EPT![[image loading]](http://www.blogcdn.com/wow.joystiq.com/media/2010/10/mlgdc2010preview.jpg)
Hey everyone, JP here from MLG. First off wanted to say thanks to everyone who tuned in over the course of the weekend and if you were awesome enough to make it out to the event in person, thanks so much for coming -- the finals crowd was epic.
As usual with any big event, there are a billion different threads scattered around the forums here at TL.net with criticism. In order for me to make an event report with (good, constructive) criticism, I've started this thread. Many eyes from MLG staff will be reading this thread and I'm sure the TL.net admins will be closely monitoring it to make sure it doesn't get out of hand.
If you were at the event, tell us how to improve the live spectator experience. If you watched at home all weekend, tell us what you would like to see on the stream. If you were a player, tell us what we can do to improve your experience over the weekend. If you attended the event as press, tell us how we can make things easier on you. We’ll try our best to listen and improve the entire experience as much as possible before the next event -- the national championships in Dallas, Texas.
Thanks again to everyone who tuned in over the course of the weekend. Big shoutout to Singlecoil and the entire crew who produced the stream all weekend long as well as the tournament admins who kept the event running smooth. You may never see their faces, but please make sure to give credit where credit is due
See you guys in Dallas, Texas, for our National Championships! Open Passes for the SC2 event are still on sale >>HERE<<
MLG Senior Vice President Lee Chen responds to a majority of the criticisms thus far:
+ Show Spoiler +
On October 18 2010 08:24 MLG_Lee wrote:
A few quick comments, scanning through in my first downtime of the event... :D
First off, thanks for the great feedback, will read more later.
re: spectator seating. It's way less than it needs to be. We're working on it, and I'm pretty excited to announce what we'll be doing in 2011. As I posted earlier, we can't use chairs because they wander off and then we end up with the fire marshal yelling at us for fire hazards. It's a catch 22, but there are ways around it. The entire MLG show travels around in 4+ tractor trailers. They're packed to the gills. It's like 3D tetris watching the production team load them up. We literally can't fit any more benches in the trucks.
re: multiple streams. The way we do streaming requires video SWITCHING--there's literally hundreds of thousands of dollars of gear in line to create graphics, camera shots and convert video signals from the broadcast PCs into something we can then encode and send out to the you, our fans. Setting up a second stream is not a simple matter of getting some cameras and throwing a couple more people on the air. Much much more to it than that.
re: jumping into another game. Unfortunately, as I think many of you know, you can't join a game once its started, especially as a spectator. So in order to accomplish that, I'd have to have 10 broadcast machines sitting around and then have the talent, who have enough to do already keeping track of the game play and talking on air to entertain you, be ready to join themselves to the game. There's some other ways to do it, but again, it's not a simple matter and we need to carefully plot it out before we implement it. MUXing out keyboard/mouse inputs so that Day9/Jp/Djwheat can switch video and audio inputs, but there are some fundamental limitations ot how many video signals you can get into an HD switcher.
re: extended series/bo7. we'll get an article published laying out how it works precisely. In fact, I think JP posted on how it works when we announced the addition of SC2 to the circuit. But it's here to stay. And as an old PC LAN veteran, I'll say that I think its the fairest thing possible. We can debate the absolute value of "fair" sometime, but it is a system that MLG uses on EVERY game.
re: sharpness explanation. Good explanation. And you're a 100% correct about what that is. But that was not the issue here, although I'll admit that I looked there first when I saw it. As I stated earlier, it's not that simple. At all. I'd nerd out and give you the technical explanation (I was one of the chief designers of the HD system we use) but that would be giving away trade secrets :D
If we could, we'd cast every single match in the tournament, but unfortunately, it's just not that easy. There's a tremendous amount of infrastructure that has to go into broadcasting ONE match at a time, much less being able to switch on the fly to another one (again, you can't join a game in progress, and you can't hold the tournament to wait for the video team to be ready for you).
Lastly, re: Friday delays. Definitely agree that we needed to communicate better to you folks what was going on. We'll work on that. The basic issue was a series of bugs in the way some legacy systems we have interface with the new MLG 2.0 infrastructure (we are mid-migration onto our new awesome web platform that Agora is building for us) which resulted in the site not correctly displaying the streams. The testing processes we have in place weeks out from the event, but these bugs slipped thru the cracks, largely due to how complex it is. Folks like livestream and ustream have great products which make it very easy for YOU to do things, but our set up is infinitely more complex than what you have to go through to throw up a stream--and no, we can't just use livestream or ustream. We couldn't go live until we had this resolved.
Now that I'm able to take a breath, I'm able to explain it. The bugs have been corrected and we've revised our QA/testing process to make sure that we're better able to catch these kinds of things. Live event production always has issues. Most of the time, you never notice how much we run around at the events trying to make sure the show goes well (even those of you here in attendance). No live show is flawless, especially one as complex as an MLG show (there are 6 tournaments going on at the same time and 4 live streams (each one in both SD and HD)). We usually do a better job of it, such that you never see it. But we missed this time around.
MLG as a whole prides itself about running on time. And John Nelson (MLG_Anakin, our league commissioner) and his team do an amazing job keeping the tournament on time. There were over 292 games played in SC2 alone, and over a thousand more in the rest of the event. These guys, and John and Ryan Moore, the PC Admin, in particular get way too little credit for how hard they work and how great they are at keeping us on schedule. The broadcasts we do could not happen if they weren't awesome at their jobs.
That we were delayed on our streams was not just a let down to you guys as fans, but also to John, the entire league ops team and the rest of the production team that makes these shows happen. So believe me, we're NOT okay with being delayed 2+hrs to get our streams live. So for that, apologies.
Overall I hope you all enjoyed the stream and the show. And again, thanks for the feedback.
Hrmm... guess that wasn't that quick a reply after all. ;/
A few quick comments, scanning through in my first downtime of the event... :D
First off, thanks for the great feedback, will read more later.
re: spectator seating. It's way less than it needs to be. We're working on it, and I'm pretty excited to announce what we'll be doing in 2011. As I posted earlier, we can't use chairs because they wander off and then we end up with the fire marshal yelling at us for fire hazards. It's a catch 22, but there are ways around it. The entire MLG show travels around in 4+ tractor trailers. They're packed to the gills. It's like 3D tetris watching the production team load them up. We literally can't fit any more benches in the trucks.
re: multiple streams. The way we do streaming requires video SWITCHING--there's literally hundreds of thousands of dollars of gear in line to create graphics, camera shots and convert video signals from the broadcast PCs into something we can then encode and send out to the you, our fans. Setting up a second stream is not a simple matter of getting some cameras and throwing a couple more people on the air. Much much more to it than that.
re: jumping into another game. Unfortunately, as I think many of you know, you can't join a game once its started, especially as a spectator. So in order to accomplish that, I'd have to have 10 broadcast machines sitting around and then have the talent, who have enough to do already keeping track of the game play and talking on air to entertain you, be ready to join themselves to the game. There's some other ways to do it, but again, it's not a simple matter and we need to carefully plot it out before we implement it. MUXing out keyboard/mouse inputs so that Day9/Jp/Djwheat can switch video and audio inputs, but there are some fundamental limitations ot how many video signals you can get into an HD switcher.
re: extended series/bo7. we'll get an article published laying out how it works precisely. In fact, I think JP posted on how it works when we announced the addition of SC2 to the circuit. But it's here to stay. And as an old PC LAN veteran, I'll say that I think its the fairest thing possible. We can debate the absolute value of "fair" sometime, but it is a system that MLG uses on EVERY game.
re: sharpness explanation. Good explanation. And you're a 100% correct about what that is. But that was not the issue here, although I'll admit that I looked there first when I saw it. As I stated earlier, it's not that simple. At all. I'd nerd out and give you the technical explanation (I was one of the chief designers of the HD system we use) but that would be giving away trade secrets :D
If we could, we'd cast every single match in the tournament, but unfortunately, it's just not that easy. There's a tremendous amount of infrastructure that has to go into broadcasting ONE match at a time, much less being able to switch on the fly to another one (again, you can't join a game in progress, and you can't hold the tournament to wait for the video team to be ready for you).
Lastly, re: Friday delays. Definitely agree that we needed to communicate better to you folks what was going on. We'll work on that. The basic issue was a series of bugs in the way some legacy systems we have interface with the new MLG 2.0 infrastructure (we are mid-migration onto our new awesome web platform that Agora is building for us) which resulted in the site not correctly displaying the streams. The testing processes we have in place weeks out from the event, but these bugs slipped thru the cracks, largely due to how complex it is. Folks like livestream and ustream have great products which make it very easy for YOU to do things, but our set up is infinitely more complex than what you have to go through to throw up a stream--and no, we can't just use livestream or ustream. We couldn't go live until we had this resolved.
Now that I'm able to take a breath, I'm able to explain it. The bugs have been corrected and we've revised our QA/testing process to make sure that we're better able to catch these kinds of things. Live event production always has issues. Most of the time, you never notice how much we run around at the events trying to make sure the show goes well (even those of you here in attendance). No live show is flawless, especially one as complex as an MLG show (there are 6 tournaments going on at the same time and 4 live streams (each one in both SD and HD)). We usually do a better job of it, such that you never see it. But we missed this time around.
MLG as a whole prides itself about running on time. And John Nelson (MLG_Anakin, our league commissioner) and his team do an amazing job keeping the tournament on time. There were over 292 games played in SC2 alone, and over a thousand more in the rest of the event. These guys, and John and Ryan Moore, the PC Admin, in particular get way too little credit for how hard they work and how great they are at keeping us on schedule. The broadcasts we do could not happen if they weren't awesome at their jobs.
That we were delayed on our streams was not just a let down to you guys as fans, but also to John, the entire league ops team and the rest of the production team that makes these shows happen. So believe me, we're NOT okay with being delayed 2+hrs to get our streams live. So for that, apologies.
Overall I hope you all enjoyed the stream and the show. And again, thanks for the feedback.
Hrmm... guess that wasn't that quick a reply after all. ;/
Other Threads and links MLG DC
MLG DC Day 1
MLG DC Day 2
MLG DC Brackets (Click Match Info to Download Replays)
.
). Hopefully next time around it will look good the first day as well :D EDIT: Oh yeah, the bracket errors were a bit annoying too, though not the end of the world.
