Pony Express Issue 108 Jan 5th 2010 – January 11th

BC: With the TSL up and running now, I know it has created a lot of work for all those responsible with the endeavor. Could you describe what work is required to put together the TSL?

Kennigit: Everything we do or release publicly has had hours of discussion, tweaking, reworking, and iterating iterating iterating. Its ridiculously time consuming but at the end of the day we have a solid product that I think people appreciate
For example:
We spent 10 hours the day before the nony/idra cast fixing bugs, testing audio, and pulling our hair out with casting software that wouldn't cooperate.
This week is pretty nuts too with R3 and then Ro16 quickly approaching but we all get a big thrill out of the end result when we go live.
Theres basically two fronts this time around
The tournament side which includes all the rules, scheduling of refs/players/matches, keeping in contact with players, chasing them down when they don’t show up, figuring out where rules need to be implemented, drawing up brackets, discussing maps, tourney structure.... it goes on and on.
The side, which I’m more involved in, is the production side - all the graphics, posters, video, and streaming. That’s basically what I worry about - I was pretty stressed out during idra/nony. People don’t realize but while the observer is casting, we are in communication with him trying to correct issues as they arise. It's a bit crazy but a huge adrenaline rush.

The guys doing production are sick heroes so big props to r1ch, sigrun, and silversky

To give you an idea of how we iterate on production
+ Show Spoiler +
That’s just for 1 image during the announcement loll....
Hotbid has this phrase that we dread... "Hey, can you just change ____ to ____ just to see what it looks like?"
That’s the result hahah


BC: As you mentioned your part of the production side of things, how many people work on it with you, and who is basically the team lead? What role does said person take?

Kennigit: Well for art production, I’m the team lead - basically other staff come to me with things that need to get done for articles, broadcasts etc and I make sure that it gets done. It’s about 50/50 with doing it myself and delegating to one of the graphics guys depending on my workload. Usually hotbid and I go over it and tweak before it goes up. 

The stream/casting side is primarily handled by r1ch
But we all chip in a big. R1ch handles all the server stuff.... you’d be better to ask him about how it works - I know he has some scripts that load balance between our two video servers so neither gets too full.
We took a lot of feedback from the first broadcast - specifically people having issue on vista with WMP embed and in WMP itself. R1CH already has a solution so you can look forward to
That’s next weekend.
The other "official" team members are:
Sigrun - is doing all of the player portraits this time around. You've only seen idra/nony but the rest he's done look really sick! We've been doing some guessing work on what he should do next as we only have a week or two between when R3 finishes and ro16 begins.... trying to get as much done early as possible and finding work around
Silversky is my sous-chef I guess hahah. He does a lot of random banners and graphics that need to get done. If I don’t have time I can rely on him to get it done usually.
Then we have our regular graphics team who I grab now and again if it’s an emergency or our core group doesn't have time



BC: With all the work you guys have done, especially through the preliminaries, extra work was created for you guys via the abusers. We all know who they are, but when exactly did you become aware of the issue and how long were the discussions on how to deal with it?


Kennigit: We know immediately. I don't want to get too much into how we track people but when you have a wizard like r1ch on staff. We can see exactly who is doing what
So....
I was really pissed off and was demanding life bans for one in particular who has been abusing since 2002 and people don't realize it because he never fesses up...
We basically just bounced back and forth until we could all agree what punishments justified the crime and would help protect the integrity of our league.


BC: Excellent. I personally think they managed to get off a little easier than I wanted, but the punishment was a strict one even for a compromise. Now lets flash forward past the drama of all the eliminated players, and onto the standings. With the preliminaries over with, and the standings finalized for the qualifying round, what was your reaction to the player groups? Which did you think would be the most difficult group?

Kennigit: I guess group F or group L were the hardest imo. It’s disappointing that a few favorites got knocked out but that’s the nature of this beast. Thinking about it I’d love to have a few "wild cards" up top who some of my American friends may label as "terrible trash Europeans" haha.
To be honest I haven't even had time to go through all the replays yet to get a good feel for the games. The day they were played was a mad house because of idra/nony, and the next day getting set for day's cast. Overall though i'm pretty happy with the results.

BC: Yea, I can imagine. I remember checking facebook in between games of idra vs. nony only to be spoiled by inc's status.

Kennigit: yeah haha. I HATE getting spoiled but I didn't really have much of a choice haha.
I managed to keep the xiaozi r2 games unspoiled until day started to cast them so I enjoyed those

BC: Have you had the opportunity to watch the idra vs. nony games?

Kennigit: yeah I was watching them live spamming irc for changes intrigue needed to make on the camera and looking for things that were "wrong" haha. They were pretty great games though - I was really impressive at the level nony was playing at despite being inactive for so long and just getting back from a honeymoon


BC: I think we all were, the storms in game two were insanely well done.

Kennigit: yeah, kid thinks he's jangbi

BC: Speaking of Koreans, and I should say Korea in particular. Were there any complications getting a time set for idra and nony to play their series? Or complications during the series?


Kennigit: You'd have to ask hotbid - the first time I really had any involvement with the games themselves was when I was asking for the reps to be sent over so we could get the first match set up


BC: With the next leg of the tournament just a weekend away, are their any new things that are going to be implemented, or will it be a similar style to what we have currently seen?


Kennigit: R3 is going to be pretty similar except we'll have all 4 casters (Tasteless Day[9] Artosis and Chill) across two broadcasts. Video wise, it will be very similar.... Ro16 is the one to watch out for production wise. As these have just been qualifier rounds, they aren't "technically" TSL. We just threw this together because we thought it would be a good idea to
a) Let people watch these matches casted
And b) give ourselves some practice with more 'low key" games

BC: What all differently will you be doing in ro16, or is that going to be something you want to surprise us with?

Kennigit: hahah I you'll have to wait and see. It's going to be a good show though - tell your friends!

BC: most of my friends that are interested are already following the series haha
Since we know you’re a busy man, I would like to thank you for taking this brief amount of time away from TSL to answer just some of the questions that people would like asked. Is there anything else you would like to add to this issue?

Kennigit: My pleasure. The only thing I’d add is that I get PMs with some frequency asking how people can help with TSL without knowing what they should do specifically. Get the word out! Post on other message boards? LET THEM KNOW! Our prize pool DOUBLED from TSL1--->2.... anything is possible in the future if we can show that people are really interested. So yeah, start a thread, call your mom, tell your prof, etc… you know the drill



☺ Thanks for taking the time for this!