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EDIT: For the record I am not an NASL employee, just a fan.
Polls to think about:
Poll: Will you be buying an NASL Season 2 premium pass?No AND I did not buy Season 1 (1262) 63% No AND I bought Season 1 (415) 21% Yes AND I bought Season 1 (232) 11% Yes AND I did not buy Season 1 (109) 5% 2018 total votes Your vote: Will you be buying an NASL Season 2 premium pass? (Vote): Yes AND I bought Season 1
(Vote): Yes AND I did not buy Season 1
(Vote): No AND I bought Season 1
(Vote): No AND I did not buy Season 1
This is the telling poll IMO. This will tell us the returning customers/dropout/new customer ratio.
Poll: How many hours/week did you watch the NASL?0-1 (763) 45% 2-3 (270) 16% 1-2 (220) 13% 3-5 (199) 12% 8+ (126) 8% 5-8 (101) 6% 1679 total votes Your vote: How many hours/week did you watch the NASL? (Vote): 0-1
(Vote): 1-2
(Vote): 2-3
(Vote): 3-5
(Vote): 5-8
(Vote): 8+
RETURNING Season One Buyers:
Poll: Satisfaction Level with your NASL season 1 passHappy with what i got, some improvement needed (294) 34% Waste of money, seriosuly needs to be improved (235) 27% It was barely worth it and has lots of room for improvement (144) 17% Not really worth it, needs a lot of improvement (113) 13% Worst buying decision of all time, beyond repair. (42) 5% Extremely happy with what I got overall (17) 2% Very Happy with what I got, very little improvement needed (13) 2% 858 total votes Your vote: Satisfaction Level with your NASL season 1 pass (Vote): Extremely happy with what I got overall
(Vote): Very Happy with what I got, very little improvement needed
(Vote): Happy with what i got, some improvement needed
(Vote): It was barely worth it and has lots of room for improvement
(Vote): Not really worth it, needs a lot of improvement
(Vote): Waste of money, seriosuly needs to be improved
(Vote): Worst buying decision of all time, beyond repair.
Personal Opinion:
I purchased it at the very beginning, really only to support e-sports in NA. I had low expectations and NASL did not exceed them. However, over the weeks they dramatically improved on every level, including video/audio quality, casting, transitions and overall production value. By the week of the finals they had a finished touch on all aspects of the stream and were very impressive about things like scheduling and audience notification.
Unfortunately, one of the main reasons I bought the pass was to be able to watch the VODS high-def. This remains the ONLY aspect IMO of the entire production that (EDIT) continued* to have a glaring fault: Cutting and labelling of specific matches. As they are casting from replays I see no reason why the uploaded videos were not only poorly labelled, but mashed into huge videos where games may not start for 20-30 minutes. It made it extremely difficult to watch specific matches. Despite this, I will certainly be purchasing season two as the production value is still extremely high.
EDIT: The videos of the finals are immaculate. After waiting about a week they have them cut-and-dried perfectly. No complaints there at all
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Waste of money, seriously needs to be improved. No offense but I personally did not like the casting, especially when Gretorp was involved.
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Not really worth it, too many NA players invited whose skills did not justify the invitation (see dropout rates from each respective region). This season, I am very tempted to buy it because the player pool improved a lit, not sure if I will. Maybe I wait another season, though.
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I'm probably going to wait a week or two into NASL Season 2. First I want to see who they bring in to replace Incontrol, then I want to see the quality of games improved and no more "oops we switched the games so that they discuss the result without showing the game".
After that, maybe I will buy it. But it has to be an incredible change. Something along the lines of IGN's crisp production quality. I don't really care that they have less time, that IGN has a month to prepare. The quality is what matters.
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I might buy it, i will watch the free stream for 2-3 weeks, then i will consider it. But right now all my money is going to GSL+GSTL.
Also for me personally, live offline tournaments>>>prerecorded online events.
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didn't buy it season 1, not gonna buy it season 2, just not worth it, weekly cups are more watchable
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I think they need to improve in many ways in order to get people to buy.
Whole organization was screaming ''amateur'',from tech quality,to venue appearance(studio sheets covering anything,rly NASL?,watch how glamorous GSL is),to random decisions like hiring Lindsey(no matter how much we love her) or this song at the season finale.
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I felt each week of the standard season had at least one series that was well worth whatever fraction of the money I paid to see the thing, with the games at the final event being even more worthy of my eyes and money, sound issues and the ret vs puma series notwithstanding.
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NASL has some work to be on par with a GSL... but I purchased a season 1 pass with NASL, and I was not disappointed. The games were excellent, the improvement week to week was pretty astonishing, and the atmosphere (if you ignored the insanely negative user chatter) was great.
I'm definitely buying Season 2, and can't wait to see how it goes. No doubt there will still be a season or two of kinks to work out, but I can't wait :D
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Really didn't enjoy NASL compared to other events. I hope something is improved because they have the money, casters, and tech to make it a better event.
In addition the player fiasco and invites were just not up to par. Sure it's a good event to watch in my timezone, but I'd rather do stuff during the day and pay for a premium GSL sub at night for my SC viewing. Not to mention, GSL is live, has the highest level of skill, and awesome casters.
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I might be a unique person, but i just want to watch my favorite players play the game! (this pretty much had all of them) and i got more content than i could watch! The casting was a perfect balance of intertainement and analysis and i personally like iNcontrol alot.
sure things could be improved, i disliked getting spoiled when trying to access vods, and a few minor things here or there. Other than that i got the cheapest intertainement ive ever payed for, and it was worth a watch for sure!
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Unless a major turnover for season 2 (which I don't see happening), I don't think I will be buying the season pass again. Too many things annoyed me and too many poor decisions were made related to the format.
Honestly, I really hope they manage to fix their league, but I'm not holding my breath now.
The finals were great though and I'll most definitely tune in for that next season (using the free low-quality).
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Didn't buy the season 1 and i wont buy it next season. The broadcasting style is really stupid in my opinion. I don't like "splitting the scene" half, i.e own broadcast times for NA and EU. So that's why i even didn't watch any NASL games during the season, except the finals of course.
But that's just my opinion and i kinda understand why NASL would want to do it this way.
The prize of the season isn't much, but what i heard from the community, about all of the problems they had during the season, it can't be worth it. 
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On July 12 2011 07:39 CursedFeanor wrote:
Unless a major turnover for season 2 (which I don't see happening), I don't think I will be buying the season pass again. Too many things annoyed me and too many poor decisions were made related to the format.
Honestly, I really hope they manage to fix their league, but I'm not holding my breath now.
The finals were great though and I'll most definitely tune in for that next season (using the free low-quality).
The bad thing is, I feel the players saved the finals while the organizers dragged it down over all.
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I went to the finals and it was a lot of fun / really well run, except for a few issues on the first day with the projectors which were fixed the next day. Some people are saying that it looked amateur and there was lots of problems and stuff, at the start of the season I agree that it looked like that and it was true, these guys took on a huge project and there was obviously going to be some problems. But I think that they did an awesome job and the grand finals was really awesome and I think that next season will be 10x better than the first one : )
Oh and I bought a season 1 pass and I will definitely buy a season 2 pass, 1080p HD is so nice and definitely worth 20 bucks for 4 months of sc2 + if I miss any really good games I can watch the vods : )
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I think it's too expensive for the quality of the stream. Not gonna buy it
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On July 12 2011 07:39 Grettin wrote:Didn't buy the season 1 and i wont buy it next season. The broadcasting style is really stupid in my opinion. I don't like "splitting the scene" half, i.e own broadcast times for NA and EU. So that's why i even didn't watch any NASL games during the season, except the finals of course. But that's just my opinion and i kinda understand why NASL would want to do it this way. The prize of the season isn't much, but what i heard from the community, about all of the problems they had during the season, it can't be worth it.
how is it splitting the scene LOL if you are european then you can stay up and watch the first broadcast LOL it's not like you get IP blocked if you are from EU. They picked the time when the most people will watch for the main broadcast, and were nice enough to give a free re-stream to europeans who couldn't stay up late
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I personally won't probably ever buy the NASL, despite buying EVERY other event. I wasn't a big fan of the casters apart from the finals event, and I absolutely hate the group stages going on for several months. There's pretty much no climax, just random game after game. Loved the finals event though, but obviously that's a tiny portion of what the NASL is.
Also, because there's game after game for months in group, it's fucking impossible to watch them all, and it's work to find out which ones are actually worth watching on top of the GSL.
Oh, and the production quality will never match that of the GSL most likely, so that's another reason why I'll be happily buying my GSL ticket every season and will most likely never touch the NASL.
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I found format boring, otherwise they have improved and I am looking forward for more improvement.
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I feel like if people went back and compared the quality of games first season of GSL with the quality of games first season of NASL there would be a lot less complaining about stream/sound/caster issues, but maybe people have forgotten what the beginnings of the korean league were like.
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I bought season 1, but I will not be buying season 2.
My reasons:
- The premium pass adds very little as it is at the moment. What I want and expect is a proper VOD system, and it just isn't there. The justin.tv stuff is a complete and utter mess, and so userunfriendly that over the course of the NASL I have watched maybe a VOD and a half. I've found out I can pretty much watch the matches I want to see on the broadcast/rebroadcast, and that most of the time I can't even be bothered to log in to switch to a higher resolution.
- The second real reason why I bought it was to watch the finals in decent quality, but it turns out I bought it too early. If I waited with buying I would have saved 15 USD, and while I understand why the NASL offers the passes cheaper end of season, part of me felt screwed over by the price reduction. I feel that the NASL should have refunded the people that paid full price, or offer a serious discount on s2 for those that bought s1. It's only logical to reward your most loyal customers.
- I strongly disagree with the delayed 'live' casting. If you're going to delay casts for production etc, I'm fine with that, but I feel that you could just as easily cast from replays then. This would be more convenient for the players and would allow for smoother production/casting. The NASL has been riddled with spoiled matched (by the casters), because they don't record in the same order they are aired, and I feel this ruins the overall 'narrative' of a night. Any league should be aiming to create a story, and answer questions like 'what happens if player X wins?'. The terrible terrible casting format has not allowed them to do anything of the sort, and a night of NASL feels like it's randomly cut and pasted together. Overall production needs to improve dramatically for me to pay for it again.
- The regular season feels meaningless. It's too many games spread over too many nights, and too many games are utterly mediocre. There are too few high end matchups in the regular season, too many lopsided games, and too many players I honestly don't give a shit about because they're not exactly up there in terms of skill.
- Justin.tv is a terrible partner for a league like this. Justin is just poor in europe, and does not offer the options required for a league like this. Lower resolution VOD's are a prime example of this, and while it's been promised for quite a while, it should have been in place from the get go.
- The NASL representatives are generally dismissive of what are very real problems, and it makes me feel like I'm not valued as a customer. MLG has had its screw-ups, but realizing that, apologizing for it and promising to do better goes a long way. I'm willing to pay to support a new league to some extent, but not when the main spokespeople keep hyping it like everything is working out fine. Take your feedback seriously, respond to it in a professional manner and don't dismiss it offhand. It's true that the NASL has gotten quite some unfair criticism, but a lot of the criticism has been quite fair and constructive, yet it gets treated as an attack on the NASL by their spokespeople. We all want this league to be awesome, and we all want to be taken seriously.
That said, if they offer the finals again at a discount rate (say 10 USD), I would buy that, simply because any 3 day tournament with 50k on the line is too exciting to miss out on.
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On July 12 2011 07:51 Zinjil wrote:
I feel like if people went back and compared the quality of games first season of GSL with the quality of games first season of NASL there would be a lot less complaining about stream/sound/caster issues, but maybe people have forgotten what the beginnings of the korean league were like.
The GSL production has always been great. The games were shit in GSL 1 though because the SC2 was too new to have any actual good solid players playing, and it had mostly guys who cheesed their way up.
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On July 12 2011 07:44 coL.drewbie wrote:Show nested quote +On July 12 2011 07:39 Grettin wrote:Didn't buy the season 1 and i wont buy it next season. The broadcasting style is really stupid in my opinion. I don't like "splitting the scene" half, i.e own broadcast times for NA and EU. So that's why i even didn't watch any NASL games during the season, except the finals of course. But that's just my opinion and i kinda understand why NASL would want to do it this way. The prize of the season isn't much, but what i heard from the community, about all of the problems they had during the season, it can't be worth it. how is it splitting the scene LOL if you are european then you can stay up and watch the first broadcast LOL it's not like you get IP blocked if you are from EU. They picked the time when the most people will watch for the main broadcast, and were nice enough to give a free re-stream to europeans who couldn't stay up late
Yeah, thats why i used "" when i said splitting. I didn't mean it literally or maybe i didn't use the correct word here? And i'm sure that i'm huge minority with this or even alone and thats why i emphasized that its only my OPINION.
But someone who uses facebook, twitter, reads forums and stuff, can't avoid spoilers unless you stop using them completely till you've seen the VoDs or watched the broadcast. And i didn't want to stop reading/using these just to avoid to not get spoilered.
If you are European you can stay up to watch the main broadcast? It's easy to say if you don't go to school or work at the morning.
I'm not blaming NASL for "ripping" the scene, doing stupid decisions with the broadcasting or anything. But this broadcasting style is just not for me. Get it? no need to get pissed about it.
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I bought season 1 and will not be buying season 2. This has nothing to do with the quality or anything. It was just far too many games to watch. I have pretty limited time to use for watching SC, so I think I will be sticking with GSL.
That being said the games were pretty good.
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No offense to people who enjoy NASL but I think it is an extremely poor choice to give them any money in their current state.
All the problems that plagued them were human error and yet they have still not taken responsibility for the problems and just make excuses or pretend people who complain are "haters".
There is no reason to expect they will suddenly improve by season 2 without staff changes. They did not improve much over the season and were still having problems at the finals that they were having on day 1. Also their website is abysmal and justin.tv/twitch.tv doesn't have a very good website either and are not suitable as a VOD provider. And the way they are streaming--by playing their prepared video in windows media player and then running a screencapping program to stream to justin.tv--degrades video quality a lot and causes inflated bitrates. They could take the time to encode and stream properly and they would get higher quality at lower bitrates.
Including other problems like "premium 1080p" being interlaced during camera shots, the audio sounding poor even when they have managed to put it out both channels at the same volume, it really puts their level below even the small weekly cups as someone else mentioned. I would rather support GSL which has very polished and superb production, and MLG who took responsibility for their screwups and really delivered a top notch show at Columbus.
I'd buy two GSL and two MLG tickets to support good organizations before I bought NASL again. Giving NASL money sets a bad precedent in the SC2 esports market that making a cash grab and disregarding quality will be rewarded. I had high hopes for them before they launched but at this point I really hope they go bankrupt to send a message that starcraft viewers have at least some standards and are not complete bottom feeders.
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Their early hiccups were pretty embarrassing, and the hiccups during the live finals was just sad. That said, over the course of the 9 weeks of group play, they improved a TON. Casting improved, the quality of games was pretty good and overall it was pretty enjoyable. I was disappointed by their decision to stop offering 480p for free half way through the Season.
I'm strongly considering a pass for Season 2, but a lot depends on the first 1/2 weeks. If they have improved and the issues are kept to a minimum, I'll buy a Season pass.
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On July 12 2011 07:52 Derez wrote:
- The second real reason why I bought it was to watch the finals in decent quality, but it turns out I bought it too early. If I waited with buying I would have saved 15 USD, and while I understand why the NASL offers the passes cheaper end of season, part of me felt screwed over by the price reduction. I feel that the NASL should have refunded the people that paid full price, or offer a serious discount on s2 for those that bought s1. It's only logical to reward your most loyal customers.
I agree. While this isn't something that we're entitled to as customers, it's a great feeling. MLG did this great, as they gave me MLG Gold free for 15 months, because I had bought MLG Dallas, Anaheim, and the deal for the next two MLG events. Feels great, and I will be a customer with MLG for a long time yet because they do baller stuff like this.
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NASL was the most amateur tournament I've seen in a long time -- even more so that $100 weekly tourneys.
There is no way I'd spent even a dollar on it without first seeing them put on a production that doesn't look like it was made by grade schoolers.
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On July 12 2011 07:56 Gurblechev wrote:
No offense to people who enjoy NASL but I think it is an extremely poor choice to give them any money in their current state.
All the problems that plagued them were human error and yet they have still not taken responsibility for the problems and just make excuses or pretend people who complain are "haters".
There is no reason to expect they will suddenly improve by season 2 without staff changes. They did not improve much over the season and were still having problems at the finals that they were having on day 1. Also their website is abysmal and justin.tv/twitch.tv doesn't have a very good website either and are not suitable as a VOD provider. And the way they are streaming--by playing their prepared video in windows media player and then running a screencapping program to stream to justin.tv--degrades video quality a lot and causes inflated bitrates. They could take the time to encode and stream properly and they would get higher quality at lower bitrates.
Including other problems like "premium 1080p" being interlaced during camera shots, the audio sounding poor even when they have managed to put it out both channels at the same volume, it really puts their level below even the small weekly cups as someone else mentioned. I would rather support GSL which has very polished and superb production, and MLG who took responsibility for their screwups and really delivered a top notch show at Columbus.
I'd buy two GSL and two MLG tickets to support good organizations before I bought NASL again. Giving NASL money sets a bad precedent in the SC2 esports market that making a cash grab and disregarding quality will be rewarded. I had high hopes for them before they launched but at this point I really hope they go bankrupt to send a message that starcraft viewers have at least some standards and are not complete bottom feeders.
I mostly agree with you, besides the whole bankruptcy thing. That's not cool. They should just learn and get better than they are know. With that same logic, you would want MLG to go bankrupt after Dallas too, and while it's not exactly the same situation, they sure have improved. Although, I don't think NASL will improve as MLG did, we can always dream, right?
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lolL everibody smashing nasl production...omg .. ive just seen the best games of sc2 ever and thats what i was there to see! so much QQ
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There needs to be an option for "It depends". Personally, for me it's going to depend on the full player list, the casters, and whether NASL makes an announcement to get their shit together.
I purchased a season pass and watched nearly every game in season 1 (at least, all the ones worth watching), however, I was unable to watch any matches "live" due to JTV's lag issues, and I found much of the casting to be unbearable (read: Gretorp and a few of the guest casters). The finals weekend was a complete farce, and I actually feel like all the effort I put into being a NASL fan over the season was thrown out the window with the shameful way the finals was put together, the lack of consistent scheduling, and the way PuMa got seeded in to win the entire thing. It was like reading a 500-page book only to find out it doesn't have an ending.
Anyway, I feel like I got my $25 worth, but season 2 is iffy for me.
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On July 12 2011 07:55 Calasmere wrote:Show nested quote +On July 12 2011 07:51 Zinjil wrote:
I feel like if people went back and compared the quality of games first season of GSL with the quality of games first season of NASL there would be a lot less complaining about stream/sound/caster issues, but maybe people have forgotten what the beginnings of the korean league were like. The GSL production has always been great. The games were shit in GSL 1 though because the SC2 was too new to have any actual good solid players playing, and it had mostly guys who cheesed their way up.
That's exactly my point. The first season of NASL had some of the best games of starcraft 2 I've seen so far, and apart from being a zerg player and having the high of fruitdealer winning the first season of gsl the majority of the games were not of a good quality.
I'm more than willing to deal with some graphical hiccups and sound issues and a host of other problems in order to see 9 weeks plus a finals weekend plus a huge open tournament of some really amazing players just beating the crap out of each other.
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I bought the ticket but could never watch the VODs because there was no low quality version. Thanks to my Australian internet I had to buffer for 2 hours to watch a 30 minute video and if I ever wanted to fast forward or rewind the process had to start over again. Won't buy season 2 if this isnt changed.
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I'm surprised more people aren't voting that they watched more hours a week. I watched 5-10 hours of the free stream each week and they consistently drew in thousands of viewers with the finals showing 80k viewers. Where are these thousands of viewers? Maybe NASL successfully grabbed a bunch of people that aren't TLers.
I'm still on the fence about a Season 2 pass; it depends on the availability of lower quality VODs. That said, they really improved their whole schtick over the course of Season 1.
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On July 12 2011 08:03 Zinjil wrote:Show nested quote +On July 12 2011 07:55 Calasmere wrote:On July 12 2011 07:51 Zinjil wrote:
I feel like if people went back and compared the quality of games first season of GSL with the quality of games first season of NASL there would be a lot less complaining about stream/sound/caster issues, but maybe people have forgotten what the beginnings of the korean league were like. The GSL production has always been great. The games were shit in GSL 1 though because the SC2 was too new to have any actual good solid players playing, and it had mostly guys who cheesed their way up. That's exactly my point. The first season of NASL had some of the best games of starcraft 2 I've seen so far, and apart from being a zerg player and having the high of fruitdealer winning the first season of gsl the majority of the games were not of a good quality. I'm more than willing to deal with some graphical hiccups and sound issues and a host of other problems in order to see 9 weeks of some really amazing players just beating the crap out of each other.
IMO only the games in the finals were great, the regular season including the playoffs were nothing special. The only real problems I had with the early season GSL were the streaming, the production were always top class, but NASL just had nothing going for it, too many meaningless games towards the end of the season and many poor quality matches.
I will judge the quality of the NASL again once we are 2-3 weeks into season 2.
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On July 12 2011 08:00 Calasmere wrote:Show nested quote +On July 12 2011 07:56 Gurblechev wrote:
No offense to people who enjoy NASL but I think it is an extremely poor choice to give them any money in their current state.
All the problems that plagued them were human error and yet they have still not taken responsibility for the problems and just make excuses or pretend people who complain are "haters".
There is no reason to expect they will suddenly improve by season 2 without staff changes. They did not improve much over the season and were still having problems at the finals that they were having on day 1. Also their website is abysmal and justin.tv/twitch.tv doesn't have a very good website either and are not suitable as a VOD provider. And the way they are streaming--by playing their prepared video in windows media player and then running a screencapping program to stream to justin.tv--degrades video quality a lot and causes inflated bitrates. They could take the time to encode and stream properly and they would get higher quality at lower bitrates.
Including other problems like "premium 1080p" being interlaced during camera shots, the audio sounding poor even when they have managed to put it out both channels at the same volume, it really puts their level below even the small weekly cups as someone else mentioned. I would rather support GSL which has very polished and superb production, and MLG who took responsibility for their screwups and really delivered a top notch show at Columbus.
I'd buy two GSL and two MLG tickets to support good organizations before I bought NASL again. Giving NASL money sets a bad precedent in the SC2 esports market that making a cash grab and disregarding quality will be rewarded. I had high hopes for them before they launched but at this point I really hope they go bankrupt to send a message that starcraft viewers have at least some standards and are not complete bottom feeders. I mostly agree with you, besides the whole bankruptcy thing. That's not cool. They should just learn and get better than they are know. With that same logic, you would want MLG to go bankrupt after Dallas too, and while it's not exactly the same situation, they sure have improved. Although, I don't think NASL will improve as MLG did, we can always dream, right?
No, MLG apologized, offered compensation to paying customers, and took decisive action to remedy their problems. As I understand it many staff were replaced and they hired new people who were capable of delivering a top notch product.
NASL has not taken any responsibility. Xeris comes on the forum and argues and makes excuses, someone apparently associated with NASL made a post on reddit saying that a mysterious "failure" was the cause of their observer problems--trying to pass it off as a technical issue--when it was clearly just that none of their employees were competent enough to set things up to send the same video feed to the stream as they were sending to the projector.
They have no intentions of improving or delivering an acceptable product. They are just milking starcraft fans. I really hope starcraft fans are smart enough not to allow themselves to be treated like cash cows.
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Make it so I can watch the vods in 720.
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On July 12 2011 08:11 Gurblechev wrote:Show nested quote +On July 12 2011 08:00 Calasmere wrote:On July 12 2011 07:56 Gurblechev wrote:
No offense to people who enjoy NASL but I think it is an extremely poor choice to give them any money in their current state.
All the problems that plagued them were human error and yet they have still not taken responsibility for the problems and just make excuses or pretend people who complain are "haters".
There is no reason to expect they will suddenly improve by season 2 without staff changes. They did not improve much over the season and were still having problems at the finals that they were having on day 1. Also their website is abysmal and justin.tv/twitch.tv doesn't have a very good website either and are not suitable as a VOD provider. And the way they are streaming--by playing their prepared video in windows media player and then running a screencapping program to stream to justin.tv--degrades video quality a lot and causes inflated bitrates. They could take the time to encode and stream properly and they would get higher quality at lower bitrates.
Including other problems like "premium 1080p" being interlaced during camera shots, the audio sounding poor even when they have managed to put it out both channels at the same volume, it really puts their level below even the small weekly cups as someone else mentioned. I would rather support GSL which has very polished and superb production, and MLG who took responsibility for their screwups and really delivered a top notch show at Columbus.
I'd buy two GSL and two MLG tickets to support good organizations before I bought NASL again. Giving NASL money sets a bad precedent in the SC2 esports market that making a cash grab and disregarding quality will be rewarded. I had high hopes for them before they launched but at this point I really hope they go bankrupt to send a message that starcraft viewers have at least some standards and are not complete bottom feeders. I mostly agree with you, besides the whole bankruptcy thing. That's not cool. They should just learn and get better than they are know. With that same logic, you would want MLG to go bankrupt after Dallas too, and while it's not exactly the same situation, they sure have improved. Although, I don't think NASL will improve as MLG did, we can always dream, right? No, MLG apologized, offered compensation to paying customers, and took decisive action to remedy their problems. As I understand it many staff were replaced and they hired new people who were capable of delivering a top notch product. NASL has not taken any responsibility. Xeris comes on the forum and argues and makes excuses, someone apparently associated with NASL made a post on reddit saying that a mysterious "failure" was the cause of their observer problems--trying to pass it off as a technical issue--when it was clearly just that none of their employees were competent enough to set things up to send the same video feed to the stream as they were sending to the projector. They have no intentions of improving or delivering an acceptable product. They are just milking starcraft fans. I really hope starcraft fans are smart enough not to allow themselves to be treated like cash cows.
You prove a good point. Although MLG didn't keel in and apologize till countless complaints were made. But like you say, NASL is not taking responsibility for complaints, and they're probably looking upon them as 'haters'. I mean, even in the sometimes unjustified unconstructive hatred of the typical pissed of netizen, there's pretty much always going to be some shred of truth in it, and it should actually be taken into consideration for NASL to progress.
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Ordered immediately when I saw the presale add. €14,40 is a joke for 2-3 months SC2. Just my opinion, not trying to generalize anything.
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On July 12 2011 08:01 reisada wrote:
lolL everibody smashing nasl production...omg .. ive just seen the best games of sc2 ever and thats what i was there to see! so much QQ
You're forgetting that a tournament doesn't entirely consist of the level of the players. Production matters a lot, casters matter a lot, the format of the play matters a lot.
If a tournament had GSL level production and bronze players, I would not be interested. Weekly tournament production and unknown GM players, I would be semi-interested in. You can't have extremes in it, and as far as I'm concerned, the production and the format of the NASL are a huge extreme in shit for me, which is why I'm not interested in the fact that they have amazing players.
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I paid money so I could access VODs, only to find out that I couldn't watch the VODs (ONLY in 1080p? Really?)
I can't watch at Stream times. When they release lower quality VODs, I'll probably pick up another pass. However I paid $25 for a season I couldn't watch, so won't be doing that again.
Casting was ok. Not everyone is Day9/Tastosis.
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On July 12 2011 08:18 Calasmere wrote:Show nested quote +On July 12 2011 08:01 reisada wrote:
lolL everibody smashing nasl production...omg .. ive just seen the best games of sc2 ever and thats what i was there to see! so much QQ You're forgetting that a tournament doesn't entirely consist of the level of the players. Production matters a lot, casters matter a lot, the format of the play matters a lot. If a tournament had GSL level production and bronze players, I would not be interested. Weekly tournament production and unknown GM players, I would be semi-interested in. You can't have extremes in it, and as far as I'm concerned, the production and the format of the NASL are a huge extreme in shit for me, which is why I'm not interested in the fact that they have amazing players.
at least FOR ME players quality is way more important than production quality.
Now that you talk about it this was the only tournament that had 1080p+ stream video quality? thats what is the most important when talking about quality. The lag people talk about is on their end. I live in a country with bad internet half world away from nasl and got 1080p+ flawless
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On July 12 2011 08:23 reisada wrote:Show nested quote +On July 12 2011 08:18 Calasmere wrote:On July 12 2011 08:01 reisada wrote:
lolL everibody smashing nasl production...omg .. ive just seen the best games of sc2 ever and thats what i was there to see! so much QQ You're forgetting that a tournament doesn't entirely consist of the level of the players. Production matters a lot, casters matter a lot, the format of the play matters a lot. If a tournament had GSL level production and bronze players, I would not be interested. Weekly tournament production and unknown GM players, I would be semi-interested in. You can't have extremes in it, and as far as I'm concerned, the production and the format of the NASL are a huge extreme in shit for me, which is why I'm not interested in the fact that they have amazing players. at least FOR ME players quality is way more important than production quality. Now that you talk about it this was the only tournament that had 1080p+ stream video quality? thats what is the most important when talking about quality. The lag people talk about is on their end. I live in a country with bad internet half world away from nasl and got 1080p+ flawless
Dreamhack has the same quality, as does Homestory and IEM. MLG isn't too far off. HD quality working on a stream on the internet isn't anything amazing at all, and it's pretty much a fucking regular standard requirement.
But honestly, you accepting some of the shoddy production of the NASL and appreciating great players is just what you like. You don't need to say 'lol qq deal with it it has good players', because it all comes down to what people enjoy. Don't hate on those who don't have exactly the same tastes, likes and dislikes as you.
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I paid for NASL S1 and was disappointed. SC2 is an amazing game and when you bring together the best players you can have some great entertainment. Unfortunately, everything surrounding the broadcast of those games (and to an extent the "best players" part) was bad.
It started with the controversy over restricting non-NA players involvement in NASL, leading to the invitation of many lower tier players that I would not pay to watch. For a pre-taped broadcast, they did not do a good job of editing resulting in a show that had the problems of live, yet it wasn't. There were amateur production values (e.g. cutting off commentators with generic "gg" guitars and applying dodge/burn effect to the screen, poor graphic design, I could go on). The sound was awful, then improved but it was never "good"; the mix was always off and this continued right up through the finals. VODs, the website and streaming in general was all fairly annoying. Finally, and perhaps most crucially, the commentary. Much has been made about it so I'll just leave it as I'm not a fan.
I will not be paying for S2. My support will be more directed toward GSL, MLG, and IGN which currently have higher production quality, a skill-based qualification system, and (generally..) better commentators. If NASL can fix its issues during S2 I will consider paying for S3, but commentary is a big deal for me and right now I don't see that being fixed in a meaningful way for S3.
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I just don't understand why in a community full of tech savvy people willing to help out for little or no money NASL chooses to do everything alone and put out a production that is at the level of a high-school news broadcast or worse. If that is the level they want to operate at, fine, but don't try and charge a competitive price to other tournaments that are light years ahead in production. Will not be paying again unless they lower the price to something like $5 or replace much of their staff with people who know what they are doing.
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On July 12 2011 08:15 Calasmere wrote:Show nested quote +On July 12 2011 08:11 Gurblechev wrote:On July 12 2011 08:00 Calasmere wrote:On July 12 2011 07:56 Gurblechev wrote:
No offense to people who enjoy NASL but I think it is an extremely poor choice to give them any money in their current state.
All the problems that plagued them were human error and yet they have still not taken responsibility for the problems and just make excuses or pretend people who complain are "haters".
There is no reason to expect they will suddenly improve by season 2 without staff changes. They did not improve much over the season and were still having problems at the finals that they were having on day 1. Also their website is abysmal and justin.tv/twitch.tv doesn't have a very good website either and are not suitable as a VOD provider. And the way they are streaming--by playing their prepared video in windows media player and then running a screencapping program to stream to justin.tv--degrades video quality a lot and causes inflated bitrates. They could take the time to encode and stream properly and they would get higher quality at lower bitrates.
Including other problems like "premium 1080p" being interlaced during camera shots, the audio sounding poor even when they have managed to put it out both channels at the same volume, it really puts their level below even the small weekly cups as someone else mentioned. I would rather support GSL which has very polished and superb production, and MLG who took responsibility for their screwups and really delivered a top notch show at Columbus.
I'd buy two GSL and two MLG tickets to support good organizations before I bought NASL again. Giving NASL money sets a bad precedent in the SC2 esports market that making a cash grab and disregarding quality will be rewarded. I had high hopes for them before they launched but at this point I really hope they go bankrupt to send a message that starcraft viewers have at least some standards and are not complete bottom feeders. I mostly agree with you, besides the whole bankruptcy thing. That's not cool. They should just learn and get better than they are know. With that same logic, you would want MLG to go bankrupt after Dallas too, and while it's not exactly the same situation, they sure have improved. Although, I don't think NASL will improve as MLG did, we can always dream, right? No, MLG apologized, offered compensation to paying customers, and took decisive action to remedy their problems. As I understand it many staff were replaced and they hired new people who were capable of delivering a top notch product. NASL has not taken any responsibility. Xeris comes on the forum and argues and makes excuses, someone apparently associated with NASL made a post on reddit saying that a mysterious "failure" was the cause of their observer problems--trying to pass it off as a technical issue--when it was clearly just that none of their employees were competent enough to set things up to send the same video feed to the stream as they were sending to the projector. They have no intentions of improving or delivering an acceptable product. They are just milking starcraft fans. I really hope starcraft fans are smart enough not to allow themselves to be treated like cash cows. You prove a good point. Although MLG didn't keel in and apologize till countless complaints were made. But like you say, NASL is not taking responsibility for complaints, and they're probably looking upon them as 'haters'. I mean, even in the sometimes unjustified unconstructive hatred of the typical pissed of netizen, there's pretty much always going to be some shred of truth in it, and it should actually be taken into consideration for NASL to progress.
To be honest Sundance apologized live before MLG Dallas was even over, offering refunds while promising to improve until the next event. I doubt it could've been handled much better.
My experience with NASL has pretty much been tuning in to the stream, cringing at the sound and closing the tab 5 minutes later. After watching 1 hour of the finals weekend day 1 and having seen 10 minutes of games, I decided to just skip it and watch the grand final. Come Monday at 2 am, I tune in only to see that the final had been moved, meaning I stayed up for nothing. On top of that, the NASL pass is ridiculously expensive compared to all other events.
The US has a great regular tournament in IPL, I don't see any reason at all to even continue watching NASL.
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Bought Season 1, will not be buying Season 2 for a number of reasons.
Most suggestions made seem to be going over NASL's head. For the longest time, complaints were made over audio, and they still had issues both with their stream and their live event in the final weeks of the overall tournament.
VOD quality for watching videos couldn't be changed. 1080p videos take forever to buffer for some people; sorry I'm not going to sit and wait half an hour for a video to buffer for a game that might have turned out to be mediocre.
I'm not sure this is a Justintv issue (I believe it's not), but almost every single time there would be a big battle going on during a game the stream would lag. I've seen many different streams/tournaments where this issue doesn't come up, so something must be going on.
Player selections, casters, etc. are largely subjective. However, I think the amount of players they had for Season 1 was too much and basically the season ended up having dead periods where the games wouldn't matter anymore. Yeah sometimes in certain divisions it did come down to the wire, but players that were under .500 by Week 5 had no shot anymore at the playoffs and just took up time.
This may have been NASL's first run and I did expect a few hiccups but they still have not proved to me that they had a refined product at the end of Season 1, which is why I probably won't shell out another $25 for Season 2.
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hopefully they will mean what they say. no more technical difficulties leading to delay, let's hope.
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On July 12 2011 08:26 vanick wrote:
I paid for NASL S1 and was disappointed. SC2 is an amazing game and when you bring together the best players you can have some great entertainment. Unfortunately, everything surrounding the broadcast of those games (and to an extent the "best players" part) was bad.
It started with the controversy over restricting non-NA players involvement in NASL, leading to the invitation of many lower tier players that I would not pay to watch. For a pre-taped broadcast, they did not do a good job of editing resulting in a show that had the problems of live, yet it wasn't. There were amateur production values (e.g. cutting off commentators with generic "gg" guitars and applying dodge/burn effect to the screen, poor graphic design, I could go on). The sound was awful, then improved but it was never "good"; the mix was always off and this continued right up through the finals. VODs, the website and streaming in general was all fairly annoying. Finally, and perhaps most crucially, the commentary. Much has been made about it so I'll just leave it as I'm not a fan.
I will not be paying for S2. My support will be more directed toward IGN which currently has higher production quality, a skill-based qualification system, and (generally..) better commentators. If NASL can fix its issues during S2 I will consider paying for S3, but commentary is a big deal for me and right now I don't see that being fixed in a meaningful way for S3.
About what you said with graphic design, I have no idea what the fuck they're doing. It's amazingly shoddy. Even the finals graphic designs were fuck ugly. It was the same in the Clash of the Titans too. The graphics were just fucking god awful. I can't iterate just how inexcusable this is given the fact that this is all pre-recorded and streamed later stuff. There is no excuse for it all, and as far as I'm concerned, whoever they hired as a graphics designer is not professional at all, given the stuff that is pushed out, and should be fired.
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On July 12 2011 08:23 reisada wrote:Show nested quote +On July 12 2011 08:18 Calasmere wrote:On July 12 2011 08:01 reisada wrote:
lolL everibody smashing nasl production...omg .. ive just seen the best games of sc2 ever and thats what i was there to see! so much QQ You're forgetting that a tournament doesn't entirely consist of the level of the players. Production matters a lot, casters matter a lot, the format of the play matters a lot. If a tournament had GSL level production and bronze players, I would not be interested. Weekly tournament production and unknown GM players, I would be semi-interested in. You can't have extremes in it, and as far as I'm concerned, the production and the format of the NASL are a huge extreme in shit for me, which is why I'm not interested in the fact that they have amazing players. at least FOR ME players quality is way more important than production quality. Now that you talk about it this was the only tournament that had 1080p+ stream video quality? thats what is the most important when talking about quality. The lag people talk about is on their end. I live in a country with bad internet half world away from nasl and got 1080p+ flawless
Well most of the NASL regular season games were not good and tbh i dont need 1080p to enjoy a tournament, 480p is good enough. That's while i watch the GSL, for the best games in the world even though the stream quality is bit lower. (its somewhere between 720p and 480p)
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My main gripe is the casting (gretorp) and the production value, there were so many problems throughout the first season and even into the finals, it was really dissapointing, i definitely wont be purchasing again until they get their shit in order and get some better casters.
In comparison to a similair league like IPL the production value and the casting is just much better than NASL and although i think i like the player list a little more in NASL the rest of the problems still leave me wanting to avoid it.
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I was very happy to be able to view the live matches at 1080p.
Many of the early season criticism had merit (only uploading 1080p vods, stream lag) but it greatly improved as the season moved forward.
I liked the fact that NASL was willing to listen to the community. It seemed like feedback and remedies on our issues and complaints were present consistently throughout the season. Problems were acknowledged and were fixed.
I plan on buying the season two pass once again. I saw positive, forward progression in the NASL-- t'was grand ^^.
edit: <3 Gretorp-- he's a cute caster =D
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On July 12 2011 07:52 Derez wrote:
I bought season 1, but I will not be buying season 2.
My reasons:
- The premium pass adds very little as it is at the moment. What I want and expect is a proper VOD system, and it just isn't there. The justin.tv stuff is a complete and utter mess, and so userunfriendly that over the course of the NASL I have watched maybe a VOD and a half. I've found out I can pretty much watch the matches I want to see on the broadcast/rebroadcast, and that most of the time I can't even be bothered to log in to switch to a higher resolution.
- The second real reason why I bought it was to watch the finals in decent quality, but it turns out I bought it too early. If I waited with buying I would have saved 15 USD, and while I understand why the NASL offers the passes cheaper end of season, part of me felt screwed over by the price reduction. I feel that the NASL should have refunded the people that paid full price, or offer a serious discount on s2 for those that bought s1. It's only logical to reward your most loyal customers.
- I strongly disagree with the delayed 'live' casting. If you're going to delay casts for production etc, I'm fine with that, but I feel that you could just as easily cast from replays then. This would be more convenient for the players and would allow for smoother production/casting. The NASL has been riddled with spoiled matched (by the casters), because they don't record in the same order they are aired, and I feel this ruins the overall 'narrative' of a night. Any league should be aiming to create a story, and answer questions like 'what happens if player X wins?'. The terrible terrible casting format has not allowed them to do anything of the sort, and a night of NASL feels like it's randomly cut and pasted together. Overall production needs to improve dramatically for me to pay for it again.
- The regular season feels meaningless. It's too many games spread over too many nights, and too many games are utterly mediocre. There are too few high end matchups in the regular season, too many lopsided games, and too many players I honestly don't give a shit about because they're not exactly up there in terms of skill.
- Justin.tv is a terrible partner for a league like this. Justin is just poor in europe, and does not offer the options required for a league like this. Lower resolution VOD's are a prime example of this, and while it's been promised for quite a while, it should have been in place from the get go.
- The NASL representatives are generally dismissive of what are very real problems, and it makes me feel like I'm not valued as a customer. MLG has had its screw-ups, but realizing that, apologizing for it and promising to do better goes a long way. I'm willing to pay to support a new league to some extent, but not when the main spokespeople keep hyping it like everything is working out fine. Take your feedback seriously, respond to it in a professional manner and don't dismiss it offhand. It's true that the NASL has gotten quite some unfair criticism, but a lot of the criticism has been quite fair and constructive, yet it gets treated as an attack on the NASL by their spokespeople. We all want this league to be awesome, and we all want to be taken seriously.
That said, if they offer the finals again at a discount rate (say 10 USD), I would buy that, simply because any 3 day tournament with 50k on the line is too exciting to miss out on.
I agree with a lot of this.
I paid for season one and will not be paying for season 2, aside from maybe paying for a pass for the finals weekend if it ends up being $10 like I think it was this past season.
The VOD system being extremely poor is a complaint that bears being repeated over and over and over. I realize NASL doesn't have the technical staff to develop a real VOD system comparable to GOMTV's but the existing justin.tv system is extremely poor. The VODs themselves are huge videos with random split ups in them on a page where other people can comment and spoil the matches for you. I personally ended up watching less and less of the divisional play as the season went on and the VOD system didn't really make me want to bother catching up.
Audio issues were rampant throughout the entirety of the NASL season, going from the beginning of divisional play up until the grand finals weekend. I don't know if they just dislike game music, but the game music was turned off very often and the game sounds were always at a poor volume relative to the commentary.
While the player pool is pretty exciting for season 2, I don't know how much of it I will watch up until the finals weekend. I just don't think the format is that great for spectators.
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Why buy it when if I miss the matches at night I can just watch the european stream during the afternoon
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Id rather spend my money buying GSL Ticket for HQ and Vods. NASL really fell short of my expectations.
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On July 12 2011 08:30 godemperor wrote:Show nested quote +On July 12 2011 08:23 reisada wrote:On July 12 2011 08:18 Calasmere wrote:On July 12 2011 08:01 reisada wrote:
lolL everibody smashing nasl production...omg .. ive just seen the best games of sc2 ever and thats what i was there to see! so much QQ You're forgetting that a tournament doesn't entirely consist of the level of the players. Production matters a lot, casters matter a lot, the format of the play matters a lot. If a tournament had GSL level production and bronze players, I would not be interested. Weekly tournament production and unknown GM players, I would be semi-interested in. You can't have extremes in it, and as far as I'm concerned, the production and the format of the NASL are a huge extreme in shit for me, which is why I'm not interested in the fact that they have amazing players. at least FOR ME players quality is way more important than production quality. Now that you talk about it this was the only tournament that had 1080p+ stream video quality? thats what is the most important when talking about quality. The lag people talk about is on their end. I live in a country with bad internet half world away from nasl and got 1080p+ flawless Well most of the NASL regular season games were not good and tbh i dont need 1080p to enjoy a tournament, 480p is good enough. That's while i watch the GSL, for the best games in the world even though the stream quality is bit lower. (its somewhere between 720p and 480p)
mm really gsl is REALLY not having the best games in the world. REALLY
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I liked Gretorps casting, I like iNcontrol casting. I wish they would show only some of the games live and maybe cast the others in down time. I do not need to see all the games and really only want to watch the ones worth watching. It just gets to be too much SC2.
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On July 12 2011 08:22 IMABUNNEH wrote:
I paid money so I could access VODs, only to find out that I couldn't watch the VODs (ONLY in 1080p? Really?)
I can't watch at Stream times. When they release lower quality VODs, I'll probably pick up another pass. However I paid $25 for a season I couldn't watch, so won't be doing that again.
Casting was ok. Not everyone is Day9/Tastosis. Justin.tv issue, they fixed it quite awhile back. You can watch vods in various quality now.
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On July 12 2011 08:37 reisada wrote:Show nested quote +On July 12 2011 08:30 godemperor wrote:On July 12 2011 08:23 reisada wrote:On July 12 2011 08:18 Calasmere wrote:On July 12 2011 08:01 reisada wrote:
lolL everibody smashing nasl production...omg .. ive just seen the best games of sc2 ever and thats what i was there to see! so much QQ You're forgetting that a tournament doesn't entirely consist of the level of the players. Production matters a lot, casters matter a lot, the format of the play matters a lot. If a tournament had GSL level production and bronze players, I would not be interested. Weekly tournament production and unknown GM players, I would be semi-interested in. You can't have extremes in it, and as far as I'm concerned, the production and the format of the NASL are a huge extreme in shit for me, which is why I'm not interested in the fact that they have amazing players. at least FOR ME players quality is way more important than production quality. Now that you talk about it this was the only tournament that had 1080p+ stream video quality? thats what is the most important when talking about quality. The lag people talk about is on their end. I live in a country with bad internet half world away from nasl and got 1080p+ flawless Well most of the NASL regular season games were not good and tbh i dont need 1080p to enjoy a tournament, 480p is good enough. That's while i watch the GSL, for the best games in the world even though the stream quality is bit lower. (its somewhere between 720p and 480p) mm really gsl is REALLY not having the best games in the world. REALLY
The finals have been REALLY bad, if that's what you REALLY mean.
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so you prefer to see better organization and worst games then better games and worst( although not that worst) organization?
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Absolutely buying it again. totally worth it!!! watched easily more than 8 hours a week. Best 25 dollars I've ever spent. Casting was okay, but became SUPER SUPER GOOD. So happy!!! :D
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Well, it is quite promising and I'm sure the next season will be quite a bit better in many ways, but I'm not sure if it's worth the money. But that's not because of the quality, so much that I don't have the time to dedicate to watching it, and I don't easily spend money. The GSTL is the only thing I'm currently paying for, and I don't really have the time to add something else to that.
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I purchased fairly early on in the season and was very happy with it until the finals. The video quality was great, the game quality was mostly good, the commentator quality was great (<3 MrBitter). It all fell apart during finals weekend, though. Day 1 was a production nightmare. The audio levels were terrible and there was really bad stuttering at any resolution. I went 9 weeks watching flawless 1080p, so I know I have the bandwidth to do it. Then suddenly during finals weekend I can't watch 480p without massive stuttering issues, especially during intense fights.
The final blow had nothing to do with the technical issues, though. PuMa winning felt so unsatisfying to me. Don't get me wrong, PuMa deserved that win more than I can describe. His play was flawless and he is one of the best out there. I just don't like that someone not even in the NASL during weeks 1-9 can win the championship. When I bought the ticket, I didn't realize how much this would annoy me.
I don't think I'll buy a ticket again until the format is change so that you have to be in the NASL from day 1 to win the NASL finals.
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On July 12 2011 08:37 reisada wrote:Show nested quote +On July 12 2011 08:30 godemperor wrote:On July 12 2011 08:23 reisada wrote:On July 12 2011 08:18 Calasmere wrote:On July 12 2011 08:01 reisada wrote:
lolL everibody smashing nasl production...omg .. ive just seen the best games of sc2 ever and thats what i was there to see! so much QQ You're forgetting that a tournament doesn't entirely consist of the level of the players. Production matters a lot, casters matter a lot, the format of the play matters a lot. If a tournament had GSL level production and bronze players, I would not be interested. Weekly tournament production and unknown GM players, I would be semi-interested in. You can't have extremes in it, and as far as I'm concerned, the production and the format of the NASL are a huge extreme in shit for me, which is why I'm not interested in the fact that they have amazing players. at least FOR ME players quality is way more important than production quality. Now that you talk about it this was the only tournament that had 1080p+ stream video quality? thats what is the most important when talking about quality. The lag people talk about is on their end. I live in a country with bad internet half world away from nasl and got 1080p+ flawless Well most of the NASL regular season games were not good and tbh i dont need 1080p to enjoy a tournament, 480p is good enough. That's while i watch the GSL, for the best games in the world even though the stream quality is bit lower. (its somewhere between 720p and 480p) mm really gsl is REALLY not having the best games in the world. REALLY
Just dont watch the code S finals then all is good. Code A is getting so awesome in the recent seasons so i really don't see where you are coming from. REALLY 
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Did not buy since I wouldn't watch. Just too many games so it's not worth it for me. $25 for the live event I was happy to pay for and go to.
On July 12 2011 08:29 BryanSC wrote:
Bought Season 1, will not be buying Season 2 for a number of reasons.
Most suggestions made seem to be going over NASL's head. For the longest time, complaints were made over audio, and they still had issues both with their stream and their live event in the final weeks of the overall tournament.
VOD quality for watching videos couldn't be changed. 1080p videos take forever to buffer for some people; sorry I'm not going to sit and wait half an hour for a video to buffer for a game that might have turned out to be mediocre.
I'm not sure this is a Justintv issue (I believe it's not), but almost every single time there would be a big battle going on during a game the stream would lag. I've seen many different streams/tournaments where this issue doesn't come up, so something must be going on.
Player selections, casters, etc. are largely subjective. However, I think the amount of players they had for Season 1 was too much and basically the season ended up having dead periods where the games wouldn't matter anymore. Yeah sometimes in certain divisions it did come down to the wire, but players that were under .500 by Week 5 had no shot anymore at the playoffs and just took up time.
This may have been NASL's first run and I did expect a few hiccups but they still have not proved to me that they had a refined product at the end of Season 1, which is why I probably won't shell out another $25 for Season 2.
Threatening taking players money for not playing won't be enough. Even the viewers know the games won't matter so why force the players to play a pointless game. Format needs reworking so that these hopeless players can be cut and no longer be obligated to participate. Maybe multiple group phases.
Plus the open qualifiers being able to go to playoffs is just off. Everyone knows about Ret's situation. It really highlights the problem. Spend 3 months and lose to a guy who qualified in a 2 day tournament. Not to take anything away from Puma. Open tournament wasn't needed. You should've rewarded the actual players who participated in the bulk of your season. So what's the point in investing watching the regular season and rooting for those players when there is a possibility (and it happened) that most of the open qualifiers would destroy everyone who played in the regular season. Knowing this shortcut to the playoffs, why would anyone want to play out the regular season? If you want to inject new players, do it next season, not insert them into the playoffs.
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My biggest concern was whether they would actually pay the players, if that's done I'll happily subscribe. I'd rather have a poorly produced StarCraft league than none.
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On July 12 2011 08:38 Nexic wrote:Show nested quote +On July 12 2011 08:22 IMABUNNEH wrote:
I paid money so I could access VODs, only to find out that I couldn't watch the VODs (ONLY in 1080p? Really?)
I can't watch at Stream times. When they release lower quality VODs, I'll probably pick up another pass. However I paid $25 for a season I couldn't watch, so won't be doing that again.
Casting was ok. Not everyone is Day9/Tastosis. Justin.tv issue, they fixed it quite awhile back. You can watch vods in various quality now.
I can't/have never been able to watch vods in various qualities. How are you doing it?
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On July 12 2011 08:41 reisada wrote:
so you prefer to see better organization and worst games then better games and worst( although not that worst) organization?
It's not GSL's fault that their Code S finals have been terrible, just as it's not to NASL's credit that MC vs. Puma turned out to be a great finals.
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Got it for season 1 and will not be buying again.
Cant stand hearing the mouseclicks of the casters and dont really like Gretorp as a caster, dont have a good voice for casting.
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On July 12 2011 08:48 BryanSC wrote:Show nested quote +On July 12 2011 08:41 reisada wrote:
so you prefer to see better organization and worst games then better games and worst( although not that worst) organization? It's not GSL's fault that their Code S finals have been terrible, just as it's not to NASL's credit that MC vs. Puma turned out to be a great finals.
the thing is that doesnt matter! what matters is what are the games you get. even if thats not nasl credit
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I really liked the rebroadcast on EU primetime. Often I let it run during the evening on my TV so I could watch some games while having dinner and then just keep it going in case any other interesting games came up. I also had a few players whose games I watched almost all of. Sure you can get the same thing by queueing up the VODs and watch everything that way but there is something attractive about watching the whole broadcast, even if it is just on in the background.
But the OP is spot on regarding the VODs. Having them so terribly unstructured is almost offensive as that is a huge part of what you've paid for. Now $25 for all those games are cheap for most guys with a job but if they do not improve on that aspect I dunno if I will pay for the next season. Having to rely on comments written by the unsung heroes of justin.tv to find the correct video part and timestamp to watch a specific game is not consumer friendly. And even with a great connection it's not very pleasant to skip to a random part of a 1080p VOD given the (at least have been) random performance of Justin.tv. It's a little like selling a christmas tree and after pocketing the money point to the forest and tell your customer "it's out there".
Obvious things regarding the overall production need not be mentioned. Everything in that department and the casting have and will improve even more with experience and proper feedback.
In short my main complaint are the VODs. They have to be structured better. If not per map, at least per overall game, which may include the intro video and warmup talk. Just don't let us sit and jump to "part 2 @ 37:40" to find our personal marquee game of the night. If this is improved upon I'll gladly hand them another 25 bucks for season 2. Having options for 720 or lower would also be nice so you can watch games on a poorer connection.
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The final blow had nothing to do with the technical issues, though. PuMa winning felt so unsatisfying to me. Don't get me wrong, PuMa deserved that win more than I can describe. His play was flawless and he is one of the best out there. I just don't like that someone not even in the NASL during weeks 1-9 can win the championship. When I bought the ticket, I didn't realize how much this would annoy me.
Yeah this kind of bothered me too. It makes regular season play illegitimate to an extent that someone can come in from the open tournament and win the whole thing. It also seems like there is really no advantage to placing high in the regular season, as long as you can get high enough to make the tournament you are basically at the same level as everyone else.
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I think I'd pay again next season if the format changes. Fatigue sets in too easily with nine weeks of group play.
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GSL games are way higher quality ainec. Code B koreans like Boxer, Puma, Ace, Squirtle, Moon etc barely lost in the NASL ffs. Not to mention guys like Ret, Select who have tried their hand at gsl and didnt make it.
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unless they have a good caster to replace incontrol, it'll lose too much personality/have none, sorry @ gretorp
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On July 12 2011 08:46 Ownos wrote:Did not buy since I wouldn't watch. Just too many games so it's not worth it for me. $25 for the live event I was happy to pay for and go to. Show nested quote +On July 12 2011 08:29 BryanSC wrote:
Bought Season 1, will not be buying Season 2 for a number of reasons.
Most suggestions made seem to be going over NASL's head. For the longest time, complaints were made over audio, and they still had issues both with their stream and their live event in the final weeks of the overall tournament.
VOD quality for watching videos couldn't be changed. 1080p videos take forever to buffer for some people; sorry I'm not going to sit and wait half an hour for a video to buffer for a game that might have turned out to be mediocre.
I'm not sure this is a Justintv issue (I believe it's not), but almost every single time there would be a big battle going on during a game the stream would lag. I've seen many different streams/tournaments where this issue doesn't come up, so something must be going on.
Player selections, casters, etc. are largely subjective. However, I think the amount of players they had for Season 1 was too much and basically the season ended up having dead periods where the games wouldn't matter anymore. Yeah sometimes in certain divisions it did come down to the wire, but players that were under .500 by Week 5 had no shot anymore at the playoffs and just took up time.
This may have been NASL's first run and I did expect a few hiccups but they still have not proved to me that they had a refined product at the end of Season 1, which is why I probably won't shell out another $25 for Season 2. Threatening taking players money for not playing won't be enough. Even the viewers know the games won't matter so why force the players to play a pointless game. Format needs reworking so that these hopeless players can be cut and no longer be obligated to participate. Maybe multiple group phases. Plus the open qualifiers being able to go to playoffs is just off. Everyone knows about Ret's situation. It really highlights the problem. Spend 3 months and lose to a guy who qualified in a 2 day tournament. Not to take anything away from Puma. Open tournament wasn't needed. You should've rewarded the actual players who participated in the bulk of your season. So what's the point in investing watching the regular season and rooting for those players when there is a possibility (and it happened) that most of the open qualifiers would destroy everyone who played in the regular season. Knowing this shortcut to the playoffs, why would anyone want to play out the regular season? If you want to inject new players, do it next season, not insert them into the playoffs.
Not sure if you misunderstood me, but when i said .500 I meant as in win percentage lol
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I would never wish failure and utter collapse on anybody.
That being said, I will not be resubscribing. As already stated, I wasn't really taking advantage of their clumsy VOD system, and there are just so much more they need to improve upon before I feel comfortable with their product and the content they're producing.
I wish them the best of luck, of course.
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On July 12 2011 08:50 reisada wrote:Show nested quote +On July 12 2011 08:48 BryanSC wrote:On July 12 2011 08:41 reisada wrote:
so you prefer to see better organization and worst games then better games and worst( although not that worst) organization? It's not GSL's fault that their Code S finals have been terrible, just as it's not to NASL's credit that MC vs. Puma turned out to be a great finals. the thing is that doesnt matter! what matters is what are the games you get. even if thats not nasl credit
NASL final>Code S final
Rest of NASL<<<<<Rest of GSL
I would rather watch good games for 99% of the season and a bad final than the other way around.
Though i am more positive towards season 2, now that we dont need to watch drebie vs painuser again. the memories still burn!
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I am not purchasing premium again (Purchased S1) until I see some improvements. It's not like there isn't tons of other pro-level content to watch that is much better produced and better commented (Inc was fun, Gretorp has some serious improvement to do)
My major reason for buying was the VODs, which were horribly cut/labeled. I'm sure they'll probably improve it, but I just can't argue for buying again given the stumbles of S1. If it seriously improves in S2, then I'd have no worries about buying S3! Hoping that improvements happen because I think a serious weekly foreign league is a great idea, but, the production value of this season was horrible. Apologists want to say "well, but the end of the Finals were great!" The last few series were definitely amazing, but the whole event was plagued by huge technical issues, a horrible format (lol BO3s, Open tournament winner against #1 seed,) and inexcusable delays.
What was most depressing, frankly, was the NASL's failure to admit the problems, both throughout the season and at the finals. MLG Dallas was awful in so many ways, but I was impressed by the constant communication about the issues and the great customer service we all received. That's admittedly a high standard to set, but that's NASL's competition. MLG Columbus was so amazing that it made most of us forget about Dallas. I hope NASL S2 does the same thing for S1, but I fear it won't.
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They need more color. NASL is like black with no other colors and looks plain boring. GSL has all these pretty eye candy which makes it enjoyable to watch in the down time. NASL had justintv commercials. GSL has korean and other commercials which are different and not so boring to watch. GSL production quality is just so much better.
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On July 12 2011 08:46 Ownos wrote:
Plus the open qualifiers being able to go to playoffs is just off. Everyone knows about Ret's situation. It really highlights the problem. Spend 3 months and lose to a guy who qualified in a 2 day tournament. Not to take anything away from Puma. Open tournament wasn't needed. You should've rewarded the actual players who participated in the bulk of your season. So what's the point in investing watching the regular season and rooting for those players when there is a possibility (and it happened) that most of the open qualifiers would destroy everyone who played in the regular season. Knowing this shortcut to the playoffs, why would anyone want to play out the regular season? If you want to inject new players, do it next season, not insert them into the playoffs.
Their format is bad but not because of the open tournament. Getting the most skilled players into the finals isn't a bad thing. Make sure the stable of players in the regular season is filled with highly skilled people and an open tournament wouldn't be necessary (although I think it still might be a good idea). As for Ret, think of it another way. Puma wins the open, flies to the US, and if Ret had won Puma would be out after playing a single game after coming all that way. That's a pretty big problem right there. There's problems with format, the open tournament is not one of them.
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I think its wise of geoff to get out while he can, i dont know why, but i was losing a lot of my fan boyism for him the longer he was casting for NASL, he was a god on SotG, and is an awesome player, NASL really wasnt for him.
Also Gretorp should go back to playing, he was actually a really good player when he was playing 100%, but now he is an average player and an average caster =/
Also, 9 weeks is too long for regular season. i just dont care enough. They are risking it becoming like a "who a support" thing if they do that, like who watches every NFL game? you watch the team you support, and maybe a top team clash, but you dont watch every match. While something like the GSL, i watch every game i can, the elimation is what makes it exciting i think, while with NASL, ill watch nony and idra and thats about it
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On July 12 2011 08:50 reisada wrote:Show nested quote +On July 12 2011 08:48 BryanSC wrote:On July 12 2011 08:41 reisada wrote:
so you prefer to see better organization and worst games then better games and worst( although not that worst) organization? It's not GSL's fault that their Code S finals have been terrible, just as it's not to NASL's credit that MC vs. Puma turned out to be a great finals. the thing is that doesnt matter! what matters is what are the games you get. even if thats not nasl credit
Fair enough, to each his own. Production value, VODs, etc. might not matter to you but for many it does.
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Hmmm. so far a resubscription rate of 38%.
Not horrible, but not good.
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Amazing production value for such a long tournament with sooooooo many games, if this season is anything like the first, it will definitely have been money well spent.
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On July 12 2011 08:46 Ownos wrote:Did not buy since I wouldn't watch. Just too many games so it's not worth it for me. $25 for the live event I was happy to pay for and go to. Show nested quote +On July 12 2011 08:29 BryanSC wrote:
Bought Season 1, will not be buying Season 2 for a number of reasons.
Most suggestions made seem to be going over NASL's head. For the longest time, complaints were made over audio, and they still had issues both with their stream and their live event in the final weeks of the overall tournament.
VOD quality for watching videos couldn't be changed. 1080p videos take forever to buffer for some people; sorry I'm not going to sit and wait half an hour for a video to buffer for a game that might have turned out to be mediocre.
I'm not sure this is a Justintv issue (I believe it's not), but almost every single time there would be a big battle going on during a game the stream would lag. I've seen many different streams/tournaments where this issue doesn't come up, so something must be going on.
Player selections, casters, etc. are largely subjective. However, I think the amount of players they had for Season 1 was too much and basically the season ended up having dead periods where the games wouldn't matter anymore. Yeah sometimes in certain divisions it did come down to the wire, but players that were under .500 by Week 5 had no shot anymore at the playoffs and just took up time.
This may have been NASL's first run and I did expect a few hiccups but they still have not proved to me that they had a refined product at the end of Season 1, which is why I probably won't shell out another $25 for Season 2. Threatening taking players money for not playing won't be enough. Even the viewers know the games won't matter so why force the players to play a pointless game. Format needs reworking so that these hopeless players can be cut and no longer be obligated to participate. Maybe multiple group phases. Plus the open qualifiers being able to go to playoffs is just off. Everyone knows about Ret's situation. It really highlights the problem. Spend 3 months and lose to a guy who qualified in a 2 day tournament. Not to take anything away from Puma. Open tournament wasn't needed. You should've rewarded the actual players who participated in the bulk of your season. So what's the point in investing watching the regular season and rooting for those players when there is a possibility (and it happened) that most of the open qualifiers would destroy everyone who played in the regular season. Knowing this shortcut to the playoffs, why would anyone want to play out the regular season? If you want to inject new players, do it next season, not insert them into the playoffs.
Imo the 2 day tournament was much much harder than the 3 months.
Assuming everyone has the same chance, ret had a 20% chance of going to the finals because he's in group play. Puma had like .000001 % chance of going to the finals. Puma had to go through the cut throat deadily bo1 tournament that was the open series to qualify into the bracket.
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On July 12 2011 08:50 reisada wrote:Show nested quote +On July 12 2011 08:48 BryanSC wrote:On July 12 2011 08:41 reisada wrote:
so you prefer to see better organization and worst games then better games and worst( although not that worst) organization? It's not GSL's fault that their Code S finals have been terrible, just as it's not to NASL's credit that MC vs. Puma turned out to be a great finals. the thing is that doesnt matter! what matters is what are the games you get. even if thats not nasl credit
That's weird logic to slam the GSL over/praise NASL for.
I do agree with you that it's about the game quality. How many of us watched G-Stars over someone 2nd hand stream with livechat translations? I know I did. Or CSN recording the LG Cinema Special Tourny via Rachel's cell phone?
Quality wasn't an issue there b/c the games were good.
But on the other hand, good games isn't something NASL can even control. They got lucky that Puma and MC put on a show. Just like GSL got unlucky that HopeTorture rolled over and died for Fruitdealer despite the two of them playing pretty good games (HT - Tester in the Ro8 was good and FD - Top was near legendary, then FD - Inca was fun too, despite being kinda weird) and just about every championship since then has sucked.
I watched a lot of the NASL regular season and those games weren't all that interesting to me. There were good match-ups here and there and I missed about half the games (basically all the wknd ones), but the ones I saw were pretty forgettable. So NASL just as easily could have had a bad finals.
Of course production does make your perception of the games that much better, for example MLG Columbus has some pretty one-sided series on the last day, but they still felt worth watching (Idra's meltdown was epic and the storyline for MMA was pretty good too).
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On July 12 2011 08:50 reisada wrote:Show nested quote +On July 12 2011 08:48 BryanSC wrote:On July 12 2011 08:41 reisada wrote:
so you prefer to see better organization and worst games then better games and worst( although not that worst) organization? It's not GSL's fault that their Code S finals have been terrible, just as it's not to NASL's credit that MC vs. Puma turned out to be a great finals. the thing is that doesnt matter! what matters is what are the games you get. even if thats not nasl credit
NASL final>Code S final
Rest of NASL<<<<<Rest of GSL
I would rather watch good games for 99% of the season and a bad final than the other way around. The only highlights to the NASL finals were MC vs sen and Puma, Alive vs darkforce was really bad and many other matches were just 1 side slaughter feast.
Though i am more positive towards season 2, now that we don't need to watch drewbie vs painuser again. the memories still burn!
Edit: oops used quote instead of edit.
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On July 12 2011 08:58 Wuster wrote:Show nested quote +On July 12 2011 08:50 reisada wrote:On July 12 2011 08:48 BryanSC wrote:On July 12 2011 08:41 reisada wrote:
so you prefer to see better organization and worst games then better games and worst( although not that worst) organization? It's not GSL's fault that their Code S finals have been terrible, just as it's not to NASL's credit that MC vs. Puma turned out to be a great finals. the thing is that doesnt matter! what matters is what are the games you get. even if thats not nasl credit That's weird logic to slam the GSL over/praise NASL for. I do agree with you that it's about the game quality. How many of us watched G-Stars over someone 2nd hand stream with livechat translations? I know I did. Or CSN recording the LG Cinema Special Tourny via Rachel's cell phone?Quality wasn't an issue there b/c the games were good. But on the other hand, good games isn't something NASL can even control. They got lucky that Puma and MC put on a show. Just like GSL got unlucky that HopeTorture rolled over and died for Fruitdealer despite the two of them playing pretty good games (HT - Tester in the Ro8 was good and FD - Top was near legendary, then FD - Inca was fun too, despite being kinda weird) and just about every championship since then has sucked. I watched a lot of the NASL regular season and those games weren't all that interesting to me. There were good match-ups here and there and I missed about half the games (basically all the wknd ones), but the ones I saw were pretty forgettable. So NASL just as easily could have had a bad finals. Of course production does make your perception of the games that much better, for example MLG Columbus has some pretty one-sided series on the last day, but they still felt worth watching (Idra's meltdown was epic and the storyline for MMA was pretty good too).
Comparing some random recordings to Over Hyped " The best tournament in the world ", that You basically HAVE to pay or just watch in 360p. Is just funny.
Im wondering from where they have that much money, cuz they can't even form semi-amateur production value.
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I refuse to buy access to VODs. If the VODs were free, I would enjoy watching the recommended games but at this point, it's not worth it for me. I only watch it live maybe about an hour a week.
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I think Season 2 will have one of the best overall line-ups, of any tournament, in the world.
Still, I'm in wait-and-see mode.
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I sadly won't be paying for season 2. I think season 1 was worth the money...if I could of watched the VODs. Streaming the NASL in 1080p cause the video to freeze (what is odd b/c i have a i7 930. Everything else plays GREAT!). Also 1080p VODs takes too long to load with my internet connection, and being its still "steaming", only in 1080p its not watchable.
And when asked why the NASL doesn't have 720p VODs (or less). They they blamed it on Justin.tv.?. The only NASL I watched was when I was lucky enough to be home to watch it live in 720p.
And to be honest, in general, it seems silly to just have VODs in 1080p.
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I just like to watch the finals, so paying for the whole season seems like a best waste of money for me!
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I did not buy a pass for the full regular season, but I did lay down the $10 for the finals weekend. The HD stream worked perfectly for me all weekend and the in-game quality was astonishing.
That said, I probably won't buy a pass for the entirety of Season 2, but I will probably lay down the cash for the finals again. Had the production blown me away this weekend though, I think it's safe to say I would have bought a pass right away.
Overall, I still feel there is this air of "amateur-ness" with regards to production values. During the regular season, the greenscreen backdrop looks worse than those in many YouTube videos. They either need to improve this, or just get a *real* backdrop (see MLG Columbus). NASL surely has some sort of operating budget, and getting a nicely designed set/backdrop for the regular season would go a long way for improving the visual quality of the regular season. In addition to that, the lighting needs to be tweaked, because from my computer at least, regular season broadcasts look like they were filmed with a crappy consumer camera in someones garage. Ironically, video podcasts like Diggnation which are actually often filmed in someones garage, look better.
I must admit I did not watch a whole lot of the regular season, I mainly just tuned in when a few select players were playing (Boxer/Idra/Artosis), so I'm not sure if I'm in a position to criticize the sound quality of the broadcasts. At the beginning of the season, and clearly during the finals, there were many glaring problems. Casters mic's not being equalized to the same level, microphones not working for the stream etc.
With regards to the finals:
-MAKE A SCHEDULE AND STICK TO IT PLEASE. I watched the entirety of the finals with a friend who lives across town, and on two occasions I had to tell him to frantically drive across town because games were starting an hour or more early. Because there was 2 hours slotted for the "opening ceremony" and the musical/entertainment act, my friend missed the entirety of the 3rd place match because it started early. The GSL schedule runs like clockwork every night, starting perfectly on time.
-I thought the production of the player highlights was decent, and they were surely well intentioned, but they were way too long. The GSL highlight videos shown for the Code A semifinals earlier today were perfect in length IMO. Something like that would be far more reasonable.
-Get someone to do a proper design for the stage please. And those booths, good god. I appreciate the fact that you had booths, but those things looked like deathtraps. Throw some sponsor logos/NASL logos or ANYTHING on the outside of those to brighten them up a bit..
-Earthquake cam was not appreciated, and neither was the clear interlacing shown whenever the camera panned.
-What the hell was going on with the observer in day 1? Huge oversight that should not happen. If there was obsing like that in a GSL finals, well.. It just wouldn't happen.
These were my main issues, and if reasonable strides can be taken in resolving them, I would gladly lay down the cash for a full NASL season.
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nah I dont think I will. Maybe if the quality was more like the GSL free stream (terribad). The 360p or w/e the free stream is now is good enough. Not worth it to me otherwise. Though I would probably buy a weekend pass for the finals if they offered it
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I purchased last season the week NASL came out for 25$ or whatever it was and i watched matches for the first week than simply stopped because i preferred GSL over NASL but i will still purchase NASL this season and will probably(maybe not) watch players i like, I dont really ever watch the NASL but i do like to support it.
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On July 12 2011 08:09 Nadir wrote:
I bought the ticket but could never watch the VODs because there was no low quality version. Thanks to my Australian internet I had to buffer for 2 hours to watch a 30 minute video and if I ever wanted to fast forward or rewind the process had to start over again. Won't buy season 2 if this isnt changed.
Same here. If they fix this I can definatly see myself buying a season 2 ticket.
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On July 12 2011 08:55 L3g3nd_ wrote:
I think its wise of geoff to get out while he can, i dont know why, but i was losing a lot of my fan boyism for him the longer he was casting for NASL, he was a god on SotG, and is an awesome player, NASL really wasnt for him.
Also Gretorp should go back to playing, he was actually a really good player when he was playing 100%, but now he is an average player and an average caster =/
Also, 9 weeks is too long for regular season. i just dont care enough. They are risking it becoming like a "who a support" thing if they do that, like who watches every NFL game? you watch the team you support, and maybe a top team clash, but you dont watch every match. While something like the GSL, i watch every game i can, the elimation is what makes it exciting i think, while with NASL, ill watch nony and idra and thats about it
You kinda have a good point. I think I watched NASL 1st week for support but after that I only watched if I wasn't doing anything and the stream happened to be going on. Most of the time I would go look at the schedule see Idra wasn't playing and just not tune in. Pretty only watched what I thought would be entertaining and sometimes I wouldn't even stick it out and wait for those games.
I think NASL was a good idea but something seriously needs to be done about the length. It seems like all the good tourneys that happen are those weekend tourneys. And even NASL final ended up good. Its kinda why I think MLG and DH > GSL atm. I just start to lose interest in gsl until they are deeper in the tourney.
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I bought season 1 pass the day it started and have barely watched. GSL is better on every level and I don't think there is enough time for both, I would probably watch IPL over NASL if I had enough time. Every so often (about 4-5 times throughout the season) I would try to watch VODs but get frustrated with the poor editing and sometimes missing games.
I wish the NASL the best, to me its not worth it.
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I would buy a pass for NASL for sure till the final matchup came up. The resolution fell from 1080p+ which i used for the rest of the matches to 480p. Yeap I know that 80k viewers is a lot of traffic but I payed for HD and not the crappy 480p.
I guess I'll think it twice next time.
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No I didn't buy a season 1 pass and do not plan to buy a season 2 pass. In fact, I will never buy a pass for any event NASL or not. Am I hurting E-SPORTS?
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watching the NASL is supporting Esports and I will continue to do so ^.^
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Pretty much impossible for me to keep up with so many games so I skipped the premium pass the first season and will probably do it the second season aswell.
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My only issue with NASL was how much time it took from match to match. I dont really care for a 45min open discussion with long breaks between games and longer breaks between matches. Watching NASL was an all day event
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My main reason for likely not buying a season 12 pass, (i bought one for season 1), was the fact that i could not take advantage of the high quality that i paid for due to lag.
The BEST quality setting was extremely pretty to look at, but was simply too laggy.
I cannot say or sure whether this was an issue with my connection, with JustinTV, or with NASL, but I can say that NASL's stream seemed to lag much worse on BEST than most other streams that I watch.
If the high quality was smooth enough to actually watch, i would likely buy a season 2 pass. But its just not worth it to pay for the high quality and still have to watch on 480p in order to see the actual battles.
I think NASL came a long way and deserves our support, and i might give it a second chance, but I will need to hear that the lag has improved first.
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I personally found it hard to keep track of so many games over such a long time-span.
The finals were awesome, won't deny that. I wish NASL the best and hope they come back in Season 2 even stronger.
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Sure, there were a great deal of problems, and some of you are no doubt perfectly justified in your decision to not pay for a second season, but I can't help but think that anyone with a vested interest in the future of e-sports ought to at least wait and see what the leadership of the NASL has in store for the upcoming seasons. How sad it would be if the established Sc2 community kills off its upstarts with a hypercritical, black and white sort of mentality when it comes to production value, when in reality some organizations are just a bit slower than others at getting "into the groove" so to speak.
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On July 12 2011 09:26 farvacola wrote:
Sure, there were a great deal of problems, and some of you are no doubt perfectly justified in your decision to not pay for a second season, but I can't help but think that anyone with a vested interest in the future of e-sports ought to at least wait and see what the leadership of the NASL has in store for the upcoming seasons. How sad it would be if the established Sc2 community kills off its upstarts with a hypercritical, black and white sort of mentality when it comes to production value, when in reality some organizations are just a bit slower than others at getting "into the groove" so to speak.
well said i agree 100% with you. Thats exactly whats on my mind.
NASL has the potential to become the biggest event afte GSL. DOnt you guys want it to happen?
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I will be buying season 2 ticket, mainly for the VODs. If I really wanted to, I could watch them live or during the EU rebroadcast, but i am too lazy and would rather watch before/after dinner.
Plus I don't have to watch the crappy games.
I didn't really mind the "problems" they had during this season. It was their first season, and I expected things to go wrong.
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I think that they should try an MLG Route where they focus on listening to the community instead of setting a plan from the beginning and not changing it
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The league was cool, the finals needed some improvements in organisation.
But i don't think the prenium pass is worth it. Even with no free vods, i'm happy with the UE rediffusion.
I was hoping to see 480p being free during the whole thing tho.
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On July 12 2011 08:43 visual77 wrote:
The final blow had nothing to do with the technical issues, though. PuMa winning felt so unsatisfying to me. Don't get me wrong, PuMa deserved that win more than I can describe. His play was flawless and he is one of the best out there. I just don't like that someone not even in the NASL during weeks 1-9 can win the championship. When I bought the ticket, I didn't realize how much this would annoy me.
Yeah I agree. Even though making the way through the open bracket and going on to win is very impressive it still felt like that whole 9 week build up was made worthless...
I think the open tournament should just award entry to the next season
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I bought a season 1 ticket upon announcement. Living in Australia means I'm sleeping when the EU re-stream is on, and I'm at work when the NA stream is on.
I said it was "Waste of money, needs a lot of improvement."
There were 2 reasons why I bought a ticket.
Firstly, I wanted to support the NA eSports scene. It was anounced at a time pre-MLG Col, and up until that point there hadn't been any "OMFG MID BLOWN" tourneys in America (that I was aware of (Please note: I'm only about 12 months into the competative scene)).
Secondly, I wanted to watch the VODs. I wanted to come home after a shitty day at work, drink a beer, ignore the girlfriend, and watch the games I'd missed 8 hours ago.
Time between moving from Live NA stream to VOD was tooooo long. 36+ hours generally. By that time the community had forgotten about the games, and I'd missed out on the oppertunity to jump online and squeel like a little school girl.
Also. The only option for watching the VODs was 1080. I have the fastest internet option availible in my area (ADSL 2+) and I still could not watch without giving each game 15-30 minutes to buffer. This is unacceptable.
In conjunction of those two points alone, It was a complete waste of time, and both things would need to be changed.
6-8 hours is plenty of time to render a game and upload it. Get a machine dedicated to each match (for rendering) and get it up there. You're missing the boat.
1080 is great, however there should be a 720 option. I don't give a flying fuck if it is something that "J.TV" does, and they can't fix. If I'm paying YOU $25, I don't want to hear you blame it on someone else, I want you to fix the problem at hand.
In ending: As I haven't watched ANY fucking games for my $25, I can't commentate on the structure of the tourney, or how good/bad the casters were, or how great the games were. This is the worst part. When you take the community out of competative gaming all of a sudden you're a fat nerd watching two Koreans play a computer game late at night. Forever alone.....
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i have no intention of paying to watch 10-15 top players steam roll through 30+ sub par players.
you want my money?
then get the best players.
until then its just another hyped up weekly Koth quality tournement with a big prize pool.
biggest joke of the NASL. it being an invite tournement, and out of the 50 so players they invited none of them won. it was someone who didnt have the popularity but was the better player then all those invited.
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I'm really considering buying a pass for season 2, depends on how much time i will have tho T.T
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Free 640p stream should be available or even free stream. Trying to earn some money on streams sucks.
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On July 12 2011 09:46 TyrantPotato wrote:
i have no intention of paying to watch 10-15 top players steam roll through 30+ sub par players.
you want my money?
then get the best players.
until then its just another hyped up weekly Koth quality tournement with a big prize pool.
biggest joke of the NASL. it being an invite tournement, and out of the 50 so players they invited none of them won. it was someone who didnt have the popularity but was the better player then all those invited.
The invite thing was definitely a problem, but the turnover for next season is completely qualifier-based, and they got a pretty good turnout. Not every top player wants to play in it, so it's not going to be GSL-quality, but the new players are much better than the ones they're losing. I think the game quality is going to be drastically higher - similar to MLG, and probably passing it in the third season.
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I didn't buy the season 1 pass simply because I wouldn't have the time to watch both GSL and NASL, so I would rather watch the GSL untill the NASL has settled a bit and the fans love it so much that I have to watch it. So livestream from time to time. But season 1 didn't leave a very good impression IMO, so I won't buy season 2. Maybe season 3, if season 2 is awesome. Or season 2 later on if it's awesome.
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On July 12 2011 09:48 Loljke wrote:
Free 640p stream should be available or even free stream. Trying to earn some money on streams sucks.
What the hell is 640p? I know theres 480 and 720, but wtf is 640.
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I didn't vote because I don't know yet - it will depend on a couple of things like who they have as the main casters, who the players are, and whether I feel like i have time. I bought the pass in season 1 and at the beginning I was watching a lot, but as it went on I spent more time watching GSL and less time watching NASL.
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Also, while I like having group play, I felt like the league went on a little too long. This was especially a problem with people dropping out, which as far as I'm concerned is completely unacceptable unless it's for medical reasons (TLO). Guys like Painuser and Artosis definitely lost some of my respect for quitting before it was over.
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NOT buying. 25$ is outrageous. It would need to be cheaper than GSL for me to consider it, because it's simply not as good of a tournament. GSL has higher production values, arguably better players, far better commentators, and is overall a much more professional and well-done arrangement. Time is finite, and I just couldn't possibly imagine dedicating enough of it to follow NASL when I could be watching the GSL. Many non-korean tournaments either release replays or have free hq less laggy streams (MLG, Dreamhack, TSL, IPL), occasionally I'll drop into those if GSL is all TvT one week. Doesn't NASL wait like a full 3 days before getting the vods up anyway? GSL feels practically instant; I go to bed just before the games are played and I wake up fairly early and there they are. I think the thing about NASL that bothers me the most is justin.tv; it just doesn't seem to work for nasl. The prohibitive price tag makes the decision that much easier, no NASL unless they both clean up their act and give me a better price. Based on the quality of NASL season one, 5$ would be the most I would be willing to pay.
I know some tournaments are going to be staying around for several years. IPL, GSL, MLG, and DH will keep hosting sc2 tournaments for a long time. NASL? While I don't wish failure on anyone, if they continue at this rate, I don't think they'll make it to sc2's first expansion.
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The professionalism shown in the finals has increased my respect for what NASL is bringing in high-level Starcraft 2 games. Starting from my attendance in Day 2 Quarterfinals and Finals, I really thought they took care of their players and did all in their power to reduce video/sound problems for their viewers. Sen vs. MC, MC vs PuMa, and PuMa vs Squirtle final game were all so awesome. Look at GSL Finals then back to NASL Finals. God, what a comparison!
So, really enjoy the quality of games. Just the local community viewing parties we've had with a season pass have been wonderful. Following my favorite players through this next season with the pass!
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I bought NASL for the VODs. The VODs suck. It is their fault for working with JTV, but nothing they can do now. I will not be buying again as I cannot watch the matches live. I even have good internet speed and still it takes forever to buffer a single video. THEN if you make a single mistake you have to buffer again OR there is another 30 minute video that is hotlinked on the right. Stupid setup.
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I didn't buy season one pass and only watched a few games during the season aswell as two matches at the finals, the reason I didn't watch more of the finals is mostly due to the delays and problems at the beginning but I wasn't so hyped for it either. The league format doesn't appeal to me at all , I just don't get excited watching it when it's drawn out over such a long period of time. I used to watch alot of GSL in the beginning when it was new and exciting but lately I haven't watched any GSL at all eventhough they have very good production and two of my favourite casters.
I get much more excited for events like the latest MLG, Dreamhack, HSC where I usually sit glued to the screen for hours and watch most of the games.
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I think I will be watching more NASL next season because there is finally better players and more korean players.
As for purchasing, I will not purchase until they show they can fix things in their control like audio. They had issues with it the entire season and the entire weekend for the finals. Until they show they can get atleast that right I will purchase. Audio is kind of a big thing for me if I am watching something online.
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Depends on the quality. Going to watch the free stream for the first few weeks. If production values are better, and games are better (less blowouts please!) then I'll pick it up. The addition of more great koreans certainly adds more value to the price for me personally (no offense NA pros!)
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I didn't got one this season since i wanted to check out what you got and was dissapointed.
So i will just watch another season for free and hope they have improved.
and no, i don't count the games with the events, it was lucky we had the games the way they were.
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On July 12 2011 08:50 Duravi wrote:Show nested quote +The final blow had nothing to do with the technical issues, though. PuMa winning felt so unsatisfying to me. Don't get me wrong, PuMa deserved that win more than I can describe. His play was flawless and he is one of the best out there. I just don't like that someone not even in the NASL during weeks 1-9 can win the championship. When I bought the ticket, I didn't realize how much this would annoy me. Yeah this kind of bothered me too. It makes regular season play illegitimate to an extent that someone can come in from the open tournament and win the whole thing. It also seems like there is really no advantage to placing high in the regular season, as long as you can get high enough to make the tournament you are basically at the same level as everyone else.
Well, it is bloody difficult to win that open tournament, and winning it was the only way to secure your spot in the finals (well, although an exception was made this time with Strelok dropping out.
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On July 12 2011 10:05 57 Corvette wrote:Show nested quote +On July 12 2011 09:48 Loljke wrote:
Free 640p stream should be available or even free stream. Trying to earn some money on streams sucks. What the hell is 640p? I know theres 480 and 720, but wtf is 640.
640p means 640 scanlines with progressive video. Progressive video is where the whole frame is displayed at once, as opposed to interlaced where it alternates between even and odd scanlines.
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My problem is GSL was my first experience and I expect every long tournament//season thing to be just as good. Sorry NASL I won't be buying. I did watch 2-3 hours a week however so there's some ad revenue.
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keep gretorp
LOL he's so bad that he's good <3
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I waited until week 1 of season 1 to decide whether to buy a pass, watched the first few days, and then decided not to due to production quality. They got better, but not enough to convince me to buy it as I had stopped following it. I tuned into the finals, and was shocked at how BAD the quality of the day1 stream was.
Two first impressions bombed. Not buying a season 2 pass unless there's SIGNIFICANT improvement.
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Idk why everyone is hating on the NASL so much.
The sheer amount of games isn't comparable to GSL which is why it costs more. I liked the HD vods and live with no commercials, only thing to improve on would be to have the vods not be on Justin.tv.
I was satisfied with what I paid for, probably will buy again next season.
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I don't like the casters enough to pay for NASL (gretorp especially), that's the main reason I never bought season 1 and will not buy season 2.
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Idk why everyone is hating on the NASL so much.
I think hating is not really the appropriate word. Different people have different expectations/standards for what they get relative to how much they paid.
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The way I see it, the production with both sound, editing and justin.tv lag is not worth watching it in High def anyway. The vods take to long to load to be worth it as well.
So for a few ads I can get the same product i was getting with my pass anyway and not pay a dime.
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THey REALLY need to eliminate the open bracket goes to playoffs. The open bracket got invitations for this season 2, so why would they have another open to go to playoffs.
World Cup doesn't hold a second qualifiers for someone after the group stages to go to the playoffs with everyone else, they respect that they already had the qualifiers to get in to the group stage.
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They want GSL money, but they don't deliver GSL quality.
No.
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I bought the first season and I'm planning to buy the second. NASL was the first tournament that I really followed start to finish and I'm pretty excited for season 2. MLGs individual tournaments are exciting but I feel like its the NASCAR of Starcraft tournaments. The points are too much of a pain to keep track of and the overall importance of an individual tournament to the season gets lost in the excitement of the 3 day event. So, for me, even though they had issues I thought that they improved pretty steadily throughout the season and I'm looking forward to some of the announced changes in season 2.
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On July 12 2011 11:48 sansalvador wrote:
They want GSL money, but they don't deliver GSL quality.
No.
With quadruple GSL quantity...depends on the person, but no ads $25 is pretty dang good if you compare the two.
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Does anyone know if they are doing the open bracket thing again for season 2? I really felt like the open bracket undermined the length of the season (in a way the Koreans playing on the NA server did to an extent also but necessarily evil in that case). I'm not sure what they can do to fix the second problem but the first one is simple, no open bracket, especially with season 2 being qualifier based anyway. My biggest gripe with season one is nine weeks of games completely failed to provide accurate seeding, which reduced the regular season to just 'some good games'.
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I feel like if you are going to charge a premium you have to be better than what's out there. NASL is actually worse than most of what's out there
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I was really hopeful when it first started and it was just awful at the start, hard to deny that. I stuck around and the product began getting better. Incontrol made huge improvements in casting and found him quite enjoyable, I really gave Gretorp a chance and wanted to like him even trying to defend him saying he was just starting and would get better. He never did in fact he was one of the reasons I really stopped watching.
IMO the season was way way to long, and there a handful of players that just out right had no place in the league which lead to a lot of complete blow outs.
The casting was awkward at best to the point where I would watch most games on mute, occasional when Gretorp was absent I would listen. (I don't hate the guy in fact it's the opposite. It's hard to watch someone stumble through a cast talking nonsense, I mean you can tell he knows his stuff but can't seem to get it out fluently or with any showmanship the guy is just not a caster, Honestly when the poor guy talks I cringe.)
The production value improved huge throughout the season which was nice to see but I felt the production for the finals was a complete joke.
I think the icing on the cake for me was the tournament format round of 16 best of three plus 2 players who weren't even in the 3 month long league, and then one of them winning it just made the whole long season look totally meaningless.
Moral of the story is I waited to buy a pass to see what it would be like and am glad I did I will defiantly not be purchasing a pass, and I'm not gonna go out of my way to watch season 2.
Sorry NASL but you just didn't do it for me maybe you'll blow my mind with season 2, but with Gretorp as your main caster it's hard to take you seriously.
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I actually liked the format of the NASL quite a bit. The fact that there were matches 5 days a week meant that I could casually watch any match. I didn't have to watch every single match, but when I had free time at night I could just pop on the NASL. I dont' agree with some of the final formatting, but I felt that the league ran smoothly.
And as for production issues, I didn't feel like they hindered the weekly broadcasts very much. In the end, the games were broadcast and they were always interesting to watch.
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I am sorry..NASL still feels like its being run by a bunch of amateurs(I did buy a season 1 ticket on presale). I'd buy a ticket for the finals only if I could but not for a complete season. I did like the finals day 2 and 3 alot.
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where do you can buy the season two pass?
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over 2months of sc2 of $20? sounds good to me
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On July 12 2011 07:56 Gurblechev wrote:
No offense to people who enjoy NASL but I think it is an extremely poor choice to give them any money in their current state.
All the problems that plagued them were human error and yet they have still not taken responsibility for the problems and just make excuses or pretend people who complain are "haters".
There is no reason to expect they will suddenly improve by season 2 without staff changes. They did not improve much over the season and were still having problems at the finals that they were having on day 1. Also their website is abysmal and justin.tv/twitch.tv doesn't have a very good website either and are not suitable as a VOD provider. And the way they are streaming--by playing their prepared video in windows media player and then running a screencapping program to stream to justin.tv--degrades video quality a lot and causes inflated bitrates. They could take the time to encode and stream properly and they would get higher quality at lower bitrates.
Including other problems like "premium 1080p" being interlaced during camera shots, the audio sounding poor even when they have managed to put it out both channels at the same volume, it really puts their level below even the small weekly cups as someone else mentioned. I would rather support GSL which has very polished and superb production, and MLG who took responsibility for their screwups and really delivered a top notch show at Columbus.
I'd buy two GSL and two MLG tickets to support good organizations before I bought NASL again. Giving NASL money sets a bad precedent in the SC2 esports market that making a cash grab and disregarding quality will be rewarded. I had high hopes for them before they launched but at this point I really hope they go bankrupt to send a message that starcraft viewers have at least some standards and are not complete bottom feeders.
Very well written and for the most part i agree with you, it does set a bad standard to support a sub par league like this, look at IPL (wich is free BTW) they did a very polished production and dont really ask for anything in return (yet) compared to NASL its like night and day.
I also really dont like the attitude of the admins and the people at the top running NASL, between xeris taking every little critisicm about his casting or the productioin of the league personally, to getting banned on the chat for telling them something isnt right , for instance i paid for the first season and about half way through the season i started getting ad's popping up (even in the middle of games it seemed sometimes) and i asked what i could do to fix it in the chat and complained about it in a very manner way a few times and i would never get a response and more often then not i would get banned, finally a random on the chat suggested a fix for me and that worked.
Aside from Geoff taking responsibility for all the misplaced hype before it started i have never really seen NASL take any responsibility for things that have gone wrong all ive heard is "it wont happen again we got it under control" and then it happens again and again and their never seems to be an explanation or anyone taking responsibility for the problems that have riddled NASL from the start. Its almost like they think that these things are normal and are expected to happen , maybe in the first week, but not again and again throughout the entire league including the live finals.
I was a paying customer before and I certainly wont be a paying customer again, ive payed for every season of GSL and have never once complained about it and thoroughly enjoyed it every step of the way. If NASL was even half as good as the GSL production wise maybe they would get my bussiness again , but i doubt it they have made me very untrustworthy of them.
Edit: also the casting just never did it for me , I liked geoffs casting he can make games sound really epic, but it was never really Geoff + a guest caster it was always Gretorp and i just cant stand his casting for some reason , i really stopped giving a crap about half way through the season ( i might tune in for nada boxer or Mc's games but thats about it) and one of the main reasons was gretorps rather annoying casting style.
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I bought a season 1 pass because I wanted to support e-sports and your competition so that it will succeed.
I live in Australia so it is not possible for me to watch the games live (as I am working when the games are shown live). I thought the season pass would be great for this but NASL chose a service which only allows me to stream in 1080p (many people don't have internet fast enough to buffer this while watching).
I made a couple of posts in a feedback thread where some mods were replying to people about issues they were have but nobody gave a solution.
I will NOT be purchasing for Season 2. Sorry guys. There will be a lot more in my boat too.
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bracket format needs to be redone (I would like double elim in the finals)
PREPARE for the love of god, the start of the NASL was rough and the finals were a major let down
i am not a fan of gretorp casting
organize the VODs (take 5-10 minutes to render games seperatly with the caster wrap-up of the game occurring at the end of the VOD)
I bought a seaosn1 pass and will buy a season two pass hoping it will work out better; if im disappointed again i wont buy further passes without strong proof of a better product.
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Great thread, tells everything I think they need to hear for NASL to become better. And I completely agree with your opinion. I always said that NASL would be too much content for anyone to really make use of, and I think I was right. It would be much better streamlined and better organized. Quality, not quantity, guys. That's the way to go.
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Still not sure. Felt unprofessional at times and with some really bad casting at times. Gretorp and Incontrol's casting just felt forced occasionally, I guess. I DO NOT have anything against the two. In fact, I am a huge fan of Mr Geoff Robinson and I wish him all the luck at future MLGs and so on.
If they get rid of Gretorp (sorry, dude) and get new, good casters to fill the void, I might be convinced to purchase the next season, like I purchased this one.
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i didnt watch the weekly matches because it was just too damn much with all the other things going on. i would just watch my favorite players. however, the finals alone was worth the money. i will buy season 2 as well. the groups are too long though; shorten it please. =) otherwise, awesome tournament.
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On July 12 2011 08:48 BryanSC wrote:Show nested quote +On July 12 2011 08:41 reisada wrote:
so you prefer to see better organization and worst games then better games and worst( although not that worst) organization? It's not GSL's fault that their Code S finals have been terrible, just as it's not to NASL's credit that MC vs. Puma turned out to be a great finals.
People seriously need to get this point across in their minds.
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On July 12 2011 12:30 dAPhREAk wrote:
i didnt watch the weekly matches because it was just too damn much with all the other things going on. i would just watch my favorite players. however, the finals alone was worth the money. i will buy season 2 as well. the groups are too long though; shorten it please. =) otherwise, awesome tournament.
Were the finals worth the money because of the games or the production? Honestly with the exception of a few Sen/drkforce the games didn't get good until the Koreans meet and Artosis and Tasteless casted. Sounds like GSL to me. Although let me say GSL has yet to produce a final series like that. Maybe they should just let a the winner of code A/B go straight to the round of 16 code S : P
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If they get a good vod system(like TSL or GSL) i would buy a new pass easily. However because of the slow uploads sometimes(Tyler vs Idra was like 3-4 days late) and the terrible vodsystem i'm not even considering it for now.
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On July 12 2011 12:38 heatly wrote:Show nested quote +On July 12 2011 12:30 dAPhREAk wrote:
i didnt watch the weekly matches because it was just too damn much with all the other things going on. i would just watch my favorite players. however, the finals alone was worth the money. i will buy season 2 as well. the groups are too long though; shorten it please. =) otherwise, awesome tournament. Were the finals worth the money because of the games or the production? Honestly with the exception of a few Sen/drkforce the games didn't get good until the Koreans meet and Artosis and Tasteless casted. Sounds like GSL to me. Although let me say GSL has yet to produce a final series like that. Maybe they should just let a the winner of code A/B go straight to the round of 16 code S : P
nasl was worth it. gsl is worth it. why cant i just like both? also, nasl brought americans, europeans and koreans together for an awesome competition. gsl hasn't done that. so, as far as tournaments go, both have their good points and bad points. plus, are people forgetting how bad gsl was in its first season? such limited memories. go look at the ban list for all the bitching directed at gsl and tastosis.
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Didn't buy season 1 but looking at the playing roster for season 2 I am going to buy the premium pass. No disrespect to some of the participants in season 1 but some of the fat has definitely been cut. If i can put up with NSW bias in my footy there's close to no level of production/professionalism which can put me off if the game quality is there.
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On July 12 2011 12:41 Hellscum wrote:
If they get a good vod system(like TSL or GSL) i would buy a new pass easily. However because of the slow uploads sometimes(Tyler vs Idra was like 3-4 days late) and the terrible vodsystem i'm not even considering it for now.
yeah, their vods are pretty bad and slow. i love how i can watch gsl the next day before i am spoilered through various threads.
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On July 12 2011 12:42 dAPhREAk wrote:Show nested quote +On July 12 2011 12:38 heatly wrote:On July 12 2011 12:30 dAPhREAk wrote:
i didnt watch the weekly matches because it was just too damn much with all the other things going on. i would just watch my favorite players. however, the finals alone was worth the money. i will buy season 2 as well. the groups are too long though; shorten it please. =) otherwise, awesome tournament. Were the finals worth the money because of the games or the production? Honestly with the exception of a few Sen/drkforce the games didn't get good until the Koreans meet and Artosis and Tasteless casted. Sounds like GSL to me. Although let me say GSL has yet to produce a final series like that. Maybe they should just let a the winner of code A/B go straight to the round of 16 code S : P nasl was worth it. gsl is worth it. why cant i just like both? also, nasl brought americans, europeans and koreans together for an awesome competition. gsl hasn't done that. so, as far as tournaments go, both have their good points and bad points. plus, are people forgetting how bad gsl was in its first season? such limited memories. go look at the ban list for all the bitching directed at gsl and tastosis.
Of course you can like them both I was just expressing why I would not be purchasing the NASL season pass.
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nasl brought americans, europeans and koreans together for an awesome competition. gsl hasn't done that.
Did you watch the world championship?
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I bought season 1 so I'd have access to VODs of series I wanted to watch knowing I can't always watch the live stream. NASL reported justintv was working on offering VODs in qualities besides 1080p which to my knowledge never happened. With monthly bandwidth caps I can't realistically use that amount of data, therefore couldn't watch VODs and therefore never got my money's worth. Unless I have guarantees the quality option will be available I won't purchase again.
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No half baked production from get go plus 3 months. I got short attention span and a life. 3 day tournaments are ideal for me not 3 months.
They should give MC and PuMA an extra $25,000 for saving their ass.
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![[image loading]](http://farm1.static.flickr.com/131/319047856_dbf1ef3e92.jpg)
User was temp banned for this post.
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I bought season 1 but won't be buying season 2.
I advised them that iof Gretorp commentates season 2 then i won't be shelling out money because i have to turn down the volume as i can not tolerate his commentating.
He improved but his use of the word extremely, for every single event on non even drives me up the wall.
All in all it's really a very amateurish production and one that i won't pay for again unless they get their act together.
Many say they improved, and they did, but let's face it, they couldn't have gotten any worse.
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I still think they should replace Gretorp. The guy is just... embarrassing. I'd elaborate on what I'm talking about but no one is going to read this post, much less reply to it.
Everything else, pretty decent. I can even forgive all the technical hiccups of the finals. It was their first time, you have to have patience with these things. The games were great for the most part, so what's to complain about?
And I LOVE that MC didn't win, yay random Terran!
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On July 12 2011 12:47 Trentelshark wrote:
I bought season 1 so I'd have access to VODs of series I wanted to watch knowing I can't always watch the live stream. NASL reported justintv was working on offering VODs in qualities besides 1080p which to my knowledge never happened. With monthly bandwidth caps I can't realistically use that amount of data, therefore couldn't watch VODs and therefore never got my money's worth. Unless I have guarantees the quality option will be available I won't purchase again.
Actually VODs are in fact now available in multiple resolutions and have been for several weeks. It was intermittent for a while as Justin.TV was in beta with the technology, but I believe it's been consistently up and running for a few weeks now.
We were very straight up with the community that we had requested this capability with Justin.TV right from the Season's start, and that JTV was aware of the request but that it was relatively low on their list of things to do with respect to making sure the live stream functioned properly. They got all of that squared away about 2/3 of the way through the season then tackled the VODs. I think they've done a stellar job in answering your request in a relatively short period of time.
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No on season 1 and no on season 2. Just not feeling the NASL group play. The production value just isn't there and I did not enjoy the casting. The only tournament I have consistently payed for is GSL, I hold all season tickets thus far. I buy those because of Tastosis, and great games. I do not watch code A, nor GSTL with the caster and price\format change. I just feel like when I pay to watch a tournament I am basically saying with my money..."Yeah, this is exactly what I want"...and I only really feel like I get that from GSL Code S. I am totally open to buy an NASL season pass mid season if they turn things around next time...and the finals were completely baller, the games I mean not the tons of waiting and delays. But even with that those games were damn near the 25 dollar price tag alone. If the NASL brought itself up to GSL standards with daily, live group play and a better format, I think they would make alot more money and would help the growth of ESports in the west so much more. As it stands now I would not want to introduce a buddy to competitive SC2 by showing him the NASL sadly and I really want that to change. Hoping that they get some good feedback and turn things around in season 2, because I really would love to buy a pass.
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On July 12 2011 07:30 Voltaire wrote:
Waste of money, seriously needs to be improved. No offense but I personally did not like the casting, especially when Gretorp was involved.
Are you on a fuck ton of crack?
Gretorp is the most amazing man alive and an even more amazing caster.
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion....except you now (((:
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I bought the Season 1 pass because:
- They did a fucking terrible job with ads constantly popping up in the middle of games/talking. (Pretty sure I could do better production spending a little time searching google.)
- I hoped they would get better and wanted to support a developing NA scene.
- Some of the players looked quite promising, and I hoped the games would be good.
My thoughts at the end of the season:
- The casting and production significantly improved since the first week. The casting is now something I will listen to. The production is still embarrassingly unstable. When it's a good day, it's ok. When it's a bad day, it's unwatchable.
- I have extremely low expectations for the coming season now that Incontrol is leaving. He was one of the only people who consistently interacted with the community about NASL (not particularly professionally, which I found disappointing, but he's human too, and I think he has good intentions). Furthermore, as people pointed out in the NASL finals thread, it seems like other people on staff just don't know sc2 that well. Backwater Gulch wtf?
- The games turned out to be disappointing. It was nice to have games to watch every evening while at work, but honestly a lot of games were just kinda... meh. I would rather watch a daily about PvT (as a zerg), or just watch Huk's stream and listen to bad music than stare blankly at the NASL matches. I think it was a combination of a long season, not the best players (as in not everyone was really deserving), and a lot of games. It became redundant.
- The season felt like it didn't matter. People played all those games, showed up at the finals, and got knocked out in one Bo3. The only games that really excited me at the finals were... the championship games (which were fucking awesome).
- The website was hard to use. I constantly had to go to Jtv to log in to my account, and the vods were really poorly done.
My conclusion: I might tune in to watch a specific player or two next season. I MIGHT buy another pass once the season starts if the players are better and the season is shorter and actually matters. It is most likely I will watch some of Sheth's games, and then the finals on the free stream.
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On July 12 2011 12:47 Duravi wrote:Show nested quote +nasl brought americans, europeans and koreans together for an awesome competition. gsl hasn't done that. Did you watch the world championship?
yes. they had eight foreigners, two of whom lived in korea (huk and jinro). didnt feel much like an international tournament to me. i think most of the foreigners dropped out in the first two rounds as well, so we barely even saw them. didnt it turn into an all korean tourney by the ro8 or ro4?
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Due to the poor handling of the vods in the first 4 weeks or so, I never bothered to watch any of them, and the live games were streamed during work hours. As a result I didn't go back to the regular season to watch any games. I'll consider buying the $10 pass for the final, but not for the regular season.
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For me personally it comes down to the casting this season. I enjoyed the games and everything I just needed some casters. Incontrol is a good caster I just don't think he allows his co-caster enough time to speak. That was a good thing when he is with gretorp, but still. Idra in a few times was awesome! Find a caster and I will pay.
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On July 12 2011 13:09 dAPhREAk wrote:Show nested quote +On July 12 2011 12:47 Duravi wrote:nasl brought americans, europeans and koreans together for an awesome competition. gsl hasn't done that. Did you watch the world championship? yes. they had eight foreigners, two of whom lived in korea (huk and jinro). didnt feel much like an international tournament to me. i think most of the foreigners dropped out in the first two rounds as well, so we barely even saw them. didnt it turn into an all korean tourney by the ro8 or ro4?
Just like all tournaments involving Koreans, later stage are mostly Koreans exclusively. The only reason why we don't see foreigners more is because they are not good enough. I don't really see this as fault of NASL.
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nothing wrong with gretorp...people just try to find stuff to complain about
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On July 12 2011 13:09 dAPhREAk wrote:Show nested quote +On July 12 2011 12:47 Duravi wrote:nasl brought americans, europeans and koreans together for an awesome competition. gsl hasn't done that. Did you watch the world championship? yes. they had eight foreigners, two of whom lived in korea (huk and jinro). didnt feel much like an international tournament to me. i think most of the foreigners dropped out in the first two rounds as well, so we barely even saw them. didnt it turn into an all korean tourney by the ro8 or ro4?
Umm dude..every tourny with koreans turns into an all korean tourny.
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Just to leave some more feedback, I'd say that a decent website with proper vod system (similar to GSL) could have saved the deal for me. As it is, I simply didn't watch any game after the first few weeks, but I would have with good vods. Maybe I would have bought another season ticket too...
This was one of the most requested thing in the community from day 1 and yet NASL failed to oblige. Too bad.
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The one thing that tipped me over to not buy it the next season either was the fact that once the important matches started the free streams went from 480p to 360p with no information at all, thats just fucking terrible attitude towards people.
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On July 12 2011 13:30 Rylaji wrote:
The one thing that tipped me over to not buy it the next season either was the fact that once the important matches started the free streams went from 480p to 360p with no information at all, thats just fucking terrible attitude towards people.
Yup exact same here.
After all the crap we put up with and continued to watch, despite failure after failure. Stream issues every single day... They go and pull that to us.
If anything, they should have REWARDED our loyalty with free 720p for the last week + finals. Not take away 480p. smh.
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On July 12 2011 13:30 Rylaji wrote:
The one thing that tipped me over to not buy it the next season either was the fact that once the important matches started the free streams went from 480p to 360p with no information at all, thats just fucking terrible attitude towards people.
I remember this....people need to bring this stuff up more, it didn't receive enough attention, that's bullshit. 360 is the same as a half blind man's vision.
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On July 12 2011 13:26 Vashx wrote:
nothing wrong with gretorp...people just try to find stuff to complain about
No, in your opinion there is nothing wrong with him.
In other peoples opinion there is.
It's personal preference and has nothing to do with looking for stuff to complain about as the NASL has plenty of that without mentioning Gretorp.
Guess what, it's a forum and people express their opinions.
There is no right or wrong on Gretorp, just personal preferences.
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On July 12 2011 13:26 godemperor wrote:Show nested quote +On July 12 2011 13:09 dAPhREAk wrote:On July 12 2011 12:47 Duravi wrote:nasl brought americans, europeans and koreans together for an awesome competition. gsl hasn't done that. Did you watch the world championship? yes. they had eight foreigners, two of whom lived in korea (huk and jinro). didnt feel much like an international tournament to me. i think most of the foreigners dropped out in the first two rounds as well, so we barely even saw them. didnt it turn into an all korean tourney by the ro8 or ro4? Just like all tournaments involving Koreans, later stage are mostly Koreans exclusively. The only reason why we don't see foreigners more is because they are not good enough. I don't really see this as fault of NASL.
i didnt say it was the fault of nasl. i said nasl felt more like an international tournament. the problem with GSL as an international tournament is that they make it so unfriendly for foreigners. they have to devote a month to living in korea, etc. etc. nasl made it easy for foreigners and koreans to participate. they are one up on gsl in that regard.
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I bought it for the VODs, and they were uploaded at inconsistent times, were difficult to find, and smashed together in giant long videos rather than being broken up by games. IPL and GSL do a great job with this so there are good examples out there--not sure why they didn't do this.
I'll be watching to see if they improve the VODs, and if they do, I will probably buy another pass. But if it's anything like it was season one, I probably won't bother and will just catch a few games on the free stream when I can.
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On July 12 2011 13:01 Cold-Blood wrote:Show nested quote +On July 12 2011 07:30 Voltaire wrote:
Waste of money, seriously needs to be improved. No offense but I personally did not like the casting, especially when Gretorp was involved. Are you on a fuck ton of crack? Gretorp is the most amazing man alive and an even more amazing caster. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion....except you now (((:
Nice post man really enjoyed it. I am guessing I am not entitled to an opinion either because I personally thought gretorp was horrific.
I am not going to defend him just because I liked him when he was a good player, and I did. As long as he is not casting I hope he lives a long healthy life, but for now while he is casting it would not hurt my heart to hear he has a nice case of strep throat.
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Thanks to the TL folks I just learned the VODs can be low quality. Why didn't NASL advertise this, I would have benn a lot more productive at work, only my work internet can handle high quality.....The VODs were annoying, JTV can be a pain to navigate especially if you want to avoid spoilers.
Agreed a dedicated single game VOD setup like GOM have would be excellent.
Yobs
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On July 12 2011 12:55 OCsurfeR wrote:Show nested quote +On July 12 2011 12:47 Trentelshark wrote:
I bought season 1 so I'd have access to VODs of series I wanted to watch knowing I can't always watch the live stream. NASL reported justintv was working on offering VODs in qualities besides 1080p which to my knowledge never happened. With monthly bandwidth caps I can't realistically use that amount of data, therefore couldn't watch VODs and therefore never got my money's worth. Unless I have guarantees the quality option will be available I won't purchase again. Actually VODs are in fact now available in multiple resolutions and have been for several weeks.
Can you please elaborate? I can't seem to find the multiple resolutions you're referencing.
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I would buy it again just because of the matches, but Gretorp's casting wasn't quite my cup of tea. It kind of makes the games not as good to watch for me.
Still enjoyable nonetheless!
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I'll stick to GSL and GSTL. I only watched a few matched from the regular season, and was not impressed with gretorp or incontrols casting.
The finals were pretty good. I'm glad they brought in tasteless and artosis. Some of issues they had made me lose faith in the organization as a whole. From what I understand (thanks to my audio engineer friends who watched too) the people in charge of sound were making mistakes that even unpaid interns would never make. The set design and the graphics are pretty shoddy as well, I can spot photoshop filters and effects that I wouldn't forgive my little brother for using nevermind someone getting paid.
Either at the start of the season they picked their jobs from a hat or someone hired their family and friends. This is why I don't buy that things will improve over time.
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A lot of issues with the NASL was brought to light in the first season and condemned heavily by the TL community. I'm fairly confident that the production team can step up their game and learn from their mistakes; especially considering the strong incentive to do better and live up to the Season One finals.
I'm buying one.
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i cant be fucked to follow group stages weeks after weeks cause at some point you know whos gonna win the group anyway and the groups losers play for no goddamn reason and there is no climax.
showing hours of sc2 nearly everyday with shitty production and quality just because they want to give out ''the most content''
Id rather watch a few amount of games with appealing quality and production that IPL has, we dont need 400 games in a tournament to make it interesting, we need climax and good production
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I will purchase another season despite really, really disliking Gretorp's casting. I enjoy the games very much.
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I will wait till i see what they will bring next chances of me buying a ticket after that grand finale are about 80%. I would love them to give me less games but overall better one's.
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I'd only buy if they have the games casted live.
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I did not buy it but I will buy it with a good chance this time, because THEY HAVE MKP :D And he will play on KR server if needed (the "play on NA even korean vs korean" rule was not making any sense).
But it's really a "support buy", because unless the vods are labelled and properly cut, there's a very small chance I'll watch them.
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I did not buy a premium ticket for season 1 and after watching some of the regular season and most of the finals I will not be purchasing a ticket for season 2. Waste of money and would gladly spend it on GSL or MLG events where I know I'm getting a quality product.
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On July 12 2011 07:44 coL.drewbie wrote:Show nested quote +On July 12 2011 07:39 Grettin wrote:Didn't buy the season 1 and i wont buy it next season. The broadcasting style is really stupid in my opinion. I don't like "splitting the scene" half, i.e own broadcast times for NA and EU. So that's why i even didn't watch any NASL games during the season, except the finals of course. But that's just my opinion and i kinda understand why NASL would want to do it this way. The prize of the season isn't much, but what i heard from the community, about all of the problems they had during the season, it can't be worth it. how is it splitting the scene LOL if you are european then you can stay up and watch the first broadcast LOL it's not like you get IP blocked if you are from EU. They picked the time when the most people will watch for the main broadcast, and were nice enough to give a free re-stream to europeans who couldn't stay up late
I often watched the EU re-stream because the US time got eaten up by other things like spending time in the evenings with friends and my wife. Sometimes we watched the US time together while we ate dinner, other times I was able to catch a great match the next day while studying. I didn't buy it, and I don't think I would buy it ever, but I will watch ads. I don't pay for TV. I made that mistake once, but I do agree that for the content the price is reasonable. Hearing above that the VODS weren't well labeled or quick to access (30 minutes before matches start) guarantees that I won't pay, because the great thing about the VODS I watch from other sources is that I can fit them into tight time windows without trouble.
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I like me some starcraft but it was a little too much for me. the finals looked pretty good but I only caught 3 games because of work. With incontrol gone from casting though i'm not sure if it'll be so hot next season. Gretorp was an okay caster but he had some trouble expressing his idea. They do need to work on casters now though since incontrol is gone
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waste of money got it for the vods and then found that they were only in 1080p making them unwatchable due to my internet speed.
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there was just so many games every single day that i didnt even bother to follow it at all. no offense to the casters as well but, there is some magic missing. i dont know if day9 or the casting archon sells this "magic" in a can but if so id buy a case or two to last you for next NASL season.
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to me nasl just is not on the same level as the gsl in terms of entertainment value, and i just dont have enough time to watch both, that said i did really enjoy the nasl finals
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I bought a ticket for season 1, and enjoyed it simply because I love watching high level starcraft 2. I didn't watch a LOT of the regular season, it didn't interest me as much as other tournaments, but if there was a matchup I was interested in i'd tune in.
I absolutely loved the finals though, the vods for those were worth it alone for an Australian who couldn't watch it all live. The atmosphere and casting was outstanding.
Casting wasn't amazing during the regular season, but in the finals they all stepped up including gretorp.
I'll probably get the next season as well.
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No AND I did not buy Season 1 60%
Seriously what are so many people doing here on this site.
Do you really want sc2 to be big? Do you really have a warm heart for your hobby?
A new alternative to make e-sports bigger in the west, an insane amount of games for less money then 2 movies...
Superb games in the finals.
Yes they've had start up problems but they can only improve. All in all there was so much quality content.
I'm quite sad to see such a high percentage didn't pay for this.
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On July 12 2011 15:11 Slaptoast wrote:
I'll stick to GSL and GSTL. I only watched a few matched from the regular season, and was not impressed with gretorp or incontrols casting.
The finals were pretty good. I'm glad they brought in tasteless and artosis. Some of issues they had made me lose faith in the organization as a whole. From what I understand (thanks to my audio engineer friends who watched too) the people in charge of sound were making mistakes that even unpaid interns would never make. The set design and the graphics are pretty shoddy as well, I can spot photoshop filters and effects that I wouldn't forgive my little brother for using nevermind someone getting paid.
Either at the start of the season they picked their jobs from a hat or someone hired their family and friends. This is why I don't buy that things will improve over time.
Yeah i agree.The staffs organizing is a joke.
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I'll pass. The only reason I pay for GSL is because I can't always be awake for the games. NASL is right in primetime for me so I'll just stick with the free stream.
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I watched alot of nasl. Most days there was at least one game or player I wanted to watch and NASL did not dissapoint. Production wasnt gsl level but there were some high quality games played every week and if they had a better vod system or at least a sample of some of the better games im sure NASL would be able to sell more tickets.
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On July 12 2011 17:19 Zandar wrote:Seriously what are so many people doing here on this site. Do you really want sc2 to be big? Do you really have a warm heart for your hobby? A new alternative to make e-sports bigger in the west, an insane amount of games for less money then 2 movies... Superb games in the finals. Yes they've had start up problems but they can only improve. All in all there was so much quality content. I'm quite sad to see such a high percentage didn't pay for this.
Wanting e-sports to grow doesn't mean blindly supporting anything related to e-sports, no matter how bad it is and how bad it makes e-sports look.
You really think people who never seen an e-sports event but tuned into MLG Dallas or Nasl to give it a short would leave with a positive opinion of esports?
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On July 12 2011 17:19 Zandar wrote:Seriously what are so many people doing here on this site. Do you really want sc2 to be big? Do you really have a warm heart for your hobby? A new alternative to make e-sports bigger in the west, an insane amount of games for less money then 2 movies... Superb games in the finals. Yes they've had start up problems but they can only improve. All in all there was so much quality content. I'm quite sad to see such a high percentage didn't pay for this.
Sorry but that isent any doing of NASL that the finals was great, could be any other tournement where you would have had them. Im not going to throw 20$ again at a tournement which cant get a proper vod format working(Sorry but 1080p vods only and not even being split up is just failure in so many ways).
As for startup problems. They showed consistantly thoughout the 3 months and not just the finals. So these startup problems shouldnt have occured at the final event, yet they did....
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On July 12 2011 17:19 Zandar wrote:Seriously what are so many people doing here on this site. Do you really want sc2 to be big? Do you really have a warm heart for your hobby? A new alternative to make e-sports bigger in the west, an insane amount of games for less money then 2 movies... Superb games in the finals. Yes they've had start up problems but they can only improve. All in all there was so much quality content. I'm quite sad to see such a high percentage didn't pay for this.
Bad products don't help esports.
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On July 12 2011 17:19 Zandar wrote:Seriously what are so many people doing here on this site. Do you really want sc2 to be big? Do you really have a warm heart for your hobby? A new alternative to make e-sports bigger in the west, an insane amount of games for less money then 2 movies... Superb games in the finals. Yes they've had start up problems but they can only improve. All in all there was so much quality content. I'm quite sad to see such a high percentage didn't pay for this.
I'd pay when they hire professional people to organize their stuff. At the moment they just have a bunch of amateur people who failed at everything. Luckily for them the matches were great and saved them.
Also the games are not live, and I'm never gonna pay to watch replays/ recorded broadcasts.
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I liked it (and did not purchase it).
The thing is, i mainly run Streams on my second Screen and play/surf on my first... So often SC2 Casts are just "background" for me and that someone talks is more important than the quality of the Stream.
I from time to time buy passes for special events and will probably do that again, for a whole season? Not really. To be honest... Many of the players that interest me are also participating in other cups that deliver good quality for free (NASL freestream is also pretty ok).
If i want to see Koreans i would buy a GSL pass, so thats not a real argument to purchase NASL...
I just don't have a real reason to buy it atm. I'm happy with the quality and 90% of the time not paying full attention anyway.
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I didn't buy, and won't buy due to my money problems, but I will continue to watch and support NASL. Really great league, keep it up fellows
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On July 12 2011 17:19 Zandar wrote:Seriously what are so many people doing here on this site. Do you really want sc2 to be big? Do you really have a warm heart for your hobby? A new alternative to make e-sports bigger in the west, an insane amount of games for less money then 2 movies... Superb games in the finals. Yes they've had start up problems but they can only improve. All in all there was so much quality content. I'm quite sad to see such a high percentage didn't pay for this.
I bet the numbers are similar for GSL man, I'd guess less than half of the people on this site pay for GSL season passes. 40% of the entirety of TL would be a ton of subscribers, but of course, it's probably a lot less than that.
The difference is, with GSL, almost everyone who has bought a pass before will say they'd definitely buy again.
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Pretty sure the competition from GSL will kill NASL.
GSL basically offers great production, players, stream and fastest VODs you could ask for while NASL has low production, worse players, tons of technical issues during S1 and slow uploading of VODs.
And personally I can't stand Gretorp either.
Murdering them here but I'm sorry paying for both tournaments is simply to pricy and S1 was very disappointing for me.
Don't overreact if NASL dies though as this is simply the reality of selling any kind of product. If you can't stay ahead or atleast even with your competition you won't be able to stay alive.
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The biggest problem I had, being someone who had a pass, was the vods took waaay to long to come out and be organized. Sure, I could have the VOD of the whole like 4-5 hour thing each night, but I just wanted to watch specific games (recommended games), I had to go through hours of vods just to get to the games I wanted. It takes less time for teamsp00ky / iplaywinner to release vods of FGTs. :/
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I bought season 1 to support incontrol because he's awesome.
Did NOT enjoy NASL primarily because the level of casting is not on par with gsl.
Gretorp in particular is very aggravating to watch/listen to.
I hope they get someone else as the primary caster.
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On July 12 2011 17:12 R4iD wrote:
there was just so many games every single day that i didnt even bother to follow it at all. no offense to the casters as well but, there is some magic missing. i dont know if day9 or the casting archon sells this "magic" in a can but if so id buy a case or two to last you for next NASL season.
i felt this way as well. having to study and having a part-time job and other interests really cuts down on my SC2 time. GSL is usually enough for me (and i cant even keep up with every match in that...tend to only watch players i care about). NASL seems to have an overwhelming amount of games, which is great for some fans but not for me. I was only interested in the finals weekend, which i watched live (had so many audio problems lol). anyways i hope NASL improves for all the hardcore fans out there, but GSL + the occasional Dreamhack/MLG weekend is enough for me
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I bought a pass for season one, but won't be purchasing one for the second season.
The format doesn't work for me. I know they want to do something different with 'seasons,' but it's just too damn long for me. After the first three or four weeks, I started caring less and less and was only keeping up on the results towards the end.
Also, since so much emphasis is supposed to be on this season format, why is there a spot reserved in the final playoffs for someone that didn't even participate in it? Hold an open tournament for a slot in the main groups before the season starts. Make everyone participate in the same way and don't add people before the playoffs. It's like if Major League Baseball saved a spot in their playoffs for a random team that won a seperate tournament like Japan Series (only open, but you can see what I mean). It doesn't make sense to me.
Those format issues and the fact that the majority of the games are played online and not live just make the whole regular season seem unappealing to me.
I have the same issue with VODs that many others have and share feelings about the poor production quality compared to other tournaments.
I'd pay $5 for a pass to watch the finals in better quality and access to playoff VODs, but the regular season format issues makes me not want to buy the full season pass. There is too much Starcraft for me to watch and I'm going to stick with GOM TV for my subscription money and likely buy passes for MLG and other weekend tournaments if I'm available that weekend. GOM is just on another level right now.
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Bought season one, immediately was off put due to the many problems in production and sound, (even in the finals there were these problems). Also didn't enjoy the casters, not a knock on them just that I didn't enjoy listening.
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I did not pay for NASL, but that doesn't mean much, cause I've never paid for anything starcraft related (except the game itself). There simply is so much content that is free and often times better than NASL that I can't really see why I should buy the ticket. The same time NASL is up (for me in europe at like 3 AM - I won't watch rebroadcasts) there are usually other streams, tourneys or cups with better production quality up.
Also, as so many said before, the format is just very boring to follow. 3 months of group play with most of the time not much on the line is not very appealing to me. They should maybe break it up in 2 week mini tournaments with small prizes and at the end do grand finals.
That all aside, the production quality is just EXTREMELY bad. It seems they haven't hired any professionals at all. Everything I see there I could have done myself, and I'm not even good on those things.
- The graphics artwork is just cheap and is something you would do in your first attempts on photoshop
- The sound has issues with levels and quality (skype casts with apparently bad microphones)
- The sound has this reverb from the studio which reminds me everytime that they just cast in some room. There really should be no reverb in a proper studio/sound setup
- I don't know how to describe it, but the audio often feels "empty". I'm sure a professional would know what it is and fix it.
- I can't say anything about VoDs, because I didn't pay for them, but from hearsay they only offer 1080p which is really bad for people with bad connections. I think a lof of the people who buy VoD passes do it because their connection is too bad to watch live. They also seem to take a lot of time uploading and some VoDs are missing entirely.
- They prerecord stuff, but don't cut out mistakes and awkward transitions
- The casting setup online and offline doesnt look good. Do something fancy with your greenscreen, it's prerecorded anyways. The "desk" they cast at looks pretty cheap.
Like the production crew, the casters are amateurs too (incontrol a lot less than gretorp). Both are great guys and i like them and what they do outside of NASL, but gretorp especially should not be a "professional" caster. Look at GSL, they tried out some casters and found good ones (Wolf, DoA - I like qxc and unstable too). I hope NASL sees this and hires someone better. Doesn't have to be someone famous, just better.
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Seeing some answers in this thread, you definatly need to add an option to the poll:
"I bought season 1, watched the first week and never watched again, so i don't know what i'm talking about but i still think it's not worth it."
I bought the ticket and while the first 1-2 weeks had some problems, NASL became quite solid over then next weeks. Even j.tv service for EU improved a lot, allowing me to often watch it live in 1080p (it's not something that is really NASLs fault, but it was still a problem with NASL for many in EU).
I can understand that someone who stopped watching after week 1 could think that NASL isn't worth the money, but if you followed it longer it's a totally different story. NASL is the tournament of improvement, everything they do starts horribly bad but quickly becomes something good.
NASL had some of the best games i have seen in SC2 history (not even considering the finals), a lot different to the cheesefest in GSL.
For the above poster:
VODs only in 1080p is a problem with j.tv and they are working on it. They are also uploading the VODs shortly after the EU re-broadcast, which might seem like a long time for some people, but for me it never was a concern (and i watched the VODs quite often because i often missed the broadcast for various reasons (i.e. too busy playing and forgetting about the time)).
Skype casts were only done with a few guest casters and only the first skype cast (Khaldor) sounded horrible, the ones after that (TotalBiscuit, CatsPajamas (spelling?), etc.) were perfectly fine.
Sound was also a lot better after the first 1-3 weeks, there was sometimes still a glitch (quite rare), but if you talk about bad sound quality, i somehow doubt you watched NASL after week 1...
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Canada13389 Posts
On July 12 2011 20:50 Morfildur wrote:
Seeing some answers in this thread, you definatly need to add an option to the poll:
"I bought season 1, watched the first week and never watched again, so i don't know what i'm talking about but i still think it's not worth it."
I bought the ticket and while the first 1-2 weeks had some problems, NASL became quite solid over then next weeks. Even j.tv service for EU improved a lot, allowing me to often watch it live in 1080p (it's not something that is really NASLs fault, but it was still a problem with NASL for many in EU).
I can understand that someone who stopped watching after week 1 could think that NASL isn't worth the money, but if you followed it longer it's a totally different story. NASL is the tournament of improvement, everything they do starts horribly bad but quickly becomes something good.
NASL had some of the best games i have seen in SC2 history (not even considering the finals), a lot different to the cheesefest in GSL.
For the above poster:
VODs only in 1080p is a problem with j.tv and they are working on it. They are also uploading the VODs shortly after the EU re-broadcast, which might seem like a long time for some people, but for me it never was a concern (and i watched the VODs quite often because i often missed the broadcast for various reasons (i.e. too busy playing and forgetting about the time)).
Skype casts were only done with a few guest casters and only the first skype cast (Khaldor) sounded horrible, the ones after that (TotalBiscuit, CatsPajamas (spelling?), etc.) were perfectly fine.
Sound was also a lot better after the first 1-3 weeks, there was sometimes still a glitch (quite rare), but if you talk about bad sound quality, i somehow doubt you watched NASL after week 1...
Agree with most of your points but that doesnt change how some of us feel. I don't watch JTV vods ever because I can't turn it down. I can handle it sure, but the bandwidth usage is huge.
The sound was never truly fixed and has always been heavily mixed to the left side or right side. Perhaps its only because I own a pair of fairly high end headphones but I notice a lot of problems. I notice issues with youtube video audio mixing even, Though on youtube I'm ok with the audio problems, I am not with NASL.
Its not the 25 bucks, its the promise behind the NASL and the lack of ability to deliver. In conjunction with this is HoN. I do not feel they should start doing HoN (at least not yet). They have more to worry about at the NASL than what game to add next. Perhaps if they had a solid showing Season 1 I would be ok with it but seriously the production was crap. And as far as a "televised" product goes you cannot charge people to watch and say hey look we are awesome and have crap production.
Work out the problems, create a branch off HoN league and have the NASL enterprise expand with some sory of HoN league but don't add HoN to the NASL without first getting something as simple (yes, simple) as audio mixing down.
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I didn't buy season 1 and won't buy season 2. I only have limited time to watch sc2 and I think gsl is more enjoyable.
Live offline event, great production, great casters and best players. Prefer that over an online event any day.
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There are far too many well produced free streams/tournaments/events going on that I'd ever fork out money for watching something that's the same but simply with price tag. Goes for GSL, goes for NASL. Goes especially for MLGs.
Personally don't understand the attitude that I'd have to reach to my wallet to support the mythical esport by paying everything on the internet that dares to ask it if they show up on google search for sc2. I'll support it by tuning in to streams that show quality product in my opinion. I don't care if it's not super duper HD. If that's not enough, then well that's too bad. Still seem to find more free streams than I could ever hope to follow.
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As you saw with PuMa, the long season absolutly doesn't matter! So until the NASL changes their tournament format, nearly no one will watch it.
The Finals were pretty OK, except of the long breaks.
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The NASL had way too many games, so it got old really fast for me. I found it really boring except for the finals.
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I bought season 1 to support esports, and this fantastic idea of an actual league in NA! I was dissapointed with season 1, but will buy season 2 anyway, because I still want to support them and see them succeed.
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Maybe if they improve the VOD section. I rarely have time to watch live so that is the most improtant thing I think. The quality of players will greatly increase this season since we have a lot of new blood pouring in.
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I bought a season 1 pass, and I also just paid for season 2. $20 (after discount) for full 1080p HD VODs and casts for four months, including the playoffs and finals, is a pretty amazing deal! Compare that to paying $10 for a weekend at MLG...it really doesn't even compare really. (That being said, I watch/pay for everything, including GSL, GSTL, NASL, MLG, Dreamhack, etc...)
The video quality of NASL trumps anything else out there, although the VOD setup definitely needs to be improved. The sheer amount of games dwarfs any other competitor at the moment, so the entertainment value you're getting out of the $20-$25 is incredible. While the season may be long, and some of the games have less hype around them than a single elimination tournament would, I actually prefer it that way. I like the idea of having a REAL season. Of course MLG, GSL and Dreamhack are going to be more exciting overall than NASL. It's like comparing watching the NBA playoffs vs. watching the regular season. You know the Lakers are making it to the playoffs...watching the regular season is really just watching for individual player performances. There's a lot less drama during the regular season, but I still enjoy watching the games play out.
With that said, $20 for HD access to just the playoffs and finals would still be a great deal. Pony up the bucks, folks. It's about the cost of decent dinner or a couple beers at a bar for 4 months of amazing Starcraft content.
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I wanted to buy season one but decided not to. Now see a good reason not to buy season 2. Maybe 3, if they fix their stuff in 2.
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I think the NASL was horrible at first, but I still enjoyed it because of the excitement of having a foreign Starleague that I could watch every day on a decent sleep schedule. Over the time NASL Season 1 was broadcasting though I think they improved in every aspect except VoDs. That's my biggest complaint now.
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For the people that say the regular season doesn't matter and there's no point in watching it... Don't you enjoy just watching good Starcraft matches? Do you not watch player streams from time to time? Does every match you watch have to have prize money and elimination on the line?
I know I get excited if I'm watching Idra's stream and he gets paired up with another top level player on the ladder. Now imagine if that player was oGsMC...and they got paired up for 3 games in a row! Now imagine that in HD instead of crappy 240p/360p stream quality. Yea...that happens, like...25 times a week for 4 months.
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Bought S1 and was a little disappointed (for the reasons that have been beaten to death by now, particularly the bad VOD organization-- Hotbid's NASL VOD thread was a lifesaver), but I still think it was a good value. $25 is almost nothing for that much content. I'll buy S2.
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On July 13 2011 02:36 pwnopotamus wrote:
For the people that say the regular season doesn't matter and there's no point in watching it... Don't you enjoy just watching good Starcraft matches? Do you not watch player streams from time to time? Does every match you watch have to have prize money and elimination on the line?
I know I get excited if I'm watching Idra's stream and he gets paired up with another top level player on the ladder. Now imagine if that player was oGsMC...and they got paired up for 3 games in a row! Now imagine that in HD instead of crappy 240p/360p stream quality. Yea...that happens, like...25 times a week for 4 months.
But why would I pay for the HD when there's plenty of free HD content of the top players around? Like you said I can watch a top players stream, download their replays or watch them casted at Youtube for no price at all. Also the fact that there's no price money or elimination on the line makes them no different from a ladder game to me.
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On July 13 2011 02:36 pwnopotamus wrote:
For the people that say the regular season doesn't matter and there's no point in watching it... Don't you enjoy just watching good Starcraft matches? Do you not watch player streams from time to time? Does every match you watch have to have prize money and elimination on the line?
I know I get excited if I'm watching Idra's stream and he gets paired up with another top level player on the ladder. Now imagine if that player was oGsMC...and they got paired up for 3 games in a row! Now imagine that in HD instead of crappy 240p/360p stream quality. Yea...that happens, like...25 times a week for 4 months.
Yes. No. Yes.
Things are quite a ways different when money is on the line. Been unsatisfied with random ladder games a long time ago.
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Good games, bad everything else pretty much : / The vod access is horrible, and website layout is pretty damn confusing. I realize they did a lot to help improve the games, working on casters, and other issues with the broadcasts, but I still think the production on everything, website and the information access, is something that needs to looked at in depth.
If you look at the way GSL has set up their website and VOD access and NASL's the dropoff is painful. GSL results and statistics are easy to access and always up to date. The VODS are laid outed simply and concisely, properly edited and cut. The graphics and videos look very clean and professional. I think this is what NASL should aim for. I don't think it's much to ask for, and I think easily within NASL's power to employ a professional full time web team dedicated to making this a reality.
If they can do this I would consider re upping. Otherwise I would rather spend my money elsewhere.
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Reasons NOT to buy Season 2:
1) Amateur mods run an amateur chat. I consider the chat to be part of the NASL experience. The mods are not professional and I expect professional mods, given that I am paying $25.
NASL permanently banned a number of customers for the entire season for complaining about various issues. Permanently banning customers for complaining about the quality of service and the quality of the product? Say bye bye to alot of paying customers.
2) NASL ignored all my e-mails. How is that for customer service?
3) Stream issues throughout the season.
4) Audio issues throughout the season.
5) Poor production quality
6) Poor caster choice
7) Disorganized VOD system
8) VODs are not spoiler free
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the league format is boring else i would buy a pass for the VoDs...my internet cant handle more than 360p streams anyways
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Very much agree with the OP's opinion. For me the two issues that remain (apart from small and marginal improvements that Xeris largely covered in his post) are:
1) the VODs are very hard to navigate, take forever to load, and prone to crashing my browser (and I have tried 3 different ones).
2) the regular season is just a little too long, I believe it will be a week shorter next time which is good and with less players, but I would like to see a quicker elimination of players who are failing to make the cut. Maybe you start eliminating players after week 4 or something, adding way more urgency and the need to catch your player and support them. It will also add the thrill of seeing players battle on the edge of making the cut, I can see some real heroes being created with this method.
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What I hated most about streaming NASL matches was Gretorp's commentary. It was absolutely atrocious. On almost every occasion, he would find the courage in himself to predict the course of the match. Then, on each of those occasions, he would be wrong.
I also found it unprofessional that the commentators were never prepared with basic preliminary information. They must know which match they are broadcasting and which match of the day it is. Also, know the group that these players are in and their record. There were times when both casters would sit there and guess the individual records of the players. "No, he is 7-1, wait, he is 6-2, no I'm pretty sure he is 7-1. Well whatever, onto the match."
Furthermore, I don't think it would have been too hard to have a screen that showed the group standings. During the cast and before each match-up, briefly show the group so streams know what is going on.
Sure, we do live with the internet and I could run around searching for all this information, but you are the ones trying to sell me this experience. I have never paid for a UFC pay-per-view fight and then have to go do research on each of the fighters. In NASL's defense, there were great improvements made throughout the season. I also believe that there are plenty more to come.
P.S. Cast replay matches to eliminate stream cheating. This also eliminates the possibility that we, the viewers, have to sit there and wait for technical difficulties to be resolved. If not, add a 5 minute delay.
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On July 12 2011 12:22 Executor1 wrote:
I also really dont like the attitude of the admins and the people at the top running NASL, between xeris taking every little critisicm about his casting or the productioin of the league personally, to getting banned on the chat for telling them something isnt right , for instance i paid for the first season and about half way through the season i started getting ad's popping up (even in the middle of games it seemed sometimes) and i asked what i could do to fix it in the chat and complained about it in a very manner way a few times and i would never get a response and more often then not i would get banned, finally a random on the chat suggested a fix for me and that worked.
NASL was censoring any customer complaints for the entire weekend. People were being banned left and right for the slightest criticism of the production (I'm not going to even repeat the issues NASL had over the weekend).
They perma-banned me for complaining about not releasing VODs after the games were played in NA because they wanted to wait until Europe had watched the NASL, thus making paying customers wait some 16 hours after the games were played to see the VODs. That's funny because they eventually released the VODs after the games were played in NA after they received enough complaints.
They also don't respond to customer e-mail. I can't even call it bad customer service because there is no customer service when they don't respond.
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On July 13 2011 03:12 TruViet118 wrote:
What I hated most about streaming NASL matches was Gretorp's commentary. It was absolutely atrocious. On almost every occasion, he would find the courage in himself to predict the course of the match. Then, on each of those occasions, he would be wrong.
I also found it unprofessional that the commentators were never prepared with basic preliminary information. They must know which match they are broadcasting and which match of the day it is. Also, know the group that these players are in and their record. There were times when both casters would sit there and guess the individual records of the players. "No, he is 7-1, wait, he is 6-2, no I'm pretty sure he is 7-1. Well whatever, onto the match."
Furthermore, I don't think it would have been too hard to have a screen that showed the group standings. During the cast and before each match-up, briefly show the group so streams know what is going on.
Sure, we do live with the internet and I could run around searching for all this information, but you are the ones trying to sell me this experience. I have never paid for a UFC pay-per-view fight and then have to go do research on each of the fighters. In NASL's defense, there were great improvements made throughout the season. I also believe that there are plenty more to come.
P.S. Cast replay matches to eliminate stream cheating. This also eliminates the possibility that we, the viewers, have to sit there and wait for technical difficulties to be resolved. If not, add a 5 minute delay.
The matches were casted from replays all season except the finals.
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Unless they revamp the site and format, i won't be buying
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The professionalism of the league has to stepped up. I love Day9 but what he wore to the finals was... Overall look and feel has to be stepped up.
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I bought season 1 the day it was available, and will not be buying season 2. The production quality really killed it for me. Another factor, as others have said, I have limited time to devote to watching vods. At this point I would just rather use that time to watch the GSL than anything else. I'll probably buy a pass to watch the finals in hq if they show significant improvement in their production next season.
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You guys are outrageous, they always start shitty and then improve dramatically over time. Is that a good way to start no but its better than them giving up and calling it a failed venture. Who do you think you all are? They just started they haven't had time to set up customer service etc. I'm trying as hard as I can to not be a internet hero right now. So I'll end what I'm saying with...
Stop flaming shit while being illogical and entitled I.E.
"They perma-banned me for complaining about not releasing VODs after the games were played in NA because they wanted to wait until Europe had watched the NASL, thus making paying customers wait some 16 hours after the games were played to see the VODs. That's funny because they eventually released the VODs after the games were played in NA after they received enough complaints.
They also don't respond to customer e-mail. I can't even call it bad customer service because there is no customer service when they don't respond."
There is a reason this makes no sense, guess what happens if they do what you want. You become happy along with people who feel like you. Guess what the people in Europe start doing.
Edit: For the record im a paying customer as well and despite the only issue being sound and JTV fucking vods up. You bet your ass im buying season two
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On July 13 2011 03:15 Hierarch wrote:Show nested quote +On July 13 2011 03:12 TruViet118 wrote:
What I hated most about streaming NASL matches was Gretorp's commentary. It was absolutely atrocious. On almost every occasion, he would find the courage in himself to predict the course of the match. Then, on each of those occasions, he would be wrong.
I also found it unprofessional that the commentators were never prepared with basic preliminary information. They must know which match they are broadcasting and which match of the day it is. Also, know the group that these players are in and their record. There were times when both casters would sit there and guess the individual records of the players. "No, he is 7-1, wait, he is 6-2, no I'm pretty sure he is 7-1. Well whatever, onto the match."
Furthermore, I don't think it would have been too hard to have a screen that showed the group standings. During the cast and before each match-up, briefly show the group so streams know what is going on.
Sure, we do live with the internet and I could run around searching for all this information, but you are the ones trying to sell me this experience. I have never paid for a UFC pay-per-view fight and then have to go do research on each of the fighters. In NASL's defense, there were great improvements made throughout the season. I also believe that there are plenty more to come.
P.S. Cast replay matches to eliminate stream cheating. This also eliminates the possibility that we, the viewers, have to sit there and wait for technical difficulties to be resolved. If not, add a 5 minute delay. The matches were casted from replays all season except the finals.
Weren't the matches casted live but the recordings played at a later date?
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On July 13 2011 03:15 StarcraftMan wrote:Show nested quote +On July 12 2011 12:22 Executor1 wrote:
I also really dont like the attitude of the admins and the people at the top running NASL, between xeris taking every little critisicm about his casting or the productioin of the league personally, to getting banned on the chat for telling them something isnt right , for instance i paid for the first season and about half way through the season i started getting ad's popping up (even in the middle of games it seemed sometimes) and i asked what i could do to fix it in the chat and complained about it in a very manner way a few times and i would never get a response and more often then not i would get banned, finally a random on the chat suggested a fix for me and that worked.
NASL was censoring any customer complaints for the entire weekend. People were being banned left and right for the slightest criticism of the production (I'm not going to even repeat the issues NASL had over the weekend). They perma-banned me for complaining about not releasing VODs after the games were played in NA because they wanted to wait until Europe had watched the NASL, thus making paying customers wait some 16 hours after the games were played to see the VODs. That's funny because they eventually released the VODs after the games were played in NA after they received enough complaints. They also don't respond to customer e-mail. I can't even call it bad customer service because there is no customer service when they don't respond.
that was the last straw for me too. during the 3rd place match, we found out on chat that day[9]/tastosis were not casting the finals. chat went crazy and people were getting banned left right center for voicing their opinions about incontrol/gretorp, and the worst thing was the Mods were spamming the chat to tell us the shut up.
you can cut it anyway you want, but day[9]/tastosis were the fan draws. it was a bit of a disappointment that they weren't casting, but banning people who were voicing their opinions and calling them trolls were a bit much.
don't forget people on the chat were paying customers. i don't think you should be treating your customers this way.
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On July 13 2011 03:26 Sylverin wrote:
You guys are outrageous, they always start shitty and then improve dramatically over time. Is that a good way to start no but its better than them giving up and calling it a failed venture. Who do you think you all are? They just started they haven't had time to set up customer service etc. I'm trying as hard as I can to not be a internet hero right now. So I'll end what I'm saying with...
Stop flaming shit while being illogical and entitled I.E.
"They perma-banned me for complaining about not releasing VODs after the games were played in NA because they wanted to wait until Europe had watched the NASL, thus making paying customers wait some 16 hours after the games were played to see the VODs. That's funny because they eventually released the VODs after the games were played in NA after they received enough complaints.
They also don't respond to customer e-mail. I can't even call it bad customer service because there is no customer service when they don't respond."
There is a reason this makes no sense, guess what happens if they do what you want. You become happy along with people who feel like you. Guess what the people in Europe start doing.
Edit: For the record im a paying customer as well and despite the only issue being sound and JTV fucking vods up. You bet your ass im buying season two
Are you kidding, why is this an illogical reason for not wanting to pay again. If you can't even perform customer service why should I buy your product. That is the bear minimum of providing a service like that. And your damn right I'm going to feel entitled, I paid money, therefore entitling me to the product promised.
Them not providing the product they promised and not even the bear minimum services is more than enough reason for people to be angry and not subscribe again. Especially not when the GSL offers the same product, but at a much higher quality. The biggest problem GSL has faced with their product some disappointing finals. They provided the product they promised and the services to support it, NASL has not so far.
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On July 13 2011 03:15 Hierarch wrote:Show nested quote +On July 13 2011 03:12 TruViet118 wrote:
What I hated most about streaming NASL matches was Gretorp's commentary. It was absolutely atrocious. On almost every occasion, he would find the courage in himself to predict the course of the match. Then, on each of those occasions, he would be wrong.
I also found it unprofessional that the commentators were never prepared with basic preliminary information. They must know which match they are broadcasting and which match of the day it is. Also, know the group that these players are in and their record. There were times when both casters would sit there and guess the individual records of the players. "No, he is 7-1, wait, he is 6-2, no I'm pretty sure he is 7-1. Well whatever, onto the match."
Furthermore, I don't think it would have been too hard to have a screen that showed the group standings. During the cast and before each match-up, briefly show the group so streams know what is going on.
Sure, we do live with the internet and I could run around searching for all this information, but you are the ones trying to sell me this experience. I have never paid for a UFC pay-per-view fight and then have to go do research on each of the fighters. In NASL's defense, there were great improvements made throughout the season. I also believe that there are plenty more to come.
P.S. Cast replay matches to eliminate stream cheating. This also eliminates the possibility that we, the viewers, have to sit there and wait for technical difficulties to be resolved. If not, add a 5 minute delay. The matches were casted from replays all season except the finals.
Are somehow a complete idiot? Every single game was cast live, except some of the open tournament games due to the number and reducing delays for players. This was one of the biggest deals for the NASL as many online tournies have chosen to go the replay route, whereas NASL has always been about live casting (as Xeris said in his post on TL in the NASL recap). Seriously, what made you think otherwise?
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I would love for group standings to be more prominently featured before each cast, and inbetween games. It's important to make sure the casters are aware of the standings, and the repercussions of a win/loss for each player. I understand that early in the season it's tough to tell what sort of impact a win/loss will have, but as the season winds down, there needs to be more discussion on how each match's result will affect the standings and the playoffs. I had to read (some very well done) write ups on teamliquid.net to understand whether a match would be important or not towards the end of season 1. If the importance of each match was highlighted more, the drama/hype around the games would be far greater. There were a lot of very important matches during the last 1-2 weeks of the season, but you'd never know by watching the actual casts.
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They HAVE to improve if they expect a lot of people to buy their product. The improvements they made after the first week fiasco yes they were good, but I think you can agree when there is a lot more they can do.
Most people will probably judge the NASL from their first week and buy the Premium accordingly, so they need to get their act together and improve fast.
The Good:
-Constant high quality games
-Reasonable quality live in comparison to the GSL LQ for free
-Casters were good and varied (opinion)
The Bad:
-The VoDs and the website generally being not very organised or well formatted
-The format of the league and the general overwhelming amount of games. It's unlikely many watched the 5 BO3s everyday for the 2 months (or 3 can't remember)
-The background of the casters and general low production value... Even the EG Masters Cup had better production
And the 'Bad' are actually more significant than the 'Good' and need sorting out.
Also, although this is good for me and a lot of people, there is actually little incentive for me to buy a Premium. Well, for me specifically I have a crappy laptop and it lags normally on higher quality, but if there is a game I want to watch on a specific day then I can just either somehow catch the US broadcast or get the convenient EU broadcast. There's normally only 1 (or no) games I want to see on a certain day, so there is no real incentive for me to buy a Premium.
(This is actually a really cool feature though the EU broadcast but I'm just saying there would be more incentive for me and maybe other EU users to buy it if there wasn't one)
IN CONCLUSION (sorry for rambling) : Fix the production value and give me some incentive to buy your product! After all, this is a PRODUCT and it should be worth its cost, even if it lets me watch seemingly endless amounts of games, I don't feel inclined to do that with one earphone working and the other not.
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On July 13 2011 04:06 Jampackedeon wrote:Show nested quote +On July 13 2011 03:15 Hierarch wrote:On July 13 2011 03:12 TruViet118 wrote:
What I hated most about streaming NASL matches was Gretorp's commentary. It was absolutely atrocious. On almost every occasion, he would find the courage in himself to predict the course of the match. Then, on each of those occasions, he would be wrong.
I also found it unprofessional that the commentators were never prepared with basic preliminary information. They must know which match they are broadcasting and which match of the day it is. Also, know the group that these players are in and their record. There were times when both casters would sit there and guess the individual records of the players. "No, he is 7-1, wait, he is 6-2, no I'm pretty sure he is 7-1. Well whatever, onto the match."
Furthermore, I don't think it would have been too hard to have a screen that showed the group standings. During the cast and before each match-up, briefly show the group so streams know what is going on.
Sure, we do live with the internet and I could run around searching for all this information, but you are the ones trying to sell me this experience. I have never paid for a UFC pay-per-view fight and then have to go do research on each of the fighters. In NASL's defense, there were great improvements made throughout the season. I also believe that there are plenty more to come.
P.S. Cast replay matches to eliminate stream cheating. This also eliminates the possibility that we, the viewers, have to sit there and wait for technical difficulties to be resolved. If not, add a 5 minute delay. The matches were casted from replays all season except the finals. Are somehow a complete idiot? Every single game was cast live, except some of the open tournament games due to the number and reducing delays for players. This was one of the biggest deals for the NASL as many online tournies have chosen to go the replay route, whereas NASL has always been about live casting (as Xeris said in his post on TL in the NASL recap). Seriously, what made you think otherwise?
Well, the games were cast live, but the broadcast was delayed ~a week. Personally I like this system, one of the few things I like about the NASL, I think live casting + delayed broadcast is a lot more exciting than replay casting + live broadcast. The commentators seem a lot more engaged when it's live.
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Where is the maybe option in the poll? It's gonna depend on the line-up of players and overall improvements for me if I'm gonna buy another season.
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Too many games, even with VOD capability I won't have the time to watch all the games.
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I purchased the season 1 pass and will likely not be purchasing the season 2 pass. It's not even really anything the NASL did or didn't do, it was just too many games that I got bored after a couple weeks and didn't really care to tune in. Never once did I even use the VOD feature. Even with that I would still pay if I could be assured that I could actually watch in HD because that is worth it to me - at least when I do tune in. Unfortunately, all too often jtv or NASL had issues with the stream causing tons of lag for some and no lag for others, this was especially frustrating at the finals. I have no issues with nearly any other stream and have a solid 25/5 connection which is sufficient for watching high quality streams.
Didn't mean to ramble and like I said, I was mostly happy with my purchase last season, I just didn't use it enough or effectively to make it worth it for season 2, at least not from beginning.
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Regular season is boring, gsl has its boring matched but at least its all or nothing every match, nobody cares about points.
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I didnt watch NASL until the semi finals and I really enjoyed it there on out. I instantly bought Season two pass after the finals were done.
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On July 13 2011 03:26 Sylverin wrote:
There is a reason this makes no sense, guess what happens if they do what you want. You become happy along with people who feel like you. Guess what the people in Europe start doing.
Not responding to customers and ignoring customer e-mails is supposed to make customers feel happy? LMAO.
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On July 13 2011 03:32 NOobToss wrote:
that was the last straw for me too. during the 3rd place match, we found out on chat that day[9]/tastosis were not casting the finals. chat went crazy and people were getting banned left right center for voicing their opinions about incontrol/gretorp, and the worst thing was the Mods were spamming the chat to tell us the shut up.
you can cut it anyway you want, but day[9]/tastosis were the fan draws. it was a bit of a disappointment that they weren't casting, but banning people who were voicing their opinions and calling them trolls were a bit much.
don't forget people on the chat were paying customers. i don't think you should be treating your customers this way.
Yeah, I was there too and the amateur mods were running the chat. I dunno why they would censor people for voicing their opinion about Tastosis over Incontrol/Gretorp. Just let your customers voice their opinions.
The mods spamming the chat to tell people to shut up was very unprofessional. I can expect that of a free stream but I expect better from a paid stream, especially a $25 stream.
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On July 12 2011 09:32 reisada wrote:Show nested quote +On July 12 2011 09:26 farvacola wrote:
Sure, there were a great deal of problems, and some of you are no doubt perfectly justified in your decision to not pay for a second season, but I can't help but think that anyone with a vested interest in the future of e-sports ought to at least wait and see what the leadership of the NASL has in store for the upcoming seasons. How sad it would be if the established Sc2 community kills off its upstarts with a hypercritical, black and white sort of mentality when it comes to production value, when in reality some organizations are just a bit slower than others at getting "into the groove" so to speak. well said i agree 100% with you. Thats exactly whats on my mind. NASL has the potential to become the biggest event afte GSL. DOnt you guys want it to happen?
Not with that kind of nepotism coupled with ignorance and incompetence, no.
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On July 13 2011 06:55 StarcraftMan wrote:Show nested quote +On July 13 2011 03:32 NOobToss wrote:
that was the last straw for me too. during the 3rd place match, we found out on chat that day[9]/tastosis were not casting the finals. chat went crazy and people were getting banned left right center for voicing their opinions about incontrol/gretorp, and the worst thing was the Mods were spamming the chat to tell us the shut up.
you can cut it anyway you want, but day[9]/tastosis were the fan draws. it was a bit of a disappointment that they weren't casting, but banning people who were voicing their opinions and calling them trolls were a bit much.
don't forget people on the chat were paying customers. i don't think you should be treating your customers this way. Yeah, I was there too and the amateur mods were running the chat. I dunno why they would censor people for voicing their opinion about Tastosis over Incontrol/Gretorp. Just let your customers voice their opinions. The mods spamming the chat to tell people to shut up was very unprofessional. I can expect that of a free stream but I expect better from a paid stream, especially a $25 stream. regardless of crazy mods and tastosis/day9 fanboys, i thought it was appropriate that incontrol and gretorp cast the finals of the tournament they worked hard on for the past 3 months, especially with incontrol leaving. they did a good job too, plus they play terran/protoss.
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Too many other tournaments to watch, regular season just isn't worth it for vods -- but I will occasionally watch free stream I guess.
Final event by itself isn't worth $20-25, especially with free stream available
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regardless of crazy mods and tastosis/day9 fanboys, i thought it was appropriate that incontrol and gretorp cast the finals of the tournament they worked hard on for the past 3 months, especially with incontrol leaving. they did a good job too, plus they play terran/protoss.
Yeah even though I have been very critical of NASL, that is one criticism I don't understand. It made sense for Gretorp/Incontrol to cast the finals with all the work they put in during the regular season. I wasn't a big fan of them during the season, but they did a good job at the finals. The only caster "criticism" you could really level at NASL is why fly Tastosis out there and not have them cast very many matches? That isn't so much a criticism as a scratch my head kind of thing, I guess it is the equivalent of having movie stars do cameos.
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I bought the first season when it was on presale, but I won't buy the second season just because of time constraints. I'll be going into last year of bachelor, so I just won't have time to catch up on VODs of all kinds of tournaments.
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I would gladly pay the full price for final day alone.
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I end up with only enough time to watch one tournament regularly. For me, that's the GSL. I likely won't buy an NASL season 2 pass, but I will probably watch some live.
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They should have a separate cheaper pass for the live Finals (I think they did this for awhile but stopped it now?), having a live crowd actually makes matches so much better.
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I feel like I have to add that I really enjoyed the finals, despite the major problems with sound etc.
But the first 8 weeks? Barely worth watching a third of it... Bit much bad casting, too many games by far to really follow and too many players I dont care too much about.
The biggest flaw that makes me not buy a pass this second season is that I really dont like the format, of soooooooooo many games for so long... I reckon I will probably buy the pass for the finals anyways if it's at a comfortable weekend, or if I hear its improved.
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I bought season 1 and I will not buy season 2 because of many reasons:
1) I sent an email after the first 7 weeks of NASL season 1 with my complaints and I didn't get _any_ response. I didn't think that they would change anything just because of my mail of course, but _no_ reaction is not the way I want to be treated as a customer.
2) VOD Setup: the nasl has about 5-6 hrs content for 5 days a week. Personally I'm not that interested in every player so I want to pick the players I like. With the terrible VOD system that was harder than you would think.
a) you can't go to nasl.tv, because the vods are uploaded late, spoilers on the schedule tab, video tab ofc. difficult to find the right vod and the biggest problem: only one file with the whole BO3 so you always know after the first game (if the vod is really short even before the first game) how the series ens
b) the alternative I choose was the 5-6 hrs file. Problems with that: spoilers because of comments just beside the vod file. Only 1080p, which is great for actually watching the vod but terrible if you are searching for the start of a BO3. A last problem with that solution: permanent crashes, which means reloading and searching for the correct time. I barely ever watched 1 hour at a time without a crash (no it's not a problem on my part, I checked)
3) too much content to follow so I choose the best for me. Which is GSL and some smaller tournaments like MLG, Dreamhack and maybe NASL Season 2 finals
4) no improvements for "the best thing in the western esports world". I heard about discussion on what the caster wear but no solution to the 1080p problem, the vod problem, the terrible homepage etc. I dont care what they wear, but _real_ problems of the nasl haven't been changed
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but I will say this: it's very unlikely that even if nasl fixes all the problems they have that I'll buy a season 3 pass just because there are so many leagues and I don't have the time to follow them all. But maybe if things turn out great I would buy a ticket for the finals for about 5$ (10$ ofc. is way too much)
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They should make the tournament a lot shorter, i lost interest after the first week of nasl. There is just no excitment, i don't care to watch games when i already know 75% of the people that will make the finals. GSL does it perfectly with only going on for a month, and other tournaments that only go on for 2-3 days. I get excited about MLG because Its a 3 day tournament that happens every few months, gives me something to look forward to.
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Paid to watch the finals, cautiously optimistic. Had the grand final spoiled by having the schedule changed on the day, opening stream just as the final GG. Took the apparently one redeeming feature of the tournament and ruined it for me.
MLG managed to improve after Dallas, so I hold out hope, but NASL seems more interested in deflecting blame than owning up to it. If there is one thing I admire about MLG, it's that they own up to their mistakes and make honest improvements to ALWAYS improve. Their response to Columbus' success wasn't "We fixed the stream, all is perfect." it was "This was good, but Anaheim will be even better!!". I hope NASL learns from this, MLG managed to turn a rabid community into the biggest fanboys in the span of a month with some hardwork and some honest attempts to improve. It is not impossible, they just need to try.
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Biggest issues with NASL for me is Gretorp. I really don't enjoy his casting at all.
They have improved so much, what they are really missing is a solid casting team. Incontrol was doing great as a caster .. it's too bad they lost him.
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I didn't buy season 1 and won't buy season 2 ONLY because I can't get full HD on my internet (rural.. slowed to 115Kb and 45Gb cap)
I WOULD BUY access to the vods in LOW QUALITY for a reduced rate (say $10) as I'm in NZ and can't often get up at 2-4am to watch these games every day.
Also think they fumbled the finals pass for $10 as it wasn't shown untill you actually went to pay (or so the chat said)
TL;DR Please sell LQ season passes for $10 for ppl who missed games, and can't do HQ (for whatever reasons)
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I bought a season 1 pass right after the Clash of the Titans, and I've been horribly disappointed by the quality of the product I bought. I don't think $25 is too much to ask for the quantity of material they produced, but if your product is shit, the fact that you make it by the truckload isn't actually a very compelling argument.
I had the same technical problems as a lot of people around here, had games spoiled on the NASL webpage and their jason.tv page, missed games I was looking forward to because they just never got uploaded, waited for days on end for videos to be posted, etc. The production quality of the whole thing was sub-par, but I could honestly care less. I bought my ticket to watch SC2 games, and between all the problems above and the format, which in my opinion produced a very large number of dull matches, I didn't feel like I got my money's worth.
Obviously the MC v Puma games were awesome. I'd probably pay $5 to watch the finals again if some of the issues from this season were resolved, but unless I'm reading rave reviews here on TL, I'll be spending my euro elsewhere for at least season 2.
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Bought season 1, will not buy season 2. The sound was off on pretty much every VoD I watched and the production of the finals was just bad.
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I think I won't buy it just because the quality of the "normal" stream is very good, I really dont need to spend money to get the HD - I dont watch NASL that much as it is anyway. But it was a nice first season and especially the final game was epic! I hope they widen the player pool a bit for the next season though!!
The problem is that if they'd like force the quality down for more ppl to be annoyed by it and be "forced" to buy premium - it wouldn't work! Coz then the ppl just wouldnt tune in rather than buy a premium account. Esp. if you can pay the money on watching Gom.Tv and stuff, which are way better imo.
I think that the best Way to fix this (make more ppl buy premium) is to (like I said above) widen the player pool and get new casters (I actually liked INControl and Gretorp, but on the long run I would have liked Tastosis/etc. to cast this, even IdrA was better just because his tactical analysis is solid and he also pretty much always increases viewers because of love/hate comments lol - he's a good person to get if you want viewers to increase^^)
Gl for season 2 though, will/hope to be tuning in a lot
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I'm going to want to see some dramatic improvements for me to even think about purchasing a pass.
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i didnt buy this season because of the horrible start...and seeing it still having problems not going to buy the second season. Especially with the bs statements they were saying during the finals. Your going to put the happiness of 1000 people over 80k people thats smart.
But i will say i like what nasl is doing, its more like the nfl and i like it...unless your a superfan you arent going to watch all the games. Your going to have your favorite 1 or 2 teams and your just going to tune in to watch their games. But imo 25$ is not worth it, i might feel differently if i respected the managment of nasl a bit more but i just dont.
Guys i have a great idea lets make a league with the biggest prize pool ever, and with whats left lets hire untested casters, have a tech crew who doesnt know what to do and dont know when its time to bring on someone who does. Brilliant buisness plan.
i think sirscoots said it best when he was answering a fan call about the fan base of esports. If you do right by us we will support you any way we can and are one of the most passionate bases you can capture. But if you come out the gate and make a horrible impression in our minds, that same passion has a very negative side.
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Compared to other content like MLG, GSL and IPL, which have far superior production and quality of which I usually and gladly pay for.
There's no way I will ever pay for a S1 pass to NASL. I will not endorse a subpar tournament who have repetitively shown little improvement over time and poor/rude PR.
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The reason NASL is unacceptable. Their streams are NOT live. Their casts are. There is not an overload of live packets hogging bandwidth. There should be no streaming or lag issues. GSL ON GOMTV. LIVE LIVE LIVE. 99% uptime. Oh did i mention that these says are LIVE everyday? with a professional broadcasting team and studio? NASL do you have that? just so NASL knows. Most people can't handle HD content. Thus the reason for HQ VODs and not HD VODs. Comcast has a 250 GB cap per month before they cut off your service. Most people pc's will not handle full HD video as the bitrates require high level of resources to process.
Oh, and it was stated that paid users will get the even "commercial free". What was up with all the commercials during the finals? You guys should give people their money back for false advertising seeing how it WAS one of your major selling points being on the front of the purchase page.
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I bought the ticket and watched every match for the first week or two then really lost interest. I even ended up being out of town for the finals so I missed them completely... kind of a waste of money.
Honestly the season dragged on too long and it got really boring. It's honestly just too much SC2, and I watch a lot.
I won't purchase a season 2 pass, although if I had more disposable income right now I probably would just to support the scene.
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It was a bumpy start, and the format was on the dull side. But I was always astounded at how exciting the games were. Boxer playing like boxer in every single match had me on the edge of my seat in a way that nothing has since the Jinro vs MC games in the code S RO32.
For what I paid, the quality of the games themselves just walked all over anything out of the GSL during that same period.
I can't see why anyone would buy the GSL -over- the NASL next season. You get more games, the games are more exciting. The live stream is higher quality and doesn't require proprietary software.
The GSL has a better format. Big whoop, we've been disappointed with every single final of the GSL code S/open. And you're insane if you thought the NASL finals were anything short of brilliant.
Diggity also has the sexiest voice and the best pacing of any caster I've seen, next to tasteless. He can talk fast as hell and be PERFECTLY clear. A very rare gift. Gretorp dropped the strange, stiff, pedantic-ness, and geoff's snarky insults was always great (so many haters though, lololol)
So in short, NASL has a devoted fan. I'm not going to renew my GSL team league (will still buy the code S in the vain hope that it stops sucking donkey cocks as the rounds get smaller)
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On July 27 2011 19:42 theDirtyDuB wrote:
The reason NASL is unacceptable. Their streams are NOT live. Their casts are. There is not an overload of live packets hogging bandwidth. There should be no streaming or lag issues. GSL ON GOMTV. LIVE LIVE LIVE. 99% uptime. Oh did i mention that these says are LIVE everyday? with a professional broadcasting team and studio? NASL do you have that? just so NASL knows. Most people can't handle HD content. Thus the reason for HQ VODs and not HD VODs. Comcast has a 250 GB cap per month before they cut off your service. Most people pc's will not handle full HD video as the bitrates require high level of resources to process.
Oh, and it was stated that paid users will get the even "commercial free". What was up with all the commercials during the finals? You guys should give people their money back for false advertising seeing how it WAS one of your major selling points being on the front of the purchase page.
Do you have any idea how horrendously terrible the GSL's broadcasts were, first season? The stream broke every single night until the RO4, IIRC.
Also, the GSL's "HQ" live, is shit. And the gomplayer is notoriously riddled with update problems not letting buyers (including me) watch the HQ service at all. I have to watch the live, shitty free stream that everyone not paying gets.
Ignorance is not a good reason for your position.
(also, comcast won't cut off your service at 250gb, brochacho. I have that same "limit," and I blow past 5-10 terabytes every single month and they've never batted an eyelash.)
Two of my roommates also work for comcast. They confirmed what I just said. If they have reason to believe you're causing poor service for other customers in the area, they'll ask nicely, SEVERAL times, before throttling you down. Even then, they won't cut off your service, just throttle your speeds specifically at peak times. That's how it worked for me in alaska and all of washington state, at least.
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NASL production was just sad....i wanted to buy a season 1 pass at the start but they had no paypal at the time.... and after i saw the first few games with gretorp and incontrol casting i was damn glad i didnt buy it. Only Premium that was worth my money was HSC3. Im not planning to buy the NASL 2 pass till they can make a proper close to problemless Season.
FYI: The Finals were saved by good games + Tastosis. If they didnt had that....oh damn
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On July 27 2011 20:10 HaRxTears wrote:
NASL production was just sad....i wanted to buy a season 1 pass at the start but they had no paypal at the time.... and after saw the first few games with gretorp and incontrol casting i was damn glad i didnt buy it. Only Premium that was worth my money was HSC3. Im not planning to buy the NASL 2 pass till they can make a proper close to problemless Season.
FYI: The Finals were saved by good games + Tastosis. If they didnt had that....oh damn
You should have watched... well... anything after that first bumpy month.
The production was very rough for the first few weeks, but the fixes came fast and heavy. By the second month I was watching every single TvX matchup (as well as my favorite non-zergs) and was happy as a clam.
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On July 27 2011 20:10 HaRxTears wrote:
NASL production was just sad....i wanted to buy a season 1 pass at the start but they had no paypal at the time.... and after saw the first few games with gretorp and incontrol casting i was damn glad i didnt buy it. Only Premium that was worth my money was HSC3. Im not planning to buy the NASL 2 pass till they can make a proper close to problemless Season.
FYI: The Finals were saved by good games + Tastosis. If they didnt had that....oh damn
Haha, this is kind of exactly my experience as well. Additionally to what you said, though, I really have to give credit to Incontrol/Gretorp for casting the finals - they actually did a good job there.
I will be eagerly following Season 2, though. NASL has shown they are able to tackle problems, so despite of the major flaws we all loathed so far, I still have faith they may come through. Before I'm convinced they did come through, though, I will not be giving money to them. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think NASL is the most expensive premium of any SC2 events, and if I'm gonna buy the most expensive service, I expect it to be the best, no less. They set that standard themselves with that pricing, and I for one am going to hold them to it.
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The games at the NASL finals were awesome, everything else was crap.
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The format kinda means im not interessted in paying for it. Waaaay too much content, would never have time to watch it all anyway. Also the production quality has a long way to go before i will consider this anything resembling a finished product.
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The sheer quantity produced by the NASL in season one justified my first season purchase and with season 2 looking to be even better, in terms of production, I am excited to watch as much of it as possible with my HD pass. I hope they continue to garner more and more support from the community as they prove they deserve it.
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I just didn't bother watching the vods enough for it to be worth is in my mind and I only watched some live games so meh not worth the 25$ for me.
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i will buy for the sole reason of the absolute fun the finales were.
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I did not buy season 1 pass, but I bought the season 2 pass. Reason? Much better lineup. Most of my favourite players just joined season 2, so a ticket was a must for me.
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I didn't expect the finals to be so terrible in terms of audio and production preparation, if I had bought a premium for it I would've asked for a refund. Also there were way to many games before the playoffs, you can't seriously expect someone to watch all or most of the matches especially as normal viewers who are interested in other leagues and other hobbies. Quality over quantity to sum it up briefly.
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On July 27 2011 20:22 Honeybadger wrote:Show nested quote +On July 27 2011 20:10 HaRxTears wrote:
NASL production was just sad....i wanted to buy a season 1 pass at the start but they had no paypal at the time.... and after saw the first few games with gretorp and incontrol casting i was damn glad i didnt buy it. Only Premium that was worth my money was HSC3. Im not planning to buy the NASL 2 pass till they can make a proper close to problemless Season.
FYI: The Finals were saved by good games + Tastosis. If they didnt had that....oh damn You should have watched... well... anything after that first bumpy month. The production was very rough for the first few weeks, but the fixes came fast and heavy. By the second month I was watching every single TvX matchup (as well as my favorite non-zergs) and was happy as a clam.
Dont worry i did watch it with most of the time sound off except when a guest caster was involved.
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On July 27 2011 20:30 Eldrythan wrote:Show nested quote +On July 27 2011 20:10 HaRxTears wrote:
NASL production was just sad....i wanted to buy a season 1 pass at the start but they had no paypal at the time.... and after saw the first few games with gretorp and incontrol casting i was damn glad i didnt buy it. Only Premium that was worth my money was HSC3. Im not planning to buy the NASL 2 pass till they can make a proper close to problemless Season.
FYI: The Finals were saved by good games + Tastosis. If they didnt had that....oh damn Haha, this is kind of exactly my experience as well. Additionally to what you said, though, I really have to give credit to Incontrol/Gretorp for casting the finals - they actually did a good job there. I will be eagerly following Season 2, though. NASL has shown they are able to tackle problems, so despite of the major flaws we all loathed so far, I still have faith they may come through. Before I'm convinced they did come through, though, I will not be giving money to them. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think NASL is the most expensive premium of any SC2 events, and if I'm gonna buy the most expensive service, I expect it to be the best, no less. They set that standard themselves with that pricing, and I for one am going to hold them to it.
Well, it's $25 for 2 Month (+ finals) of content 5 days a week in ultra-high quality. GSL $10 with ads, $20 without ads for one month in not really that good quality and for GSTL you have to pay extra.
The price of the NASL is definatly not high in any way, just because it's one payment for multiple month instead of multiple payments each for one month, it seems higher.
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id rather see 360p at 3 am in the morning then paying 20 euros.
i would prolly buy it, if it would be sth like 10 dollars, and the whole thing would start 3 hours earlier. no1 needs RE-broadcasts.
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Bought a season pass for S1 but as other people said its to many games so I am not bothering with an S2 pass. Will probs get an S2 finals pass though.
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Bought a season 1 pass, will buy a season 2 pass aswell. I can't say no to that many starcraft 2 games.
As Artosis said in a recent SoTG, if I feel like watching a PvZ, I go to the NASL website and watch a PvZ. If I want to watch a PvT, I go to the NASL website and watch a PvT. Having so many starcraft 2 games available is amazing
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Didnt miss a single game of division 1. ( fan of grubby and moon )
And it was 5am here
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Season 1 pass = bought.
Season 2 pass = bought.
Yes, it's not perfect and it's not yet at the production level of the Korean broadcasts, but the only way it stands a chance of getting there is if we support it.
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Some people think there were too many games (you can just watch the ones with the players you want, y'know. Without worrying that they'll get knocked out and you won't see them for the rest of the tourney)
Some people think the production was bad (despite being fixed very quickly) and that having optional ultra-HQ streams for people with better internet was bad.
Some people didn't like the re-broadcast that they very graciously provided for EU players
Some people thought $25 was too much for hundreds of hours of content over three months (price/hour is on an exponential scale better than the GSTL. And the games are better, to boot.)
This is like the Goldilocks story, as told by retards.
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I did not buy HD pass for season 1 but I am planning to buy season 2 pass just to support the sports. It is just a bit disappointing that so many Koreans are now in the roaster. Is NASL becoming GSL #2 Where's our North American Stars??? I mean, if I want to see Koreans play I can always check out GSL?
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I think it was a good first attempt for what it was trying to do. GSL had to start somewhere and I assume it wasn't that great either.
VOD's need to be improved. Multiple viewing qualities should be available and they need to be more properly labeled and edited to avoid the useless downtime that was in pretty much every single VOD they released. Seriously hire one guy to edit the videos and make sure they get uploaded in multiple resolutions and that will be taken care of.
Also the Finals needed some work, the audio was horrendous at the start I good technician really needs to be utilized (one with experience) so that us people streaming aren't constantly turning our sound up and down just to avoid hearing damage.
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I was considering purchasing the Season 2 pass, is that Season 2 pre-sale code invalid now? I guess I assumed it would be the pre-sale rate ($20) until the season started?
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its kinda sad reading all these post because it seems as though 90% of people only look at the bad things which arnt even that bad instead of looking at the fact that you get more starcraft than you can possibly watch, whenever you want, with top class players, for four months, for the price of about two movie tickets or maybe four lunches. If you dont have anything constructive to say maybe don't go around bashing on everything.
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United Arab Emirates7 Posts
I bought the Season 1 pass and watched a few hours per week. I also have GOMTV and MLG passes for most seasons, so that is my measure of comparison.
Why it was worth my money:
- Quantity of games (nice to always have some interesting games to watch when I get some free time)
- Constant improvement of production during the season, indicates things will get better
- Got to see some memorable games
- Ads, pauses, dead time, etc kept to a minimum, at least compared to other similar tournaments
Stuff I'd like to see improved:
- Casters not as good as other tournaments; I'd rather be beaten with a stick than hear the word "momentarily" once again in my life
- Without the "NASL VoD thread" in TL it would be impossible to follow the tournament; I can't believe why there can't be a simple list of all matches per day that one can click through (maybe even one that remembers what I've already watched)
- A lower-quality VoD should be available; as it is I can only watch from home on a good connection; it really pisses me off when I'm travelling / in a hotel and I can't watch something I paid money for because it demands a superb connection; I don't see why this is so hard
I guess what I would like to see is a tournament that has the casting quality of MLG or GSL, without MLG's outrageously horrible website / ad system / no way to find how to buy and watch the damn VoDs (seriously don't get me started), and a clean, simple page where I can see the list of all the games I've paid for and click them to watch them one by one.
I would not mind paying more for a production that fixed the above problems, was completely free of ads / dead time, and made it easier for me to consume the content (lower quality option, good list of matches)
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I bought premium only for Finals, does it count ?
And i wont buy Season 2 Premium - No koreans = No premium.
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I hated the vod service because of huge lag and messy system. This was my only real issue but it's really severe for me since I basically only watch vods. Will NOT buy another pass that considered.
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There are many other tournaments that have better casting, players, presentation and effort. NASL will not see any money from me in Season 2.
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I found my Season 1 subscription frustrating due to laggy video early on, difficulty in accessing videos without getting results spoilered, difficulty in finding the games within each video, and the occasional game that simply wasn't uploaded. I also found the quality of many of the games lackluster.
I'm taking a wait-and-see attitude toward Season 2. If people are saying that it's gotten good, I'll definitely get a ticket. Otherwise I'll just wait for them to get it together a bit more. I'm pretty reluctant to pay for a ticket when I feel like there is higher quality content out there for free.
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Im torn on whether or not to repurchase. Its not that I didnt enjoy it its more that when I've paid for something I feel obliged to get my moneys worth from it and so I'll spend a lot of time watching a lot of games. And its not that I wont enjoy it, I will, its just that I only have so many hours in the day and I think with NASL I'd be over doing it. Its good, its just that with major LAN's every other weekend and GSL on weekdays, NASL is often just the side of fries next to a meaty steak of SC that's already making me fat
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I'm not on US time, so I won't be watching much at all.
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On August 23 2011 19:49 Jinsho wrote:
I'm not on US time, so I won't be watching much at all.
EU re-broadcasts?
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EPT
