The puzzle of IEM Katowice

In recent days I have been getting comments on my Twitter account about the upcoming IEM event in Katowice, which game is on which stage, tickets, what you get for those and so on. I’ve decided to put all my answers from Twitter and various reddit threads in one place.

2015

The IEM has changed from the previous year to this one. The event overall takes place in the Spodek arena and the 800sqm Expo hall. Last year, the SC2 IEM and the CS:GO ESL One tournaments had their stages at the Expo and the LoL IEM event was in Spodek. On the last day of the event the finals for all three tournaments were played in Spodek one after another (so SC2 and CS:GO both had a single match in front of 10,000 people).



2016

This year, we still have one stadium and one big expo hall, and three game titles with communities that demand the best treatment for their game (and rightly so). We’ve got three days and one stadium. How does one arrive at a good solution to this?

It’s a rather complicated puzzle, one that was challenging to put together.

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive



The 2015 ESL One event for CS:GO in Katowice was a massive success in terms of turnout. In all honesty, it was not done justice with the stage it had at the Expo and the single final match in the stadium. (That was dictated by the fact that IEM did not have a CS:GO event planned in the season budget and we had to raise money for the event via ESL One and a new set of sponsors.)

We polled the visitors of the event the data indicated that there were slightly more CS:GO fans visiting than League fans (by a single digit % margin). The conclusion was clear: CS:GO needs more time in the stadium.

At the same time, the CS:GO event is one that fits well into 4 days. We held conversations with many of the teams that were very likely to attend and the feedback was very positive towards a system with 2 groups of 6 (and the top 3 teams advance). The other takeaway from the conversations was that the teams did not want to play semi finals and the grand final on the same day. Especially if the grand final is a bo5 match which we wanted to have.

League of Legends

Obviously LoL is the world’s most popular game and needed treatment at the same level as CS:GO, not least because it was the leading title for years. It’s a smaller (and quicker) event than the CS:GO tournament. It fits very well into three days.

The biggest piece of feedback from last year was how we managed the final day of the event. Because three different games had finals all one after another, a delay in SC2 automatically causes one in CS:GO and then in League. So while the show and the atmosphere were great, League fans weren’t the most pleased about it. After a few years of very structured scheduling a difference in start times of more than 15 minutes isn’t something the League community eagerly accepts :).

So the key takeaway was to give League its own space and its own time. And the only way to do it is to give it a full day in the stadium with no other games present.

Combining CS:GO and LoL

So we have a 4 day event for CS:GO and a 3 day event for League. It became rather simple at this point - the CS:GO group stage would be played from the “tournament area” and the two remaining playoffs days would be played in the stadium on Friday and Saturday. That gives us a neat split of group play off stage, playoffs on stage.

That leaves League with a full final day for Sunday. The remaining question was just to upgrade the Expo stage to the most badass thing we’ve built inside an expo hall. And we’re doing just that. The Expo stage is a massive upgrade on last year and will be as broad as one of the walls of the hall.

In terms of net content time, League gets three full days, as opposed to two days plus the final in 2015. In terms of content on CS:GO, there are not four bo3s and a bo5 in the stadium, as opposed to a single bo3 in 2015.

Where SC2 fits into this

Where it got complicated at one point was the StarCraft II tournament. We had plans to run it as a 3 day event, all in the auditorium of the Expo, in a 650 seat theater of sorts. That seems to be the magic number when it comes to SC2 in Poland - the WCS event in Krakow was around the same size.

After this was circled in, we received support from Blizzard to make the event the WCS Winter Championship. That gave us two objectives:

a) Give the tournament the feeling of a truly major spectacle (priority).

b) Change the tournament to a 32 player format (so 4 days instead of 3).

Increasing the player numbers is “just about adding an extra day”. Not the most difficult thing in the world. But the harder part was to find a time slot for SC2 where the tournament would conclude in front of 10,000 people, on one of the most awesome stages esports will see in 2016.

The one available time slot would be Saturday, before the grand final of CS:GO. There was just the right amount of time to run two semis and a grand final before the CS:GO final. That is assuming that we would set our minds to a bo5 final in CS:GO (meaning there wouldn’t be the semis on the same day).

This shifted a three day event with a final on Sunday to a four day event with a final on Saturday. This meant that it would start on Wednesday and Thursday, before the tournament opens. Unfortunately, both are construction days and the venue as a whole is literally and legally a construction site. That means no audience on those days.

Conclusions

I hope this post provides some insight on how we do things, the things we take under consideration and why we do them a certain way. Planning for an event of this scale begins more or less a year in advance, but some pieces of the puzzle get moved on the board quite late in the game and need to be reassembled. That’s our life and we do our best with what we have.

Speaking of planning: we have an idea for 2017 where most of the challenges of running 3 big game titles on one weekend disappear. This time is not the right time, I can’t wait to share it with you.





——

P.S. How we have communicated all this to people is another matter altogether. Clearly we need to do some work in that department.