SCBW Meet up @ DreamHack Montreal - Sep 6-8 - Page 3

On April 20 2019 08:52 BasetradeTV wrote:
TLDR:
If you are going to do anything with Dreamhack, have very clearly defined language agreed upon before hand, and have several different people sign off on everything you do so that there is verification later. A fun and simple BYOC LAN can be the worst experience of your life when working with DH. I'll explain in further detail as to why, below.

Some already know this, some have likely never heard it before, I only bring it up so you hopefully know what to look at avoiding. I should note, before I write any of this, I do not believe anyone truly had malicous intend on screwing over our event, I think there was a lot of miscommunication and strange prioritizing, but this is still how it played out:

Original plan: Dreamhack was hosting a $2,000 BYOC tournament for SC2. We managed to work with blizzad and sponsors to bring that number up to $7,500 USD ( 2017 DreamHack/Atlanta ). We would be given supervision of the tournament in the BYOC area, and run the event for them in exchange for our prize pool boost and online coverage, the finals would even be played out on the "Main stage" (air quotes because the main stage was like 1/2 the size of the CS:GO area).

What actually happened: Dreamhack Atlanta was one of the most frustrating and embarrassing live events I've ever tried to coordinate. We were told initially we'd have a row reserved for us in the BYOC LAN area, that we could use for starcraft people. We even rented PC's & monitors from The Cave (shout out to those bros in fairfax) as well as a PC set strictly for streaming. However, upon arriving for set up days before the event, we were greeted with unreasonable hostility from the area coordinator, which I wrote off as being stressed out with a big event happening, and it led to many many problems.

1) When asking which row was ours to begin setting up the 10 or so PC's we brought, he said we were being given our own little area instead. I thought that sounded pretty awesome, but what we got was a small 16ft x 16ft area, not roped off, right infront of the admin area. This was a concern because it would result in a lot of traffic from not starcraft people coming and going to the admin desk, right through our set up. Unhappy, but did our best to cope. After spending 2 hours moving desks, unloading PC's and setting up, I asked where we could plug in our ethernet cables (I learned from a previous Dreamhack experience they don't provide you with any cords or cables, you have to buy or bring your own). Turns out the area they "reserved" for us didn't have any possible access to the internet at all.

2) Despite being in direct contact with several dreamhack admins across various emails, I had done most of the point of contact stuff with Adebisi and Heyoka, and while I understand that both of them were busy working this event as well, neither were really available to help with our situation. I can't recall if it was Heyoka, or who, but someone eventually got back to us and let us move to the BYOC LAN area as originally planned, however as it was clear this was an afterthought/plan B situation, we were only given the unclaimed seats and placements, meaning the PC's were scattered all over the place randomly throughout the sections. Frustrating, but doable.

3) The day before Dreamhack officially started, we were finishing up everything we needed for set up. We ran into some hiccups regarding missing cords etc but we had managed to go to best buy to get what was missing. Upon returning I was flagged down by the leader of the LAN area, and he was very upset we weren't reporting for duty. What? He was under the impression zombiegrub and I (Rifkin) were there to act as volunteers for the other LAN areas, when we were not working the Sc2 tournament, implying we were meant to be running around helping the other areas set up and fetching stuff, and furthermore that we were to do this throughout the entire 3 days we were there. I laughed it off because it seemed like a joke, or a simple misunderstanding, but this escalated very quickly to him name dropping somebody named "Gary" as if I were supposed to know or fear that name, and said he'd go grab him. I asked him, politely, to do just that. Gary, who was titled with "head of all of dreamhack north america" came up and made the same demands of our work load. I said there was not a chance in the universe zombiegrub and I were going to act as volunteers during downtime, or any other time. He then said I agreed to it when we were emailing, and confident that I hadn't I pulled up the only email chain between us and showed him this email where, no matter how many ways I read it, looked like they would be providing us with volunteers, and not us joining their volunteer crew. (blacked out parts are sensitive information not related to the point of the image) They would continue to badger me about this the entire weekend, until one of the PC rental guys volunteered to be a volunteer in my place.

4) We were told there'd be a viewing area for the sc2 fans. With everything else that had happened, this went from a dedicated area to watch, to a small office room that could fit like 5-10 people that was way away from the actual event, to not having a viewing area at all. Good guy and esports angel archnog bought a 32 inch TV https://twitter.com/Rif_kingz/status/888484095520649216 for us to use as a cloned second monitor, so that any SC2 fan that was there could at least watch the games and hear us cast IRL, as we were on the edge of the seating area https://twitter.com/Rif_kingz/status/888764309144293376

However upon walking back into Dreamhack with this TV, the same lead guy came up to us and told us that we couldn't use the TV, and that if we did in order for fans to watch behind us, he'd kick us out. This was really stupid, and frustrating, because it seemed to be for no reason other than this guy was power tripping, and we were really upset that we had spent all this money flying ourselves out here, renting the PC's etc and putting our money into the prize pool! So I expressed this frustration and was met with, "You didn't spend that much money, get over yourself". Needless to say I was pissed, but rather than punch this guy in the neck and get kicked out, I just said "ok" and spoke with Archnog about returning the TV to the store in the morning.

5) This part is just hearsay, but a trusthworthy inside source told us they were considering stripping our badges after this last altercation, and running the tournament without us, fully unaware that we were providing the prize money and coordination for the tournament. This explained his really shitty response to my frustrations with things a little, but it didn't make it any more forgivable. So the Day of Dreamhack Day 1 is live, and overnight somebody has bumped into our casting PC's monitor and broken it overnight. Lucky for us we had a back up TV to use, so we plugged it in and got to video testing right away (this was really awful, but at least it got the job done, and it looked okay on the stream). Gary, the "head of dreamhack north america" instructed mr asshole to walk up to us, and I believe the intent was to strip our badges, upon seeing us use the TV despite being instructed not to. As he came up to us, one of the players, can't recall who, intervened and explained our situation to him before he even got to me, although I could hear all this as I was running audio tests and the microphones were picking them up. I guess this satisfied him because when he finally got to me he asked me awkwardly not-so-casual questions as to what we were doing, then left without saying anything.

Almost done here, promise.

6) Despite working against all odds, we managed to get things going with the tournament. It flowed fairly smoothly, not too many issues in regards to the tournament itself, but so many problems with handling it. Due to the fact that they scattered the PC's all over randomly throughout the BYOC area, we had some players right next to us, and some players super on the other side of the area, and some of the folks who brought their own PC's and not using the ones we rented, were off in Africa and/or a 10 minute walk from our area. This lead to several different Dreamhack admins contacting us and giving us "official warnings" about having players walk around the area to report their score, as so much movement could cause issues. (???) We just said sure, sorry, but there wasn't anything we could do about this at all so we just kept going and kept getting warnings (like 15 by the end of the day)

7) Last thing that went wrong. We've fought through all the bullshit and gotten to the final day, where suppy, masa, pilipili and true would compete on the main stage, and we would get to cast! It didn't matter what else happened at this point, we were in the clear. Until we learned that the entire first bo3 (suppy vs masa) was broadcast in 360p. Supposedly they had a local recording in high quality they would send to us after for youtube, despite the stream being so awful. (to this day, despite multiple emails throughout 2018, I still never received this video) After I caught wind of this I demanded we stop and restart the stream, and the production crew was unaware that I, as "talent" was also in charge of the show and could make such demands, and in my ear piece told me no. I had to create a bit of a commotion on stream, and tried to make it look like a silly bit "angry rifkin" but internally I was livid and had to make demands about restarting in a WATCHABLE quality. They finally caved and restarted, it was 720p, whatever. We finished the finals and were told due to time we had to CUT the 3rd/4th place match, which I was unhappy about but convinced the players to do a rock paper scissors off bo3 on the stage. They agreed and said it was probably more fun than playing the match out anyways (if memory serves, I think suppy won, haha)

And that was the nightmare experience I had working with Dreamhack. I would receive some follow up emails about our "conduct" but when I demanded to speak with someone in HR to report the issues I experienced, those emails stopped coming. Good luck bros, just don't get caught off guard like we did.