BlizzCon: 5 Ways to Fuck it Up

If there’s one thing WoW tournaments are known for, it’s their bad organization and tendency for everything to go wrong. While some of this is down to pure bad luck, in their last two tournaments Blizzard has given e-sport tournament organizers a wealth of knowledge on how NOT to do things. So let’s take a look, in no particular order, at the top 5 ways to fuck up a tournament:

1. Stream just 3 of 14 Games:

While it’s ridiculous to expect every game streamed, only streaming 3 games out of a possible 14 is underwhelming to say the least. This is what occurred at the EU Regional’s and, in fact, Blizzard didn’t even think to record the other games for later viewing. Indeed, even without commentating, recording them would still have been better than doing nothing.

It’s understandable they wanted to Stream as much SC2 as possible, but would providing two streams really have been too much to ask of a billion dollar company?

Amusingly the sound dropped out of sync as soon as SC2 went off air and WoW came on. The sounds guy must have gone home at this point.

It wasn’t as if this was entirely down to “technical difficulties” either. The original schedule only had 4 of the 14 games scheduled to be on stream. In fact, it wasn’t like there wasn’t a demand for WoW either. They’re Facebook page had requests every 5 seconds for WoW to be put on stream.

Ok with most teams consisting of Shaman/Warlock/X there was never going to be that much of a difference between games, but still there were teams like Khuna’s RMP and Hydra and Inflame teaming up to form, the best named team ever, Colgate. In fact, without any practice, Colgate was one of only two teams to take an arena game off the dominant Showtime. It would have been interesting to see. Fortunately though we did get this nifty catchphrase from Inflame:

Full interview

2. Under no circumstances, whatsoever, update the brackets and announce any problems. Instead stick to the murder mystery theme for added enjoyment and have your viewers search the web for answers:

At the EU Regional’s Blizzard didn’t deem it necessary to update those pesky brackets until 4-6 hours after the games had occurred! It was also deemed too much of a hassle to use one of the many breaks between SC2 games, to update us on how the WoW tournament was going. Writing a blog post to update us on the delay and how the tournament was going? That was too much of a burden as well.

3. Promise high quality WoW VoDs in a few weeks time only to release the same high quality SC2 VoDs right after the event:

Unfortunately, Blizzard decided not to stream the US Invitational because certain technical difficulties such as the game not been installed can occur. Instead they told us the event wasn’t an afterthought and they’d be releasing high quality VoDs shortly that we’ll really appreciate. Two weeks later Blizzard finally released these VoDs. The quality was good and the sound was in sync to boot! However, claiming they put so much effort into these wasn’t quite believable especially they released high quality SC2 VoDs while the SC2 Invitational was still ongoing.

Not an Afterthought…who were they trying to kid?

4. Hire someone without the slightest bit of knowledge of WoW Arena to cast the event:

The EU event had arguably the worst tournament caster ever seen. Blizzard employed Soe Gschwind to cast this event—an avid fan of toothpaste who knows next to nothing about arena.

When your commentator has to ask whether Shaman A has used hex or wonder with bemusement why everyone on team B have changing health pools while spirit link is clearly down, you’ve clearly hired the wrong person. While she provided some eye candy, her poor camera work and failure to set up the spectator UI made the event an unintended hilarity to watch.

This was actually one of the most bizarre oversights. It made no sense why Blizzard would hire her.

With sights like this:

Let’s hope Blizzard never employ her again.

All of the World of Warcraft action will be brought to you by Luke “Virulence” Bodenheimer, Jared “Vhell” Coulston, and Soe Gschwind.

Ohh fuck!

5. Don’t have the Game Installed:

You’d think this would be one of the most critical aspects of a tournament and at the top of any organizers priority list. However, at the EU event, Blizzard thought it’d be a good idea to update the game to Cataclysm as the tournament was about to get underway.

There are technical errors and then there’s the outright stupidity of not having the game fully installed prior to the event! Need I say more?

Let’s hope BlizzCon runs smoothly and Blizzard learnt some valuable lessons from these two events.