Battle of the Beasts organisational improvements

Yeah well, after reconsidering it a bit more, you guys definitely have a point.

1. It felt like indeed a lot more happened in the 2v2. Viewers want to be excited, they want to see action and not only build up and occasional army engagement. In order to make successful e-sport we cannot bore people. The more lasers and explosions the less boredom according to majority of people (I enjoy macro and strats but that's minority)

2. Indeed 2v2 or any team game can allow for awesome usage of multiplanets and orbital play. This is huge plus, I think audience LOVES planet smashing (I do too). We don't have orbital play in any other serious RTS, bringing more layers of warfare will make people definitely more interested in game, it's just fresh and indeed awesome.

3. PA broadens boundaries of RTS games. Hell, why not broaden it even more and make it competitive team RTS? If we introduce 5v5 competitive tourneys it would bring absolutely insane level of strategies and possibilities. I can't even imagine how complicated and awesome the Build Orders and strategies and everything can be.

4. Humans are social creatures. I believe the biggest reason why League of Legends is so successful is because it is social. People can go back from work and just relax with friends with beer or joint and play the game and have a laugh. Laddering in 1v1 in starcraft 2 is pretty sad and lonely experience when you grind games over and over again for hours and all you find is bad mannered people who wish you cancer after you beat them or they flame over imbalance or whatever. Although the number of stupid people in LoL is even bigger, the fact is simple - if your friends do something it's MUCH MORE likely that you will do it too with them together.

Here are my concerns though:

1. Right now the game is not optimized enough for anything more than 1v1 and maaybe 2v2. We can't have tournaments that viewers see 1 frame per second and try to figure out what's going on. Right now servers and the game and pc's of users are limiting factor. This is just very unproffesional to have such lag in tourneys watched by thousands. I believe it can and will be circumvented so this argument is only for current state of the game, in future it will most likely be not a problem or much smaller one.

2. We need big player base in order to make 5v5's any kind of competitive and at all viable. Right now it's hard to find good practice partner for 1v1. Before Battle of the Beast we barely were able to practice because finding 4 good people willing to play at the same time was nearly impossible. So right now it feels like practicing for 5v5 would be impossible, basically we have 10 really good players in the scene, that makes what, 2 teams, how are you going to organize tourney and practice with such number? Another problem in this matter is that to bring big numbers of people the game should be free to play and have microtransactions. As LoL and other games showed it's probably the best way to bring people. As far as I know UberEnt can't afford such system of distrubuting the game, so there might be a problem.

3. Competitive 1v1 is already incredibly hard. I can't even imagine how hard could the 5v5 be. The game to be popular and successfull it must be casual friendly. The growing percentage of players are the guys (or girls) who come back from work and just want to relax for one hour. Does 5v5 and PA in general allow for this? I'm not sure. Imagine all the cooperation that has to be done to play perfectly. I guess the nature of casual players will be that they just will not care about making it perfect and they will play their own game. I guess this might or might not be a problem.

4. Uberent and maybe PACE needs to step up and force something. If we have 2 major 1v1 tournaments, one 2v2 and one 5v5 it will be total mess. People will not know what to practice. People will attend only in the ones that are familiar with. Some poeople would specialize in 1v1's, some in 5v5's. Scene will be definitely divided by this. And this is bad. Because if there is 5v5 tourney and 1v1 guys won't watch it, it means numbers of viewers will be smaller and sponsors won't be as interested. So Uberent should probably force or promote one type of games as most popular. Like the ladder and instant search button should be default at something. If we promote all types of competition at the same level it might get messy. On the other hand any kind of enforcing anything will put some people

5. I'm not sure how hard it would be to observe action on more than 2 planets. I guess it's the matter of how good observing interface would be. I believe it's solveable by Uberent, they do awesome job at stuff like this. We also in future might consider people who observe games as their job so caster can focus on talking.

6. I realize I'm biased. I truly don't like any kind of team competition because I like to rely on myself. I think entering heavy team competition in future might be in fact really beneficial for PA's e-sport. For reasons stated above the game might not be ready for this yet. I wonder which kind of team play would be best, 2v2? 4v4? 5v5? 10v10? If one of them, why?

1v1 is far more stressful than team games, and in fact the larger the game the less stressful it becomes because less is riding on you individually. It's also because you have people you can blame if you lose, thus alleviating the pressure to win. It's why LoL is such a troll fest because a loss is never your fault, or as one person put it:

"[Playing a MOBA] is like using a Ouija board with 4 other people and spelling LOSE every game. Nobody knows who moved the piece but everyone is sure it wasn't them."