I wasn’t going to write something while the event was happening because I wanted to have all my attention focused on the games, but what with the streams going down, the site going down, and the noisy commercials. I decided to step away, give them some time and write a little ditty. First off, if you’re like me and resized your windows so you could have multiple streams open, then you may have also spent more time than necessary looking for the brackets. I feel stupid now because they were right there in front of me, but what are you going to do? So to help you out and anyone else still looking for them, here are the links:

Championship/Pool Brackets

Starcraft 2 | Halo: Reach

Open Brackets

Starcraft 2 | Halo: Reach | Call of Duty: Black Ops

I think a big topic of discussion tonight, tomorrow, and post-MLG Dallas will be the streaming issues (obviously). Both the free stream and the HQ stream have been failing miserably. Up one minute down the other. This is disappointing because from what I’m told, MLG has a lot of money! I would think Sundance and the boys over there would have expected a potential mass of viewers trying to get all this eSports goodness. So that means they either didn’t plan appropriately or there’s just that many viewers that it was unpredictable. Even still, people like myself have a right to be pissed, we spend the money to support the organization and then can’t access any of the features. Hey Sundance, how about some free t-shirts or something?

But I won’t be too harsh. In fact I can totally understand what it must be like over there. Technology is unpredictable, you can only do so much before an event this large to test it and even then the numbers it brings back are only theoretical. And don’t forget, there’s not much else like this going on in the United States. It’s not like eSports has been around for nearly as long as other sports that got to test, retest, and perfect their mediums of distribution over time. MLG is more or less “shooting in the dark” and hoping that it will work. Give em’ time. I’m sure they’ll be up late tonight fixing these issues and getting the streams all stable for tomorrow and Sunday. At least they better be!

Oh and I try not to “shamelessly promote myself,” but if you have a minute and want to support an aspiring eSports…whatever I am, check out our Twitter and Facebook page and show us some love! Thanks a lot!

Other Tags: COD BLOPS, MLG, Pro Circuit, StarCraft II, SC2