[Dox]

Oh yeah as far as feedback goes, I've been asking around and talking to a lot of people. These are the only 2 points that keep coming up, every single time.

1) Advertising outside of channels you already have an audience in.
You're not reaching out to NEW participants. Currently you're only advertising to people who already know about ACL and plan on attending. The last mention of ACL on Reddit was over a year ago - for ACL Brisbane 2013. You can walk away from the event and say to yourself, "I guess SC2 is dying, our open bracket attendance was awful" or you can assume responsibility for those numbers and think of ways to improve that.

2) Downtime. Downtime. Downtime.
This has been an ongoing echo for 2 years now. As far as I can tell, we ONLY streamed matches on the feature station all weekend. (I could be wrong). So after 1 series finished, we had absolutely nothing on the stream for 30 minutes while players packed up, set up, warmed up and veto'd. Just keep chaining games back to back, especially during day 1. I was going to offer to interview people during downtime over the weekend but that idea went out the window when I ended up spending all my time at the venue behind a casting desk. :P

Over the weekend, there were several individuals who actually grabbed players/personalities, dragged them aside and (offline) interviewed them for their own YouTube channels and Facebook pages. Grab these people and have them produce content for you instead. Or even put the footage aside to use in between games, ALA CoD Champs.

I know that ACL Brisbane wasn't meant to be a high-production spectator-focused event. You guys made that clear in the announcement. But on the other hand, it was the first opportunity to showcase what you've learned and improved upon since ACL Sydney & Melbourne 2013 (7-9 months ago).

EDIT: Stuff like this just gets swept under the rug. I think you need to give it your full attention.

Quick Comments

Maynarde:

Gonna try and do my piece for 1 and 2!

[ToRSpookToR]

Note sure if this has been mentioned but perhaps people can stream games from home so there is always something to watch. Like duckville or something.

[syfChadMann]

Basically what Dox said...

I just want to point out some positives and maybe this is where ACL has their focus. The tournament ran pretty smooth, everyone got to their games and it seems like it cruised along pretty fast. Could have easily pushed it faster, but there wasn't need. Admins know what is going on, the PCs and the Internet connection was super smooth. The set up was nice and the tournament itself was run really well. This I feel is ACL's focus. This part of the event was executed really well, just improve on the above points raised by Dox and I don't think I could fault it.

Hope to see you guys in Sydney ^_^

[Stallion]

what Dox said, i tried to tune in between stuff and wasnt anything on so went away.

[Sensator]

Originally Posted by Dox

2) Downtime. Downtime. Downtime.
This has been an ongoing echo for 2 years now. As far as I can tell, we ONLY streamed matches on the feature station all weekend. (I could be wrong). So after 1 series finished, we had absolutely nothing on the stream for 30 minutes while players packed up, set up, warmed up and veto'd. Just keep chaining games back to back, especially during day 1. I was going to offer to interview people during downtime over the weekend but that idea went out the window when I ended up spending all my time at the venue behind a casting desk. :P

It's not as simple as "just stream more matches!". If you stream back to back to back matches then you are holding up the tournament; the players, the casters and the entire event suffers.

In ACL Brisbane's case we chose to put the tournament ahead of the stream.

The only real way to have back to back games is if there was a limited and pre determined number of players, and it was set up so we knew the exact time that players are playing each other. That is just not realistic for the type of tournaments that we run (we want as many players as we can fit).

Maybe if we had a second feature station it would have improved the downtime issue, but that is more work piled on to the already large amount of work that has to be achieved in a small amount of time for production. There's only so much you can do in a night.

If you want more interviews and more content to the stream then someone has to be proactive about it, ask the stream director and he will probably say "yeah, jump in to the chair and let's go!" Hell, even if someone wanted to download some replays and go through play by plays of previous matches in the downtime then we would have obliged.

[Maynarde]

Originally Posted by Sensator

If you want more interviews and more content to the stream then someone has to be proactive about it, ask the stream director and he will probably say "yeah, jump in to the chair and let's go!" Hell, even if someone wanted to download some replays and go through play by plays of previous matches in the downtime then we would have obliged.

Was talking about this with the stream team today on Skype, interviews and replay analysis are easy enough to do in Sydney + future events (as long as there's a person on obs and also a person who is keen to mix between interviewing / casting / etc)

[doble]

Thanks for the feedback Dox,

I think we are slowly improving in terms of downtime, mostly due to better organization and communication internally - this event had one of the quickest turnarounds overall, with a few exceptions due to things like technical issues or players requiring food etc. Ultimately we are governed by the tournament and the players.

Overall consensus from our *informal and unofficial* debrief today has been:

- Second feature station *may* help, but this may also slow the tourney down which we want to avoid.
- We want to do post-set replay analysis by casters or our observer to recap the pivotal moments in the game.
- We also want to do live interviews with players and spectators while the next set is being prepped.

Replay analysis can be done with our existing team, so this is fairly easy to add into our workflow.

Interviews require an additional camera operator and an interviewer, which we don't have at the moment. If anyone from the community would like to volunteer for these two roles we'd be happy to have you on board.

Thanks everyone for attending and watching online!

[syfChadMann]

Originally Posted by doble

Second feature station *may* help, but this may also slow the tourney down which we want to avoid.

Not at all, I was told to vs Peppy on Stream.. Peppy and I were watching the game that was on stream before we set up. If getting through the tournament asap was the priority, we wouldn't have waited. People always wait for stream games and having a 2nd feature station means players for the next series can be prepared to go almost straight away with good organisation. (Don't pre-determine games on the stream, just work out a series that can be played as the stream game is underway and get the players to wait for the stream (as long as they aren't waiting for a 2 hour per map series, this should be fine.

Originally Posted by doble

We want to do post-set replay analysis by casters or our observer to recap the pivotal moments in the game.

For Sydney, why not have a desk of people to go over key moments in the games or for interviews

There are a few people that I'm sure would be a good interviewer, I'd be happy to do it, but I doubt I'll make it to Sydney.

Quick Comments

ACL VaNzR:

Doubt you'll make Sydney. Pffffffttttt