NASL and WCS America Qualifier - Page 3

On September 21 2013 12:12 mikumegurine wrote:
wow round of 512, and only 135 signed in to play?

what a waste of code A qualifiers for an entire season...

On September 21 2013 12:10 Dark.Carnival wrote:
So far it has been a major disappointment in how the tournament was advertised and how they ran it today.

It almost went by unnoticed except for a few posts on reddit when NASL released the information for sign-ups about a week ago. But NASL didn't announce it on reddit or teamliquid as far as I know. The WCS website had a couple news posts about it but again nothing was posted to community sites.

First qualifier was today and it was a bit of a mess. Only 135 people signed up since there was very little advertisement but they still kept their "schedule" that said ro512 would start 12pm PDT. Since there were so few sign-ups there was no ro512 so the vast majority of us were online at 12pm thinking the schedule would be moved up only to find out they didn't want us to play until the scheduled time. ro256 was at 1:30pm PDT and ro128 was at 3:00pm PDT.

Other issues are there was only ONE admin, and he was often not replying to questions probably due to being messaged by everyone. There was a check-in required 30mins before your match that you had to do by messaging this one admin and waiting for a reply. If your opponent wasn't there or afk you were supposed to tell the admin, who eventually went through every no-show by asking in chat for them to reply to him. For the ro128 this was done before 3pm PDT and lead to several people getting walked over despite returning in time for the match at 3pm PDT. As far as I could tell the one admin wasn't able to get to everyone having issues so a lot of walkovers went unresolved.

Next issue; map pool. The maps are the same as the ladder but there was zero information on starting maps or if there was a veto system. After messaging the admin to check in for the ro128 he gave out the maps which were randomly selected by him (or someone). They were set maps for each game so no vetoing or loser picks. The funny part is in the very next round for the maps the starting map was chosen again by the admin but it became loser picks for no reason. The lack of information regarding the map rules also lead to some people ignoring the admin and doing vetoes for map picks anyway.

Overall it was probably one of the worst qualifiers for an important tournament I've been in or seen, and probably the worst WCS qualifier for all three seasons. To sum up the problems; lack of advertising it, lack of information, poor scheduling and only one admin. Hopefully the qualifier on the 24th is ran better but I'm not getting my hopes up D:

For information on the next qualifer; http://nasl.tv/News/Article/20130914wcs-america-season-3-qualifier-information

Qualifier 2
12pm PDT on September 24 - Registration opens
12pm PDT on September 27 - Registration closes
12pm PDT on September 28 - Tournament begins (I assume ro512 same as todays)

On September 21 2013 12:10 Dark.Carnival wrote:
So far it has been a major disappointment in how the tournament was advertised and how they ran it today.

It almost went by unnoticed except for a few posts on reddit when NASL released the information for sign-ups about a week ago. But NASL didn't announce it on reddit or teamliquid as far as I know. The WCS website had a couple news posts about it but again nothing was posted to community sites.

First qualifier was today and it was a bit of a mess. Only 135 people signed up since there was very little advertisement but they still kept their "schedule" that said ro512 would start 12pm PDT. Since there were so few sign-ups there was no ro512 so the vast majority of us were online at 12pm thinking the schedule would be moved up only to find out they didn't want us to play until the scheduled time. ro256 was at 1:30pm PDT and ro128 was at 3:00pm PDT.

Other issues are there was only ONE admin, and he was often not replying to questions probably due to being messaged by everyone. There was a check-in required 30mins before your match that you had to do by messaging this one admin and waiting for a reply. If your opponent wasn't there or afk you were supposed to tell the admin, who eventually went through every no-show by asking in chat for them to reply to him. For the ro128 this was done before 3pm PDT and lead to several people getting walked over despite returning in time for the match at 3pm PDT. As far as I could tell the one admin wasn't able to get to everyone having issues so a lot of walkovers went unresolved.

Next issue; map pool. The maps are the same as the ladder but there was zero information on starting maps or if there was a veto system. After messaging the admin to check in for the ro128 he gave out the maps which were randomly selected by him (or someone). They were set maps for each game so no vetoing or loser picks. The funny part is in the very next round for the maps the starting map was chosen again by the admin but it became loser picks for no reason. The lack of information regarding the map rules also lead to some people ignoring the admin and doing vetoes for map picks anyway.

Overall it was probably one of the worst qualifiers for an important tournament I've been in or seen, and probably the worst WCS qualifier for all three seasons. To sum up the problems; lack of advertising it, lack of information, poor scheduling and only one admin. Hopefully the qualifier on the 24th is ran better but I'm not getting my hopes up D:

For information on the next qualifer; http://nasl.tv/News/Article/20130914wcs-america-season-3-qualifier-information

Qualifier 2
12pm PDT on September 24 - Registration opens
12pm PDT on September 27 - Registration closes
12pm PDT on September 28 - Tournament begins (I assume ro512 same as todays)

On September 21 2013 12:14 Zenbrez wrote:

Not really.

On September 21 2013 12:25 geokilla wrote:

It's because no one knew..

On September 21 2013 12:28 Zenbrez wrote:

I'm more curious about how many of the relavant people didn't know. I'm not going to feel bad because JoeBlow didn't get to participate.

On September 21 2013 12:42 Iberville wrote:
In NASL's defence, Code A qualifiers weren't broadcasted by Gom TV either to my knowledge.

On September 21 2013 12:54 mikumegurine wrote:


also season 2 there were 4 different qualifiers for code A

this time, there are only 2 qualifiers

On September 21 2013 12:55 TumNarDok wrote:
I'd wish the organizers - and thats all of them, ESL NASL GOM- would put more focus on these qualifiers.
I understand the major focus on premier for the resources at hand, but I don't understand the poor communication.

These qualis are the touch point where the unknowns meet the stars.
So it should be a very important part in the strategy for community building and prolonging the game's lifecycle.

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If you look where most visits to the BB bracket come from, its Liquipedia.. 73%..

There should be announcements about it on this very major community site (and nope, neither nasl website, esl website, wcs website, reddit news aggregator, or battle net will ever replace TL in regards to getting the news to the fans of the game).
When i started to get involved in SC2 there would be these posts/announce by NASL, IEM etc in SC2 general. Nowadays only Proleague does a good job at it (thanks Ghost!).
It shouldn't be so hard to hire a CM (and he should be at Blizzard I think) who takes the info from the partners and publishes/forwards it to WCS website but then also to the established fan communities (TL, netwars, goodgame, readmore, sc2sea, whatever korean etc)

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Now for the first NASL qualifier I kinda expected a bit of a messy start. They never ran much of a bigger cup or something.
Hope the poor hero admin doesn't get "terminated" and learnings will be made.