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On September 06 2010 23:12 IdrA wrote:
it isnt hard to avoid spoilers at all, even if its been reported everywhere else, as long as the casters dont talk about it during the games. it just means you dont visit any esports sites as long as the tournament is going on.
Well it´s still kinda hard to not get spoiled if a tourney goes on a week or 2. You click on a hype thread and one of the comments is: 3-2 IdrA i saw it in his match history. Bam Spoilered and there was not really much you can do if you want to check maps, time and get some prehype. Which is kinda important for many.
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you value the "live experience" more than the assurance noone is watching his opponent play while playing him?
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Fiddler's Green42661 Posts
I agree with Huk here. As much as I love watching livestreams, Watching a replay of a series doesn't spoil anything as long as all of the replays are sent in a timely fashion and the scheduling of the tournament isn't screwy. And honestly, as spectators we have to try our best to let the players be as comfortable as they can when playing these matches so that we can see good games. A good compromise would be to let the players ban any spectators or streamers if they are feeling lag or to just stream live only when it gets to the higher rounds of a tournament like ro8 or semi-finals.
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Should be something like this:
If there is a tournament, the casters sign up to this tournament and they're the delegated casters for casting the replays (note: I said replays). When the match is concluded by the players, they have to upload the replay on this site where the casters can obtain access to it (and only the allowed casters), and then they can begin their cast of the match. Players are then under obligation to not release details of the match and not publicly upload the replay until, say, 5 days after the match.
I don't understand people that only want to watch it LIVE, would you rather players play at their best or having to struggle with the lag conditions and frustration it elicits too? It would be hard to keep a straight head when playing under so much pressure, and if you have lag problems, it just adds to the frustration.
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On September 06 2010 18:02 iCCup.Raelcun wrote:Show nested quote +On September 06 2010 18:00 Silver~Guy wrote:
Hello as a player I'd like to weigh in on this issue.
The lag issue is a problem and should not be ignored, if you want the best competitions you have ever seen, every second counts.
Cheating is a possible problem since game-sense and cheating are hard to distinguish.
Stress? Well, I don't know if that will be going away but we can at least mitigate it...
Ideally I think the future of streams should look like this:
[people in the game]
players
admin who video captures (who does not cast)
Admin (otherwise called 1st streamer) lags video by 2 minutes to a hub with a password.
Caster (otherwise called 2nd streamer) picks up the stream and recasts with audio to general public.
Spectators watch 2nd stream.
benefits:
-keeps game almost-live
-limits lag
-minimize the effectiveness of cheating
drawbacks:
-more coordination for admin/streamers/casters
The drawback will be dealt with by formalizing the process by which the admin and casters interact (which will naturally happen after an initial testing period).
Care to provide the hundreds possibly thousands of dollars on server support for this setup?
I don't see why it would cost thousands of dollars if the casters are still streaming on UStream/Livestream. You just need a competent observer with a decent connection, 100/100 Mbps is quite common in Sweden and can easily stream 1Mbps video to 10 casters. I feel the guy's suggestion is quite good and got ignored unfairly just because you decided to post this.
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I just remembered something. A lot of people have mentioned HDH as an example for a tournament casted from replays. However, there was a poll back then when HDH asked the viewers whether they would prefer a delayed live recording or casting from replays. The results were overwhelmingly in favour of the live recording, even though they were both going to be casted on the same day. Can anyone confirm whether this is the way it happened or do I remember it wrong?
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Until blizz implements a way to watch replays online with more then one person watching, replay casting is horrible. At least if there are more then one caster. One of them always de-sync and then you hear them talk about stuff that happened 20s ago or stuff that hasn't happened yet. Honestly i just turn off the cast when that happens.
The real solution would be to have some kind of software buffer so that livestreams of online events have a few minutes of delay. I am surprised no1 has come up with something like this yet, because this really doesn't sound very hard to do.
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The point for the tournament admins, and especially sponsors is, that they NEED to have their games covered, since this is how the money gets in - which is the players pricemoney in the end. There's no way someone will fund a tournament which isn't being watched. And a live coverage is always going to recieve more attention than replay/VoD coverage.
Edit: Since you say the KOTB or HDH did reviece more attention, this is most likely due to casterpopularity and pro-player denstity, not because they did it with replays.
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^ Casting replays is the same thing. The player will be seen in action either way. The sponsors will be mentioned. Streamers usually have the banner up with the sponsor logo which at the end of the day is important throughout the tournament. When the VODs come out, it's the exact same thing. Some people don't even know that they are watching a VOD of a casted replay.
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8750 Posts
On September 06 2010 22:31 Slasher wrote:
As a member of the media, and someone who has watched all major sports since i was 5, and followed eSports for the past decade, it HAS TO BE LIVE. Competitive and sporting events only work when they are played live. When a match is over, it is over, and it is reported on that instant. The scores, highlights, pictures, videos, celebrations are all posted on the front page of any respectable media organization covering the event. There is no waiting and there never will be after the fact.
That's fine because all the big LAN events can broadcast live.
The issue here is broadcasting online events.Slightly delaying the stream (by ~90 mins) would make these events so so much better. The only problem here is people looking at players' matchlists and spoiling results. But they wouldn't be spoiled on the stream. So anyone who isn't F5'ing forums for an hour straight before a stream would be safe. Yeah, they have in the back of their head "this isn't perfectly live" but how is that worse than "these players could be cheating and the game is lagging"
On September 06 2010 23:59 funk100 wrote:
we need a survey
It'd be totally counterproductive. Why use a survey on a discussion forum? Most people responding would be uninformed. People don't know what's best for themselves.
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From a former caster perspective:
I can say that I understand both sides. When I was just starting playing sc2, djWHEAT decided to stream our games. Insanely high pressure, considering I hadn't played an RTS in 3 years. (Bastard.) So there was probably 700-1000 people watching my horrible noobish play. Haha. But I've also been the caster for a lot of these tournaments. One way to get around this stuff from an organization standpoint is to have the organizers setup the casters and obs for the games. I agree that they should be limited. Players kinda have to accept the fact that they are going to be casted. It's part of the whole thing. It's not the same thing to cast the replays. People want to watch the stuff right away. The KotB tournament and HDH tournaments were different, because they were beta. People didn't have a lot of options to play or obs a lot of those matches.
I dunno if you've ever tried to listen to a cast when playing, but it's insanely hard to concentrate on both. You might be able to pick up some kind of crazy strat out of the periphery of your hearing if you're not scouting or if you're way better, and don't have to pay attention to your play as much.
When money is on the line, the players have an obvious right to be tense. Sorry, but the casters aren't going anywhere. Admins just have to be a bit more organized. Things were a lot easier in BW and War3 to keep everything organized. Hopefully, blizz will help somehow. (Doubtful)
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Live casting is much more exciting but obviously some kind of delay should be worked in. It is also much more difficult to generate hype without spoilers when things are not offline.
Finally: If vods are to be used, casters are going to have to start posting dummy vods to conceal a 2-0 or something to that effect. How many games from Day9 Kotb or HDH1 were spoiled by only 2 vods being posted from a bo3?
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On September 07 2010 00:02 Liquid`Tyler wrote:Show nested quote +On September 06 2010 22:31 Slasher wrote:
As a member of the media, and someone who has watched all major sports since i was 5, and followed eSports for the past decade, it HAS TO BE LIVE. Competitive and sporting events only work when they are played live. When a match is over, it is over, and it is reported on that instant. The scores, highlights, pictures, videos, celebrations are all posted on the front page of any respectable media organization covering the event. There is no waiting and there never will be after the fact. That's fine because all the big LAN events can broadcast live. The issue here is broadcasting online events.Slightly delaying the stream (by ~90 mins) would make these events so so much better. The only problem here is people looking at players' matchlists and spoiling results. But they wouldn't be spoiled on the stream. So anyone who isn't F5'ing forums for an hour straight before a stream would be safe. Yeah, they have in the back of their head "this isn't perfectly live" but how is that worse than "these players could be cheating and the game is lagging"
The problem is the bigger and bigger e-sports becomes the more and more this will become standard. It also takes a lot of the fun out of things like live discussion chats.
Also it already happens, I knew you lost to IdrA 0-2 or 3 (cannot remember if it was bo3 or 5) in HDH because some asshole put it on the Ustream channel comments. All I had to do was load the Ustream channel and it was spoiled. I seriously paid about 2% attention to the rest of the match because of this.
And to everyone suggesting that the casters just add a delay, it's not feasible unless the company has tens of thousands of dollars to work on this. I had a very long talk with the highest level of tech support Ustream has about this. They were able to show me several devices that added a lag, but all of them were about $900 for 30 or less seconds (which would not help anything). and we could not find a one that was over 30 seconds. Remember these networks (especially Livestream) pride themselves on having as little of a delay as possible, this is a unexpected development for them and they are unprepared.
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What I'm most frustrated with is that all these problems could have been easily avoided if Blizzard just did some research and took a lesson from other games. Especially since they focused on making sc2 a competitive game and all.
This might be slightly offtopic but I still want to talk about these points as it creates problems for players/organizers when creating ESPORTS for Blizzards own game. They ought to support and give us the tools to do so properly!
Lag
Why is observers even affecting the latency of the players at all? Code it properly and let the observers lag by themselves.
Cheating
This is another problem easily prevented by having an additional option when creating the game. Let the host chose a Delay Time for observers. Caching 5-10mins worth of replay data on the observers end is nothing. It's practically live, and many channels do this for rl sports anyway.
Crashes/Disconnects
Why Blizzard, why didn't you code a reconnect feature for custom games? At least a save game option? WHY?!
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Live casting is pointless. There's nothing gained from it that wouldn't be gained from just immediately casting replays in a tournament. Either way there would be nonstop action, but the players would be more satisfied and everything would run more smoothly (there wouldn't be gaps in the early stages because casters would always have replays ready to cast.
And technically, casting a replay immediate is just as live as professional sports on TV which are broadcast with a significant delay.
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While I agree with the fact the games should be casted via replays. The viewers do not want replays and without the viewers the players won't have any funding. Yes, it does suck for the players but players could always RealID official casters who cover tournaments and not have to deal with inviting players. Perhaps they could just sit in lobby for 2 minutes before the game to let casters in. To prevent full lobbies; just have a select few casters who have a good reputation(no lag) allowed to cover the semi/finals game. While I'm on that subject any stream with 2+ casters is a bit overkill. I'm sorry but if you need a camera man because neither of your computers can handle it; you may be causing lag.
Yes cheating, does suck however someone could always use maphack in a tournament and as long as they are smart about it; it wouldn't be obvious. Also as the game progresses; map hacks anti detection will improve and eventually it will be smart enough to not upload the data of you looking at your opponents base. While streams are a path of cheating, it is not the only/best method so its not a valid reason to disappoint viewers.
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All these people going "replays just aren't the same" are kind of missing the point. It's understandable that it's a little harder to get excited about it when you know it's delayed but it's a matter of choosing the lesser of two evils. You can have the "live experience" or you can have a situation that's optimal for the players. If it's a choice between those two things I don't know how you can value anything above giving the players the opportunity to play as near lag free as possible with minimal fear of losing to a cheater.
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On September 07 2010 00:09 Ghad wrote:
Finally: If vods are to be used, casters are going to have to start posting dummy vods to conceal a 2-0 or something to that effect. How many games from Day9 Kotb or HDH1 were spoiled by only 2 vods being posted from a bo3?
By the time VODs are posted the results would have already been known because the matches/replays were streamed. If you did not happen to see them, then that is your problem not the organizers.
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United States22883 Posts
On September 06 2010 22:31 Slasher wrote:
It seems that StarCraft is the only gaming community that is insistent on casters going over finished, ended games (replays). I think this is mainly due to Korean eSports and casting over their live Korean broadcasts for VOD's, and general old-school attitude around here. No, it's because of continual drama surrounding the live casting system. How can you not understand this? We've been talking about potential problems since beta and they've all come true.
As a member of the media, and someone who has watched all major sports since i was 5, and followed eSports for the past decade, it HAS TO BE LIVE. Competitive and sporting events only work when they are played live. Truly live sports is only two decades old, so no, they don't HAVE TO BE LIVE. You're stuck in the ESPN model just as Gotfrag always was, simply because it's the ESPN model. How much it adds to the experience is relative to each watcher and ultimately, the 15 minute delay is more than offset by the cost to the integrity of the game. Big CS tournies, which doesn't even need more than a 3 minute delay, always ran HLTV delays of 10-20 minutes. I can't find the details now, but I'm almost positive that CAL finals were delayed and even CPL finals were delayed, I believe.
If a broadcaster was found to be giving results to a player during a live match (which is pretty hard to do anyway), then there's a much larger issue at hand. I've personally never heard of this happening in any of the major eSports (SC, Quake, CS, Street Fighter, Wc3, CoD, etc). It already has happened with BigT tipping off HuK on his opponent's strat the previous game. Whether the admin or obs or casters lag the game depends entirely on the people. You'll still have a situation where an admin or the official caster ends up lagging and will be bitchy about wanting to stay in. I know because it's happened before.
The rest of those games rest on entirely different elements. And BW DID have similar problems, with Korean fans at live events tipping off players on what their opponent was doing.
I've been following ESPORTS just as long as you have. BW/SC2 was just my final stop after CS/Q3/WoW/SF3S. To me, this sounds like casters whining about losing privilege.
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EPT
