EPTOur initial philosophy was pretty simple, GSL level players and 1080p / 60 fps streams. You see, in 2015 this was not very easy. GPU encoding was probably around iirc, but CPU encoding was preferred. With the quick movements and massive armies of SC2, 1080/60 was very difficult to execute. Element and Bobby (casters/big brains) were absolute wizards. Their understanding of computer architecture and windows processes was unreal, For our first tournament, and for some time after, we streamed 8k bitrate at 1080/60 with a pre-Ryzen AMD CPU that had no business performing that well. We peaked around 5k viewers, it was insane. There was viewbot drama at the time, but hand to heart I did not viewbot that or any event, I have no knowledge of anyone doing that, regardless it still felt great. I can remember other organizers asking how we do it, or read comments that we had some godlike setup. The truth is that Element and Bobby stripped windows to the bare minimum, overclocked the shit out of an old CPU, and had the courage to try. Their talent was truly special. The official WCS series broadcasted in 720p/30, and I always felt awkward when a chatter would call them out and compare our production quality. We did progress to better hardware, but the initial splash was pure talent. Ultimately, we wanted to produce events, not necessarily cast them. We built things up and actually did several LAN events remotely, PSISTORM and OSC for example.
Technology has improved so much, basically anyone can stream 1080/60 these days with GPU encoding, but I'll be damned if I don't have something out there that gives Element and Bobby their due respect for production quality, value, and courage. I hope they see this, and I hope they are well. They were loyal skype users, it took me forever to get them on discord, which they literally never get on now, so it's been quite some time I've connected with them.
Long overdue post, but thanks for the memories gents. Thank you to anyone who watched and participated in our silly formats like pro vs joe. Thanks to PSISTORM, SC2ReplayStats, Matcherino, and others, you guys are all good to the core. Thank you to our competitors, I wish we could have had a better working relationship, but I hold no ill will.
EDIT: Added more context. Also shoutout to Lichter, that was a thing once. Also to dfs, who forgot to ban me after i doged our DOTA2 match, thanks.
