Keeping expectations… what they are.

Posted on 4 January 2012 | Leave a comment

I don’t want to turn this into a blog that comments on /r/starcraft all of the time, but I do think the following needs some sort of recognition.

Everyone needs to relax, it’s completely OK to use TL and r/starcraft together. Each site has its strengths and weaknesses, just accept each one for what it is and use both.

There’s really no need to try to make this subreddit into what you think it should be, because much like the hot hacker from “Transformers” believes about the code that hacked the US military network, a subreddit’s personality is a living organism, it changes every day. If people want to talk about SC2 celebrities, let them.

That’s the beauty of Reddit and the upvote downvote system. Don’t hate it, embrace it. 1

HotBid makes plenty of sense here. /r/starcraft is a community that consistently thinks of itself in the highest possible regard even though the most common of failures associated with any public forum come along for the ride. Team Liquid has this same failing, but it has a history of being an environment where the discussion actually meant something.

In Reddit, as other posters in the thread would go on to point out, the point-whoring system that is inherent in the system sets up a situation where the lines of post quality and quantity are often blurred.

Moderation is virtually nonexistent, aside from when the user base demands some sort of change and a token change is made to calm the /r/starcraft hive mind. I’d prefer if things stay the way that they are, though.

The freedoms of a more-or-less unmoderated experience on the subreddit have its benefits over a controlled experience such as Team Liquid. Then again, true StarCraft fanatics are more common at the latter compared to those on the progressive edge of the community.

Notes:

  1. ESPORTS_HotBid on /r/starcraft ↩

→ Leave a comment

Posted in esports

Tagged , ,

Reeling back on the sharing.

Posted on 29 December 2011 | Leave a comment
I just went out to lunch and forgot to post about any unusual events that happened during that time on a social media site.Womp womp.
29 December 2011 13:01 via webReplyRetweetFavorite
@bcarr
Brad Carr

I haven’t been posting as often as I should have been lately. This isn’t from a lack of want to do so, really, but a lack in available brainpower to come up with something to write to this space. I make this excuse every so often, but this time it really is for more than simply being lazy.

If it weren’t for a couple of pretty monumental and life-changing personal/family situations, I’d be on this path towards getting my upcoming column for ESFI out of the conceptual part of the development process and into the side of the process that can be proved to exist.

There are emotions that I want to convey and thoughts I have on subjects that aren’t limited to technology and esports. Eventually, I will write about these things. I will give no fucks. You have been warned.

 

→ Leave a comment

Posted in blogstuffs

Tagged

The acceptance of your peers.

Posted on 7 December 2011 | Leave a comment

For as many strides that ESFI has made in the recent weeks, it seems like it can’t catch a break with the critical inner circle of esports personalities, namely InControl on last evening’s State of the Game podcast.

The lack of faith and abundance of skepticism that the established SC2 personalities have is well-deserved—I won’t deny them that. Anyone that claims to be identifying issues or reporting developments in their scene is creeping on their turf and it stands to reason that they could potentially lose the position of relevance with regards to news in the community should a site like ESFI begin to release the content that they have even been asking the community to provide for the sake of itself.

I’m not speaking for ESFI corporately, but I do think I can opine that I believe the mission of ESFI is to report what is happening within the scenes we can investigate with a fair and even-handed approach to coverage. I am not affiliated with any league organization or public team and I’ve never strived to be one of the folks who are. It’d be nice to have that sort of access all of the time and to get on the inside of some circles, but I don’t think that’s what my current goal is. I just want to be able to bring either news that lacks bias (in as much as it is possible) and share it with the community.

I’m sure there are those out there who just want to rock the boat, but that’s not really what I’m into, granted the situation might arise in which rocking the boat might be inevitable, but hopefully the community would be ready for that sort of turbulence if it came down to publishing an exposé written by ESFI—talk about a rock and a hard place.

I suppose it’d be nice if the community could just see the effort as what it is and instead of just bracing for the worst. There are some who are all for what we’re doing, but I just hope the skeptical amongst the remainder can limit their negativity for what we’re trying to accomplish.

→ Leave a comment

Posted in esports

Tagged , ,

The numbers game.

Posted on 6 December 2011 | Leave a comment

MLG recently released its self-collected statistics about its 2011 season regarding viewership numbers and other assorted facts about the three different games that it featured and the DotA-clone exhibition added to the second-half of the 2011 season. I added this post to ESFI referring to the press release and the infographic that is being distributed with the press release.

The infographic is a nice amalgamation of all of the little tips and factoids that might have been dropped into the press release itself and presents the information in a way that it doesn’t take someone reading the entire letter to everyone in the industry.

Throwing the numbers back at DreamHack might have given it a few badass points to play around with for next year, but it still remains the fact that the other events were better organized throughout the year of 2011. I know this is going to change a lot as we come into the new season for MLG 2012, but until then, do numbers really name the king of the leagues?

I’m not particularly sure that numbers can make that distinction alone. Sure they separate the NASLs from the MLGs, but to me, it seems like the competition at NASL Season 2′s final was more nail biting than most of MLG’s lesser events.

This year might not be the year of the numbers quite yet, but look out 2012.

→ Leave a comment

Posted in esports

Tagged , ,

Sometimes I feel like /r/starcraft understands.

Posted on 5 December 2011 | Leave a comment

Case-in-point: this self-post regarding the casting selection for the NASL finals.

I really can’t emphasize how important it was to have coherent and well-respected casters bring the final match of the tournament to everyone. I didn’t have to hear someone who wasn’t sure of what was going on and didn’t have to survive through the slow, soft and confidence-lacking play-calling.

DayJWhe9t on the other hand, performed well and even kept me in the loop with subtle hints of locations and movements even as I listened to merely the audio of the cast while driving around for a bit yesterday evening.

I wish radio was still a thing, sometimes.

→ Leave a comment

Posted in esports

Tagged , ,

Realization why so few watched NASL’s second regular season.

Posted on 2 December 2011 | Leave a comment

Gretorp and orb, among many technical failings.

I’m not quite sure how to say this… but I sure do hope that these two aren’t casting the finals of the tournament.

I know that they’ve been working hard for the smaller-than-expected viewership throughout their second season, but one would think that after weeks of casting together that they would pick up on some of the flow of being a broadcaster in general.

To be fair, orb has the timing and the role he’s playing down (as the guy who know’s what he’s actually talking about). And Gretorp, well… I don’t think there’s a nice thing that I can say about him at all.

And I know I’m not the only one that’s not particularly happy about this caster combination so far today.

I genuinely feel so bad for #NASL. The cheesy intros thing is bad enough, but with so few people there it's actually embarrassing .
2 December 2011 16:02 via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite
@Zechleton
Michael Radford
omg, @ finals is sooooooooooooooo bad. I thought they would learn from season 1 finals hiccups?
2 December 2011 17:00 via Twitter for MacReplyRetweetFavorite
@adambronte
Adam Bronte
@ Awesome casters, more awesome sound guy and most awesome cameraman... NOT!
2 December 2011 17:09 via webReplyRetweetFavorite
@teh_lemur
Dragan Popovic
Welp, I was looking forward to watching @ finals, but with anything better than 360p behind a pay wall...nope.
2 December 2011 16:40 via webReplyRetweetFavorite
@YetiRevolution
Amzi Jeffs

→ Leave a comment

Posted in esports

Tagged , ,

Second chances and boxing rings.

Posted on 2 December 2011 | Leave a comment

These two things typically don’t go together, but that’s exactly what’s being merged together with the North American Star League’s Season Two championship beginning this afternoon and running through Sunday. There’s a DotA-clone tournament going on as well as the single-elimination best-of-five StarCraft 2 playoffs.

Quite a few names are in attendance for the chance at the $40,000 grand prize including my pick to win the tournament, Gama Bear’s Sen—but that’s only because it’s truly time for him to come out and take a pretty big tournament. Or something like that. It’s a decent tournament that had lost most of what made it appealing from the massive amount of players and Korean interest in the online-season and offline-finals and its massive prize purse for the winner of the high-octane championship playoffs.

This time, it seems like they’re having to resort to making the main event seem like… a main event. The untried boxing ring set-up is cool, but how will booths fit into the equation? I suppose we’ll see as soon as the DotA-clone semi-final finishes and the StarCraft 2 event begins.

The stream is live right now at NASL.tv coming from a convention center in Ontario, CA. Brent, Derek and Jacqueline from ESFI are on the ground to cover the event. Along with the rest of the staff, I’ll be adding in well-written things from home.

→ Leave a comment

Posted in esports

Tagged ,

A little thought about beta participation.

Posted on 30 November 2011 | 3 Comments

So, CS:GO is going to be the next video game to be hitting the beta testing chopping block. It will inevitably be subjected to the scrutiny of a game meant for release, even though it is a beta release and not a finished game.

Have I got that right so far?

How many of the people who are getting keys to the beta, expecting there to be some sort of paradise in the small player base the beta pool will have?

Will the prospect of having fun with a beta outweigh the price to play the beta when, undoubtedly, the chance of getting a code is relatively small and that game-altering bugs are present?

Personally, the beta isn’t something that I’m particularly looking forward to. I would likethegame to just get released tomorrow so I can take a look at the entire product. I have a feeling that this CS:GO beta might replicate the BF3 open beta experience that I had. Sure the games are different, but that didn’t stop those from exploiting what bugs the game had to ruin the multiplayer experience.

I guess BF3 just ruined beta testing things with the rest of the crowd for me, granted the Source engine might not have the same or as many issues as the Frostbite 2 engine has—I’m not entirely sure.

→ 3 Comments

Posted in theorycraft

Tagged , , ,

When do the gloves come off? (Part 1)

Posted on 30 November 2011 | Leave a comment

I’ve been doing a bit of thinking about some of the comments recently made by (some would argue) important people within the StarCraft 2 community. I arrived at the question posed in the title of this column after coming to the conclusion, that perhaps it is time to do so.

Kennigit brought this up on a recent episode of State of the Game. He made mention about the camaraderie within the StarCraft community that makes it seem difficult to break in and offer the hard-hitting content that was in one of the spotlights of panel member and all around buddy of the community InControl. One says freelancers are missing from the scene, the other says confidence is missing from those who are covering the scene.

I don’t want to be tooting my own horn, so to speak, but ESFI was mentioned as the example of a new source on the edge of progress in bringing quality production and journalism into the community. That kinda says a lot when there are certain personalities that have a larger reach than we do and yet have the inferior content (at least in principle).

I think there are some fundamental reasons as to why the envelope hasn’t been pushed up until this point. I want to break this down into parts and here is the first of this series of posts.

One of the goals of most websites and communities are to get hits and continue to get hits. In this way, fledgling community sites which are lacking a large number of hits might not fare well in the court of public opinion should they publish an article that addresses something controversial in the community. Numbers might be responsible for inflating what the definition of success is, but there is a certain critical mass that allows nearly any website to sustain readers unto itself.

One of the key things behind being able to generate numbers in this manner has to do with having a personality at the core of the brand. For a streamer, it might be BM. For a caster, it might be game knowledge. While opinions have a place with news reporting, objectivity isn’t exactly the most endearing personality trait.

Along those lines, avoiding favoritism in reporting is a big hurdle that many of those who will be joining with aspirations of journalism will have to overcome. Not favoritism in the manner of simply liking a player because that player won an event lately, but favoritism more in the style of believing that a player is the best without some sort of reason why.

Being able to argue for or against a particular player should always be something that you’re willing to do regardless of who it is or how prestigious that player seems to you or the community at large.

I’ll continue the second part in this series explaining my best guess for a timetable for glove removal.

→ Leave a comment

Posted in esports

Tagged , ,

Real time pressure.

Posted on 22 November 2011 | Leave a comment

When it came down to covering an event this weekend, every time I was asked to cover a specific event, I had a mini-panic. It was the first resorts event I tried to cover with some respect to real-time while not being in attendance. It felt like I had to force myself to get excited about certain aspects of the games. I had to write down notes for games that I covered in recaps.

I had to write down notes.

That might be one of the biggest failings that I’ve come to realize as I grow older is the fact that I just flat-out forget details all the time. This is why I’ve re-architeched my workflow at work to incorporate more written notes to myself and outlines in general so I don’t forget to say something important to my point or research that I’m writing up.

The other thought that crosses my mind is the realization that I have less skill than others in the field that I aspire to become a key mover in. I want to give exports journalism as much of a try as the opportunities come at me, but there are points where some of my writing just gets confused and boggled down in editing. For the most part, keeping tenses the same while I’m writing is not at the forefront of my train of thought, however it is important for certain write-ups… like recaps.

The lack of confidence that came from the editors notes from articles I submitted this weekend was quite apparent to people that I interacted with. “You look tired.” “Are you okay?” “Is work treating you alright?”

The first two I generally have responses prepared in reply and the third one is always something along the lines of “I’d be the last person to complain about work.” The latter statement is the truth and nothing but.

I’m sure that any reply to the belief that I’m exhibiting “writer’s block” or explaining that esports is ruining my confidence would only shorten the delay from that point in time to when I’m questioned about feeling depressed.

Of course that’s what it comes down to, isn’t it? Life is about managing stress and depression and cultivating value and confidence. Perhaps I’m just not up to par with the people that I surround myself with.

→ Leave a comment

Posted in blogstuffs

Tagged , ,