WCS
I just wanted to take some time to apologize for what happened last night on our stream. We should have taken better care in selecting a partner in South East Asia to run our qualifiers with. We received assurances that ended up not panning out and we ended up going along with it due to the venue's short timetable for testing availability. We should have screened the quality of the event more intensely. Our intent was to help StarCraft 2 gain popularity across the globe, and we should have done our jobs better. What we thought was going to be something that progresses the scene in SEA has actually done the opposite.
I want to address a couple points that have come up.
1) Regarding YoonYJ's situation (http://www.sc2sea.com/showthread.php?t=2699)
This is a terrible situation that we had no information about until when we read his post. We feel like our part in this has been misrepresented and wanted to clarify that our agreement with the PPSL included a schedule for payments which we were up to date on - PPSL was never waiting for money from us.
2) Regarding our involvement in the event
Our involvement in the event was limited to providing money to support the event as well as providing a streaming channel. We also wanted to support the event by taking its winner to IPL 4. We spent time reviewing what they were planning, as well providing them with production assets and we felt fairly secure that they could run a decent event with what they had promised us. However, we should have been more involved with anything that had to do with the IPL name. We feel this name has come to mean quality entertainment to the community and we apologize for letting everyone down. This is a lesson we will be taking with us for future events with other regional partners. While we realize that our regional partners cannot hold something of the scale of a main IPL event, we feel like at the very least they should have significantly less issues in streaming gameplay and more of a responsiveness to the community.
3) Casters
The only casters we were aware of going into this event was Tastosis. We were under the impression they would be casting the entire event. Regardless of the quality of the other casters, this was something that should have been communicated, as I know many people tuned in specifically for Tastosis.
4) HoNslaught
We had no idea they were going to be trying to run a HoN event alongside SC2. We apologize to the HoN players who were mislead and wasted their time coming to the venue.
What is going to happen now:
We do not feel confident that the PPSL can present a watchable product. As such, we have taken away their streaming privileges from our channel. They may end up streaming on another channel but it will not be through the IPL channel. We have been promised replays from the event and we will be sorting through them and will be broadcasting the top notch games from our own studios, with our own casters. For tonight we will be streaming games from our Multiplay Qualifier #2 that happened this past weekend. Note we are not pulling our support from the PPSL event itself, so players can rest assured that the event (and prize pool) still has funding.
In short, we apologize, we never imagined it would be so terrible and we will work hard in the future to prevent a failure of this magnitude from happening again. You all expect a certain level of product and we completely wasted your time last night. This is completely unacceptable to us and we are sincerely sorry. We hope everyone still recognizes the level of quality that we at the IPL work hard everyday to present to the community and has trust that we will do our best to make sure this doesn't happen again.
Thank you.
Edit: My apologies in advance if any of this is factually incorrect, this post was made based of the information we received from the community, messages with people at the venue and from what we observed from the event last night.
