Thoughts on WCS Challenger

Last weekend we've had the WCS Challenger qualifiers for WCS Spring.

I always enjoy playing in these and I am happy I managed to qualify, but there were a couple of things which bothered me which I wished would be fixed for the next edition.



COMMUNITY CASTERS

I am not sure how this normally works, but this time around there was an insane amount of community casters and it seemed like there was no vetting of them whatsoever.

This resulted in a couple of different annoyances:

1. I had many noticeable lag spikes in my games. The games didn't necessarily show the "Waiting for player" screen, but I had multiple big spikes in at least 7 of my games(they were all caused by observers). I even had 1 guy lag out in the first game and then try and come back in the 2nd game.

This obviously is rather annoying which is why I would like if there were some pc/internet requirements for the community casters.



2. There was a couple of instances where the lobby which I hosted filled up really fast, this meant that some casters weren't able to join and thus couldn't broadcast a game. Instead of accepting their faith they would start messaging me "Hey man, I see broadcaster X is in the game but he only has 25 viewers while I have 29 viewers. Can you kick him and let me in?" or "We've been following you all day, I can't believe you won't let us in right now."

This obviously is not what I want to be dealing with as I am playing qualifying matches.



VETO SYSTEM

I've spoken against the current veto system before which I believe to be extremely unfair.

Right now the veto system is:

AB BAN

AB PICK

AB BAN

I believe this to be a massively imbalanced way to veto, as A gets the short end of the stick in every single Ban or picking round.

I would prefer a regular ABBA BAC or ABAB BAC system



TIMEZONES/RUNNING TIME

The european qualifier started at 4pm CEST and runs till it finishes.

I believe there should be some kind of time limit on when it finishes, I already was struggling with how long the first qualifier ran and I am in an advantageous timezone.

For example I finished my final match of the first qualifier at 1 am.

I played vs Hellraiser who is a Ukrainian which means at in his country it was 2 am.

I think there has to be a limit somewhere till how long a qualifier can run, I don't think playing till 2 AM makes for good games and it doesn't necessarily make the best player win.



I hope you guys managed to find a coherent thought in here somewhere.

Love you all



Kevin





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