Official State of the Game Podcast Thread - Page 859

On April 22 2011 05:19 Liquid`Tyler wrote:

I guess the bottom line is that on demand video sucks. TSL2 had torrents on TL.net's tracker and it was awesome. Now TSL3 has video on demand via youtube, and it's not as awesome. At least their web interface at http://www.pokerstrategytsl3.com/vods is spoiler free, but you can still see the length of the video. You're still stuck with the shitty youtube video player, which has nowhere near the options of something like VLC's video player. And you can only access the video in places that you can access youtube, which is less convenient for some people than having the file and being able to access it anywhere you can watch a video file.

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NASL's first season shouldn't have been hyped at all. This is standard knowledge for any experienced folks in the scene. Before you talk and hype and make promises, it is a million times better to JUST DO IT and let your work speak for itself. Once you're making a good product, then you can start promoting it. If your product's success depends on people blindly following hype and unsubstantiated promises, then you have a piece of shit product. So yeah, you can go for all the marbles by promoting it before you have it, and if it turns out you do have a great product, then you benefit from your premature promotion, and everything is great. Or you can avoid that unnecessary risk, because if you have a great product, things will work out.

You can see a million bad examples on TL if you look for them. Someone starts a blog "hey I want to do a weekly show, how much interest is there for this and this and this" or they say "I'm gonna start a weekly show, here are all my hopes and dreams for it, and I'm just gonna blog my process as I get started." NO! Do the show how you want to do it. Do it the best you can. Take feedback once you have something and improve. Generate interest by putting your product out there, not by asking people what product they want and promising to make it. Don't get people excited about something that you might not 100% commit to. Do it or don't do it. Either way, don't go public about it until you've done it.

(A few good examples: pretty much everything JoshSuth does. Of course, now he's working for complexity, so it's like, his job and stuff, but still! He just did stuff and put it out there and that got him a job! And now he continues to do stuff! Also, the fucking State of the Game podcast. I don't know how JP started it with WoW or whatever, but he had to start over with SC2. So he just did it and posted it. And now he's doing that with SC Center and numbers are rising for that.)

So, how do you promote it without promoting it so that your first broadcast doesn't have only 5k people? Well, NASL actually knew the answer to that. Clash of the Titans. It's a little preview for your product. I think IPL is doing the same thing with this first $5k tournament. They announce "a series of tournaments" and throw $5k at a quick 16 man invitational. If that product is good and they then announced a $100k prize (I have no idea what IPL's future plans are -- I'm just saying this is what NASL could have done) then they will have a hell of a lot more people than 5k lined up. Problem was with Clash of the Titans, it actually wasn't a preview for their product. It was worse than their product, so they kind of disowned it, but then it ended up kind of being a preview for their product anyway.

And all business outside of the ESPORTS world works similarly, although the previews for products might not be in public. You make a product, you show it to investors or buyers, you sell them on it and then the promotion starts for its public debut. Or you get people who have made good products before that say "here's our new idea and here's our past work" and you pretty much know what you're gonna get. Once you've earned that status, you can do that. If djWHEAT or Day[9] announced that they've decided to start work on a new show, then that's fine. We know they'll do it and do it well.

So, most people at NASL know this now. Geoff 100% knows this. He probably knew it 6 months ago and just got too excited. I probably would've done the same in his position. I'm not trying to give feedback to them at this point, especially since they can't go back in time anyway. But there are people who don't understand why people are so critical of NASL. Well, the people who can't understand the negativity toward NASL probably didn't buy into the hype as much, probably never got the sense that NASL was really proud and in some sense arrogant before they even began their work. They somehow felt like NASL actually was a from-the-community startup, and not an alien entity that plucked people out of the community and decided a bunch of things and did a bunch of things privately and without any community input.

Unprecedented rules with team requirements and team limits and public video applications and $250 deposits etc, an oddly rigid player schedule for an online tournament, an announcement event that wasn't a product preview but then kind of was, a launch web site that wasn't a preview of the real site but then kind of was, the theme of "korea isn't unique! we're bringing esports to north america", the theme of "we're professionals and we need the players to be professionals too" while unprofessional debacles were happening and their base of operations was another league's web site's forums, a teaser video of their studio and their crew practicing (implying that AV was gonna be all set, 24 hour drill for editing would be routine, everyone would be comfy in the studio for day one, etc), not broadcasting live implying that everything will be smooth and crisp, turning down an outpouring of support/volunteers with a "nope we've got all the crew we need, but we'll let ya know"

Those are some of the components of the perfect storm leading up to week one that made people want to criticize NASL for failing to be completely awesome. In retrospect, everything that happened before NASL started broadcasting makes almost no sense. If they had an awesome debut week, it'd make sense. All along it was like "trust us, gonna be awesome. oops, sorry, yeah that rule actually isn't so great, we'll change it, but trust us, gonna be awesome. oops yeah, the production value is gonna be way better than that, trust us, it's gonna be awesome." and then it wasn't awesome. And unforeseen new problems happened (broadcasted spoilers, wrong map versions).

For some idiots on the internet, this is enough reason to eternally hate NASL. For people with an ounce more of rationality, it's enough reason to write scathing criticisms. As for me, it just made my first experience underwhelming.

If that's all you heard was that a new league was happening, and then you saw they had a bumpy start, and you heard them apologize for all the bumps and saw that they immediately started fixing things as best they can, then you probably can't understand where other people are coming from.

I will say that their willingness to listen to the community and improve is absolutely wonderful. In some ways that's a more important quality than having a good start. NASL will easily maintain enough interest so that when they have improved everything and have a great product, the masses will know and will watch. So yeah, I guess it's a wag of the finger for what NASL has done up to this point, but a tip of the hat to what they're doing now. However it is regrettable to think of the new faces whose first experience watching SC2 was week one of season one of the NASL. It certainly will not go down in history as one of the best presentations of competitive SC2.