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I liked the combination of HD/Husky and Day9/JP.
The first are entertainers, but are slowly missing whats going on in the games. So mixing them up would result in an entertaining AND analysing coverage. The commentators have been the highlight of the tourney sadly.
As in stated in another Thread. The games very most of the time boring as hell. No one can improve that, just the players. Also I'm missing emotions, look at korean events, you dont understand a word, but u love to watch them goin crazy if anything happens.
I would consider du prepare some "fillers": ie: Mapreviews, critical reviews of Maps and tactics, Playerhistory and style. Perhaps more interviews, I really like to hear the players getting more involved.
Also very IMPORTANT to me.
PLZ feature Custom Maps, which lead to longer better more epic games. Blizzard has to see that their maps dont work like they should. There is a reason why Metalopolis is the alltime favourite map!
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I used to just watch Husky and HD and though they were good, but their commentary really falters when it's right next to Day9's....
Day9 just obviously knows most about the game, where as Husky and HD obviously rarely play.
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On August 30 2010 00:47 Kexx wrote:
major thanks for hosting the sc2 event so early, so us Europeans could watch entire day 2 including the finals.
What he said ^___^ big thx for that!
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the event was amazing, ALL the casters were great.
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On August 29 2010 22:23 endriod wrote:Show nested quote +On August 29 2010 22:11 Whalecore wrote:
Awesome event and awesome casting!
What I think could improve:
- Better summary between matches. Show brackets, explain who played who, who got beaten and how/when. When you're streaming online, a lot of people will join the the feed mid-cast, and it can be a bit confusing to see who's progressing and what not. All in all a great show and well done casters and crew! Exactly what I thought. I don't care much about interviews. A few here or there are good. But definitely find a way to show the brackets when you're talking about them. The map preview was pretty cool, I guess. Reminded me of American Gladiators when the chick explains the set up before the match lol. Overall, great casting! I enjoyed it.
I completely agree with this. Because of the lack of explanations between the games of who else ways playing who, and the casters not even knowing what round they were casting, it was just like watching a bunch of games in a row rather than watching an actual tournament. Showing brackets before each match and saying who else is playing who would give it much more of a "tournament feel".
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Since I've been watching MLG ever since they started streaming, this one was no difference. Everything was fine imo. There could have been more pre/post game interviews. The ingame lighting looked kinda dark from my side. I had personally no problem with some of the matches you guys choose to broadcast but I think you guys could have picked better matches to stream. SjoW for example, we never saw any of his matches and Socke as well.
Even though we're suppose to treat them like everyone else it could have hyped things up a bit more hyped consider how these guys come from Europe, who is suppose to be better than the North American region but get no stream time. Overall it was fine. Know the players better, JP constantly saying "he's been doing pretty good" to who ever he thought that fit, became pretty obvious at one point, doesn't say much about the players or Day9 getting away with "Select has no LAN experience". Things like he recently placed x. at this tournament or mentioning that HuK is coming into this tournament after a rather poor performance at IEM and winning this whole thing.
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-More player interviews between matches! There was a lot of downtime and that would have been much more interesting to watch since the casters looked too exhausted to recap things on their own.
-It was a struggle to find the brackets and the matchups on the first day, I had really no idea what was going on.
-Casting was good, but there are many ways they could improve themselves if they make the effort.
-Invite more zergs. I think only 3 Z games were casted, and one was with someone who was a complete noob.
-If there is a staff shortage or something get incontrol to do interviews, that guy is awesome.
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After watching a fair bit of the event:
I think Husky and HD did a fantastically entertaining job!!!! Entertainment is what most people tune in for (at least the mainstream) and these guys provide it in bags. Day9 and JP were nice too but they werent as entertaining (I liked watching them tho as well). I have found most of the criticism unfounded and overly harsh. They will all get better with more experience of live casting. Mixing up the casting pairs was refreshing and should be done more.
More player interviews would be greatly appreciated. Maybe some before the tournament (these could be pre-recorded like on the news) so you can get a view of the players hopes for the tournaments. Also maybe interview the teams together so its quicker and theres always something to talk about. Also interviews of non-players would be good like the team managers. How about asking the fans there some questions??
More video of the venue and the different areas and how the place looked would be nice to give the guy at home an impression of just how big this is. Maybe a shot of the outside of the venue and a sped up run to the gaming area would be nice (pre-recorded ofc)
More cast matches overall would be greatly appreciated. There seemed to be a lot of deadspace which wasnt filled up with commercials and casters talking for tooo long about nothing important. More cast games please!!! Maybe have 2 streams??
Get a better variety of commercials pls!! The same 6 or 7 were shown in the same order and then they were shown again straight away. Please break them up so we dont get the same roll shown 3 times in a row.
Maybe remove the double elimination thing in the last stages (quarter and on) so its a proper knockout. Have the finals a Bo7 and the semis a Bo5. This would make it deadly and intense at the end.
Could you get the players to NOT cover their heads with hoodies etc when they are playing or in the interviews at least. The interview with Huk was really strange and I felt it took away professionalism from the event. Maybe get the casters to wear t-shirts or blazers, but defo not hoodies like by husky. That was just kinda amateur I felt.
Hopefully there will be more events in the future and as a first go I thought it was a good effort (7/10). The stream was great btw here in Europe. I enjoyed myself although the first day went into the early morning but the second day was right on time.
Asking for feedback is awesome btw!!!!! MLG rules.
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The only thing i can complain about is the cutoff of the screen in full screen other than that i was very impressed it was awesome how entertaining everything was and how you could tell how much fun you guys were having i will definitely be watching more MLG.
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- HD needs to do less "ladies and gentlemen". Seems like a go to crutch.
- Get the players names right. Many were mispronounced by one or more casters on various occasions.
- *Please* don't say "X is about to happen". I've said this before but when you are wrong it makes you look like a total idiot. And if you're right, then you have nothing to say after X does happen.
- I still like the idea of one person being play-by-play and the other being color commentator. All the casters seem to want to fill both roles and it feels a little odd because of it.
- I like the current two sets of casters together. I think you should stick with them and practice casting outside of tournies (on your own). Learn how to work with the other person best. It will show when the real casts are done. You'll produce a better product.
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United States22883 Posts
Granted I'm not a player, but I think you guys need to branch out and change the maps a bit. Throw in a few player designed maps.
It's obviously related to the balance issues, and we keep saying "wait for tourneys to start picking up REAL maps, then some of these things might get sorted out!" Well, to date, no one is picking up the other maps, so it would be absolutely amazing if MLG lead the charge.
Obviously it'd be experimental as we see which maps are better for which but you could like release a list of 4 or 5 potential maps for testing and then a month before the event, you have the players choose the 2 most balanced maps and go from there. I think a big tourney like MLG doing it is the only way we're going to see 3rd party maps enter the scene.
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Right, as an avid viewer of previous MLG events along with being an avid viewer of Starcraft 2, I want to add my personal thoughts, whilst trying to remain as impartial as possible towards my personal like/dislike of certain aspects. Just as a warning (not that I think it's necessary since you can probably see the size of this post) that this is a big Wall of Text.
There are a few key areas that need to be discussed:
1) The Format
2) The Player Pool
3) The Map Pool
4) The Stream Quality
5) Scheduling
6) The Casting
7) Down-time
8) Final Thoughts
I'll address these issues one at a time from my own Point of view and an impartial one.
1) The format, well for streaming or spectating the format, even single elimination, is very unfriendly. With a 64 player pool squeezed over 2 days you are going to have a lot of games clashing, in the First few rounds, confounded by double-elimination you basically can Only cast 1, maybe 2 series from a round, that's going to mean a lot of missed games. If you want to keep this event spread over 2 days (possibly 3 given the fact it could possibly be extended to that time) the player pool is too big, I realise there were a lot of sign-ups and MLG wants to give players a chance, but as a streamer 64 players in a double-elimination means a huge chunk of games missed.
I much prefer the Style the wow players adopt, with a round-robin Style format moving Into a double elimination. This leads to more games can be casted and so-forth. Now this Style Really relies on a smaller player base, which is a separate issue I will come on to, but personally group Style matches means you can eliminate players Just as easily and have easily scheduled matches people can tune in for. I would much rather have 16 good players where I can tune in specifically for a certain match-up that I find interesting, rather than 64 players where I have to apparently have luck to get a good Game shown on the screen before the semi-finals.
I also want to add that the extended Game issue is way too confusing for a spectator audience, the fact that the TL Live report thread had something like 10 pages of people trying to explain this to others really confounds the issue, I feel double-elimination is perfectly easy to explain and comprehend but when you go Into the final with an extended series bo7 instead of 2 bo3's I feel this is unfair. I feel that there is little Point in a double-elimination format if the loser is further punished by being behind further in a bo7, as it so happens the extended bo7 Actually helps the loser bracketted person, which is again rather superfluous in my opinion. If you want to go with double elimination, which personally I am a fan of if they are not going to be bo5's, then there definitely needs to be no tournament History bought in to avoid confusion for the spectator.
2) The Player Pool was surprisingly poor, both in quality and variety. This is bound to happen unfortunately though due to the GSL being scheduled at the same time as MLG, this automatically meant you were going to lose a lot of players to that tournament, and I very much doubt MLG could compete with the GSL, however something else needs to be done for the player pool. Whilst I like the idea of sign-ups, I feel the player pool was too big and too low calibre for a high prize pool tournament. There definitely needs to be some form of offline tournament, so to speak, to whittle down the numbers and Only bring 16 or 32 Max of the Best Starcraft 2 players who want to go to MLG. Especially if you are going to go for a 32 invite/32 sign-up format you need to have a balance of races, sure there are way more terran and protoss playing at a higher level in North America and Europe, such is the Flavour of the Month right now, but inviting only 3 zergs, one of which switched to terran I believe is just not right for spectating.
It is Only logical that non-mirror match-ups are more exciting than mirror-matchups.Mirror-matchups are almost always going to be more technical and "samey" than a fluid PvZ,PvT or ZvT, which is appealing to a certain demographic of really knowledgable sc2/sc1 players, I mean I never followed Brood War but Fantasy vs. Flash was really fun to watch once figuring out certain sc1 mechanics and really loving how mistakes and more obvious to see and technicalitys and such.
Personally I find the ZvT matchup is the most engaging, basically because it is whether the Zerg can hold to the late Game and both players have to engage different types of micro, compared to the same type of micro you get in mirrors. Now, sure, if there are more Protoss and Terran players playing well now, then its Only Natural there should be more of them at the tournament, but all this means are a lot of mirror matches or one type of match-up, at the very worst it should be a minimum of 25% representation of a race. Variety is the key here, if you are going to have loads of one or two types of matches the event is going to become boring, sure the IEM had a lot of ZvT's and that actually got really irritating because the openings of the games became very similar.
Whilst these 3 paragraphs are perhaps contradictory, I feel like you should have something like 50%-75% of the players being invite-only based on race-composition and performance in previous MLG tournaments/battle.net rankings. Whilst the remaining 50/25% of the competition is filled out by an offline qualifier, whilst this may Skew race compositions slightly, if you have a solid minimum 25% of invites being from each race you at least have a good representation of all the races, like shown at the esl as long as the quality of the players is good and there are enough they will progress through the tournament. I don't want to argue semantics here but the protoss players Really underperformed in that tournament and I don't Really have any sympathy since probably the best 8 (maybe 1 arguably shouldn't have been there) made it through the group stages.
3) The Map Pool is almost Always going to be a dilemma, mainly because of the poor diversity of the Blizzard map pool. Personally as a spectator I loved the fact that Desert Oasis was included, but since players could Just downvote one map it was almost Always going to be downvoted. I Remember Day[9] specifically saying he had a specific strategy for that island map in brood war for the WCG's he attended, and that he Just picked it knowing he could Win on that specific map. Whereas at MLG nobody could Really get anything out of practising Desert Oasis specific builds because 99% of the time it would Just End up downvoted and Never seeing the Light of Day.
Personally I want to see it included in the map pool and no down-voting to occur, perhaps this is unpopular with players and Desert Oasis would still not see much choice but I feel that somebody who went out and practised a specific map should be able to pick SaiD map regardless of how the over player feels, maybe there are maps they don't like, but hey that's why it is loser's pick. The map made the map pool so obviously the tournament organisers feel it is suitable for tournament play, it shouldn't be down to the players to snub a map that viewers may want to watch.
I could go on and on about the map pool Really but Scrap-station should be in the map-pool, it is a good map and has different dynamics to the vast majority of the maps. I would definitely agree with limiting the map pool to the ladder pool, simply because it's easier for players to practise these maps on ladder and in custom, perhaps if certain maps become popular MLG could adopt these, but right now it should definitely be confined to the map-pool.
The map-overview was ok.. but I feel like it should be an option, you know one of those secondary streams you get at events where you can browse through technical information if you want to, it Really seemed to Just interrupt the commentator's giving their own opinions on the maps and so interrupted what they are likely to comment on throughout the match, whilst the map information is very useful and valid it is out of place because different commentators place different values on certain aspects of a map. Some people will want to discuss positioning, others the base layout, others expansion patterns, others choke points. There are different aspects of the maps that certain commentators like to focus on and giving a generic preview on top of the caster's preview they are already giving is Just too over the top. These sort of things should be on a secondary stream and in the pre-game show, I.E at the Start of the Day and such.
I also feel that "selected maps" and best of 3's don't work, each map is very different and going to favour a certain race and having certain maps definite starting maps (I believe they were anyway) for each of the rounds means that if you get unlucky, say a zerg player on steppes, then you are probably down for the count. I personally believe every round should probably Start on Metalopolis, it is probably the most balanced map in the map pool right now and has certain rng elements that mean it can favour 1 race or the other, and indeed make some strategies viable and others not so. If you want to go with a loser's pick format every match should definitely Start on Metalopolis with the others choosing, I don't think you will find many players who dislike playing on Metalopolis and more often than not it is the map ChOseN for the second Game (unless a terran wins and then it is seemingly Steppes of War, but lets not get Into semantics).
Perhaps offering Metalopolis First means you have a somewhat bland variety of maps, but I feel we already have this situation where Metalopolis, Xel'Naga Caverns and Steppes of War are probably the most played maps in the tournaments mostly because Steppes is what terran choose when they lose, Metalopolis is what Zerg seemingly default to (although this decision is based on some rng) and Xel'Naga Caverns is usually a secondary choice for all players. You can't Really do much about that since the map pool isn't big enough yet, hopefully the ladder pool will expand over time and we get some other maps in the pool, personally I hOpe crossfire gets in the ladder pool as it is probably my favourite custom map to play on as Zerg.
4) On to the Stream Quality, there are a few points: the free stream was pretty good quality, I akin this to how the Wow-arena stream free quality was Really good for the First few events then it got drastically worse whilst the hd-quality remained the same, please do not do that, this is the precise ReasoN I stopped watching the wow stream, I Actually paid for the hd-quality stream when the difference wasn't so big, but then once the free stream was so awful that you were basically forced Into the HD stream I didn't want to pay at all. Please do not do this.
Secondly, 480p is not HD, not by a long shot. Please do not advertise it as such, 720p is what an HD stream is and I would gladly fork out Money for an HD stream in 720p, a free stream should be in 480 or 360p and the HD stream in 720p. I chose to ignore MLG for vast passages of time on Saturday in Favour of watching the I40 LAN, where sure the quality of players was not as great but the quality was superb, the 720p provided there was exquisite, I would have easily paid Money for a stream of that quality at MLG, and watched all Day, but because the HD stream was not what I would call HD by any shape or form, I would Never pay for it.
If MLG can't fork out the cash or don't have good enough equipment to provide a 720p stream I suggest not providing the option and giving everybody 480p quality, maybe that means less revenue for you but 480p in Starcraft 2 Just does not cut it for a Game of good graphical quality where you want to be able to see things such as the minimap with pristine clarity.
Obviously the issue where full-screening the stream cut-off a good chunk of the screen if you were not in the exact aspect ratio of the screen was pretty ludicrous aswell, I was simply control-zooming to get the stream as big as possible without full-screening to compensate for this.
I guess I will include it here but the adverts definitely need to have some gaming prowess, I know that sponsers obviously need their Air time, but perhaps ask them to provide gaming related commercials at the very least (apart from maybe old spice, because their advert is amazing <3). I don't Really MinD having lots of adverts but they should be gaming related products or at least gaming related commercials, I realise this Point would be pretty hard to accomplish but I think lots of people would appreciate it and perhaps view their adverts if they were more akin to the current genre being broadcasted.
5) I touched on this in previous sections but the scheduling was pretty dire, both because of the long downtime and the fact that so many matches were happening at once and the streamer was given the choice of Only watching one match. This probably has to be solved through previous resolutions to other sections of this post and perhaps subsequent sections but I feel like this was a Major problem.
The most important Point I want to make is how MLG needs to spread this tournament out over 3 days, if it's a weekend I don't Really like how an RTS Game, where matches can take up to say 40 minutes compared to the fast paced Action (relatively) of fps or wow-arena, (and with a bigger player pool) can be fit Into the same time-frame as those events. I respect you had 1 (maybe more?) Wow players in the Starcraft 2 tournament who wanted to participate in both, but Really I would much rather have had less overall matches per Day but more streamed matches overall across 3 days than it all being jam-packed in to 2 days and missing out on half the matches.
The second Point is you need parallel streams if you want to maintain a high player invite list, if the tournament is to remain at a high invite level we need 2 streams so we can watch them both, even if that means swapping in different commentator's, perhaps solo casting some, so people can have breaks. I feel like people would greatly appreciate having some choice if matches are going to be scheduled with conflicting start-times. So this could be solved v.i.a not having conflicting Start times or by simply having parallel streams.
6) Casting, this is a tricky subject without sounding far too personal and neglecting a lot of people's thoughts and views. Regardless to say that there are a few things I want to comment on here. I don't think there could be a contrasting Style of delivery than HD & Husky, compared to JP & Day[9], I'm going to excuse to mix-matching because I don't think it worked. Whether I am for or against these commentators I feel by having all 4 here you get a group of people who Only want to listen to HD & Husky and a group of people who Only want to listen to JP & Day[9]. I feel like their styles are way too different, personally I prefer the latter of these 2 combinations but you cannot dismiss how great the synergy is for HDH I Just personally prefer how people sound as a spectator and JP & Day[9] "sound better", I don't think I could explain it properly it's Just their tone is soft and not harsh and I prefer to listen to that.
Now, whilst you can see how this brings in the viewers for MLG, something commendable since you get a bunch of people who are casually Into starcraft 2 and like the more color commentary of HDH and the people who like the softer more technical commentary of Day[9] & JP, it Just creates too many problems. Again, like with the previous post, I feel if you want to invite all 4 people to cast they need to be on parallel streams, even later on commentating on the same Game so people can choose their commentary. Taking an example from say "the BBC" when you view a sporting event on their website you can choose between radio commentary and television commentary, which personally I Really appreciate as I can pick and choose which commentator's I like to hear on a specific Game.
Of course MLG is also a live-casted event so casters would have to share the main-stage, but I feel a separate "back-door" commentary booth where the other pair could provide commentary to a spectator at home would Really add to the quality of the event and not leave me in a position where I Really Just want to mute the stream.
I also feel their is a big advocation for employed observers covering the match for the main-stage. I feel that commentary is Always a good thing and that having separate screens for commentator's to look at is great, but having say a second monitor for all of them to look at where the observer is looking would be an added bonus, it would mean they would miss less stuff caught in the heat of the moment, or perhaps they could let the main screen cover battles, which perhaps a spectator is more interested in whilst they pan for drops or look at the decisions a player is making and commentating on them, along with drop-play for example.
There was a recent thread here on Team Liquid about how observing the Game is very important and I feel that if you could employ an "expert" observer who provided the stream observation that would Really add to a professional setup, there is nothing worse than a commentator getting caught up in the heat of the moment and missing important Action because they have too much stuff going on.
I also want to add about some of the other aspects, I feel like a tournament is not a place to be going "on and on" about balance, maybe some people love that discussion in a tournament but personally I would rather see between game discussion on strategy, tactics, mechanics and such rather than hearing Day[9] go on about how Zerg feels like a chore to play, I actually love playing Zerg it's just really fun for me to play and not everybody wants to hear the endless tales of balance/imbalance. Discuss them on the forums or in a pre-event show but not pre-game or in periods between games. I feel this was really annoying to hear since whilst balance is somewhat of an issue arguably a tournament is a tournament and I want players to be judged on how well they played and not on various imbalances that may or may not exist, at least at a big tournament.
Other than that, put Husky in a suit, it was ridiculous that he was wearing a hoody when everyone else was wearing a suit for commentating, it was highly unprofessional and would have made me want to switch off if I hadn't known him before. I don't MinD if nobody is wearing a suit and somebody wants to wear a hoody, but it's highly unprofessional to have a casting uniform and 1 caster not abiding by that.
7) I couldn't Really think of an appropriate title for this but I Really wanted to comment on what was happening during the down-time of the event and such. Firstly I think it was somewhat ludicrous the amount of game-stopping that had to occur, I Remember one Game where Select had to wait a good 30 seconds for the Game to be paused after requesting it, that's a pretty big deal in Starcraft 2 and the other player seemed clueless what to do and the extra time in-game probably disrupted him more than the pause screen would have done. I realise you don't want people to tactically use pause and therefore have this request rule in here, but it Really disrupts the flow of the Game. I feel like each player should perhaps have an observer (similar to korean booth girls) who would pause the Game from a separate Machine if their player has a problem, this is done instantly as soon as the player has a legitimate ReasoN explained, i.e less than 5 seconds.
Secondly, the downtime before games seemed Really excessive. There were plenty of times where computers were being re-arranged or something like this and the commentators had to fill in this time, I realise that running a lan on battle.net is absolutely attrocious but I feel there was Just way too much downtime/re-arranging. Obviously Players can't sit next to each other but if you aren't going to employ a "booth-style" system on the main-stage then this needs to be pre-arranged for the games.
I want to add how at the beginning of the matches stat-screens should be introduced, even if its Just their name and played race and maybe a fun-fact or something. Perhaps a W/L record from bnet along with match-up histories (if that information is available) about how they fair depending on what race the opponent is. Obviously this will be much easier to implement in subsequent MLG tournaments because of past results in SaiD tournaments. Something like this Just to fill-in the time or at the very least delaying starting of the "pre-game" until the players are entirely set up so the time before each Game is very standard. Obviously certain hiccups at the Start of a Game might be common but they shouldn't be delaying the actual Start of the loading screen and such.
Post-game analysis was also pretty thin mostly. Their were sparsely any interviews, I mean if there was one thing I took away from IEM it was how much I enjoyed the player interviews, <3 Take, they give you a great insight to the players and well as a spectator I had no idea what half of these players looked like, I Only Really knew how NonY, qxc and HuK looked like because of previous stuff I had watched. So whilst pictures of them in-game were good I simply had absolutely no idea who was who, interviews and stat screens add to this and Really get people behind certain players.
I can safely say, for example, that before the IEM I had no idea what DIMAGA looked like or his personality or attitude other than he was a very aggressive zerg player in online tournaments which were streamed. However after the IEM you could see how happy he was, his attitude and personality seemed to be something I Really took a liking to and regardless of his play made me want to cheer for him compared to some other players. I also knew who he was so I could see his specific reactions on the player cams during a Game.
I also want to say that their wasn't really enough "closeness" of the crowd, plenty of times on the stream you could hear massive roars and screams from the halo (i'm guessing) in the background whereas the Starcraft 2 crowd was barely involved. I can't comment much because I wasn't there but I feel that at the very least there needs to be "sound-dampening" of the other venues so you don't get random noises from other crowds whilst watching the stream, it was really annoying trying to watch a good play just to hear a random cheer.
8) I thought for a First time streaming of a NA tournament it was pretty good, the stream was better than I expected (based on IEM and MLG's usual quality of streams) and I mean you can't Control that the final games ended up being a whole series of PvP's (probably the most boring match-up for me to watch personally). I feel that some work definitely needs doing to make this *the* North American Starcraft 2 Esports tournament, specifically stream quality and a higher calibre player pool.
I feel with some of the issues I have raised here addressed the tournament could become much better than Raleigh and hope to tune into the next MLG weekend and see an improved tournament.
Thank you for reading my criticism.
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First of all I think you did a great job. =) I had a great time watching the games I did.
I don't know how it all is planned or organized, but it seems to me that you as commentators have to take on many different roles compared to traditional tv-casting. You are commentators, hosts/anchors, on-the-spot-reporters and expert sources during the same show. In addition to that it seems you have to handle some of the organisation as well. Getting players ready, inviting them and creating games.
If the roles were split up a bit more I think you could devote more time and energy to each role. Research the players you don't know, if you are going to commentate a game. Even though they are relatively unknowns, they might have relateable stories, you can throw in, adding to the experience of watching the game. Remember that in the game all players look the same apart from the name. This works well with the players whose names we already know because we associate them with other stories and their history, but makes it can be bland when we see unknows we don't have any associations with. It doesn't have to be their whole biography, but simple things like why they choose the race they play, favourite units, what they see as their weakness strength. etc. Simple things that sets them apart from the rest.
If it are well known players make sure the details are correct. The truth lies in the detail.
Prepare the on-the-spot interviews. As you get experience doing them, you probably find out which questions gives the best answers. The interviews seemed pretty random to me.
I loved the map presentation with the graphics. It might have been a bit too fast for my taste. And it would be nice to have them at the beginning of the broadcast. The special tournament structure with the double knockout could use some a graphical explanation and updates.
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I was watching the stream from my home and here's my feedback:
Stream
Was great. Worked perfectly from start to finish. Free stream quality is decent enough, unlike the ESL free stream. Really nothing to complain about. I'm planning on getting HD next time. Only issue is that Flash fails to properly display a wide screen stream (in fullscreen mode) on a 5:4 or 4:3 monitor, but as long as I can watch the stream in VLC it's not a real problem.
Casters
Day9 + anyone was great. But I did not like the HD + Husky setup. They seemed really uncomfortable, especially in their first few casted matches. Might be their lack of LAN casting experience but I didn't like it. Their mediocre game knowledge and understanding is really annoying. You really should invite Day9 to every event if possible. JP was doing good as well.
Tournament
I really like double elim, especially for an event with free sign-ups because everyone gets a second chance. Would suck if you pay money to go there, lose two games and drop out of the tournament. The only problem I have with it is that it's hard to follow individual players if you don't have a site with a proper bracket that's regularly updated. The GotFrag bracket was a total mess. Needs to improve.
Schedule
Was good, but the times are difficult when you're watching from Europe. Half of the first day was past 1:00 am. Second day was better. Guess you can't do much about that, but it's hard to pay for premium stream if you can't even watch everything because you fall asleep half way through. 
Broadcasted Games
Some of the games that were shown were really boring. The first round games were completely one sided. I would've rather watched Machine and Incontrol than a pro vs noob game where I know who'll win before the game starts. Later on with fewer games played it was better obviously.
Misc
I would really like to see more pre/post game interviews. You couldn't really see much of the players except a few seconds between the games. IEM was better in this regard even though their interviewer was not very good.
Overall I thought it was really good. I'd definitely watch again, most likely with HD. 
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0) Great casting, esp. day9, yourself, hd and husky need more knowledge.
1) More Player interviews
2) Crowd shots/participation
3) Brief on players previous games (2 win etc. ) and what you think they are aiming for
less importantly
- Players rating themselves for final games (ie. like OSL, star quality, defense, offense etc. apm averages, im willing to help with gathering data)
- Chairs for the crowd!
- Replays! Replays! Recaps! Inbetween new matches to review great plays or pivotal moments for further understanding.
Great show!
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It was a really good job! I liked the rotation of casters, however something i did not like (too much) were the lack of diversity in the games, it seemed like every game was toss defending against an mm push at the same time, of the same size or zerg defending reapers and if it lasted the mmm ball. The last few games of PvP were intense and excellent though.
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On August 30 2010 01:29 alexpnd wrote:
- Chairs for the crowd!
This x100.
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Personal opinion, over all it was good. (I watched from home.)
4 casters, one game at a time, waste of resources. Do it as IEM did with a second stream, that way people can pick and choose. Or just do a secondary stream without casters with just an observer moving the camera with production tab on. That way you can view both games at the same time.
You can have two streams easily due to it being b-net based. Just have the second stream be casted from off location, saves on costs of flying people in as well. This secondary stream will get the "worse" games from what one knows beforehand.
The dead time wasn't all that fun when watching the stream. A lunch break is fine, I need to eat as well. Have pre-recorded player interviews or something like that in the breaks between games when it isn't lunch/dinner.
I liked day 2 more than day 1 due to being in Europe. Time zones.
I would like prior to game info to be expanded if we have that much dead time. Things like map info, player info and anecdotes about the players. Make us care about generic player number 3. ^^
Oh and use the tabs top left. The production tab can cover the mistakes of casters and observers to a large degree.
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Also:
- Fullscreen view was cut off on the edges. This is bad.
- Game sound was low in the matches. Would make the casts much more entertaining if I could actually hear the sounds in the games.
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Day 9's Audio level was bad at times but its expected . You and Day did great commentating had a great flow.
HDH didn't really have a flow in the beginning of the event but it really did improve the longer they talked and being their 1st event I think they did well.
I heard there is a MLG Anaheim is this true?
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EPT
