EPT-
* This post in audio form because that's lots of words!
* Replay pack (spoiler-free)
* Tournament info and donation page
* SCI Master Playlist, relatively spoiler free
* Twitch.tv Channel
It's that time again folks, another SHOUTcraft Invitational is over and it's time to analyse what went right and what went wrong to improve for next time around. As always, this will be long and often full of boring technical/financial stuff. This is for the sake of transparency and accountability, so please feel free to skip past it if you just wanna hear about the games. There will be some spoilers.
Firstly, how many people did we get watching in comparison to SCI2?
* 14617 SCI2 Day 1 average concurrents
* 15386 SCI2 Day 2 average concurrents
* 189730 SCI2 Day 1 Total views
* 299415 SCI2 Day 2 Total views
* 14789 SCI3 Day 1 average concurrents
* 14109 SCI3 Day 2 average concurrents
* 156531 SCI3 Day 1 Total views
* 255443 SCI 3 Day 2 Total views
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While average concurrents were around the same at approximately 15,000, peaking at 23,000 (also very similar to SCI2), video views overall were lower, with almost 300,000 on the final day of SCI2 but only 255443 on the final day of SCI3. Honestly, I have no clue what "video views" actually is, it doesn't seem like that it's uniques, so I'm not really sure that number actually matters. I would like to see Justin.tv provide a more useful figure overall, for instance how many "unique viewers" we received over the course of the tournament.
I would put the slightly lower views down to the awkward time for Americans, plus the potential effect of the September 11th anniversary. We started the show 3 hours earlier than SCI2 due to how unpleasant SCI2s finals became for Socke. That said, I think we may have overreacted somewhat to how long SCI2 overran. In reality, SCI2's final day overran because we only got 3 Best of 5s done on the first day. There were delays and some clashes on Day 1 (part of the delay was the ridiculously long series between Morrow and SelecT) that caused the final match to be carried over to Day 2. That didn't happen here, in fact the first day was done in under 6 hours. We suffered a 1 hour delay due to WCG Ukraine on Day 1, when Strelok was delayed and unable to start his match on time. We then suffered a further hour delay on Day 2 when White-ra had to play his Loser Bracket finals match against Dimaga at WCG Ukraine. Regardless, the tournament ended before 7pm BST, less than 7 hours after it began. This indicates to me that we have a bit more legroom to push it forward a bit so it's at a little more America-friendly time, which will increase viewership.
Ad revenue generated over the course of the tournament stands at $450.87 on the first day and $480.21 on the second. This is a pretty good figure and beat July significantly, where we raised $347.53 on Day 1 and $238.34 on Day 2. This is as a result of Justin.tv fixing the commercial system, which was prone to breaking down before they implemented the Twitch.tv console with push-button commercials rather than the unreliable chat command. Thanks for that guys, it's a life-saver. Overall ad-revenue is on course to be a record breaker this month. We're not even half way through the month yet and we've already raised $1,131.23. I will try to stream as much as possible this month to push that figure over $2k, I do have some events I need to attend including Dreamhack Valencia and Eurogamer Expo, but aside from that, all is clear for yet more gold-league flailing for eSports dollars.
Our donation count for this tournament stands at $2427.87. In addition last month, I raised $1403.73 in ad revenue, which is actually higher than the $1050-1250 I estimated in the post-mortem for the second event. To make matters even rosier for the tournament's finances, we now have our subscriber system, which allows a $5 a month subscription to the SHOUTcraft Twitch.tv channel, which gives a couple of nice benefits. While the donation amounts may have been lower this time around, many more chose to subscribe instead, providing a stable revenue flow for the forseeable future. This recurring revenue current stands at $1250 every month, assuming people stay subscribed. Obviously this will vary as the subscriber numbers change. The next tournament is guaranteed to be another $5000 event, there is no question about that.
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Financing for next tournament breakdown
of $5000 prizepool
* Donations = $2427.87
* Ad revenue = $1403.73
* Subscriptions = $1250
= $5081.60 ($81.60 covers wire-fees and Paypal transaction fees for sending prizemoney and participation payments to the various players).
Remainder for SCI5 = $1131.23 + whatever else is made this month + SCI4 donations, revenue, subscriptions and "This shirt is ruining eSports sales". Obviously that's difficult to put an exact amount on at present because I am not a Timelord. Whatever the case, SCI4 is fully funded.
Also this time around we had the rollout of our player tipjar system, where viewers could contribute directly to their favourite players. Since this was not part of the prizepool, it did not breach the terms of our tournament license. You are probably aware that the standard tournament license has a $5000 limit on it. Go any higher than that and you have to arrange things with Blizzard, which as I've explained before, usually involves them taking a share of your ad revenue, which for this tournament would hurt us more than it would help. As a result of our tip-jar system, a further $1211.38 was contributed directly to the players. The full breakdown of tips is already public so there's no harm posting it here along with prize winnings.
* Dimaga : $100 + $72 tips = $172.00 total
* Destiny : $100 + $92.51 tips = $192.51 total
* Strelok : $100 + $77 tips = $177.00 total
* Tyler : $100 + $150 tips = $250.00 total
* TLO : $300 + $455.37 tips = $755.37 total
* White-Ra : $600 + $201.50 tips = $801.50 total
* DDE : $1200 + $97 tips = $1297 total
* Socke : $2500 + 170.37 tips = $2670.37 total
Everyone's a winner baby. TLO in particular received a large number of tips, which is testiment to his popularity and the community deciding to reward his good nature. While there will always be debate over "who deserves what", in reality tips are a completely personal decision and are beyond criticism. You can give money to someone freely for whatever reason you desire. Our system also ensured that most of the players received these tips instantly into their Paypal accounts, so they saw immediate benefit from playing in the tournament. We had to act as proxy for a couple of them who don't have Paypal accounts and will be wiring them the money along with their winnings very soon. Whatever the case, this model further reinforces our ability to support the players by putting money into their pockets so they can continue to be full-time professional players. We hope this enriches the foreigner scene.
We'd also like to give a special thank you to Colin Smith who gave an astonishing $1200 donation. As a result, we will be naming SCI4 after him. Though we did thank the SCI2 donors last time around, we'd just like to once again remind everyone that they made SCI3 possible and not to forget their contributions, or the contributions of those who donated during this tournament either, no matter how large or small their donations might be.
Ok, now that the money is out of the way, let's talk technical.
The Positives :
From a technical standpoint, this tournament ran smoother than any we've done before.
Total incorrect robot-voice button presses : 1 - and that was during a break. This is a 66% decrease from SCI2, a clear improvement!
Reliability was a key factor in this tournament, after we suffered technical problems on the final day of SCI2, causing around 45 minutes of downtime and glitchy audio. This time around the setup worked as intended and we suffered no technical problems of any description. Video quality was also improved, though it is still not at the level I would like, I cannot push it any further without either improvements to Xsplit or a better internet connection which is physically impossible to obtain in my area right now. Sound quality was also an improvement on SCI2. Compression on the audio, something lacking in many eSports events at the moment, ensured consistent commentary audio levels. I do hope to improve this further by replacing my BPHS-1 headsets with Sennheiser HMD-26s when finances permit. These are pretty much the best possible headsets you can obtain at present for this particular purpose.
There were no delays in this tournament at all due to technical issues, in fact the downtime was the lowest it's ever been. 2 issues outside of our control caused the 2 significant delays we had, one was Apollo's car breaking down and Strelok being an hour late to WCG Ukraine, which delayed the start of our tournament too and the other was once again, WCG Ukraine interfering with our schedule as White-ra had to play his matches against Dimaga before his RO4 matches in the SCI3. We are going to have to take a fairly harsh step in order to prevent this from happening again and as a result, SCI4 forward will not allow contestants who are also playing in another tournament that has the potential to interfere with the SCI3 schedule. Delays hurt the tournament and cause drops in viewer numbers which in turn hits the revenue. We cannot risk that continuing to happen. We feel SCI is a good deal for the players, it is one of very few tournaments and as far as we know, the only online tournament that pay the players regardless of whether or not they win a match. In return, we will have to ask that players ensure that no delays occur due to participation in other tournaments on the same day.
Since we're doing all VoDs from Justin.tv now and cutting them as we go. We now have all the tournament VoDs available on Youtube cut on a match by match basis, less than 24 hours after the tournament ended. That's pretty good.
Also hey, the scoreboard worked this time! People have been asking for a proper scoreboard for a while and we are now using Starboard for that purpose.
The Negatives :
While the audio was more reliable, the setup we used introduced a feedback noise into the background of the audio. It was not noticeable while game audio was running and while we were talking but in between game music tracks and in the seconds while we unmuted mics/switched between game, break music and commercials etc, it was very noticeable. This is I believe called a "ground-loop" and is as a result of taking audio out of the computer and then putting it back in via a different interface. Our setup was as follows.
2 Audio-technica BPHS-1 headsets into a TC-Electronic Impact Twin Firewire interface. Stereo 6.3mm line output into a Mackie 402-VLZ3 analogue mixer. Game audio out from the onboard sound via a 3.5mm to double-phono stereo connection into the tapemix channel of the mixer. Stereo 6.3mm line output from the mixer into an Alesis Linelink analogue to digital USB converter.
The groundloop occurs with the game audio, regardless of what interface I plug it into. Any suggestions for removing this groundloop would be appreciated because I am fresh out of ideas. This issue has been occuring for years with various pieces of equipment, including different computers, it's just what happens when you set things up this way. Once again, Xsplit can eliminate this problem entirely by providing full ASIO support, which would mean I could just use the Impact Twin for everything and it'd sound great. At this point, I think this should be a priority for Splitmedia Labs. Xsplit is being used increasingly by large, professional events and if you can't use some of the more modern, fire-wire/USB-based professional audio equipment with it properly, there are going to be problems in future.
Away from the production side for a second, the tip-jars also did not correctly update their amounts. This appears to be as a result of the Chipin system we used and we'll be looking for an alternative in the future. It is possible that, regardless of his popularity, TLO actually received "sympathy tips" because it looked like he hadn't gotten any tips at all. In reality, that was just Chip-in not updating properly and TLO having to accept every tip individually into his Paypal account due to some odd German thingy. We also wanted the ability to leave messages to the players along with the tips but Paypal for some reason didn't enable it's messaging feature on these donations. The servers were under heavy load and struggled to stay up during the tournament so adding it to the site might have crashed the whole thing entirely. We'll look into ways and means to deal with that before the next event.
There's also the issue of "virtual stadium", which we really need to find a better, less-ghetto way to present. Showing pictures direct from Facebook by putting the browser window over my gamescreen doesn't look professional at all.
While uploading the vods from Justin.tv is a massive timesaver and allows us to get them up for you guys to watch rapidly, it also means that creating anti-spoilers is much more difficult. I have an idea of how to solve this, by creating a big "anti-spoiler" video on Justin.tv that we can take slices of and upload to Youtube. Problem is I only came up with that idea this morning so it'll have to wait until the next event. We do have a big "master playlist" that can be watched if you don't want to see the number of matches easily, that's available in the links at the top of this post. You are also able to watch the raw vods on Justin.tv which include all the breaks, music and pre-postshow chatter. Several people on Reddit have suggested we include parts of these in our Youtube vods to better mask the length of games plus add some flavour to the experience for those who did not get to watch live. We'll try to do that for SCI4.
Onto the games themselves.
This is where I feel responsible for a serious lapse in judgment. The tournament was littered with 3-0 wins. There were a couple of completely unexpected results, but some I kinda feared would happen but hoped wouldn't. I personally feel that in an effort to create a "fan favourites" tournament, I made the tournament less enjoyable to watch overall. There's the issue of the brackets, where 4 of the strongest players faced each other in the RO8. Why did this happen? Because I wanted to put Destiny vs TLO on in the RO8. If the tournament had been based on strict seeding, TLO and Destiny would have both faced statistically strong competition in the RO8. I say statistically because that's really all it comes down to, players who have showed recent strong results get stronger seedings and often face those who have not shown such results in the first round, ensuring they do not meet other strong contestants until later rounds. In this case, I put TLO vs Destiny because it was a match a lot of people including myself expressed interest in seeing and would most likely not occur if it didn't happen in the RO8. This one change ensured that at least 2 out of the "big 4", Strelok, White-ra, Dimaga and Socke would be knocked out in the first round. Of course, people keep counting out DDE which as we saw, was a foolish thing to do. DDE is capable of taking on anyone in the tournament and winning, people need to quit underestimating him. Should I have thrown Destiny and TLO "to the wolves" as it were? I don't think anyone is going to argue with the DDE vs Tyler matchup, that clearly was no easy ride for Tyler but all credit to him, he fought extremely hard and was on the verge of winning on a couple of occassions if not for DDE's incredible holds. I hate even discussing it honestly, belittling TLO or Destiny is a horrible thing to do and they both provided an extremely entertaining first match that will be remembered alongside several others as stand-out, entertaining experiences for the spectators.
I'll be honest, the bracket kept me up at night this last week, I was extremely worried about how the community would receive it and yes, some did react in the way I feared. I don't necessarily regret the chance to allow the three statistically weaker players a chance to shine, but it was a different kind of "dark horse" from the previous SCI tournaments, where it was some lesser known contestants given a chance on a big stage, rather than well-known but recently untested players.
I feel like I've damaged the reputation of the tournament, simply due to the number of 3-0s. I feel guilty for it and regardless of how many people have told me it was not my fault, I can't shake the feeling that I made decisions based on personal whimsy rather than a more rational and logical approach which would have been better for the tournament as a whole. I'll be honest, I felt rather miserable after the tournament ended, I wasn't feeling great the entire time. Some of you noticed that I even expressed frustration with TLO on Day 2 over a couple of decisions. I feel terrible for doing that, I hate criticising players decisions and the chat definitely took issue with me doing that. It's not my place, I'm not the analyst. I am usually just the "happy to be there" guy but it was hard to maintain my enthusiasm in the face of so many 3-0s, with some of them not being close either. I felt that SCI2 just provided better matches overall due to a more balanced bracket and I need to carefully consider that going forward to future events.
However, after that moment of moping, allow me to congratulate both DDE and Socke once again. Their rematch was a story in and of itself, with DDE breaking out a build that surprised everyone, as well as Socke going for some risky and out of the ordinary strategies of his own. DDE's epic comeback from 2-0 down against White-ra was exceptional and let's not forgot Socke's dominance, not losing a single match until the finals. DDE and Socke are extremely evenly matched and I hope they both enjoy success going forward. The tournament had drama, it had entertaining games and while it did not go quite the way I'd hoped, many people still enjoyed it and I suppose that's the most important thing of all. The virtual stadium really helped things out in my opinion. It was great to see people enjoying themselves. Almost 200 photos were submitted to the Facebook wall and the number of hats was higher than initial projections indicated. We'll definitely be doing that again and it was something for people to do and discuss during the breaks.
As always, thank you Reddit and Teamliquid for your support and feel free to leave feedback, not that you need my permission or encouragement to do that.
Oh and before I go, let me drop a little hint about SCI4.
"48534"
