Pretty interesting that they finally "officially" said something about this only after a certain reddit thread was posted that completely annihilated Dan and Nick and pinned them as scam artists. Damage control! Damage control! It's a shame that responses and apologies only ever come out after people are called out, in order to protect ones own public image.

Deleted reddit post

Cricketer12

United States14000 Posts

October 10 2014 04:42 GMT

#1082

wow it finally happened :D

GiveMeCake

148 Posts

October 10 2014 05:07 GMT

#1083

Tastosis's demeanor, words they used, and way they spoke in the 'film' lead me to believe that they DID in fact have a narrative in mind for the documentary. Their angle was; we came to Korea with nothing, we never fit in, Starcraft made us who we are. After all, most of the content of the film is them talking...

When I read things like:

"In other words, we wanted to be hands off with how he told our stories and what he decided to put in the film." - Tasteless

I'm more than a little skeptical.

The final product makes me believe that Tastosis felt it was important to be portrayed in a positive light.

graNite

Germany4434 Posts

October 10 2014 06:43 GMT

#1084

We should host a kickstarter so they can make an excuse video.

Zanzabarr

Canada217 Posts

October 10 2014 06:59 GMT

#1085

User was warned for this post

Shortizz

Singapore129 Posts

October 10 2014 07:56 GMT

#1086

Esports ventures rarely ends well.

Over the years, how many failed projects have we seen compared to successful ones? NASL, Sons of starcraft and a ton of others just flat out fails, ending in debt or unfulfiled promises.

Its easy to deceive a bunch of teenagers and even some adults who have no knowledge of how an event or project works to ''support'' it. But for anyone with even the slightest idea of business and marketing, its easy to see why tournaments / projects / teams are never going to succeed. Afterall, most of the people, including all the big name personality and organisers have no clue how to run a self sustaining event / team / project. No seriously, they might be adults who are capable of presenting themself and their ideas well but really, they have no clue.

Any successful event or ideas like TI, LoL, Blizzcon or the documentary about TI are usually sponsored or produced by the company itself. Lets not even talk about how much debt(players) big time organisers like Dreamhack or ESL have.

These people are gamers at heart and i meant that in no condescending tone, but they are no clue. So really, stop letting them milk your paycheck or allowance. Stop paying for kickstarter documentary or send X player to etc. Dont even support someone or a company whom has no idea what they are doing.

This is why esports will never be mainstream, the people who run it are often too immature and frankly, incompetent, regardless of their enthuasim. Just a rant, sick of seeing X team disband players farked, X tournament owes money, X people didnt fulfill promises.

reapsen

Germany559 Posts

October 10 2014 08:05 GMT

#1087

I've seen the episodes of SoS, thought they sucked and i know alot of kickerstarter backers feel betrayed but i just wanted to drop two very important points, i think are overlooked:

1. Backing a kickerstarter-project is a high risk venture. And its your own risk. In numerous occasions other than SoS people who contributed did not get the value they hoped for their investment. Everyone should know that when backing a project. Demand refunds is pointless.

2. 42.000$ is not alot of money regarding the filmmaking business. Alot of comments i read seem to suggest, that for 42k dollars, you can expect a great documentary to come out but that is simply not true. It is actually a really low budget for such a project.

That said, i think there are only one key fault with everything:

The Filmmaker (Alejos or whatshisname) should have come out a loooong time ago, man the fuck up and say something like this: "The project got to huge for me. I had no idea how to do it. I have no idea of the business side of filmmaking. I am just an amateuer filmmaker and i fucked this up. I am sorry, i will be releasing all my material under public domain so maybe some editor out there can try to do a nice cut of it. Furthermore here is an excel sheet of my accountancy for this movie, here you can see where your money went and why it is gone."

Projects fail. Everyday. It happens and its not a big thing, if you deal with it well. The true problem is the shady handling of the whole situation. The going underground of the Alejos Guy, Tastosis beeing wishywashy with the whole thing, and even worse more stupid promises were made.

aka_star

United Kingdom1546 Posts

October 10 2014 08:16 GMT

#1088

On October 10 2014 17:05 reapsen wrote:
I've seen the episodes of SoS, thought they sucked and i know alot of kickerstarter backers feel betrayed but i just wanted to drop two very important points, i think are overlooked:

1. Backing a kickerstarter-project is a high risk venture. And its your own risk. In numerous occasions other than SoS people who contributed did not get the value they hoped for their investment. Everyone should know that when backing a project. Demand refunds is pointless.

2. 42.000$ is not alot of money regarding the filmmaking business. Alot of comments i read seem to suggest, that for 42k dollars, you can expect a great documentary to come out but that is simply not true. It is actually a really low budget for such a project.

That said, i think there are only one key fault with everything:

The Filmmaker (Alejos or whatshisname) should have come out a loooong time ago, man the fuck up and say something like this: "The project got to huge for me. I had no idea how to do it. I have no idea of the business side of filmmaking. I am just an amateuer filmmaker and i fucked this up. I am sorry, i will be releasing all my material under public domain so maybe some editor out there can try to do a nice cut of it. Furthermore here is an excel sheet of my accountancy for this movie, here you can see where your money went and why it is gone."

Projects fail. Everyday. It happens and its not a big thing, if you deal with it well. The true problem is the shady handling of the whole situation. The going underground of the Alejos Guy, Tastosis beeing wishywashy with the whole thing, and even worse more stupid promises were made.

We hear point 2 a lot, but then we see the smash brothers documentary that was done on a shoe string and a million times better.

reapsen

Germany559 Posts

October 10 2014 08:57 GMT

#1089

I knew my point 2 would bring the "cheap but awesome" Smash Brothers documentary argument up.

While i agree that it is a friggin awesome documentary, you have to keep in mind that it was shot while Smash Brothers was a pretty much underground scene. In this AMA with the guy, the creator said the budget of the film was around 12k$ and that he put in roughly 2000 hours of work. These 2000 hours are unpaid work of passion. As far as i recall, the Alejos Guy himself lived off of the kickerstarter money, that must be taken into account. 42.000$ is less than the average yearly household income in the U.S. Try living off of that while traveling the globe...

Also i almost guarantee that the Smash Brothers guys did not recieve any payment for the interviews, the filmmaker did not travel nearly as much and probably the whole project was a lot easier to budget.

Because you can clearly see the Smash Brothers Filmmaker had his outline ready from start to finish. He wanted to tell the stories of the 7 greatest players of their time and that is the structure of the whole film. And the documentary goes on chronically from player to player and tells their story and that is it.

The Alejos Guy had no such structure. As i recall he just "followed Tastosis around for a bit" and then see what footage he gets.

Furthermore it is much easier to handle low budget projects, because you have a much easier time saying: "Nope, can't to that, too expensive". If you have a large amount of money its much easier to get lost in the attitude: "Yeah, lets do this and this, and also this". And then suddenly the money is gone. The more budget you have the more experience in project management you need.

Edit: To make my point clear. I am not trying to defend the Alejos-Guy. I am just saying that crying for refunds is pointless and that the amount of money is not even that high. After all he did deliver something.

I totally agree, that the whole "crisis management" was super bad from all sides and we ended up in a lose-lose-lose situation (alejos himself - tastosis - community).

TRaFFiC

Canada1448 Posts

October 10 2014 09:31 GMT

#1090

On October 10 2014 16:56 Shortizz wrote:
Esports ventures rarely ends well.

Over the years, how many failed projects have we seen compared to successful ones? NASL, Sons of starcraft and a ton of others just flat out fails, ending in debt or unfulfiled promises.

Its easy to deceive a bunch of teenagers and even some adults who have no knowledge of how an event or project works to ''support'' it. But for anyone with even the slightest idea of business and marketing, its easy to see why tournaments / projects / teams are never going to succeed. Afterall, most of the people, including all the big name personality and organisers have no clue how to run a self sustaining event / team / project. No seriously, they might be adults who are capable of presenting themself and their ideas well but really, they have no clue.

Any successful event or ideas like TI, LoL, Blizzcon or the documentary about TI are usually sponsored or produced by the company itself. Lets not even talk about how much debt(players) big time organisers like Dreamhack or ESL have.

These people are gamers at heart and i meant that in no condescending tone, but they are no clue. So really, stop letting them milk your paycheck or allowance. Stop paying for kickstarter documentary or send X player to etc. Dont even support someone or a company whom has no idea what they are doing.

This is why esports will never be mainstream, the people who run it are often too immature and frankly, incompetent, regardless of their enthuasim. Just a rant, sick of seeing X team disband players farked, X tournament owes money, X people didnt fulfill promises.

If you don't contribute to e-sports in any way, as you are suggesting, how will it grow? Why not pay to send your favorite players to an event? If e-sports is ever going to grow, it needs money behind it. You don't have to support every kickstarter that pops up, but using your wallet to support teams and companies that are in e-sports is the best thing you can do.