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what's the point of this thread

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because of being on the front page of twitch

also i dont think having "more" viewers diminishes the effect of lacklustre production, rather the opposite

the damage numbers showing up is pretty fuckin sick

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This grand finals is incredible. Good online Twitch viewership aside, it is such a breath of fresh air after the past two days (and arguably the past month of shitstorms) to finally have a fantastic grand finals with both teams giving it their all; as a bonus, to actually secure the stage.

There has been an abysmal trainwreck of issues with i63 and the buildup of it that I'm not going to talk about until tournament's over and I'm done screaming LET'S FUCKING GO LADS at my monitor.

Bit ill-timed but the mods can probably go through the logs to see if it was a misunderstanding.

EDIT: while it is Twitch chat moderation being massively shit was an issue too, I'll also expand about that later

@uberchain

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Hi plunk here shit caster here and most issues have been down to multiplay a lot has been done and cunts working tirelessly to get this lan going

so cool that the word "uwu" is banned and gives me a 10 second timeout but when multiple people type "nursey is a man" over and over (when she isnt even fucking at lan lmao) they just get a free pass

great job guys proud of u

anyone who is complaining about something that happened in twitch chat has already made a fatal mistake

Thank you for taking such a bold stance and speaking about the issues that really matter.

i saw this guy say "im from na my brain has delay" in twitch chat
needless to say ive never been so angry before in my life

I have no interest in uwu but it has been the theme of the weekend that racial/gay/etc slurs and random Punjabi/foreign language typing have been spammed with nothing done about it for long stretches, but then folks are getting timed out for other super dumb shit like saying uberchain or uwu

The moderation has had two modes.. erase everything over-zealously, or do nothing. It's been frustrating.

I think production was pretty good and I would like to thank them for:
1. dealing with all the shit they've had thrown at them by both the community, and Multiplay/the LAN itself in a good way.
2. preparing a lot of extra content, mid game interviews (in GF), and all of the other things that were not in game.
3. great game observing with a lot of cool tricks like simultaneous replays and live gameplay, showing two POVs at once, and generally good observing
4. that thing that uploads the logs every time a round ends (Twiikuu MeanMode?), while it had some bugs it helped me understand and feel like i'm watching games that weren't casted.

I would also like to thank the casters as they were good.

I didn't attend but this was a great LAN

wasnt this the attitude towards the tf2 communities?

big surprise a 'mireal army' shitposter is downplaying something trans related
http://www.teamfortress.tv/49249/insomnia63-day-2#16

moderate chat properly or dont bother spending the manpower there imo

please do this for every casted match btw, makes viewing 10x better

Impossible for ESEA matches unfortunately, their fault.

Yes the production from the stream's point of view was riddled with problems to the point of frustration. A majority of matches started half-way into the midfight. Game audio levels were too low for a majority of the lan except for grand finals. Spectating errors where a camera would get stuck on one player for too long, or you'd have the picture-in-picture with both screens displaying the same feed.

There were some of those prerecorded bits I thought to be completely unnecessary and added nothing to the stream. "The marriage game" felt so shoehorned in and had no substance, why not just get more interviews with more players? On day 2 the guys on the couch cut to a pre-recorded segment of Dr.Happiness literally saying "Yep it's day 2 at LAN the games have gotten started and production is under way :)". What did this add to the stream? Why even put it in there?

On day three after the Ora Elektro vs SVIFT match you guys left the camera on Grumpykoi, Samski and Ombrack for an hour and 10 minutes whilst we waited for the next match to start and throughout the entire interview you can see Grumpy desperately trying to pull new topics out of his ass to keep the interview going. Why was this interview not cut short after MAX 30 minutes to one of those "stream resumes in X" screens? Was it so necessary to put an hour and 10 minutes of the same 4 interview questions phrased differently on stream?

Like OP said in the title, no disrespect. Thank you very much for producing this for us, but please learn from these shortcomings to make future productions of iseries better should Essentials continue producing them...

The only good filler content was grumpy mum tbh

The first thing I want to do is thank the people behind the Essentials production. I have no clue how bad it actually was and how much was within control/out of control. I do know they worked very hard to make sure that shit worked, and with whatever they were able to do while everything was on fire, they did their best and they made a show happen, and I bawled like a baby when the outro rolled. I can say lots of positive things about this LAN - the casters, the teams and players, the spectators and community, the Twitch connections so we got 12K views, the talent available - and I will later.

Production quality felt worse than i61. There was effort and good work put in by the volunteers that got downplayed due to how cheap and put together last minute everything seemed. I could sense their tension from all the disorganization from across the transatlantic. The only exception is the Grand Finals stage, which felt better than i61's. Crowd noise was hype and audible due to actually being near the casters, the stage was cool, and it helps that both teams played fantastically and so evenly. It was almost therapeutic how satisfying the grand finals stage production was, because of how rough Day 1 and 2 were, after hearing about production people who probably fought tooth and nail to get shit working.

Feel free to not answer me ever if something sounds presumptuous or entitled, or feel free to correct me if I don't know what I'm talking about.

This is a long bullet-pointed nerd essay of my gripes with details. Meanwhile, here's the condensed list:

Now here's the thing - some of these complaints might actually be just the budget TF2 can maintain. From what it seems like, and I could be wrong:

1. There wasn't enough production equipment that people needed actually there like prod or social media PCs, limiting what the social media/photojournalism/video editing/admin team who needed them could do
   
2. People spread themselves out too many roles and a lot of different things at once, which made it hard to keep track of things or stay on the ball
   
3. Somebody didn't step up as much as they could have or got lazy, and if it's a repeat offender, should not come back next year to do their responsibilities if they under-performed so badly after feedback, that it affected the show

I was around Dashner's production team around i55 for 2 or so years, which was post-Lange and fairly similar in quality, hard work, and professionalism from talent. Dashner's era was fantastic-looking and high budget but it absolutely spoiled TF2. It was very micromanaged, and people who had specific roles were flown out rather than asked to multitask: the audio engie focused on audio, the live graphics operator controlled NodeCG, the roaming camera people focused on video, and the photojournalists took photos and edited them to post to social media and to TFTV's gallery. People like War and Sideshow both have stated that it wasn't sustainable to have that high quality of production. It exceeds the budget of what a small grassroots seed is capable of, let alone can sustain, without really generous sponsors.

Before i61, TFTV held open communication channels for people who wanted to volunteer and learn more about what was happening at the event, unlike what I've heard about Essentials. Additionally, TFTV would talk to dedicated Multiplay admins who were coordinating the TF2 tournament months, MONTHS earlier (not 2, not 3, a bit more than that) to talk to higher-ups to get what they needed. We're talking the moment the project is signed. Those admins are retired now. It might be a harder struggle. Thing is, whatever was not available was actually brought into the LAN's country or rented out - high-end video cameras, cables, mackey, industry standard commentator headsets. These things cost up to thousands of dollars.

Because Dashner and Lange used that stuff outside of TF2, it makes some sense that some of the shit that was really nice on-stream was due to that money in their own equipment they contributed, and completely optional - but we might perceive some of these things like player cams as mandatory when they are bonuses.

I don't doubt this is what some Essentials staff also had to do with whatever sponsor money or money they had available and bring some of their own stuff. I don't actually have a decent camera or equipment; my stuff is sponsor-rented or rented from somebody's pockets. There was an instance a camera lens and body was bought from a store, then returned after LAN. This sounds common, but it's money that can't be afforded to be spent when you need to consider which production people you're going to help pay for flights and hotels. There was already a saturation of fundraisers this year and production fundraisers don't make that much to send maybe more than one person out.

With this being considered, I'm not sure if I'm just spoiled based on being used to the old days, and expect more than what the budget provides due to these paragraphs above - or if I feel like Essentials with the equipment they had, could have helped their volunteers better in providing them what they needed, or have brought on people better suited for certain roles. Based on this thread as well as other places i63 feedback was left, I'm going to lean towards the latter opinion.

God forbid that we have a little bit of heckling between spectators and the production crew, castors, and teams at LAN.

i63 got 12k+ views at one point and we got to see some of the best TF2 played in years,Sure the production wasn't the best but atleast be grateful that this game is even alive let alone very alive

I was more upset by all the delays (not only the GF, but delays between rounds on friday, maps of BO3s on saturday) than with whatever audio balance or turbotabs makeup issues you guys mention.

There also has been rumours of people stalling matches between maps at some point? Ombrack mentioned it about se7en during the upper bracket finals I think. Is that true? If yes how's that allowed? I'm not saying it's only se7en after countless delays on saturday but I have trouble conceiving a team in the middle of a bo3 (it started, so the server and all the PCs are working arent they) needs more than a 5 minute break between maps. It should be an enforced rule to make schedule tighter and viewer experience better.

Regarding the note in the google doc on this, Essentials have actively rejected the use of any of my work in any of their productions despite it being freely available to all (apart from that impossibly high barrier of, you know, asking), so the end of the services will have had no effect on the i63 show. The reasons I've heard are "it's shit" and "it's off brand" (modifying OBS browser instance CSS being too hard presumably), although this is second hand at best.

Generally speaking the production shortcomings are down to a lack of attention to detail. The layouts were only very slightly improved from last year (as far as I could see one caption had better alignment) and there was still poor status information available most of the time, we still have a black curtain backdrop, shot framing was poor, hosts still left to fill desperately for hours on end, etc. Some of the nice novel technologies that made last year interesting are gone, at least partly because Wolfmachina has pissed off the developers.

This isn't to suggest that previous years efforts were perfect, and it's not the fault of the on-screen talent that they're put in difficult situations or that contributors aren't given enough time, but it's obvious that the amount of work put into this year was not enough.

However I would disagree with Uberchain that budget has that much to do with it, it's mostly down to control freakery at the top of Essentials combined with poor project planning and execution. An army of volunteers are there, they just aren't included either because of poor management or for frankly bizarre reasons. From the start Wolfmachina has pursued a course that has alienated established volunteers, but it doesn't matter if he has the protection of being the only Multiplay contact.

If anyone's planning to challenge Essentials for coverage the weak points are obvious and easily exploitable in a rival bid. At the very least some competition might force Essentials to up their game.

Also regarding the 12k, that's roughly a measure of how many website visitors there are on the Twitch homepage at any one time. Think about your own behaviour on the Twitch homepage if you happen to go to it. How long do you hang around watching what's there? Peak numbers from homepage exposure are meaningless (although if you have a clueless sponsor it might be handy), it's consistent numbers throughout the tournament that matter. We've had plenty of homepage exposure over the last few years and the total impact on long term TF2 viewing numbers is zero.

We got to 10-12k without front page, we checked. Front page for monthlies normally gives 5k when we're on the front of the carousel and 1k otherwise. Viewership was good.

Usually when tf2 gets front page it gets like +3k views at most so the 12k definetly wasnt all because of the front page