Xeris, I wanted and still do want the NASL to work. We as a community have extremely high standards and we expect those standards to be met if not surpassed. Growing pains are fine but Season 1 was a far cry from being a finished product.
NASL struck me as a project that garnered interest from some investors and enthusiasts, as well as community volunteers. But, it seemed from the start that there was no managerial presence, no structural hierarchy, and no responsibility. NASL felt like an "internet project", and I'll use a personal anecdote to explain:
When I was younger, my friend and I used to come up with ideas for RPGs. We had elaborate character backstories, we sketched out some character portraits, we thought up fun battle systems, but the only games we had created were simplistic RPGs in QBasic that used text as graphics. After a few years, the ideas grew bigger and more elaborate until we ultimately had the Internet at our disposal. The next thing I knew, he was pulling in all sorts of volunteers from all over the world who were submitting character portraits and game concepts to us. Because he was just grateful to receive any kind of help, he would say to anyone who submitted anything "WOW this character looks GREAT, THANK you for this omg" even if it was objectively terrible. The people who approached us were enthusiastic about working on the project, they shared our vision, and they wanted to be included. Those same people who submitted things would stick around for a week or two, then they'd disappear. When it came down to actual necessities like designing cities and dungeons, tile art, sprite art, cogent dialogue, we quickly realized how little we had. If we had a plan in place from the start, with an actual schedule and knowledge of what exactly we needed, we would have been able to make real headway as opposed to drowning.
That, to me, was NASL Season 1. It was like you had a grandiose idea for an awesome league, but the transition between the brainstorming phase and actual planning and delegation hit like a brick wall. Get a paid, qualified staff with experience in the field of editing and post-production. Get experienced department leaders who can manage their teams effectively, report issues to you upfront and provide their suggestions for improvement. Run it like the business it should be -- and needs to be in order to succeed. Volunteers and hopeful dreamers are no substitute for proven, experienced, career-minded professionals. Listen to their feedback and take it to heart.
You can dismiss this post as "hate" all you like, and you can shirk the blame all you like. You, Gretorp, and Inc are the faces of NASL whether you expected to be or not, and you guys are the ones who will be held collectively responsible for the positive or negative results of your league. All I know is that if my name is attached to something, I want to be its harshest critic and demand perfection at every turn.
The good news is that by changing things up, Season 2 can be a lot better. You've already received some constructive criticism in this thread and others, don't just ignore it because you think people are being hateful.
Nasl was great, the games were exciting aswell. I missed day 1 so cant really comment on what happened there. But, please talk iNcontrol into casting season 2. He's the best caster in the whole world! He's just so funny that it doesnt matter how boring the game is it's still enjoyable when he's behind the microphone. I even enjoy PvP when he's casting and that's probably the most boring thing I know..
Other than that, keep on rollin'. Looking forward to Season 2.
Hey hey. I didnt watch very much of NASL throughout the group stage, in fact I only watched a handful of games there so I won't be commenting on that. I will set my focus towards the finals, since that was mainly what I saw. My problem is with the person observing the game, he was missing a lot of battles, and didn't seem to have a cool enough head to realize the most important places to focus. Examples of this, that I can remember are: When a drop was going off in MCs base, Puma was focusing a citadel and the citadel went down. While the citadel was going down the observer didn't click on the building to show how far along the upgrade was. In a few other general spots there were drops going on that he would catch the end of, and when a battle was about to happen, sometimes he would go to a random place on the map.
I am well aware of the pressure on an observer, he has to be on point and that's incredibly hard, especially knowing that so many people are watching. I would just suggest spending a lot of time to improve the quality of his viewing skills. Another possibility is to hire someone who is a professional observer, I think SC1 used to have those. :D
I do not know if you have one dedicated floor manager while setting up and running the event, if you dont you really should have. I have helped out at a lot of events and having the owner/head of the organisation in charge of that stuff often leads to problems since he has a ton of other responsibilities as well.
So, one guy who is responsible for co-ordinating everything on site and making sure everything gets set up and tested correctly and who does not have to step aside every other minute to deal with a phone-call or something else.
That is how we usually did it, we had one guy at the top responsible for everything, in your case russel. His job was mostly to be the events face outwards and talk to sponsors, team managers, media and all the rest. He should not get involved in the details unless he absolutely has to.
Below him we had two guys, one in charge of the tournament part and one in charge of the venue part, if that makes sence. So the guy in charge of the venue part is what i would call the floor manager, he has the overall responsibility of everything practical going smoothly and working.
And one in charge of the tournament part, he is responsible for players, brackets, rules, maps, casters ets.
Ofc both of theese two has several people below them doing most of the actual work. But splitting up the responsibilities and making clear definitions while having competent people managing both branches of the event really helps.
Not sure if you had volounteers helping out? In swedish events at least volounteers are standard, help out 4h/day during an event and get in free + get a cool t-shirt for example. Or help out 8 hours before the event and get a free pass + dinner. It is standard both in LAN-events and in big student-parties aswell. It is also pretty popular to help out, plenty of peolple love helping out and find it quite fun to carry around tables and drawing cables for an hour or two if it helps E-sports =)
Having a bunch of bodies to throw at the menial tasks goes a long way to free up time for people "in the know" to fine-tune and test everything. For example dreamhack has some ~400 volounteers and while i do not know exactly how they do things now way back many years ago they had some kind of work/get in for free setup. Now i think they actually has enough people willing to volounteer full time...?
*edit* My experience comes from LAN-parties 5-10 years ago aswell as a lot of other student events. In your case you should probably add a 3rd person right below the head honcho, someone responsible for the production of the event on site. Why do you think that the guys who makes a lot of the magic happen at dreamhack almost never is seen in the community or seen/talk to the players? They are to busy actually making things work, a huuuuge problem is having a guy at the top trying to be in charge of everything. Like Russel (not saying you have this problem, just an example), if the guy in charge of production is also responsible for the venue, and palyers, and stream he is just way to split up to be able to do a good job managing the people below him and therefore they will not know what to do and things will go sluggish and slow.
Also, the person in charge of the venue should not be the same guy that is any kind of contact person for players, teams or whatever. If you are managing 20 people and telling them how to draw the electric and internet cables you do not want some ego-inflated player manager getting in your face because his players chair is to hard on his bum...
To me it seemed like you had no full-time organizer/producer for the Finals. Noone who told people what to do all the time.
It sounds stupid as everyone should know what to do all the time, but as a matter of fact: They don't. They would in normal situations, but under this high pressure, they don't. You need someone capable to be on top of everything, tell the sound guys "now activate the mic input for the interviewer and translater", tell the progamers "_now_ go up to the stage, shake inControls/Day9s/Tastless hand and go directly to your booth", tell the casters "ok, announcing is over, now you're on to entertain", etc.
It looked really unorganized, noone seemed to know what they were supposed to do. Lots of confused looks by everyone, from caster to player.
It's a life fact: If you don't tell someone how to do something, he will most likely do it wrong.
Sorry but using Boxer, Moon, and Darkforce as one of your excuses for time delays/schedule conflicts comes off as either being ignorant to the real problems plaguing your event, or just a cop out. It's not even the fact that those issues come up, it's that you're blaming them for your shortcomings. If I were Boxer, Moon, or Darkforce, I would probably feel disrespected as it was the players and the games they produced that saved your event, because taking other things into consideration such as audio quality, interview setups, lighting, etc, they were passable at best.
Regardless of all the haters (even from prominent members of the community, which is pretty disappointing to me), we're going to keep plugging away. We won't lose faith or give up because all of us here believe in our vision. We started from nothing and put on a great show, especially considering that this was our first large scale event. I feel great right now
Haters will always exist and there's nothing you can do about it. But don't group "prominent" members of the community which many people on TL know and recognize as being haters as well because you might not take criticism well from them.
I think NASL's biggest problem is that they are very green. They went into this huge project with little experience and had to learn on the fly and it showed. I understand why they did this. One, its cheaper. And it also allows them to build up their own team. It leads to a lot of growing pains.
On July 12 2011 13:48 Leo702 wrote: I was able to attend this event, and from attending other big conventions such as Blizzcon and PAX, this turned out to be an amazing event. I think we got really excellent games because of the big prize pool incentive and the players did not have to play many games in a row like in other tournaments, giving them more time to rest and hide their strategies.
NASL Finals > Every GSL Finals (GSL is awesome but NASL finals win)
Keep up the good work and continue to improve.
Im assuming you have never attended a GSL finals and that is why your view is this way.
NASL finals had no special flair like the GSL does, i guess they did have a musical performance but its nothing like the GSL finals where they have pop stars that have songs that top the charts performing.
I dunno the games were fricking amazing so if your going just based off of that i agree (although most players did come from korea and play in the GSL in some form or another) if your talking about the actual production its like freaking night and day, NASL in general has been very bland throughout the regular season and the finals. The studio before the green screen was just a grey backdrop and a grey desk with nothing on it (really bland). The finals reminded me of a blown up version of their studio, it was mostly grey and black with nothing on the caster desk except an ibuypower banner and nothing really to catch your eye. At GSL finals there is Flames fireworks , epic epic player intro's (did you see the intro's for the super tournament? OMG) its not even worth comparing pretty much thats mainly because GSL probably invested close to 10x more money in their finals then NASL did and thats only for 1 match so i guess NASL finals did okay (aside from the first day) with what they had.
I mean the games between Puma and MC. GSL production is off the hook but their finals have all been one sided for the most part. (Fixed my original post)
Do you guys have a dedicated observer? The observer during the LAN was quite bad and it seemed like it was someone who had done it for their first time. They were clicking around the map and moving wayyy tooo fast. Having one or even two dedicated observers would greatly increase the watchability of the games over the stream. There were too many times during important battles where the observer would click somewhere else on the map.
When they first get there a day or two in advance, every player should set up and you should save it so a staff member just copy it over before their matches.
Tell the players no installing drivers is allowed (this should be obvious, tbh) and if their stuff doesn't work, plug SS or whoever and have extra Kinzu's/Xai's/7g/6gv2's on hand.
Ask for any special accommodations like German language in advance. Relocalizing is a 2 minute process, and I believe you could even do it through the key bindings save file.
As far as the delays go -- this was fairly standard for almost every LAN event, but luckily Saturday went MUCH more smoothly. Some delay problems were caused by (to name a few): Moon refusing to let our staff touch his mouse/keyboard and plug them in for him... Boxer accidentally tripping a power cord and shutting off his computer, DarkForcE changing the computer language into German and trying to install some obscure logitech mouse drivers, etc.
I don't know how involved you've been with esports in the past but probably like 90% of players want to set up the computer themselves.
Also you should inquire what kind of drivers/settings etc players are using and get them before hand and install/uninstall and see that they work. (this should be possible when its just 16 players and should make things run a lot smoother)
The boxes that these players play in during the finals... they look like they were 1/3 of the sizes used by the koreans... are you planning on making them bigger? it'd also provide more air for the players... for some gigantic amerikans might have problems trying to get inside...
There is a lot of good constructive critisim here, really great ideas. I just fear no one at NASL will listen because they just think that anyone who had the slightest problem with it is just a `` hater``......Makes me upset
That, to me, was NASL Season 1. It was like you had a grandiose idea for an awesome league, but the transition between the brainstorming phase and actual planning and delegation hit like a brick wall. Get a paid, qualified staff with experience in the field of editing and post-production. Get experienced department leaders who can manage their teams effectively, report issues to you upfront and provide their suggestions for improvement. Run it like the business it should be -- and needs to be in order to succeed. Volunteers and hopeful dreamers are no substitute for proven, experienced, career-minded professionals. Listen to their feedback and take it to heart.
QFT.
Everyone wants to help out for a week or two, and be part of the 'fun' of giving opinions and coming up with ideas. Very few people understand what it takes to coordinate and prioritize ideas and actually construct a coherent vision or plan. The production is actually straightforward, it's the management and implementation that's hard.
Excalibur put it more eloquently than I did, but the NASL is under-managed. The owner should not be staying up all night reviewing video. He is supposed to be doing business development, promoting the league, building partnerships and raising funds.
On July 12 2011 16:19 Jibba wrote: Also, for any small player pool LAN tournaments in the future, it really shouldn't take that long for players to set up.
When they first get there a day or two in advance, every player should set up and you should save it so a staff member just copy it over before their matches.
Tell the players no installing drivers is allowed (this should be obvious, tbh) and if their stuff doesn't work, plug SS or whoever and have extra Kinzu's/Xai's/7g/6gv2's on hand.
Ask for any special accommodations like German language in advance. Relocalizing is a 2 minute process, and I believe you could even do it through the key bindings save file.
Is it standard in RTS games for players to not be able to install drivers before their matches? I come from a FPS background and couldn't imagine playing that way.
basicly i enjoyed the live event alot, so much that it pushed me over the line to buy a season ticket next season. Not to support e-sports but because i wanne keep the live events going.
On July 12 2011 16:19 Jibba wrote: Also, for any small player pool LAN tournaments in the future, it really shouldn't take that long for players to set up.
When they first get there a day or two in advance, every player should set up and you should save it so a staff member just copy it over before their matches.
Tell the players no installing drivers is allowed (this should be obvious, tbh) and if their stuff doesn't work, plug SS or whoever and have extra Kinzu's/Xai's/7g/6gv2's on hand.
Ask for any special accommodations like German language in advance. Relocalizing is a 2 minute process, and I believe you could even do it through the key bindings save file.
Is it standard in RTS games for players to not be able to install drivers before their matches? I come from a FPS background and couldn't imagine playing that way.
It's not standard. I think Korean players would riot if they enforced that kind of rule.
First, the map pool. Even if players were given a veto, this map pool was absolutely horrible. It is clear that whoever picks the maps is not familiar with other SC2 tournaments or the game. There are very good reasons for why some of the maps in your pool (for example Backwater Gulch) are not used in any other tournament.
Second, the audio. While the balance issue was fixed, audio was horrible throughout the weekend. Various microphones not turned on at various times throughout the entire cast, and horrible audio quality all around. Not to mention the incredibly annoying audible clicking from the commentators...
Third, scheduling. You were two hours off schedule the first day and decided to take a 1 hour break anyway. You were 1.5 hours off schedule the last day for no apparent reason at all. This could be made better.
Edit: And one more thing: when the entire internet is hating on you, retweeting the 5 people that think your event is amazing is pretty silly.
There was no way to know why there was a delay or how long it would last, that is really not good. Viewers can accept a two hour delay, if they are informed about the problem and are given an estimate of when normal viewing will be resumed.
There should have had been an informative overlay on the stream, informing viewers about delays and when the next match will be played and with which players.
EPT
(Fixed my original post)
