image loading]](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BUwZpKRCEAA_YI3.png)
