Special Endrey Profile Joined June 2010 Germany 1897 Posts Last Edited: 2011-11-16 18:36:54 #1 I decided not to put this in Blogs or SC2 Tournaments part because it is for part of SC2 in general then it is personal opionion or pure tournament data/LR. In addition to that ALL HD Pass holders can get their money back and VODs will be for free.



Hey folks,



so after a little bit of time to talk about everything, looking at the numbers etc., it is time for recap for the Battle in Berlin 2011 from our (Berlin eSports e.V. Endrey & Flyersa) point of view. So first of all we will list the things we liked and those we didn't, then I'll go into a little bit more detail and in the end there will be a small personal statement.



What went well:



-Players felt comfortable: Picked up at the airport/train station, own VIP area, different kinds of free food + drinks, they had fun, Stephano casted with me even though his semi final was played right after the one we were casting together

-Amazing games: No cheese at all. Macro oriented, smart games, upsets - good entertainment, no mirror finals

-Emotional Crowd: Cheering, chanting, applauding, making so much noise I was not able to hear my own voice oh so often. It was way louder than it was on stream.

-No huge outside factors (power going down, tsunami etc.)

-We operated with 1/3 of the budget which is common for events with that size and a relevant amount of that money was from us (Endrey & Flyersa) private

-Volunteers making the whole event possible by helping setting everything up cleaning up etc.



What did not went well:



-We started 1 hours 40 minutes late

-Too much downtime inbewteen the games early in the tournament

-Some hardware issues

-Sound Problems with the stream

-no working german stream

-no working internet connection



So let me adress all the good and bad things with a little more detail now:

One of our main goals was that we wanted the players to have a good time at the tournament no matter if they came far or not. I can proudly say we achieved that very well. I heard from basicly every player that they had such a good time that they are willing to play and participate in a possible next event as well, even though they already lost in the first round. I heard comparisons to other tournaments so I am very happy about that.

Keep in mind how important it is for a good PR that a player feels well at a tournament. Tweets, Facebook messages, statements in Interviews etc. regarding a tournament are always a good thing to have. Not to mention, that if a player feels good, he can play his best to provide the most awesome games.



We basicly saw no cheese. Players wanted to win because they had the best overall gameplay, not because they have chosen an all-in(ish) strategy to go for. GoOdy beating Stephano was just a miracle and one of the biggest upsets in major foreign tournaments lately.



The crowd was simply amazing, the amount of noise the crowd made was absolutely incredible. So often I was not able to hear my own words so I was only able to brabble some bullshit while trying to some casting at all lol). When Ret was playing vs Kas part of the crowd chanted for Ret the other half for Kas very loudly in a friendly competitive environment.



We were sold out. We hoped for 250 visitors we had 550 on site. All the visitors had a place to sit.





Now lets go into a little more detail about what went wrong and why:



Why the delay in the first place? There are a lot of little things which accumulated here. Reason number one is money. We did not have enough money to rent the venue for 2 days to have more time to prepare and since there was an event on the days

before and right after our event we had very limited time to prepare and set up everything. Finding a good day without colliding with other major tours is quite hard nowadays as well. Audio, Video, Internet, Lights etc. had to be set up, so in hindsight, I can say it is quite an accomplishment that we were able to set up most of it in just 5-6 hours (starting with simple bolts to cables, computers, video and audio equipment, the screen, beamer, sponsor wall, advertisement banners, just everything). However it should not have happened.



We had some wierd hardware issues which we noticed only on site when we were setting everything up for example stuff such as display adapters, simply because we didnt test each single screen. Same goes with power adapters, we thought a location like that would have plenty of power slots and cables, which turned out to be wrong. So we had to go shopping again. All of this is extra time we lost when setting everything up.



4 out of 12 PCs were not working on site. We had one PC without a working network connection (driver went boom, so no SC2, no production possible). And others missed screens or were in action in the warm up area later. Another one had to be replaced later pm because it refused to start anymore (god knows why).



So our plan was, to have 2 PCs on each side on stage (one for each player to play, another one for each player to plug in periphials, set up etc.) in addition to the warm up PCs, this was not going to work out simply because we didn't have enough working PCs. Thats another cause for the delays.



On site people were not able to see the complete left side of the screen. People were telling me about it and I immediately talked to the tech guy on site (who was responsible for lights, audio, beamer). We tried some fixes to resolve the problem, however it was not possible, then he told me that he cannot do anything about it and it actually might a problem with the production. People down in production told me its the other way around. So today we still don't know if it was a not properly calibrated beamer, wrongly cropped screen region on the production software or the video signal not getting to its destination on full health. Here we have to add that we also didnt want to interrupt the event again because we had already this large delay and there was more important stuff to fix and to take care of for our small staff.



About the sound/annoying backround sound on stream. As it turned out there was power distributor just about 1-2 meters next to the production (behind a wall) which caused an interference. The solution to this problem would have been to install a 50Hz filter to get rid of it. Interestingly enough on our first tests this issue was not present.



Why was there a german cast on stage? The answer to this is very simple. We had issues getting a working internet conenction over to the area where Mori, the german caster was supposed to set up his stuff. We made new LAN cables 3 times, replaced the switch, tried a laptop as bridge and a wireless LAN connection, still it was not working properly to stream. There was a second internet connection near his casting booth, but this line was not powerful enough upstream wise and it was already solely dedicated to the stage computers for starcraft, to isolate the player computers from the other network and streaming connection. It worked out in the end. The player's internet connection + the main stream was running stable, which was most important to us.



To give him at least something for the event we decided that he can cast some games on stage after he asked nicely, since people expected a German stream online this was the least we could do. I wanna thank Khaldor now that he jumped in to provide a german cast later into the tournament and doing 2 games in English while we had the German casts on stage.



We could have saved a lot of time with more time to prepare, better organisation, better logistics from us and less hardware issues. However, considering what we achieved given the circumstances, we absolutely could say that this first event was a success esp. considering that if you compare our first event to other first timers on this scale we can be pretty happy without a doubt.





So let me just use thread here to thank everybody who was involved in making the Battle in Berlin 2011 reality. Sponsors, donations, volunteers, spectators, press. Without your effort, without your help this event would absolutely not have been possible at all. Spending countless hours day after day. Achieving what we, as a team, were able to achieve despite all the mistakes and obstacles is still a memory which we could look back to quite gladly in the future.



With all the knowledge we gained in the last few weeks and months and esp. with the event itself, we are looking even more forward to create new events.





Endrey & Flyersa - Berlin eSports e.V.



P.S. any questions, discussions etc. are very welcome - more updates on twitter:



P.P.S. Here is a small story with My Little Pony, Endrey and TLO the pony thief. (I think it is only worth reading if you are into MLP:FIM - I copy pasted it from the thread in the General Forum)



now here is a picture but there is also a story to it and I thought sharing might not be a bad idea:







Some of you might now that I am a SC2 caster. On Saturday, I did my Kas, GoOdy, Nerchio, Stephano, Grubby, Socke, and (who like some of you know is a Pony fan as well). So one of my friends, who I met when I was at Gamescom decided to team up with even more and drive all the way over to Berlin. Beside from the fact that they helped out a great deal with setting up the event on site, she in particular also had present for me. As you can imagine, I was quite busy with the tournament, since not everything seemed to work out as we planned for it to be. She told me I can only open it, when TLO is watching. As you can imagine this was a little confusing not only to me . After like 8-9 hours of casting, organizing etc. I finally found 4 minutes to rest, before the semi finals started. So she got TLO to come over to the VIP area. I told him I was confused as he was, that why the fuck he needs to watch me unpacking my present. So I opened it, and the present is what you can see in the picture above. Before I completly unwrapped the present, TLO grabbed it out of my hands and started to run away. The last 4-5 days I was up from 8 AM to 2 AM preparing the event so I was quite exausted in addition to that my thyroid gland is shutting down, but I couldn't start with any new medication before the event was over. So as you can imagine, I barely couldn't stand on my own feet. However, as soon as he started to grab my present I immediately jumped of my seat, chased him, caught up to him and a menacing scream was enough to force him to give it back. We had fun





P.S. Her wings light up in different colors and she says different stuff.



♥ Caro, thanks a lot. Hey folks,now here is a picture but there is also a story to it and I thought sharing might not be a bad idea:Some of you might now that I am a SC2 caster. On Saturday, I did my Battle in Berlin tournament with Ret and TLO (who like some of you know is a Pony fan as well). So one of my friends, who I met when I was at Gamescom decided to team up with even more and drive all the way over to Berlin. Beside from the fact that they helped out a great deal with setting up the event on site, she in particular also had present for me. As you can imagine, I was quite busy with the tournament, since not everything seemed to work out as we planned for it to be. She told me I can only open it, when TLO is watching. As you can imagine this was a little confusing not only to me . After like 8-9 hours of casting, organizing etc. I finally found 4 minutes to rest, before the semi finals started. So she got TLO to come over to the VIP area. I told him I was confused as he was, that why the fuck he needs to watch me unpacking my present. So I opened it, and the present is what you can see in the picture above. Before I completly unwrapped the present, TLO grabbed it out of my hands and started to run away. The last 4-5 days I was up from 8 AM to 2 AM preparing the event so I was quite exausted in addition to that my thyroid gland is shutting down, but I couldn't start with any new medication before the event was over. So as you can imagine, I barely couldn't stand on my own feet. However, as soon as he started to grab my present I immediately jumped of my seat, chased him, caught up to him and a menacing scream was enough to force him to give it back. We had funP.S. Her wings light up in different colors and she says different stuff.♥ Caro, thanks a lot. In addition to that ALL HD Pass holders can get their money back and VODs will be for free.Hey folks,so after a little bit of time to talk about everything, looking at the numbers etc., it is time for recap for the Battle in Berlin 2011 from our (Berlin eSports e.V. Endrey & Flyersa) point of view. So first of all we will list the things we liked and those we didn't, then I'll go into a little bit more detail and in the end there will be a small personal statement.What went well:Picked up at the airport/train station, own VIP area, different kinds of free food + drinks, they had fun, Stephano casted with me even though his semi final was played right after the one we were casting togetherNo cheese at all. Macro oriented, smart games, upsets - good entertainment, no mirror finalsCheering, chanting, applauding, making so much noise I was not able to hear my own voice oh so often. It was way louder than it was on stream.(power going down, tsunami etc.)which is common for events with that size and a relevant amount of that money was from us (Endrey & Flyersa) privateby helping setting everything up cleaning up etc.What did not went well:-We startedinbewteen the games early in the tournament-Somewith the streamstreamSo let me adress all the good and bad things with a little more detail now:One of our main goals was that we wanted the players to have a good time at the tournament no matter if they came far or not. I can proudly say we achieved that very well. I heard from basicly every player that they had such a good time that they are willing to play and participate in a possible next event as well, even though they already lost in the first round. I heard comparisons to other tournaments so I am very happy about that.Keep in mind how important it is for a good PR that a player feels well at a tournament. Tweets, Facebook messages, statements in Interviews etc. regarding a tournament are always a good thing to have. Not to mention, that if a player feels good, he can play his best to provide the most awesome games.We basicly saw no cheese. Players wanted to win because they had the best overall gameplay, not because they have chosen an all-in(ish) strategy to go for. GoOdy beating Stephano was just a miracle and one of the biggest upsets in major foreign tournaments lately.The crowd was simply amazing, the amount of noise the crowd made was absolutely incredible. So often I was not able to hear my own words so I was only able to brabble some bullshit while trying to some casting at all lol). When Ret was playing vs Kas part of the crowd chanted for Ret the other half for Kas very loudly in a friendly competitive environment.We were sold out. We hoped for 250 visitors we had 550 on site. All the visitors had a place to sit.Now lets go into a little more detail aboutWhy the delay in the first place? There are a lot of little things which accumulated here. Reason number one is money. We did not have enough money to rent the venue for 2 days to have more time to prepare and since there was an event on the daysbefore and right after our event we had very limited time to prepare and set up everything. Finding a good day without colliding with other major tours is quite hard nowadays as well. Audio, Video, Internet, Lights etc. had to be set up, so in hindsight, I can say it is quite an accomplishment that we were able to set up most of it in just 5-6 hours (starting with simple bolts to cables, computers, video and audio equipment, the screen, beamer, sponsor wall, advertisement banners, just everything). However it should not have happened.We had some wierd hardware issues which we noticed only on site when we were setting everything up for example stuff such as display adapters, simply because we didnt test each single screen. Same goes with power adapters, we thought a location like that would have plenty of power slots and cables, which turned out to be wrong. So we had to go shopping again. All of this is extra time we lost when setting everything up.4 out of 12 PCs were not working on site. We had one PC without a working network connection (driver went boom, so no SC2, no production possible). And others missed screens or were in action in the warm up area later. Another one had to be replaced later pm because it refused to start anymore (god knows why).So our plan was, to have 2 PCs on each side on stage (one for each player to play, another one for each player to plug in periphials, set up etc.) in addition to the warm up PCs, this was not going to work out simply because we didn't have enough working PCs. Thats another cause for the delays.On site people were not able to see the complete left side of the screen. People were telling me about it and I immediately talked to the tech guy on site (who was responsible for lights, audio, beamer). We tried some fixes to resolve the problem, however it was not possible, then he told me that he cannot do anything about it and it actually might a problem with the production. People down in production told me its the other way around. So today we still don't know if it was a not properly calibrated beamer, wrongly cropped screen region on the production software or the video signal not getting to its destination on full health. Here we have to add that we also didnt want to interrupt the event again because we had already this large delay and there was more important stuff to fix and to take care of for our small staff.About the sound/annoying backround sound on stream. As it turned out there was power distributor just about 1-2 meters next to the production (behind a wall) which caused an interference. The solution to this problem would have been to install a 50Hz filter to get rid of it. Interestingly enough on our first tests this issue was not present.Why was there a german cast on stage? The answer to this is very simple. We had issues getting a working internet conenction over to the area where Mori, the german caster was supposed to set up his stuff. We made new LAN cables 3 times, replaced the switch, tried a laptop as bridge and a wireless LAN connection, still it was not working properly to stream. There was a second internet connection near his casting booth, but this line was not powerful enough upstream wise and it was already solely dedicated to the stage computers for starcraft, to isolate the player computers from the other network and streaming connection. It worked out in the end. The player's internet connection + the main stream was running stable, which was most important to us.To give him at least something for the event we decided that he can cast some games on stage after he asked nicely, since people expected a German stream online this was the least we could do. I wanna thank Khaldor now that he jumped in to provide a german cast later into the tournament and doing 2 games in English while we had the German casts on stage.We could have saved a lot of time with more time to prepare, better organisation, better logistics from us and less hardware issues. However, considering what we achieved given the circumstances, we absolutely could say that this first event was a success esp. considering that if you compare our first event to other first timers on this scale we can be pretty happy without a doubt.So let me just use thread here to thank everybody who was involved in making the Battle in Berlin 2011 reality. Sponsors, donations, volunteers, spectators, press. Without your effort, without your help this event would absolutely not have been possible at all. Spending countless hours day after day. Achieving what we, as a team, were able to achieve despite all the mistakes and obstacles is still a memory which we could look back to quite gladly in the future.With all the knowledge we gained in the last few weeks and months and esp. with the event itself, we are looking even more forward to create new events.Endrey & Flyersa - Berlin eSports e.V.P.S. any questions, discussions etc. are very welcome - more updates on twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/SpecialEndrey P.P.S. Here is a small story with My Little Pony, Endrey and TLO the pony thief. (I think it is only worth reading if you are into MLP:FIM - I copy pasted it from the thread in the General Forum) + Show Spoiler + This signature is ruining eSports - -Twitter: @SpecialEndrey