[TSL7] Shopify TSL 7 - Thanks, and a recap

Trap!

I think all of the above for TSL 7 were fairly solid, but I did see a healthy amount of feedback wishing for more players. I think that’s worth exploring, and some kind of transition to a 24 or 32 player scale might be feasible with the time we have to work with. For the format, I like a “pure” double elimination or single elimination, and would also be happy with Groups, if it made sense. The hybrid format used for TSL 6 doesn’t jive very well with me, though, so I intend to avoid that kind of approach. As for the schedule, I’ll remind everyone that we’re working around as many other EPT events as we can, so the availability for a multi-weekend event like TSL can be a challenge. I’ve got a few ideas on how to best address all of these changes simultaneously, but I don’t want to promise anything before we make the big TSL 8 announcement, which is coming “soon”.

Though the VODs are available on Twitch and are going up on YouTube starting later today early next week, it’s clear to me that our process here needs work. We’ll have a more defined plan for future TSLs, with a more timely schedule to stick to.

I realize that this switch was a risk, and it seems like we ended up with pretty similar viewership to what we were expecting. We don’t plan on doing this again in the future, and only considered this approach because of the scheduling conflicts with the Team Liquid Pride streams. The delay on Saturday was unfortunate, and I spent most of the time that morning trying to coordinate with ESL’s broadcast team for the hand over, but by the time we were able to get that moving, it made more sense to wait for their stream to close out.

Time zones are always a tricky thing to navigate for online tournaments that span multiple continents, and I hate that we have to choose between remotely playable times for Korea and viewership in the Americas- and let’s be honest here, it’s not reasonable to ask a player to play multiple Bo7s starting at 2 AM. This is something we’ll have to continue looking into for the best possible options, but in my mind it boils down to a handful of options:

1. Do what we did this time, and risk missing out on significant English-language viewership from the Americas (and risk unreasonable times for some of our players)
2. Cast some/potentially many games off replays, to align with audiences (and risk viewers and fans being frustrated at it not being live)
3. Have a live event (this increases our event costs by a LOT)
   
   I think each of these solutions has a time and place where they make sense. It’s something for us to think about moving forward.

There’s always some things lost in the handoff for events, but I’m happy to say that the majority of problems that arose were caught before they affected the event. For TSL 8, we’ll be defining some of the more nebulous things more concretely, so we have clearer owners for things like our social media coverage, liquipedia updates, VOD process, and a few other things that are less visible.