For the 2019 official tour cycle, the TD team has been working pretty closely with various folks from other areas of the site in an effort to make the overall tour experience better. Some of these things have been happening behind the scenes, while others are a bit more public, like the introduction of custom PS avatars for teams or Zracknel's awesome redesign of SPL artwork. And we’ve tried to become a lot more actively engaged with the social media crew in particular, helping to make sure important games get highlighted and working with them on things like the great team primers they did for SPL.
One big area that we’ve never really managed to capture, though, is live coverage. While the smogtours lobby is a great way to view tours as they happen, official live coverage has always been all but non-existent. And that’s a shame, because live coverage is such a quintessential part of any sports spectating, and is huge in most other eSports. With good commentators it can provide some really interesting on-the-spot analysis that can really change the way people spectate games. However, there are a couple of stumbling blocks that have always prevented us from providing this.
The single biggest issue is definitely timing. Good coverage requires a decent bit of planning in advance. Commentators need to be recruited and scheduled, streams need to be advertised, etc. Since games can happen almost any time, it becomes difficult to schedule these things in advance.
Another issue with smogtours is that its visibility to the people playing means that we have to crack down hard on speculation. We want to make the playing environment as fair as possible, and that means preventing any ghosting or information advantage whenever it’s within our power. But the flipside of that is overly sanitized discussion where people can’t really discuss the game itself.
We’ve been talking a lot recently about how to expand and improve tournament coverage, tour-related community resources, etc. And as part of this, we’ve decided to dip our toes back into the waters of live coverage starting this Snake.
Here’s what we’ve discussed:
1. During team tournaments, we plan to schedule a Twitch stream on Sundays from 2 to 4 PM Eastern. From reviewing previous tournaments, this timeblock is the period when the most number of games tend to get played.
2. When any games occur during this timeframe, the casters will announce the game live on stream, including play-by-play analysis and discussion.
3. In between games, the commentators will look at replays from earlier in the week, discuss games, talk about tournament trends, interview winners, etc.
4. In order to prevent the stream from being used as ghosting, the stream will be time-delayed by one minute. This is significant enough that it should prevent players from being able to use the stream to influence their plays, but brief enough that it still more or less captures the game live.
5. Because the stream is time-delayed, we will not carry the smogtours lobby rules about speculation over to the Twitch chat.
We’re going to try this out beginning Sunday, September 1, to see if there is interest in this kind of content. If there is, I’d like to make this a staple part of tournaments in general, and also expand it to coverage of other tournament games of note.
So why am I posting here, since this isn’t technically tour policy? Well, part of it is to discuss the speculation aspect, since a few people have complained about the quality of the smogtours lobby chat since we’ve begun strongly enforcing the rules on lobby speculation. But also, I wanted input specifically from the tour community on this, which is why it’s being posted here instead of IS or announcements.
I’m especially interested in hearing things like your thoughts on the type of content you’d like to see when games aren’t being livecast (player interviews, team analysis, “what each team needs to qualify,” etc.), thoughts on the one minute stream delay (too long? not long enough?), etc. Also, if you’re interested in potentially being on stream, please reach out to me via PM or on Discord. We’ll be sticking to folks with casting experience for the first week, but ideally this becomes an ongoing feature once we get any kinks ironed out.
One big area that we’ve never really managed to capture, though, is live coverage. While the smogtours lobby is a great way to view tours as they happen, official live coverage has always been all but non-existent. And that’s a shame, because live coverage is such a quintessential part of any sports spectating, and is huge in most other eSports. With good commentators it can provide some really interesting on-the-spot analysis that can really change the way people spectate games. However, there are a couple of stumbling blocks that have always prevented us from providing this.
The single biggest issue is definitely timing. Good coverage requires a decent bit of planning in advance. Commentators need to be recruited and scheduled, streams need to be advertised, etc. Since games can happen almost any time, it becomes difficult to schedule these things in advance.
Another issue with smogtours is that its visibility to the people playing means that we have to crack down hard on speculation. We want to make the playing environment as fair as possible, and that means preventing any ghosting or information advantage whenever it’s within our power. But the flipside of that is overly sanitized discussion where people can’t really discuss the game itself.
We’ve been talking a lot recently about how to expand and improve tournament coverage, tour-related community resources, etc. And as part of this, we’ve decided to dip our toes back into the waters of live coverage starting this Snake.
Here’s what we’ve discussed:
1. During team tournaments, we plan to schedule a Twitch stream on Sundays from 2 to 4 PM Eastern. From reviewing previous tournaments, this timeblock is the period when the most number of games tend to get played.
2. When any games occur during this timeframe, the casters will announce the game live on stream, including play-by-play analysis and discussion.
3. In between games, the commentators will look at replays from earlier in the week, discuss games, talk about tournament trends, interview winners, etc.
4. In order to prevent the stream from being used as ghosting, the stream will be time-delayed by one minute. This is significant enough that it should prevent players from being able to use the stream to influence their plays, but brief enough that it still more or less captures the game live.
5. Because the stream is time-delayed, we will not carry the smogtours lobby rules about speculation over to the Twitch chat.
We’re going to try this out beginning Sunday, September 1, to see if there is interest in this kind of content. If there is, I’d like to make this a staple part of tournaments in general, and also expand it to coverage of other tournament games of note.
So why am I posting here, since this isn’t technically tour policy? Well, part of it is to discuss the speculation aspect, since a few people have complained about the quality of the smogtours lobby chat since we’ve begun strongly enforcing the rules on lobby speculation. But also, I wanted input specifically from the tour community on this, which is why it’s being posted here instead of IS or announcements.
I’m especially interested in hearing things like your thoughts on the type of content you’d like to see when games aren’t being livecast (player interviews, team analysis, “what each team needs to qualify,” etc.), thoughts on the one minute stream delay (too long? not long enough?), etc. Also, if you’re interested in potentially being on stream, please reach out to me via PM or on Discord. We’ll be sticking to folks with casting experience for the first week, but ideally this becomes an ongoing feature once we get any kinks ironed out.
