NASL Event Discussion Thread - Page 14

On July 09 2011 16:13 Dr. ROCKZO wrote:
Things like Day[9] sounding like Cho'Gath are all evidence to suggest that there has been a lack of beta testing in the system. Honestly, NASL just needs a little more experience (which I agree, shouldn't be realized only just now)

Equalize every audio feed, EQ main mics, balance the audio and then most importantly, send the orchestrated sound in equal amounts out of your Left and Right. I really don't know how that wasn't fixed all day. Sort of embarrassing really, but oh well, great games NASL, I still love you.

On July 10 2011 01:18 Xeris wrote:


Getting 2 more booths would be about $10,000 in additional cost. Those things are expensive and money doesn't grow on trees and we don't have unlimited money.

On July 10 2011 01:35 Hrrrrm wrote:


Or you guys could do what Homestory Cup did and just have laptops as the main comp and a Monitor in the booth you connect to the laptop for the player. When the next match is up you take out the laptop from inside the booth and switch it with the one the next player just warmed up on. No lugging around huge towers, just moving two laptops...

There are easy fixes that don't take thousands of dollars for quick setup time.

On July 10 2011 01:17 Xeris wrote:
Companies have to start somewhere. We will improve with every day that goes on. Next event will be better. Look at the first ever GSL and the first ever MLG, and the first ever any major LAN. You guys are expecting us to start off and be the same as GSL, which is backed by a company that has been running Starcraft events in Korea for years, and MLG, which has been around for years.

We've only been around for less than 6 months. Anyway, it's okay if you guys don't like us. We still <3 everyone.

On July 09 2011 18:54 Jibba wrote:

It is on NASL. The problems exhibited at the Grand Final have been characteristic of NASL all season long.

I'll start with the venue, since I knew this was going to be a problem just from seeing the pictures several days in advance.

You chose a big airy ballroom with seating for 720 people. That's honestly not a lot of people and you would've been much better served to use a more intimate setting such as a highschool or college auditorium. Reasons:

1. Anyone who's ever been to a club knows that it's better for the club to run out of space than to have vacancies. You say, "Oh, we'll fix that next time but hey everyone, we were overflowing with demand." Even if your crowd was full (it did not look like it was from pre/post-event photographs and first hand accounts), the ballroom was probably only 60-70% filled which just makes it look unpopular.
2. Price. Renting out an auditorium is going to be cheaper than an event center ball room. Your internet requirements are minimal, so that shouldn't be an issue.
3. Knowing your product. It seems like you're trying to emulate an OSL Grand Final in every way you can, but that's not the product you're selling. A smaller, more intimate venue feels better for the live audience, and it looks better at those types of numbers. It also reinforces the idea that this is a home grown product, the way DH Invitational looks.
4. Equipment (I'll touch more on it later.) A lot of it would already been in place and you wouldn't have to bring everything of your own.
5. Audience. Ontario, California is far from everything. No one actually wants to travel there. If you get a campus auditorium, you're not only more centrally located, but you're centrally located for your core audience- young people.

Now onto equipment. You have too much of it. Your event makes me think of a rich kid learning to play guitar, who buys an expensive Fender, amps and effects units before actually knowing how to pluck a string. That soundboard, the lights and the stage are overkill.
1. The soundboard doesn't fit your needs. I don't know who recommended it, but it was a terrible recommendation and you're obviously having a difficult time handling all of the features it provides.
2. Choose a better venue and you don't need that fuckton of lights. The amount you have is seriously absurd and again, it makes lighting harder to manage.
3. Screens. We know you had projector problems, but you still didn't set them up properly for the live viewers. You know this, so I won't touch on it that much but I'll bring up something you might not realize. You don't need 3 screens. 2 would be perfect, 1 would even be passable. The audience isn't spread out enough to really need that much screen coverage and it can actually be distracting from the single screen, the way that watching a panel of TVs at Best Buy is. Again, in a venue with theater style seating, this is even more true.

Staff problems.
1. Your audio people are not good at their job. This has been a problem all season long. They might be nice people, but they don't deserve anyone's slack.
2. Your cameramen are not good at their job. The job of a well-trained cameraman is not a difficult one. I assume yours aren't, so I hope they're at least volunteers. It's actually not the shakiness or losing focus that suggest that the most. It's that they don't know how to center their shots. You learn that on like the first day of class.
3. Your graphics people are not good at their jobs. I don't mean the CGI, that stuff is fine. But the NASL graphics/logo have always been ugly and that overlay needs to be scrapped. Again, I hope no one was paid to make it because that's just the lowest of the low of Photoshop know-how. A bar with a gradient filter, half cutting off the nice overlay that Blizzard built into the game. Who thought that would be a good idea, any why didn't anyone see that and say "turn that off"?
4. The set looks shoddy. The job of set design is an iffy one and I can understand if they were limited by time or resources, but it really just doesn't look good. On top of that, the design is tacky. I'll go back to an earlier point and say you need to tone it down. You don't need a huge stage like that. Give your people less to work on, and they'll do a better job on the fewer tasks they have. This was a problem during the NASL regular season as well. The set design was poor, with very bad colors/shades.

Overall these are a few of the things you need to fix, but these are all symptomatic of the bigger problems NASL has had all season long. You shouldn't have to learn all this stuff over again and go through growing pains. ESPORTS has been going on on a major scale for over 10 years now. There are staff from WCG/IEM/DH/CPL/ESEA/MLG/Blizzcon/ESL/etc. who already know how to put this type of production together. You should've hired them, at least to direct things, than do it entirely yourself. Just think about these two sets of events: NASL regular season/EG Master's Cup and NASL Grand Finals/Day9 Beta Countdown. When you're a business, it being your first time is not a valid excuse.

A lot of these aren't major issues and they don't detract from the game viewing experience, but they highlight a bigger and more serious issue: the director is not doing their job. Running things is a terrifically difficult job, but it falls on them to see the product and say, "that part isn't right, fix it." There have been so many little things continually not right about NASL, and no one noticed it until the fans pointed it out. And I don't mean big, complex things that are difficult to fix. I'm talking about stuff that could be fixed within an instant, and should have been noticed on the first pass through. That "noticer" has been absent. You need to hire a dedicated director, who simply understands how a finished viewing event should look.

EDIT: Also, your tournament format is not very fair to most of the players. I don't mean in a "omg extended series is dumb!" kind of way. I mean that people chocked up a lot of money to fly to the middle of nowhere, play two games and then be out. "But they had the chance to win $50,000!" doesn't matter. Either make it a double elimination bracket (then you set up an extra set of competitor computers backstage) OR make the ro16/ro8 online. Paying $3,000 for a plane ticket and being done in 15 minutes is an awful, souring experience.

On July 10 2011 01:17 Xeris wrote:


Companies have to start somewhere. We will improve with every day that goes on. Next event will be better. Look at the first ever GSL and the first ever MLG, and the first ever any major LAN. You guys are expecting us to start off and be the same as GSL, which is backed by a company that has been running Starcraft events in Korea for years, and MLG, which has been around for years.

We've only been around for less than 6 months. Anyway, it's okay if you guys don't like us. We still <3 everyone.

On July 10 2011 01:26 Xeris wrote:


We actually plugged in all their gear while the videos were going on, except Moon, who refused to let anyone touch his mouse+keyboard.

We had several lame problems later in the day, for example... Boxer accidentally hit the power cord with his foot and shut the computer off... MC wanted a long cord for his headphones, Moon mandated that he set his stuff up himself, aLive lost internet briefly on the computer because he accidentally unplugged the ethernet cable, DarkForcE was trying to install some very specific mouse driver and was having problems, White-Ra had a broken headphone and couldn't get sound so we had to change for a new one...

You guys don't know what goes on behind the scenes

On July 09 2011 15:29 Kamuy wrote:


Please!! This game is too 'random', and I say that loosely, to travel as far as many did to get only 1 Bo3.

^ That goes for any competition really.

On July 10 2011 01:48 Drlemur wrote:
You can't drill extra holes in a sound-proof both and keep it sound-proof, btw.

I think the between-match downtime can't really be consistently avoided because of the special equipment and the fact that players like to set up themselves. Best you can do is have the players setting up their equipment during those highlight videos. Which were decent, but can be further improved too. You could talk about their equipment to fill some of that time. I bet their sponsors would like that.

My intuition is that you have to expect that there will be lots of downtime and plan for other kinds of entertainment to fill. The casters can fill and do a great job when they are telling stories, or talking to the crowds. You can do more behind-the-scenes interviews, e.g., about the pressure of coming all the way to CA with the risk of losing in the first round. Play some music. Do some crowd giveaways. But you have to plan for it. Both the live audience and the stream should be kept entertained for the whole event. You'll get more sponsors if you have more eyeballs paying attention.

On July 10 2011 01:37 Numy wrote:


I guess you don't understand how picky progamers are when it comes to equipment. The only feasible way for it to work is having completely separate booths like the GSL has. Unplugging then replugging will take just as much time.