Posted 13 May 2014 - 06:39 AM

Congrats to all who got in, and good luck.My own thoughts on this initial tournament.1 - The Timezone issue is understandable for their first tournament. HOWEVER, I would hope that the next 2 events would change up the primary times, one to favor the EU timezone and one to favor the Australasian players, with both being VERY inconvenient to NA players. All the people out there in NA basically telling other time zones to just suck it up and deal, need to have the shoe placed firmly on the other foot, if not just for the delicious irony that will be their mass QQing. And I say this as a player from the US East Coast.2 - Single Team Elimination is a terrible way to run it, considering the time and effort invested by teams.3 - Judging from the amount of people who are saying something like either "Yay, this tourney is OMGAWESOMESAUCE I just signed up with 14 random pugs to play and anyone QQing about the team format needs to shut it" or "This is so amazingly community building any team has a chance to win on any given sunday", I have to conclude that the majority of the community has 30 seconds or less experience with the competitive scene. Make no mistake, the established pro teams are going to clean up in epic fashion in this tourney. The level of skill and coordination difference is orders of magnitude. Casual teams fielding 12-mans and/or teams thrown together ad-hoc for this event are going to drop against the elite comp teams and be roflstomped like nobody's business. I hope you guys are ready for the fact that after all the effort of fielding a team, practicing, working your schedules out, etc, your actual "tournament experience" is going to consist of probably 3-4 minutes, tops, unless your opponent decides to troll/toy with you.And I am being deadly serious with that estimate. It's roughly the equivalent of saying "Yeah, my coworkers and I at the local mortgage company, we used to play ball hockey in our driveways as kids, so lets go play Team Canada. With a little luck, we'll have that Crosby guy begging for mercy!". I'm not trying to be disparaging here either. I consider myself a pretty good player, I'm a member of a unit, drop regularly in 4-mans both inside and outside my unit and so on. But at the present time, if I grouped up with 11 others on roughly the same skill level as myself and dropped in the 12's queue against someone like Steel Jags or Lords, we would get SMOKED.That said, I'm not really sure what the point of a tournament is where there are 32 teams, where only maybe a dozen or so teams have ANY chance at taking it, and realistically probably only a half dozen or so have a realistic shot at it.What we REALLY need is a CW system where each skill level and drop style has some part to play. CW /= eSports. That means the eSport crowd should have their role, the solo PUGs should have theirs, the casual units should have their place, etc. As it is, the eSports crowd already has RHoD, MCW, and so forth, and with the addition of the lobby system, those leagues can now function easily without the ridiculous sync-drop hoops to jump through that they used to have to deal with. But do we really need a giant Hero Mech giveaway to them on top of it to basically honk off the rest of the community who either do not have the time or inclination to put in hundreds or thousands of hours of meta-comp drops.4 - Lots of people who aren't participating seem to think that it's going to be great entertainment to watch these matches streamed. I really think they are going to be in for a surprise at how un-entertaining these matches actually are going to be. Here's an example from NGNGTv with Phil and roflWaffle commentating an RHoD match between Steel Jags and SiG using the alpha build of the spectating tool. I dont think too many would classify this as an exciting/entertaining watch: