You went on a series of tangents when you started talking about ACL/GESC. You started talking about stream numbers and viewership and then iaguz results and then moved on to Josh's blog. Would have been nice to hear you finish those thoughts!
Quote:
Originally Posted by Benji
FXO.BoSs is smarter than everyone in SEA. He knows more than every admin, every manager.
This bit really puzzled me. Care to elaborate? You followed up by talking about your stream viewer numbers.
Can you elaborate on this "Old Boys Club" as well? Everyone is talking about them, but who are they? (Your definition of it seems to stray from what most other people have been saying.)
You said "Dox's current belief is that Double Elimination is superior" and that I'm ignoring the wide array of data.
But in my original response & blog I said:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Dox
I'm on the fence about Double Elimination, and unfortunately when it comes to ACL this is out of my hands. ACL is always about offering players more games (read: value for money) and Groups/Double Elimination is one way to support this.
Furthermore, there were soooooo many tournaments for a very long period of time where players would say, "wtf? Single Elim?" or "wtf? Best of 1?" because it puts everything on a knifes edge. One accident or misplaced engagement and you're out. It's not very forgiving. So it's nice to have that extra security.
However I do agree that most of the time, the grand finals are very underwhelming for a spectator.
But recently, we saw a perfect example of how Double Elimination Grand Finals can be an absolute spectacle - tgun vs TargA in the ASUS / Gamespot Pro-Am. tgun fell to TargA 0-2 in the WB finals, then came back to win the whole thing 2-0 2-1 in the Grand Final. Those are the sorts of storylines which truly make you appreciate double elimination. There was so much tension going into that final set, and final map. We've rarely seen anything like it.
So yeah... I'm truly torn. There needs to be a healthy balance between viewer satisfaction and player satisfaction. As far as ACL is concerned, this isn't going to change any time soon. As for the rest of the events I operate, I'd be interested to poll the community and see what consensus emerges. If people want more Single Elimination, I'm flexible!
Quote:
Originally Posted by Dox
Now I'm not writing this to argue that Double Elimination is definitively the best and fairest format for both players and spectators, but it's events like these that clearly demonstrate that when you have an event full of players with very similar skill levels, it can create one of the most exciting scenarios ever.
I'm not sure how you so inaccurately derived "my beliefs" from those paragraphs...
I reckon you should come on Systems show sometime instead of making these!
Really enjoyed it and hope you can keep making these. I agree that it would be cool to get you on systems show to talk about some of these things with others.
On the old boys club its not necessarily a specific group, I mean just as an example theres that guy called doghead or something who is posting in a bunch of threads. EVERY SINGLE TIME Chadmann leaves a sarcastic rep which comes across to said poster get out unless ur gonna come out and do lots work for the community. Not to hate on chad here but thats just an example of us almost turning the site into a clan, you have to do this, this and this to be in the "club" and honestly I think we're all guilty of this.
Dox what your blog says then, according to yourself, is that double elimination has the potential to be just as exciting as single elim (I think a 4-3 bo7 is more exciting then a 4-2 double elim final but theres the underdog factor as well which helps the story so this is subjective). No one was saying it didnt have the potential to be so, its just that it is very unlikely, your point is that it DOES happen more often than what is suggested by Benji by stating only the facts that support the double elim position. What happens if we had 50 double elim torunaments in the last month and only those 3 had a decent finals, maybe they were the only 3 tournaments and so therefore all the tournaments have good finals. benji is trying to say that you need to include the negative events as well. Then your blog has a meaning that you can draw conclusions from, atm its just data without context.
Hopefully that makes sense Im a little tired so if I offended anyone DON'T SHOOT ME TT
My blog wasn't supposed to provide definitive, conclusive evidence to suggest that Double Elimination is superior, or anything like that. I feel like I'm repeating myself here. All I was saying is that, "Sometimes, RARELY, Double Elimination is good for the spectator. Here are a few recent examples."
I don't know how many more ways I can phrase the same sentiment.
Yeah I understand where you are a coming from, I assume the community after the first blog must have decided that in almost no circumstance will double elim have a good finals and that as a format it should perish. I think thats where your blog came in, personally I only watched the first blog (did not really keep up with the reaction to it) and in that Benji just agreed with what your point of the blog was so I dont know... the blog felt... unnecessary. It was probably the community taking what Benji said to greater extremes though so ignore me I guess ^_^.
On the old boys club its not necessarily a specific group, I mean just as an example theres that guy called doghead or something who is posting in a bunch of threads. EVERY SINGLE TIME Chadmann leaves a sarcastic rep which comes across to said poster get out unless ur gonna come out and do lots work for the community. Not to hate on chad here but thats just an example of us almost turning the site into a clan, you have to do this, this and this to be in the "club" and honestly I think we're all guilty of this.
If you want to mention those specific cases, keep in mind that a large number of those posts were redundant spam messages and a number of pointless thread-necros simply for the sake of posting.
I know I reported a number of his posts as being post-count spam. Whilst commenting on every post may hardly be the most efficient method of dealing with it, it does send a very blunt message that he shouldn't be opening every single thread in the forum and responding to it for the sake of posting.
Edit: The other thing to keep in mind is that if this was to occur on, for example, Team Liquid, he'd be banned for spam with no discussion on the matter.
Yeah the boys club is an attitude of exclusivity that has permeated many levels of our community right down to us communicating in ways that are often hard to understand to the uninitiated. The sort of forum behaviour where a new poster is outright abused for asking a silly question, or where no-one on chatbox is bothered to even respond to someone asking a simple question because they don't know who the person is. This makes it sound obvious but it's not, it's subtle things we do without thinking and it does hold us back from welcoming newcomers... at times.
Behaviour like Chadman's reps on Dogheads posts could be seen as just trying to keep a level of quality on the site in his intentions but it is clearly the worst way to go about it. I'm not sure if there's a history behind those two but I don't know why he as an admin isn't just sending Doghead a PM about the quality of his posts and questioning why he is writing such generic "spam" posts. Instead making rep comments like that is a sort of subtle bullying that basically is demanding Doghead behave differently on the forum. As soon as we start demanding too much on new posters it creates a hostile environment. IT doesn't mean we should stand for spam or zero quality in posts on a forum but heck, not everyone is initiated into forum or online rules and norms. Hence a helpful PM explaining that the posts look a little like spamming for postcount, and that adding a bit more content and thought would go a long way! This would be the right approach.
That is just one example of something which does happen all the time. Anyone that denies the old boys club exists (the way benji defined it) is blind. Basically it's the way we communicate, and the way we feel privelaged as the members of a small community. As we fit together so well, so do we reject outsiders or demand harsh tests for them to prove themselves. When this is added to a crappy in-game interface and the preponderance of trolls in popular chat channels it can be extremely hard for newcomers to get involved in the scene. Many are turned off by their first negative responses to them behaving against the norms of the forum or ingame. If no-one jumps up and explains anything and instead just make jibes or ignore them they often think "ugh this seems like work i'd rather just ladder".
There are some great guides on sc2sea as on TL to how to make quality posts and partake in the forum activity. But for many with no RTS experience they don't have the content to make particularly interesting threads and so chatbox, streamchat and replying to threads is how they usually interact at first.
Streamchat is horrible. Nothing we can do to fix it. It's generally got a good quota of morons and even when it doesn't the streamchat mentality of trolling is inevitable. Sub 50 viewer streams with a good moderator or two is the only time you can get some nice communication going.
Chatbox I do on occassion see someone asking a simple question that has been ignored amidst the other conversations and I would hope people are more willing to think of these people as an old lady that needs to get helped across the street, rather then the weird kid who farts a lot and no-one wants to go near.
Forum replies: Pretty much need to recognise when people are new to the forum there should always be leniency on their posts and explanation and discussion should always come before insults and bullying.
This is a small overview of some ways to overcome the problems of the old boys club.
^ This is a really good post! Although I think there have been multiple interpretations/definitions of what this "Old Boys Club" actually is now (all of them valid), so I imagine people are gonna start getting confused.
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