ZombieGrub Profile Blog Joined May 2011 United States 627 Posts #1



TL;DR: We learned a lot about creating a tourney and have some ideas to throw around to make the potential next one a better, less costly venture. Overall our feelings are good/great on HIAT, especially when it came to the live crowd, and will be looking to replicate that ‘VIP’ live experience in the future. Learning



Tournament Format



Day one was pretty haphazard. The online crowd certainly saw it (constant delays, lag, etc), but the offline crowd did too. The projector didn’t work for the first half of the day and the stream wouldn’t work above medium, as it wasn’t a live feed. We also experienced a lot of stress, as Thursday was supposed to be our prep day but was instead taken up entirely by setup. My thoughts about the tournament format are -



Is an open bracket stream even necessary? What if we just made it offline, and used Friday as an additional setup day? Simply adding Wednesday to the days we rent the venue is far too costly, and it’s not like open bracket day gets that much hype, especially when it’s obvious who will get out.



Is an open bracket in general even necessary? I want to say yes to this question, simply because we like having people tell us ‘you support the NA scene’ and getting the ‘foreign hope’ is always fun. Plus, having people like Intense give fantastic interviews is something that probably won’t happen without an open bracket. Oh, and on top of all that, the open bracket is one last chance for guys like Hydra to enter into our tournament. I can certainly see why some tournaments are only two days and only start at the RO16/8, but I’m not sure it would be worth giving up all the pros I just listed.



Was the venue a good choice? For those that don’t know, the venue was a fairly large LAN center. This type of venue should guarantee proper internet for the players/streaming, as well as proper equipment for the players. Any other type of venue (like a hotel or convention center) and we would have to rent out a lot of equipment, make sure their internet can handle it, and hope they have a good wire setup for production. The drawbacks to doing it in a LAN center is that it was fairly out of the way, and finding another LAN center as big as that would be difficult, if we planned to move locations for the next tournament.



Attendees



Venue/ticket timing: We had quite a few people say ‘if only I knew the exact location/ticket price, I would’ve been able to come!’. And even a few more say ‘if only I knew the exact dates sooner, I would’ve been able to come!’ So, obviously, we need to have the venue/tickets locked down waaaay sooner. That’s something we can certainly do, as we didn’t plan on this venue being as ‘iffy’ for as long as it was.



Ticket Counter: inb4 trolls say ‘haha got em’. Yes, we saw both the legitimate concerns as well as troll posters about the tickets left unsold. What do I have to say to that? Fuck the ticket counter. Maybe not the most mature response, sure, but we don’t want that killing hype before the event even begins. WCS Toronto’s crowd was not very big, if you couldn’t tell online, and not as many people seemed to care, probably because they didn’t have a counter saying ‘oh we have 500 tickets left to sell, whoops’.



Tournament Schedule: Basically, was starting at 10am EST a good thing? Most people don’t want to get up that early unless something big is going down (which is obviously not guaranteed on open bracket/ RO16, or hell, even finals day), but it impacts the hype at the start. Is it bad a crowd isn’t there immediately, or even three hours later? Do we sacrifice the online EU crowd to start it later, and end later? This is one I don’t really have an answer for.



Additional Cost

Day one was pretty haphazard. The online crowd certainly saw it (constant delays, lag, etc), but the offline crowd did too. The projector didn’t work for the first half of the day and the stream wouldn’t work above medium, as it wasn’t a live feed. We also experienced a lot of stress, as Thursday was supposed to be our prep day but was instead taken up entirely by setup. My thoughts about the tournament format are -What if we just made it offline, and used Friday as an additional setup day? Simply adding Wednesday to the days we rent the venue is far too costly, and it’s not like open bracket day gets that much hype, especially when it’s obvious who will get out.I want to say yes to this question, simply because we like having people tell us ‘you support the NA scene’ and getting the ‘foreign hope’ is always fun. Plus, having people like Intense give fantastic interviews is something that probably won’t happen without an open bracket. Oh, and on top of all that, the open bracket is one last chance for guys like Hydra to enter into our tournament. I can certainly see why some tournaments are only two days and only start at the RO16/8, but I’m not sure it would be worth giving up all the pros I just listed.For those that don’t know, the venue was a fairly large LAN center. This type of venue should guarantee proper internet for the players/streaming, as well as proper equipment for the players. Any other type of venue (like a hotel or convention center) and we would have to rent out a lot of equipment, make sure their internet can handle it, and hope they have a good wire setup for production. The drawbacks to doing it in a LAN center is that it was fairly out of the way, and finding another LAN center as big as that would be difficult, if we planned to move locations for the next tournament.We had quite a few people say ‘if only I knew the exact location/ticket price, I would’ve been able to come!’. And even a few more say ‘if only I knew the exact dates sooner, I would’ve been able to come!’ So, obviously, we need to have the venue/tickets locked down waaaay sooner. That’s something we can certainly do, as we didn’t plan on this venue being as ‘iffy’ for as long as it was.inb4 trolls say ‘haha got em’. Yes, we saw both the legitimate concerns as well as troll posters about the tickets left unsold. What do I have to say to that? Fuck the ticket counter. Maybe not the most mature response, sure, but we don’t want that killing hype before the event even begins. WCS Toronto’s crowd was not very big, if you couldn’t tell online, and not as many people seemed to care, probably because they didn’t have a counter saying ‘oh we have 500 tickets left to sell, whoops’.Basically, was starting at 10am EST a good thing? Most people don’t want to get up that early unless something big is going down (which is obviously not guaranteed on open bracket/ RO16, or hell, even finals day), but it impacts the hype at the start. Is it bad a crowd isn’t there immediately, or even three hours later? Do we sacrifice the online EU crowd to start it later, and end later? This is one I don’t really have an answer for. (So this is the section a lot of budding tournament organizers might want to read, as this will basically be a cost-cutting/we-fucked-up-don’t-do-as-we-did section.)



First and foremost, we had some people complain about where the money was being used, even though it was clearly stated in the Kickstarter. Stuff like pizza and ice cream, or the photo booth! I just want to say to anyone who thought that was a bad use of funds...it really, really wasn’t. It was fucking cool, and almost essential to the VIP experience we wanted our live crowd to get.



With that out of the way, let’s talk about surprise expenses. First, currency conversion. If you plan on having an event where it is not USD, either clearly state the prize pool is in ___ currency, or expect to deal with currency conversion. It might help, or it might really, really hurt. Second, budget for taxes. On everything. Third, keep in mind the ‘misc’ expenses that are almost guaranteed to pop up. I wish I had a ‘budget x percentage into this’, but I don’t. I’ll just say, think of stuff like water/Redbull for players, tables for organizing, cables that the venue/production might not have but desperately need, emergency runs to Walmart for food/supplies, providing food to hard-working people because you’re a nice event organizer, having to pay for taxis even if you thought you had someone picking up a player, confetti poppers for a nice ceremony, etc etc. Fourth, packaging and shipping stuff is so expensive, and you are almost guaranteed to have to ship something or another, and they probably won’t be very small or easy to ship. I’m talking like, at least $600 for this, as we easily spent a lot more than that (but some of it was just cool stuff, not important).



Let’s talk about good money surprises. We forgot we would actually make money from ticket sales. That’s basically our only good money surprise. Don’t expect many of those. Actually, after we considered we’d make money off of them, combined with 99% of people saying the tickets were too cheap, we plan on increasing the tickets for the next potential tournament.



Oh, and get an app or save every receipt for everything you buy. Business expenses.





First and foremost, we had some people complain about where the money was being used,. Stuff like pizza and ice cream, or the photo booth! I just want to say to anyone who thought that was a bad use of funds...it really, really wasn’t. It was fucking cool, and almost essential to the VIP experience we wanted our live crowd to get.With that out of the way, let’s talk about surprise expenses. First,. If you plan on having an event where it is not USD, either clearly state the prize pool is in ___ currency, or expect to deal with currency conversion. It might help, or it might really, really hurt. Second,. On everything. Third,that are almost guaranteed to pop up. I wish I had a ‘budget x percentage into this’, but I don’t. I’ll just say, think of stuff like water/Redbull for players, tables for organizing, cables that the venue/production might not have but desperately need, emergency runs to Walmart for food/supplies, providing food to hard-working people because you’re a nice event organizer, having to pay for taxis even if you thought you had someone picking up a player, confetti poppers for a nice ceremony, etc etc. Fourth,, and you are almostto have to ship something or another, and they probably won’t be very small or easy to ship. I’m talking like, at least $600 for this, as we easily spent a lot more than that (but some of it was just cool stuff, not important).Let’s talk about good money surprises. We forgot we would actually make money from ticket sales. That’s basically our only good money surprise. Don’t expect many of those. Actually, after we considered we’d make money off of them, combined with 99% of people saying the tickets were too cheap, we plan on increasing the tickets for the next potential tournament.Oh, and get an app or save every receipt for everything you buy. Business expenses. Overall Impression On Our First Live Event



Crowd



The crowd was amazing and made the event 1000x easier to cast, and honestly, if any of you are reading, you’re easily one of the reasons we really want to do another one. A hundred people or so would be the perfect VIP experience that’s in between Homestory Cup and a bigger event like WCS, and that number is what we’ll be shooting for when we potentially look at venues. We loved the boomsticks and think the crowd did too. The crowd-player-caster interaction had to have been at an all-time high with the trading cards, photo booth, and casters right next to the crowd. We consider this interaction a must-have and will be looking to incorporate similar elements and are open to suggestions.



Player Accommodation

The crowd was amazing and made the event 1000x easier to cast, and honestly, if any of you are reading, you’re easily one of the reasons we really want to do another one. A hundred people or so would be the perfect VIP experience that’s in between Homestory Cup and a bigger event like WCS, and that number is what we’ll be shooting for when we potentially look at venues. We loved the boomsticks and think the crowd did too. The crowd-player-caster interaction had to have been at an all-time high with the trading cards, photo booth, and casters right next to the crowd. We consider this interaction a must-have and will be looking to incorporate similar elements and are open to suggestions. (Any player that reads this, feel free to message Rifkin or I on your feelings, good or bad, especially if coupled with suggestions.)



Safe Space: We tried to give the players a ‘safe space’, and we think we did a good job of it. They basically had an entire section of the building dedicated to just players, and further back they had a couch/water/sockets to charge their phone. As the event went on, we tried to move out the open bracket players to allow even more exclusivity.



Player-Fan Interaction: Some players don’t appreciate fan interaction and no one should judge them on that. However, we felt justified in asking the bare minimum, which was walking through the crowd once or twice and handing out their personal player cards to anyone who asked. We will continue to make that the bare minimum for future events.



Gophers & Volunteers: We had specific ‘gophers’ and thought it worked out well. However, there was still miscommunication on airport pickups, and we’ll try to iron those out in the future.



Online Viewer Count



We successfully avoided other Starcraft events on the same weekend! But then we clashed with CS:GO, LoL, and Pokemon, whoopsie. Unfortunately, there’s not much we can do about that, so while we will honestly state we were disappointed with viewer numbers, there’s an uplifting thought of ‘well, we had everything going against us, so actually not that bad’. We had downtime, we had lag, we had ZvZ finals, we had no ‘star power’ casters, we had limited Twitch front page time that got overshadowed by everything else going on that weekend...I mean really, all that considered, we’re okay and maybe even happy with the numbers overall.



Ad revenue was a total bust for this event, for anyone wondering. Yay ad-block?







We tried to give the players a ‘safe space’, and we think we did a good job of it. They basically had an entire section of the building dedicated to just players, and further back they had a couch/water/sockets to charge their phone. As the event went on, we tried to move out the open bracket players to allow even more exclusivity.Some players don’t appreciate fan interaction and no one should judge them on that. However, we felt justified in asking the bare minimum, which was walking through the crowd once or twice and handing out their personal player cards to anyone who asked. We will continue to make that the bare minimum for future events.We had specific ‘gophers’ and thought it worked out well. However, there was still miscommunication on airport pickups, and we’ll try to iron those out in the future.We successfully avoided other Starcraft events on the same weekend! But then we clashed with CS:GO, LoL, and Pokemon, whoopsie. Unfortunately, there’s not much we can do about that, so while we will honestly state we were disappointed with viewer numbers, there’s an uplifting thought of ‘well, we had everything going against us, so actually not that bad’. We had downtime, we had lag, we had ZvZ finals, we had no ‘star power’ casters, we had limited Twitch front page time that got overshadowed by everything else going on that weekend...I mean really, all that considered, we’re okay and maybe even happy with the numbers overall.Ad revenue was a total bust for this event, for anyone wondering. Yay ad-block? Cost Cutting Ideas



Merchant booths. We’re optimistic that sponsors will want to have merchant booths, and that people will want to buy from said merchant booths.



Two day event instead of three. Whether this means an open bracket but no stream, or no open bracket, or what, we’re not 100% sure. Give us your opinions.



Ticket pricing. Everyone, players and spectators, told us our tickets were too low-priced. We had no problem with that for this, as this was the ‘once in a lifetime blowout event so everyone should be welcome!!’, but if we’re looking toward future, sustainable events...we’re going to increase the prices. Not by so much it’s unfair! Just a little.



. We’re optimistic that sponsors will want to have merchant booths, and that people will want to buy from said merchant booths.. Whether this means an open bracket but no stream, or no open bracket, or what, we’re not 100% sure. Give us your opinions.Everyone, players and spectators, told us our tickets were too low-priced. We had no problem with that for this, as this was the ‘once in a lifetime blowout event so everyone should be welcome!!’, but if we’re looking toward future, sustainable events...we’re going to increase the prices. Not by so much it’s unfair! Just a little. Cold Hard Numbers

* Dips from technical problems/restarts can be seen on fuzic graphs

*This is Rifkin writing~



Day 1: Peak viewership(Personal) 6628. 9079 across all streams

Unique visitors: 42920



Day 2: Peak viewership(Personal) 9885. 12387 across all streams

Unique visitors: 56040



Day 3: Peak viewership(Personal)11,584. 13713 across all streams

http://www.fuzic.nl/events/5938-hell-its-aboot-time/

Unique visitors: 56020



We can’t give exact ad revenue numbers, but we can tell you that less than $250 was made all 3 days combined! We left to Toronto with 813 subscribers and came back to 815 (Currently sitting at 798 at the time of writing this). All streamers know that any time you take off streaming means bleeding out subscribers, and since we took nearly a week off (not including streaming the actual event itself) that depressingly small amount of subscribers gained vs lost is actually quite impressive.



Costs:

Sadly there is a confidentiality agreement I signed with the media crew so we can’t discuss exact costs of things, but I’ll write down a ballpark so folks know whereabouts things cost us. Again, these are not accurate numbers, but within the ballpark



Venue costs: $1500 - $2500 per day (included PC rentals for the whole LAN center)



Staging costs: $1500 - $3000 per week. This includes things like risers, back drops, basically anything building a nice looking stage requires.



Staffing costs: $1500 - $3000 per event. We hired a production team (Producer, Camera man, Stream director, audio technician), a dedicated observer, several admins, a camera man and several volunteers. One thing I was shocked to learn about is that it’s apparently not ‘normal’ for event organizers to pay for the meals of the staff. We were more than happy to do this, and we even surprised everyone with PopEye’s chicken for dinner during set up day (guys, we bought enough chicken to feed 25+ people, think about that for a second).



THE MOST EXPENSIVE - Printing: $2,000-$4000 For our event we really did try to take it above and beyond and create some extra things like the backdrops for the photo booth, extra large banner to cover the windows etc. You could probably get by with a 70% cost of what we did for this, but then again it did look fantastic (not to mention how great the Carbot murals looked on the easels behind the players)



Misc Costs: $1000+

The ice cream truck rental was $600 for 6 hours (Allowed us to hand out free ice cream, much cheaper if they are selling it themselves) we spent nearly $400 on pizza, and some generous souls bought nearly the same amount for the days we didn’t as well. We spent nearly $300 on silly things as well such as props for the photo booth, packaging for the VIP’s etc. Close to $400 (unbudgeted, whoops) was spent on Red Bull & Water for the players/staff/sneaky spectators that tricked staff into giving them some.

Insurance: $350 - $1000 I wasn’t sure if this was a misc cost or not, because it’s something you need to have in order for Blizzard to white list your event (regardless of whether it’s Blizzard assisted or not)



There’s a lot of other costs such as the camera rentals, purchasing cables and headsets etc that all added up to be very costly, but the reason I’m not including those here is because it’s not something I think every event is going to have to deal with. In fact, I know that these are some of the most variable costs (others I didn’t list above). The above expenses were the bare bones of what it required to run this event well.



Hope this was an interesting read, at the very least. Thanks to everyone who supported the tournament!







Peak viewership(Personal) 6628. 9079 across all streams http://www.fuzic.nl/events/5930-hell-its-aboot-time/ Unique visitors: 42920Peak viewership(Personal) 9885. 12387 across all streams http://www.fuzic.nl/events/5935-hell-its-aboot-time/ Unique visitors: 56040Peak viewership(Personal)11,584. 13713 across all streamsUnique visitors: 56020We can’t give exact ad revenue numbers, but we can tell you that less than $250 was made all 3 daysWe left to Toronto with 813 subscribers and came back to 815 (Currently sitting at 798 at the time of writing this). All streamers know that any time you take off streaming means bleeding out subscribers, and since we took nearly a week off (not including streaming the actual event itself) that depressingly small amount of subscribers gained vs lost is actually quite impressive.Sadly there is a confidentiality agreement I signed with the media crew so we can’t discuss exact costs of things, but I’ll write down a ballpark so folks know whereabouts things cost us. Again, these are not accurate numbers, but within the ballpark$1500 - $2500 per day (included PC rentals for the whole LAN center)$1500 - $3000 per week. This includes things like risers, back drops, basically anything building a nice looking stage requires.$1500 - $3000 per event. We hired a production team (Producer, Camera man, Stream director, audio technician), a dedicated observer, several admins, a camera man and several volunteers. One thing I was shocked to learn about is that it’s apparently not ‘normal’ for event organizers to pay for the meals of the staff. We were more than happy to do this, and we even surprised everyone with PopEye’s chicken for dinner during set up day (guys, we bought enough chicken to feed 25+ people, think about that for a second).$2,000-$4000 For our event we really did try to take it above and beyond and create some extra things like the backdrops for the photo booth, extra large banner to cover the windows etc. You could probably get by with a 70% cost of what we did for this, but then again it did look fantastic (not to mention how great the Carbot murals looked on the easels behind the players)$1000+The ice cream truck rental was $600 for 6 hours (Allowed us to hand out free ice cream, much cheaper if they are selling it themselves) we spent nearly $400 on pizza, and some generous souls bought nearly the same amount for the days we didn’t as well. We spent nearly $300 on silly things as well such as props for the photo booth, packaging for the VIP’s etc. Close to $400 (unbudgeted, whoops) was spent on Red Bull & Water for the players/staff/sneaky spectators that tricked staff into giving them some.Insurance: $350 - $1000 I wasn’t sure if this was a misc cost or not, because it’s something you need to have in order for Blizzard to white list your event (regardless of whether it’s Blizzard assisted or not)There’s a lot of other costs such as the camera rentals, purchasing cables and headsets etc that all added up to be very costly, but the reason I’m not including those here is because it’s not something I think every event is going to have to deal with. In fact, I know that these are some of the most variable costs (others I didn’t list above). The above expenses were the bare bones of what it required to run this event well.Hope this was an interesting read, at the very least. Thanks to everyone who supported the tournament! Commentator "Defeat is the acceptance of my own laziness." Masters terran: twitch.tv/zombiegrub Caster: @ZGGaming