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Bisutopia19051 Posts
The issue: Blizzard offered free Beta access for any team of five the registers with a college email.
As any college-town bar owner or university caterer will tell you, you don’t offer college students something for free without being prepared to get absolutely mobbed. And that’s exactly what happened as nearly 900 freaking teams signed up to compete. But while TeSPA suddenly had an unruly 900-team tournament to administer, a large number of those teams vanished into thin air the moment they got their keys.
The article then goes on to discuss the rule change controversy we've seen previously on the Heroes forums. Does anyone think Blizzard made a mistake or just got 900x5 students interested in playing Heroes? The funny part is they practically hand out beta keys anyone, so most of these students went well out of there way to get beta access. On top of that, now all their friends have access too. It's friggin brilliant imo.
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I pretty much just see it as giving out more beta keys which can only lead to more hype and greater popularity, so I think it's good publicity overall You end up with 1 or 2 weird first rounds of walkovers in the tournament, and then everything gets readjusted no problem. Obviously, 900 teams is a huge number (the bracket would need to be 1024 with a ton of walkovers/ Byes lol) but that's not the biggest deal in the world imo.
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So, to translate this:
"Advertising Programm launched succesfull!"
But 900 * 5 = 4500... Thats not even that many keys? I mean, everyone i know that wants one allready has one but that number doesn't seem absurdly hi?
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First, the servers must have been ready to handle a large influx of players or Blizzard would have changed the set-up of the tournament, such as instituting a maximum cap of teams.
If I were organizing a tournament of this magnitude, I think I'd go in expecting a lot of beta keys to be handed out to eventual no-shows. Unfortunately, teams that don't show up greatly disrupt the scheduling, but that's true for any competition.
If teams do not show up, Blizzard doesn't lose any money in any way. A non-zero percentage of those players will still find their way into the game and spend time and/or money playing HotS.
So, in my opinion, there is no real problem here. However, I'm sure that JimmyJRaynor will provide reasons why Heroes of the Dorm was a mistake and explain that this is more evidence that HotS will be a commercial failure for Blizzard.
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The scheduling was pretty horrible - that might have prevented alot of teams from playing, as you only need 1 person on your team to not be able to make it.
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On April 14 2015 22:12 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:I pretty much just see it as giving out more beta keys which can only lead to more hype and greater popularity, so I think it's good publicity overall You end up with 1 or 2 weird first rounds of walkovers in the tournament, and then everything gets readjusted no problem. Obviously, 900 teams is a huge number (the bracket would need to be 1024 with a ton of walkovers/ Byes lol) but that's not the biggest deal in the world imo.
Unfortunately, they didn't readjust from what I understand. They carried the no-shows through the whole bracket and randomly assigned wins and losses when no-shows hit no-shows, which screwed the tiebreaker scores.
I only heard this second-hand though, so it might not be accurate.
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On April 15 2015 03:23 TheTenthDoc wrote:Show nested quote +On April 14 2015 22:12 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:I pretty much just see it as giving out more beta keys which can only lead to more hype and greater popularity, so I think it's good publicity overall You end up with 1 or 2 weird first rounds of walkovers in the tournament, and then everything gets readjusted no problem. Obviously, 900 teams is a huge number (the bracket would need to be 1024 with a ton of walkovers/ Byes lol) but that's not the biggest deal in the world imo. Unfortunately, they didn't readjust from what I understand. They carried the no-shows through the whole bracket and randomly assigned wins and losses when no-shows hit no-shows, which screwed the tiebreaker scores. I only heard this second-hand though, so it might not be accurate.
If that's the case, then I'd blame the incompetence of the tournament officials, rather than the oversaturation of fake teams. It could certainly run a lot more smoothly than that!
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Why didn't they just set a "check-in" time before the tourney and made the bracket from there? That would have been like common sense?
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