Zero vs Mind (Best of 7) Announcement

Could someone upload these VODs to Youtube? Also, if anyone recorded the Zergman commentary stream, it would be awesome if that could be uploaded and added to the Small VOD Thread as well.

These are links to Afreeca VODs that can be viewed without special software. However, the buffering can be insufferable depending on the time of access and your location.
Mind's stream recording
ZerO's stream recording (starts after about 10 minutes of practice/talk)

The match took almost 2 months and 40 emails to put together and I learned a couple of things about organizing things with Korean players.

• A real-time method of communication, such as Skype or some sort of chat, is desirable for organizing future events. The players do not check e-mail that frequently because they all prefer text messages (or Kakao Talk). I think that I will try to use Kakao Talk for future communications.
  
• The players are scary serious about winning because it is a matter of pride and reputation, especially when many people are watching.
  
• The players are very resistant to playing on maps they have not played recently. This has a lot to do with the previous point. Even maps like Andromeda, Gladiator, and (to a lesser extent) New Bloody Ridge, which were used in the most recent OSLs were met with some resistance. All of these maps have match-up specific sim city layouts and builds they wanted to spend extra effort on reviewing. Gladiator was dropped as a compromise.
  
• My observation is that having someone popular cast the match hurts the bottom line of the players to some extent because it splits the viewership. The commentators also have a positive effect of increasing overall viewership, so the income loss is not serious, but it is still there. In the case of the more popular commentators like Zergman, they can take a lot of the viewership. This is probably why, these days, Zergman tries to find sponsors first and then recruits players afterwards. I still think that commentary and observer streams add a lot though. FPV is sometimes too much for me.
  
• As an alternative, I think that it would be a good idea in the future to have 3-player match ups so that each player can sit out a match and commentate, which would lead to a more fair sharing of viewership.
  
• Some players are better at real life stuff and computer stuff than others. You need to patient enough to guide them through certain tasks that involve web sites and tools that Koreans do not use. Of course, there are exceptions like Movie, who apparent has set up Twitch and PayPal.
  
• Movie was asked to observe the match and stream on Twitch, and he was okay with it in principle, but the timing was not right because he had to be in China.
  
• Mind is nice and polite. He is also capable of chatting in broken English on a very limited number of topics (On the linked stream, we see him chatting briefly with a random Twitch viewer on Fish after the match concludes). Communication in English is not really an option for more important things. My correspondence with Mind was in Korean.
  

Looks like it might take another week because of Zero's schedule. This might be a good thing because Zero still seems to have some rust that he needs to shake off (From what little I managed to hear on his stream, it sounds like he felt compelled to reveal himself before he was ready once his Fish server ID TheCute was exposed). The players also requested that they need to go back and study the TvZ simcity for these maps, which really surprised me. That might be a signal that they want to play it seriously. They want to play one game on Fighting Spirit because of that, which I am trying to resist, but we will see.

By the way, apparently Zero lives on the southern tip of the Korean peninsula. It takes him five hours by bus to reach Seoul. The time and monetary costs of travel to a studio are nontrivial, so we probably shouldn't expect that to happen unless there are some fortunate coincidences.

About opening up the pool for donations, I think that's an awesome idea, but I want to make sure this test run goes smoothly before we try more ambitious community projects. It would be a shame if I wasted other people's money on a test run. I don't want that on my conscience. Plus, I am swamped at work at the moment, which makes additional coordination a little difficult.

For the last few weeks, I've been in communication with Mind to arrange a competitive exhibition match between Zero and Mind. Zero has now agreed in principle to the match.

The map pool will be: New Sniper's Ridge/Gladiator Circuit Breaker (by pros' request)/Andromeda/New Bloody Ridge

The winner will be awarded $100 and the runner-up will receive $50.

More details will be forthcoming (and updated here), but it is quite likely to take place next weekend [maybe one more week; see update], so keep your eyes open for updates.