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FuDDx
United States5014 Posts
I have a couple that really bother me, the have allready been brought up.
I really dislike the offline tourny, my first wcg experince was an offline prelim that lasted all weekend all the games were being played and we had 25-26 Brood war players at the event.I had a blast as did everyone I got to talk to.Also its much harder to cheat,abuse,hack in offline events.
My second wvg prelim also an offline event had less people than my first and only lasted a day but i still had a blast with 8-10 people showing.
Also the dates being announced/changed at the last minute.If I had enough time to plan id be at many more events (as long as the wife dosent enforce more children,shes hopeful,im saying no)
more than likely just to show some support, feed the corprate entity.
O yeah and fix the dang website its horrid to navigate and you cant find anything without 300 people on a thread pointing you in the right direction.
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1. lend a helping hand to wcg canada, or would it be possible for both countries to cooperate the national grand final event. (ie. have the national final for both canada and usa in same location/date.. it would of course gather more gamers at one event, probably be beneficial for sponsors instead of splitting, (or canada mooching off usa little bit).
2. more offline prelims, less online prelims, and don't "filter" players.. I don't see a reason why hackers should not be allowed to compete in offline...If a guy cares enough to come to the event, that's all it matters..more the merrier.
3. more players to qualify for national finals. I know it sounds pretty counterintuitive, since gamers will be "tired" and too many gamers = "timeconsuming". C'mon, the WCG event is like 2 or 3 day event... better organization can definitely pull it off, and it'll be better economically. (more players show up, more people staying at hotels and such, more crowd, more ppl exposed to sponsors, etc.)
4. consistency in format. whatever format of tournament the WCG Final holds, WCG national finals should do it the same.. (ie. group stage -> single elim tournament). Sure, one can argue one way is better than the other, but it's WCG's tournament. If they decide to do it certain format in the grand final, then the national finals should do the same. For this year's case.. I thought splitting it into 4 groups of 3's (1 group of 4), with best two advancing would have been a lot better for players like Idra and Incontrol. Two groups of 5's seemed pretty ridiculous.
5. website.. or any other medium of delivering information would be great. I don't know about USA's case, but wcg canada had really poor modes of informing gamers and even lans! I know there were "wcg starcraft qualifiers", and some people qualified, then wcg canada announced that the game is off the list.
I'd like to stress on my first point. It would be awesome for canadian gamers to meet with usa players on a less "international" level. Possibly, it'd attract more media, and more attention. Of course, the tournaments will be held separately for Canada and USA.
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offline quals in major cities is all i give a fuck about
Edit: and announce locations at least a while in advance so ppl acn prepare their lives.
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On November 13 2008 11:48 red.venom wrote:
offline quals in major cities is all i give a fuck about
Edit: and announce locations at least a while in advance so ppl acn prepare their lives.
depends on the city.
I went to Chicago, it was fucking horrible
like $25 to park and shit =(, maybe in the burbs of a major city or something.
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WCG Prelims need anti-hack (preferably on iccup not that piece of shit gameon). WCG Online Prelims need to happen on 1 day, not 1 match each day throughout the week. No obs should be allowed in any of the wcg online games. Offline and online admins need to speak fluent english, know starcraft and how to judge winners / make better decisions in disconnect issues etc... WCG National Finals is so disorganized, almost everything about it just seems like a big cluster fuck. They also do NOT know which games should be played on stage / which matches should be played on stage. At WCG USA GF they did the groups by skill, not by seeding (the night before the tournament). This is absolutely absurd especially when you look at the groups and realize that you have the only 2 foreign progamers, me (who placed 2nd in the entire tournament) and the defending champion in 1 group. Whoever decided those brackets on "skill" obviously doesn't know what he was doing / the sc scene and that should NEVER..... EEEEEEEEEEEEVER happen again. And of course, letting the players know where the regionals will be A LOT sooner. We spend so much to travel there. Personally, I think there should also be travel stipends at regionals as well, depending on how far away they live from said event. Because I always loose a shit load at regionals, with flight and hotel... its horrible. Just to get to go to NF? And if I loose at regionals, its a huuuuuuuuuuuuuuge waste. Shit like this needs to be fixed. Either provide a travel stipend or do what I personally prefer.... have regionals online with an anti-hack.
Personally I think there needs to be more common sense around WCG USA, from a business standpoint and from a gamers standpoint. If WCG put me on there payroll and I worked for them, I damn well guarantee a much better tournament / organization. Especially since they have all year to work on it. You need smart people who actually play the games in the tournaments.
Edit: oh and of course... making it so that players on the stage can't hear the damn commentators at NF.... That along with the small round table we played on where my keyboard and mousepad was balancing on the edges cuss they are so big and its a fucking circle table. Everything about the main stage screamed amateurism. Which is a shame since the screens and set up actually looked nice. But everything beyond the look of it, was complete shit.
This is all just me spit-balling. Hopefully some of this helped.
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coordinating with Canada is a really interesting idea IMO o_O; although I believe USA and Canada have too many to have a joint-WCG unless we send top 3 or 4 to the grand final.
for example, Baltic states do this (Czech + Slovakia joint WCG, Lithuania + Latvia + Estonia joint WCG), but IMO Canada and USA have too many players.
WCG Canada is just another issue in itself.
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iNcontroL
USA29055 Posts
WCG canada is also like the backyard neighbor's kids version of WCG in comparison to WCG USA. WCG USA is a huge company and is pretty damn serious. WCG Canada is falling a part basically.
Eric a lot of what you said in your post is good.. that was stuff I brought up and will pursue. They have already said they are looking to do a more "gamer" friendly model for the prelim stages. Forking that much cash for a prelim is ludicrous I agree.
Keep em coming guys.
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the best change that can be done in wcg finals:
The group winner choose either we moves out from 1st or 2nd spot. This would completely remove the gaving away games aspect.
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Is there any reward for a country, which gets a lot of (gold) medals? I don't think so but maybe including something like performance in the pay/sponsor package regarding the WCG GF could ensure that the national organizers care more about who they send to the grand final (i.e. not some random people but the very best).
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I'm more experienced as an admin for other games, but like someone suggested... online tournaments needs some hype as well. Just having some sort of commentary to a few selected games will improve interest a great deal. There's a reason for online prelims. If it's just gonna be bothersome and no hype, then people won't be arsed to participate because they have more entertaining things to do. I'm sure there's people willing to help out with this. Either make something out of the online tournament or skip it by having some "foreign ranking" or similar.
If there's more focus on the foreign scene, more people will find it rewarding to participate and improve. There's a need for a boost in the competitive scene for foreigners. This boost might just be starcraft 2.
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they need to make an official partnership with tl or at least gg.net to just do coverage and news about the event (just something like gom where susie is staff and can make newses about it). there were like 3 people in the first online qualifier because nobody knew it was starting yet. theres just a lack of information throughout the event, or the information is buried somewhere in their site and no one can find it. could also be solved by fixing their site, but cooperating with tl, which everyone already reads, would be quite a bit easier.
needs to be more structured and official. the night before wcg usa they decide to re-arrange the groups "by skill" (someone who knows nothing about the bw scene puts the 4 best players in one group). stuff like that just cant be done by a professional organization. i dont even know what to say about it, except that they need to use common sense. same thing with the online qualis, some random guy who doesnt know what hes doing is given final say over basically everything. if he fucks up, and he invariably does, people get screwed and they cant do anything about it.
really, they just need someone who knows bw and is in touch with the competitive scene to run the thing.
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iNcontroL
USA29055 Posts
On November 13 2008 22:19 IdrA wrote:
they need to make an official partnership with tl or at least gg.net to just do coverage and news about the event (just something like gom where susie is staff and can make newses about it). there were like 3 people in the first online qualifier because nobody knew it was starting yet. theres just a lack of information throughout the event, or the information is buried somewhere in their site and no one can find it. could also be solved by fixing their site, but cooperating with tl, which everyone already reads, would be quite a bit easier.
needs to be more structured and official. the night before wcg usa they decide to re-arrange the groups "by skill" (someone who knows nothing about the bw scene puts the 4 best players in one group). stuff like that just cant be done by a professional organization. i dont even know what to say about it, except that they need to use common sense. same thing with the online qualis, some random guy who doesnt know what hes doing is given final say over basically everything. if he fucks up, and he invariably does, people get screwed and they cant do anything about it.
really, they just need someone who knows bw and is in touch with the competitive scene to run the thing.
Yeah I am pressing for the "partnership" or at the very least a liason that knows the community. It wouldn't take much to get people informed PRIOR to a WCG prelim as oppose to after hehe.
Also a better website seems viable to fix a lot of these problems. We will see.. I think websites are really expensive (I have no idea) on that level.
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I think they need to completely revamp the qualification process. The offline regional structure eliminates players in three unreasonable ways:
1. Players who have limited ability to travel are often unable to attend at all. Good players who deserve a slot int he finals may not get to attend because they can't travel 500 miles to the nearest regional event. This is unacceptable.
2. Players who have the ability to travel at will have the advantage of qualifying for regionals where they "do not belong" and competing in what could be seen as an easier field for whatever reason.
3. Starcraft is geographically imbalanced in the USA, and as a result you get some weird condensing of players at the regional events. Most of the best players are west/east coast, and there is hardly anyone in the south. For example, people who actually live within driving distance of the south regional are basically nony, lzgamer and myself - whereas at the pacific regional you have half the US community piling into one event.
My solution for the qualification process is this: ICCup + community oversight = win. WCG should recognize the community's ability to regulate and run itself. I have no doubt WCG could use a small staff of quality BW volunteers and work with ICCup to have a WCG USA ladder/tournament system/whatever that is free of hacks and monitored for abuse. Clear rules defining what is and what is not abuse/cheating and enforcement of said rules would help here too.
A pure ladder or pure tourney system would each have too many flaws to be viable, but a ladder that then went into a very large, or several smaller, double elimination tournaments would be ideal. If the objective is, after all, to have the best possible candidates at the finals, then the competitors should be competing with one another in serious fashion to qualify.
So say the top 64 of the ladder go into 4 16 player double elimination tournaments and then the top 4 from each go to the finals. This format would give the same seeding as regionals and a similar "format" but allow greater participation and remove the arbitrary nature of geographic distribution of USA players.
That last part hints at what I see as the last piece of this restructuring - a larger player pool at the finals. I think all of us could agree that a larger pool of good players at the finals would only improve the competition. The immediate issue here would be cost for WCG, but eliminating offline regionals saves money for both WCG and the players. If players didn't have to spend hundreds of dollars to attend the regionals, then spending a few hundred for the finals would seem like less of a hurdle.
Of course along with all this we need the improvements others have already mentioned - such as better, more timely scheduling, 3 slots at the grand finals, etc. But there is definitely hope for WCG USA.
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On November 13 2008 12:14 G5 wrote:
Edit: oh and of course... making it so that players on the stage can't hear the damn commentators at NF.... That along with the small round table we played on where my keyboard and mousepad was balancing on the edges cuss they are so big and its a fucking circle table. Everything about the main stage screamed amateurism. Which is a shame since the screens and set up actually looked nice. But everything beyond the look of it, was complete shit.
Nail on the head. That whole thing demonstrated just how sloppy and unorganized WCG USA really was when it comes to actually running the gaming tournament. These are things a marketing oriented organizer might not ever consider but if they had one actual gamer involved they would've dealt with that stuff ahead of time.
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I won game prizes at the Dayton regional event I attended years back. (the one sadist is talking about.)
WCG never sent them to me. I contacted them and their official response was that it was the fault of their partner and they didn't do business with them anymore and if I wanted my prizes I would have to fight the other company.
This made me think of WCG as a shady half-ass organization.
You should encourage them to have integrity regarding promotions and prizes.
I agree with Sadist's posts and everyone should be able to attend regionals. The event I attended was a lot of fun and my starcraft love was enhanced by watching better players over the shoulder and getting to meet fellow starcraft competitors face to face. One memorable moment was seeing the pylon/cannoncannon/pylon cheese behind the minerals for the first time(there were no public replays with that strat at the time of the regionals if I remember correctly).
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FuDDx
United States5014 Posts
On November 14 2008 13:14 ChoboCop wrote:
I won game prizes at the Dayton regional event I attended years back. (the one sadist is talking about.)
WCG never sent them to me. I contacted them and their official response was that it was the fault of their partner and they didn't do business with them anymore and if I wanted my prizes I would have to fight the other company.
This made me think of WCG as a shady half-ass organization.
You should encourage them to have integrity regarding promotions and prizes.
I agree with Sadist's posts and everyone should be able to attend regionals. The event I attended was a lot of fun and my starcraft love was enhanced by watching better players over the shoulder and getting to meet fellow starcraft competitors face to face. One memorable moment was seeing the pylon/cannoncannon/pylon cheese behind the minerals for the first time(there were no public replays with that strat at the time of the regionals if I remember correctly).
I also had a prize that never came a digital cmaera i had won thru there website.
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I'm from Germany and travelled to WCG Cologne on Saturday to get the chance to watch my favourite Korean players. I was psyched to see the big names first time in real life and over all it was amazing to see all the games played on such a high level from international players.
The good thing:
You could get very close to the players, they were hanging out near the lan playing area (about 24 computers) and get a glimpse of them playing in close proximity.
The bad thing:
There was no way to watch a single game beside the one (Jaedong vs Stork) beeing played on stage. Everyone (about 100 people) was standing very tight behind the barriers trying to watch the half finals over their shoulders. You could see nothing. They had only one screen showing the brackets of the tournament that was updated two hours after the games took place. No commentary, no spectators, no information, no chance to watch the games! It sucked.
Its supposed to be the biggest offline tournament, the olympics of e-sport, it takes place in a huge hall in the heart of a town of one million people with the european headquarter of electronic arts and place of the new Gamescom next year - and they don't get the idea of actually showing the games to the people who travelled 500 km and payed to see them??? Just in case you wonder, the same happened to all the other games (warcraft3, Age of Empires, C&C...) It was SO disappointing to take up all the hassle and loose this chance in a livetime for this tournament beeing in Germany. I still can't believe it.
What they should do:
1. Set up a big extra screen over the heads of each player in the lan area so everyone can watch them play 1st person from behind - great!
2. Set up a separate smaller viewing theater for every game inkluding live commentary. - wow!
WCG has one big misconception. The people going there want to see their favourite games, not all games. I did not come to Cologne to watch Carom 3D on stage. No one is into watching 12 different games one after another because the nature of computer games makes it not understandable and outright boring to watch games you never played and don't care for. Its not the olympics where the art and power of the athletes reveals itself to the spectator. How am I supposed to appreciate the skill and taktics of a Fifa or Need For Speed or Virtua Fighter player if I never played it? Through the commentary? I tried it. It just doesn't work. You have to understand and feel the game mechanics and inner dynamics to get into it. You need much more knowledge to follow the action than in non e-sports.
So if you want people to go there - show the games. Its easy.
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On November 14 2008 14:15 FuDDx wrote:Show nested quote +On November 14 2008 13:14 ChoboCop wrote:
I won game prizes at the Dayton regional event I attended years back. (the one sadist is talking about.)
WCG never sent them to me. I contacted them and their official response was that it was the fault of their partner and they didn't do business with them anymore and if I wanted my prizes I would have to fight the other company.
This made me think of WCG as a shady half-ass organization.
You should encourage them to have integrity regarding promotions and prizes.
I agree with Sadist's posts and everyone should be able to attend regionals. The event I attended was a lot of fun and my starcraft love was enhanced by watching better players over the shoulder and getting to meet fellow starcraft competitors face to face. One memorable moment was seeing the pylon/cannoncannon/pylon cheese behind the minerals for the first time(there were no public replays with that strat at the time of the regionals if I remember correctly). I also had a prize that never came a digital cmaera i had won thru there website.
psh
none of you didnt get your computer.
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they outa pay for the players trip to the national finals also. 250$ for a plane ticket (that has to be last minute since they give you 0 notice) plus all your food and stuff for the weekend means that anyone who doesnt live in-state or doesnt get top 3 is going at a loss.
get rid of the idiotic childish FREE STUFF! shit on stage and use that money to pay for it.
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EPT
