The Destiny Fan Club - Page 117

This is going to be an all-inclusive write-up of my first tournament, Destiny I, excluding finances in this post. I'll cover finances in the next post that I'll make tomorrow. I want to keep them separated because I think there are a lot of people who will be interested in the finances who may not be interested in what I'll be writing about here.

I'll label each section in a table of contents so that you can skip over stuff if you want to.

Before I say anything else, I want to take a second to thank two tremendously important people.

Naruto (caster from the German stream) was extremely patient anytime there were problems with getting matches ready. On the day of the quarter-finals he saved me so much time and trouble getting matches set up when my admin wasn't there. It seems like such a small thing, but for someone to so nonchalantly offer to help with something with such a light-hearted attitude when I felt like everything was falling apart around me (for reasons you'll understand more later on in this post) was such a tremendously awesome thing that I can't even put into words how it felt. I've always been a very independent person, and to experience someone stepping in and helping with something when they're under no obligation to and to do it in such a cheery way was beyond amazing. I'm so grateful Naruto was here as a German caster.

I'd invited Totalbiscuit to cast on the 5th day of the tournament as well, for the quarter finals. Up to that day, there'd been zero issues with sound and zero issues with my connection, but obviously we all saw things go south, especially that morning. John not only woke up earlier than I'm sure he would have liked to in order to cast, he was an absolute God-send as the day went on in picking up the stream for me. He sat by essentially wasting 30-45 minutes of his time while I struggled to identify the completely inexplicable reason why my upstream had gone to shit, offering a few times to just cast via his stream, which I ultimately ended taking him up on. For all the work he puts into his Youtube, and the fact that he's still coming off of his chemo and his battle with cancer, not to mention the fact that the $100 I'm paying to each caster is honestly nothing compared to other ways John could be monetizing his time, I was incredibly grateful for his patience. Not only that, he offered to host my stream on his own, meaning all of the views and the recorded video went to my stream. He was also incredibly supportive despite the trolling and lag issues going on at the beginning of the quarter finals.

Without John and Silvano there's a very good chance that I would have terminated the stream and done the quarter/semis/finals all offline. I'm not a person who's gotten much help in the past with much of anything, so I'm infinitely grateful to both of these guys for all of the help they provided during the day of the quarter finals. Even if it didn't seem like a big deal to either of them, it meant the world to me.

Here's the section break down for this post:

- Motivation
- Mood
- Casters
- Format
- Production
- Artwork
- Music
- Timezone

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- Motivation for hosting a tournament

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I wanted to run this tournament for a few reasons. If you've noticed right now, the landscape in SC2 has been changing dramatically over the past year. Many popular streamers such as Demuslim, Grubby, iNcontroL, MsSpyte, Idra, Ret, TLO, Sheth, etc...have all either cut back a lot on their streaming hours or have quit altogether.

This is probably due to two things - 1) ad revenue on twitch makes streaming almost worthless unless you have other revenue channels established that benefit from streaming, and 2) Starcraft 2's fanbase (and potential earnings) is much smaller than other comparable games.

Caster contraction has been happening as well. Husky, HDStarcraft, Ret, CatsPajamas, Mr. Bitter and a few other once popular casters have completely stopped casting. Others, such as Day9, Artosis, and Tasteless have cut back on their casting by quite a bit. That leaves the current caster pool relatively small, compared to where we were a few years ago.

We've also seen a reduction in the number of high quality, well known tournaments being produced. MLG is probably never going to run SC2 at an event again, unless out of desperation. IPL was re-evaluated by IGN's new owners as a worthless asset and was subsequentially terminated. NASL wasn't able to keep the Russian mafia happy and lost their World of Tanks contract, bankrupting them as well. I'm not even sure if it's worth mentioning ESGN, but you get the idea. Red Bull/ESL/DH have really stepped up here in their tournament production.

When I originally saw the contraction of Starcraft 2 (back when I made my post detailing general frustrations with Blizzard's approach to SC2 back in 2012), I thought that switching to a more popular game with more longevity was the best decision I could make. I tried my hand at League of Legends for a while, but ultimately I couldn't function as well in a team environment and I longed for the 1v1 format again. I was drawn back to SC2 and resumed playing it after sticking with League for less than a year.

Upon returning to the Starcraft 2 scene and stagnating in here for a while, I spent a while thinking about how I wanted to proceed, business-wise, in the world of streaming. As I'd considered all of the previous things I'd mentioned, I figured that some "vacuums" of sorts were forming due to the contraction. I wanted to be able to step in and pick up as many fans as possible from the previous streamers, casters and tournaments that had left the scene.

Hosting a tournament, then, was the logical decision. I could practice my casting, I could establish a tournament, and I could tie it all to my own name, strengthening my brand and fortifying my reputation in the community. This is also one of the reasons why I've been working so hard over the past year to rebuild and strengthen my connections within the community.

- Mood leading up to and during the tournament

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I never thought I'd be one to be susceptible to mood swings, but the weeks leading up to this tournament have been the absolute darkest days of my entire life. As such, my sleep for the tournament was almost non-existent, which anyone who hangs out in my chat probably noticed over the past week. For the first few days it was okay, but once I hit day 4 with QXC I think the lack of sleep started to become very apparent. I probably slept on average 2 hours a day between each day of casting, and not for lack of trying, I promise. For the most part I've been doing okay during the actual casting itself, though I feel I could have been much more upbeat (as I normally am) given a better emotional backdrop and more sleep for the tournament.

I'm very disappointed in this because one of the reasons I wanted to host this tournament was to help develop my casting, and I feel I fell short of this on more than one day due to the myriad of personal issues I'm struggling with at the moment. This lead me to make a few poor decisions (like getting my wisdom teeth removed within a week of the tournament...) and it set a very somber tone for me, emotionally, during the entire tournament.

To clarify, I'm not looking for pity or for a deluge of e-mails and comments supporting me or wishing me well, I'm just giving a context for the tournament to sit in to help you understand how I was functioning at the time and processing things, in case there are certain events that seemed like they didn't make much sense.

Some of this came to a head on Saturday morning. My admin had accidentally missed the day's worth of work, meaning I was left to run through vetoes with two Korean players who couldn't speak English very well. On top of that, my ISP decided I wasn't going to have any bandwidth on my upstream on that particular day, probably the most important day of the tournament as I'd had Totalbiscuit and his fanbase present at the time. Also on this, we'd moved from NA to the KR server to host the first set of Innovation vs Life, only to have the same guy who was following us around change his name to one of the casters hopping servers so he could sneak into our game to spam and lag out, frustrating both of the Korean players who were kind enough to accept invitations to my tournament.

This was the closest I've ever been to completely giving up and walking away from something in my life.

I'm sure I could have came back later and had the games played off stream or something, but being overly emotional, extremely tired, starved from a terrible eating schedule, and now stressed due to lag problems, I was in a terrible state of mind.

To point to what I said at the start of this post, John and Silvano were absolutely instrumental in carrying me through that Saturday.

- Caster selection

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I think a strong caster line-up is one of the most important aspects of a tournament, second to probably nothing. I'll go through each of the casters and go with a rationale for why I chose them. I think being able to cast with a variety of people is important, so I wanted to pick a variety of people to cast with, as it strengthens my casting abilities to be more versatile.

Day 1 - Tod

Tod's had a good bit of success in playing, casting and organizing events. I also get along well with Tod and I think we have decent enough chemistry to make this a strong line-up for the first day. His skill as a player also makes him great for analysis.

Day 2 - Nathanias

I thought Nathanias was a fine choice because I feel like I get along with him and he's had a lot of success recently casting WCS and Red Bull events. He has a decent following and is easily recognizable so I think having him cast was a good decision as well. His play by play is good and he brings great game knowledge to the table as well.

Day 3 - Incontrol

I've always gotten along well with Incontrol and our casts at HSC in the past have been well received, so this was a no brainer. Again, Incontrol plays the game at a high level and his entertainment factor is undeniable.

Day 4 - QXC

QXC has great knowledge when it comes to Terran and he had a splurge in caster popularity a few weeks ago when he was casting the WCS NA season finals.. I was a little disappointed that he wasn't able to cast from a better area, and my lack of sleep and food was starting to catch up with me at this point. I think me and QXC probably came off as not casting that well together, but I think that was mainly due to psychological problems on my end.

Day 5 - Totalbiscuit

This is a no-brainer. If Totalbiscuit was willing to cast then I 100% wanted him. Placing him at the quarter-finals meant I could rope in any of his fans that hadn't seen the previous group stages and, hopefully, make them interested enough to stick around for the finals. As with the previous day, my mood and lack of sleep were really catching up to me here so I think I missed a great opportunity to showcase myself in front of Totalbiscuit's fanbase.

Day 6 - Minigun

This is probably my riskiest selection of casters. There are a lot of people who would have placed Totalbiscuit in here for the finals, and those people would have probably gotten a few more viewers. I ultimately went with Minigun because Minigun is a very strong player who could provide better analysis than almost any other caster on my line-up. I also know Minigun well and I feel like we get along well enough to have decent chemistry for a cast together. After the finals took place, I have zero regrets about this. There were a few people hating on the decision, saying Minigun was a poor choice, but I felt like he brought a lot of game knowledge to the table, even in the TvT matches, that I wouldn't have gotten from almost anyone else.

- Production

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I decided I'd wanted to do all of the production for myself because it'd give me greater control over the presentation of everything. I get very particular over how I want to present prepared material. I think this went okay for the most part, the most difficult/annoying thing being setting up and getting used to Gameheart. I'll spend a lot more time familiarizing myself with all of the Gameheart hotkeys so that I can blaze through it if I have to do production on it ever again. I think when you're lacking sleep, it affects your ability to learn from your mistake and form better behavior patterns in the future as well, so I wasn't picking up the gameheart hotkeys as quickly as I should have been. Again, this was my fault due to mood issues over the week.

- Format - round-robin groups into high-game series?

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The reason I went with a round robin group was because I thought it made it more exciting and gave greater ability for "the best" players to get through their groups. The problem with conventional group formats is that it's possible to fail the group simply because you can't defeat one player in the group, which I always hated. I think the round robin format introduces greater flexibility for "the best" players to rise up out of their groups. It also makes 1st/2nd place more "interesting" because every game counts, especially when you might make it first out of your group due to map score.

I like higher game series for quarters/semis/finals simply due to the fact that more games played means less variance, meaning a higher chance of the best player passing through. It also means more games played between people we love to see play, such as Innovation and Life. Also, getting to see two extra games of amazingly close series, such as HuK vs Major, it something you lose out on if you restrict yourself to bo3's.

Artwork

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I wanted the art to be very special for the tournament, and I'm a huge fan of minimalistic designs. If you look at how Apple's done their branding over the past few years, you'll see what I mean. I don't like the graphics and the overlays with the flashy buttons and all of the starcraft related images and tech and what not in the background. I think the artwork for this event was awesomely done, and I think it gave the tournament a very unique flavor.

- Music

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The music was all pulled from my composition challenge submissions.
I'd been planning this for quite some time, back when I launched the second composition challenge. It's an awesome way to give exposure to my fans who participate in these contests and it lets me evade any copyright issues with playing any other kinds of music.

- Timezone selection

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The timezone selection was difficult, but I wanted to go for a timezone that gave EU/KR/NA players a chance to play at decent hours. The times I settled on (starting at 10AM EDT) made it so that Koreans could play without having to stay up at insanely late hours and North Americans could play without having to wake up at insanely early hours. It was pretty much perfect for Europeans.

Original: http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/starcraft-2/464612-destiny-i-financial-report#1