Battle of the Beasts organisational improvements

To be pretty blunt zaphod is in a class of his own. Not only is he the best caster but he has the most knowledge. He understands why players are doing the moves and appreciates the play. Although not so much any more, during alpha he spent so much time learning the game and building relationships with the better players. You cant just download this game and expect to be able to cast it. Other than martenus who has recently began to do the same nobody else has shown this commitment. Well deserved imo.

Agreed. He actually has learned many of the strategies possible in a match - though he has shown something is lacking in his *ways to kill with orbital* list. And he can communicate them well and concisely.

It'll take some serious work for someone to come close. Well done Z.

Regardless, other casters will feel discouraged if they dont get some encouragement. Personally, if I start a channel, I would relish the challenge. But I'm...competitive by nature

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I so hate it when casters do this. Watching PA Stats by now usually gives a better overview of what is happening in a game than watching a caster, because casters zoom waaay tooo much all the time. I know there are people who just watch for the explosions and stuff, but it totally puts me off from watching streams.

I'm just one step ahead.

So Zaphod is PA's version of Al Michaels?
I am just trying to understand the argument here, don't hurt me.

My last post here got deleted because of particular puns, whoops.

Looking back I'm a slightly less silly way (and now I've realised how the prizes got distributed in the end), I think the main suggestion I can give is still: more clear rules. That means for the players determining what they can and can't do (or say), and for the tournament in general on what happens with byes and if there are bugs and delays etc. Plus get sponsors before the tournament if you can, they always make it seem more fancy, and (practically) 3 army FFAs aren't reliably balanced enough, and are kind of too complex to watch, to have to win big big prizes.

Pls.

First of all congratulations with the first tourney. Some things could have gone way smoother but hey, first tourney is always the hardest.
Things that were a let down:
Time between first and second game that shouldn't have happened really.
Drop-outs could have been handled better (reserve teams/players)
Brackets really need to be shown between games to get a feel where you are in the Tournament.
The 2v2v2 for the nvidia gfx cards should have been announced before hand, I found it really confusing.
Especially with the other drama going on then. Anyways was fun to be on the viewing side for once, learned stuff from it that will improve PACE tournaments.

Lesson to be learned, running a tournament is harder then they look.

About the whole casting thing I'll say one thing, if you want to have as many viewers as zaphodx, just start casting and recording more. Zaphodx didn't get at the top from the first day, he worked hard for it. I'm not saying that the other casters are lazy not at all. But I feel nagging that you don't have enough viewers won't help you along. Instead of making drama, you should come up with better solutions. PACE is all up in trying to give more visibility to other casters. It is a hard case to crack, but don't always create a shouting match if things don't go your way, it really makes you guys look immature.


Anyway I hope the frontpage twitch got Uber some new sales and that some new people join this wonderful community.

There are three primary tasks for any business.
1. Create a quality product
2. Promote the product
3. Network to improve and promote your product

Zaphod has done all three of these things very well.
Quality Product: He is the best caster I have seen. I have watched a lot of them. The measures of a good caster for me are, quality matches, good insight into the strategy and tactics the players use, and casting on a consistent and regular basis. Zaphod has done all of these things very well.
Promote the product: Every day there is a new cast from Zaphod, with a few exceptions. This is, I believe, the most effective component to effectively promoting a castor.
Network to Promote and Improve Your Product: Zaphod over time has built solid relationships with many of the top players. By consistently casting with top players he has improved the quality of his casts over time. The overall quality of his casts has drawn Uber to him. That in turn helped him to build a solid relationship with Uber, especially Meta. This relationship put him in a position to be the exclusive castor for the past 2 2v2 tournaments.

It is not the decisions of Uber, that have pushed the castors away. It is a lack of determination by those "would-be-casters" to invest the time effort and dedication to casting that is necessary. Zaphod has set the bar pretty high but those casters who continually work and hone their craft will find a place.

My final word is, Uber is not swatting down casters. Plenty of casters have come and gone since Alpha and this is the first time Uber has ever done an official tournament. Those casters who did not get the job quit long before now.

Brian and Oath. I have thoroughly enjoyed all of the casts of yours I have been able to watch. But neither of you have produced casts frequently enough for me to get in the habit of watching them. Both of you have cast games other than PA far more frequently than Zaphod. I would say Zaphod, Brian, and Oath are the best casters this community has. and Zaphod, IMHO is the best of you three. Up your game and the audience will come to you. Rather than crying foul figure out what has set Zaphod apart from the two of you and do it better than he does. this is a game of king of the hill. The hill is never unassailable. Dig your heels in and give me reason to have you at the top of my caster list. I will switch in a heart beat if you start doing it better than he does. I am always looking for new casts. I like variety.

On topic:
I learnt some more things about streaming + casting and feel as always I've improved and could put on a better show next time.

From my perspective I think the problem is transition between games being smooth and flawless, but it's difficult to have players ready and in there so that a streamer can just jump immediately into game so that viewers barely realise all the organisation that goes on behind the scenes. I'm not sure how this can be tackled other than perhaps an ingame UI for tournaments with alerts, automated game setups, an ingame tournament chatroom, with a dedicated tournament director and a dedicated director's assistant. Until then I guess we will have to do the best with what we've got and use the constructive criticism from viewers.

Mostly offtopic but relevant:
I have put well over 1000 hours of effort and 15 months of virtually every part of my free time into building my Youtube channel into what it is.

One thing you learn quite early on in your Youtube career is the unavoidable aspect of 'the big get bigger'. I've been in the position of the little guy, trying to catch the big guys and it's heartbreaking and frustrating because they have more views, more popularity, more opportunities and they grow faster than you. Because they grow faster than you, you can never catch them and it's hard to deal with that. There's a huge amount of optimisations and promotion you can do to increase your growth rate and I'm still learning about all the techniques there are. No matter how much you think you know, you really don't.

This was a small tournament with short games, it really makes sense to only have one channel/caster covering the games. Uber have hinted at the possibility of larger open tournaments and more casters getting involved, and I'm looking forward to that!

Over 100k viewers last night man. Congrats.

Not sure how switch works, but I guess Uber would not give out their channel its login information to a 3rd party in order to cast?
But I understand that if its an official tournament, people expect it to be on the official channel

That's what I try to do with PACE. And I feel we are starting to move in the right direction there now.

I think you did a great job. There was a nice mixture of on-the-ground close ups and high level tactical views. I was a little miffed at first as I felt Meta was pushing the promotional/introductory talk too much but he scaled it back by the midpoint, and I understand the importance of drawing in new players. You get extra kudos for the interplanetary final, which was very well cast (and difficult I imagine). Also I really enjoyed the use of the PIP swapping and as always discussion of players backgrounds and high level strats. In general it was obvious you had really prepared for the event as the UI transitions, camera work, and discussion where all a notch above your usual good work.

There will be plenty of chances for others to cast in 'official' tournies, but this was a special occasion and it was important to put our best public foot forward. What's good for the goose is good for the gander - your success casting PA is a win for PA in general as seen in the viewer numbers last night. And that will ultimately help other casters make it by producing a bigger piece of the pie. Frankly the pie isn't very big right now, so it's understandable there are not a lot of views to splash around.

I think I just met my metaphor quota for the month.

With twitch you can give out a stream key to allow other people to broadcast to your channel, it's very easy to do and you can reset the key whenever you want.

First of all thanks for organizing the tournament. It's awesome that you put such work in giving something to the community.
I'd like to point out some things that could make next tournaments even better in my opinion.

1. Make tourneys 1v1. Tourneys are competitive, this is no longer a for fun stuff. For some of us that don't live on the west, such graphic card is actually a lot of money. When everyone practices 1v1 and then 2v2 we randomly get FFA - a game type that is very random and unpredictable for obvious reasons.

2. Make tourneys 1v1. Really. I've got punished for words that were completely independent from me. I don't argue that it was unjustified. It happened, I accept this. I'd just really not face such situation in future. The same goes for Clopse, he got punished by my bad internet. I got DC's for 10 minutes in final and 1st game which caused us a lot of problems, I wouldn't be surprised if he felt disappointed about this too.

3. Make tourneys 1v1. Yeah lol. I imagine duhreaper from team 420 Dunk Squad must have been pretty disappointed when his mate didn't show up. This is pretty personal input but still: 2v2 require relying on the other guy to achieve victory. I've always hated this. There is a reason why I don't play League of Legends and I chose RTS. In such matters I prefer to rely on myself and myself only.

4. Think about implementing pause button in PA. This is really critical. Technical problems are immanent part of playing computer games, whether it's internet problems, pc problems or bugs in the game. Even now after 3 years of polishing and developing Starcraft 2, pauses happen really often in official tournaments for various reasons. As far as i know, there are like 3-4 teams who would have paused the game. Gunshin with his halley problem, me with internet problem, brianpurkiss/mered with their bug with building factory and ptah had some problems too.

5. Announce prizes before tournament. I've organized once a tourney in prohouse 1,5 years ago, we randomly threw 500$ to the prize in the middle of tournament(wasn't my idea). Players were really mad at us because they didn't know how seriously they should treat this tournament and they would have prepared completely different.

6. Give players some more room to breathe. If there are technical difficulties this is not our fault. We don't deliberately delay the tourney, we want to play it just as much as you want it to run it smoothly. In Starcraft 2 they give players #1 priority. Even in huge tournaments with prize pools of 100 000$ happen significant delays (hour or so!!!) in order to make sure players play in absolutely best conditions. When i reconnected after 10 minutes and I ask question what do we do now and I get answer "play" i got mini heart attack . I can't even imagine such situation in starcraft tourney, even if it was in front of 70 000 people on twitch with 100 000$ on the line. It's normal that there are breaks in games and between games and people shouldn't make big deal out of it. I understand it might hurt viewership but it shouldn't be at a cost of players. Right now players don't have any serious voice since we don't have any big fanbases like casters do. This doesn't mean we should be disregarded.
We also couldn't join to zaphods game for 20 minutes, It again wasn't our fault.

7. The final should always be at least Best of 3. I understand games take quite long in Planetary Annihilation, but this is very important part of competitive RTS to be able to play in the series, not in just 1 game. It creates very interesting stories with comebacks from players when they were loosing 0-3 and made it to 4-3. It also creates interesting mindgame aspect where you differentiate your play between games, in one you play aggressively, in one you play defensively. As much as I'd love to not have randomness It's a fact that there is a lot of randomness in the games. One random fighter intercepting vanguard drop and many other things, not to mention technical difficulties. Making BO3 allows to minimize the luck factor and adds much more skill to the game. In Starcraft everyone heavily criticizes any kind of BO1. I know it's not starcraft but at least final should be BO3. Especially since it was invitational and there was not much games.

8. Congratulations on over 2,5k peak viewers. Looks like PA is growing, really happy to see it.
Thanks again!

I think this is really important feedback for developing the e-sports side of PA. I totally agree with you and think that this is all spot on. Just a few things though

- I think we can see that this 'tournament' was really more of a promotional event than a true competitive venue. But it was a success, and that might generate the player base and interest level to sustain a true competitive scene

-Totally agree with the need to give priority to the players, allow for downtime, etc. Again I think this was really more of a promo event so there was a strong emphasis on timeliness, narrative, showing off different gameplay in performance 'ideal' settings (hence the small planets), etc. They knew this might bring in a lot new blood so a huge emphasis was put on appearance, to great success. I am sure this will not be the case in the future, and I think PACE is probably going to become the side of 'official', true competitive. You could think of the uber tourney as a display tournament rather than a serious competition.

- As for 2v2s, I have to disagree there. Not that 1v1 is not always going to be the premier space for competition, but I think one thing PA has to offer uniquely to the scene is the fresh gameplay of shared armies in team combats. I understand that this is a unique challenge, and as much as I hate to say it, if you really dislike it you might consider not playing in future 2v2 tournies to keep your rep strong in what you enjoy. But I do hope we'll see a strong 2v2 element emerge as it's really the only way to showcase multiplanet combat and the more unique aspects of PA. And it is very clear that the dev's vision for PA very strongly emphasises large multi-team matches across planets. I don't think much can be done here other than ensuring both types of tournies continue.

I think its all about communication. Have everyone is TeamSpeak at the start. Have 1 person set the game up the leave it when everyone has joined and then set the nest game up. I dont know if you had this but have one person telling everyone what to do. Like a tournament director whispering to everyone over TS telling what to do when.

All this will help it run a lot smoother.

For a 2v2, have each team name an alternate far in advance.

This thread:

• All other casters complaining about Zaphod.
• Everyone else loving it was Zaphod casting it.

There is basically noone but Zaphod, who was capable of casting this properly, he has been cooperating with Uber for many monts now. Also I believe he wasn't just invited to cast it, but done some work for the preparations. All of you, who are complaining only want to be able to cast, but you have nothing to offer. You have no fanbase (most important) and your casting experience isn't that good as Zaphod's.

And I am no Zaphod's puppy for defending him here. I am defending Uber, because it was a good choice. They simply chose the best the community casters can offer. Shall I be mad to them for choosing the best? That is silly.

All you complaining about not being invited as a caster should work on your fanbase and growing your Youtube and Twitch channels. And stop complaining about the monopoly, there is no such a thing. It is a poor excuse for your own suckyness.

If you are trying to copy Zaphod, you are not gonna beat him. The rule of business is

DO IT FIRST OR DO IT DIFFERENT​