Lasse was a hugely underappreciated member of the i61 team, and put a lot of work into the innovative production stuff we saw then (player cams, nuze news, web hud/overlay, srctv+). It was a big mistake for Wolf to let him go with little reason, and the costs were suffered this lan.

Me responding to the criticism in this thread is my decision, as I believe people are owed answers to a lacklustre performance from myself. It also helps me organise my thoughts and focus on what I need to improve next time. Nobody put me up to this, I'm sure answers to others' failings will come in time.

Had epic games on both days (online vs lan servers) in the real tournament vs "fun" tournament. As well as in dmixes.

Mad respect for getting stuff working. Talking to people we played vs, seemed most teams had a good time playing.

seems like a recurring theme here

Maybe, but the fact there is a vacuum to fill is the point isn't it?

Same dude.

I might as well throw my hat into the mix.

No shade to anyone at Essentials, but I sort of was thrown into a situation I was neither prepared nor planned for. With Heny stepping down from regular Head Admin but saying he should be the Tournament Lead for iSeries we were planned to go ahead with Heny leading and me shadowing him, doing most of the basic admin expectations; reporting scores, resolving match disputes etc.

However, Heny stepped down from Tournament Lead as he was not able to attend, so being the only other "official" Essentials Admin, I took up the reigns that were left behind. In a small frame of time (which should have been much bigger and plans are in the works to resolve that) I had to cover all the bases that would have been done by someone far more experienced than I. I ended up getting Aoshi on board since he was keen to help again this year and he is someone that I have tremendous respect for and faith that he would help cover areas in which I was more inexperienced. However, I did not expect him to "carry" me and I needed to put as much effort into this as everyone else was. Upon retrospect, it may have been better for Aoshi to lead and me to shadow but at the time the way we were doing it seemed the most appropriate given the circumstances.

Because of the small time frame that we were given to prepare for this, certain aspects needed to be rushed. Case in point, the ruleset. The rules format was a combination of the old League of Legends iSeries ruleset and our monthly cups ruleset where all game specific rules were covered. In an ideal scenario, I would have rewritten the whole ruleset by hand, but the rules covered most of the disputes that would occur. However, at no point did I relay or go through the ruleset with my other Admin which led to decisions that were allowed by one but not by the other. Again, as Aoshi had said, we had separated into two different areas due to an oversight by the event organizers causing our communication to be quite inconsistent.

There is a lot of things that could have gone better, and I'll be the first to admit that some of it is on me. Information should have been far more transparent and easy to get than it was. I cannot speak for production, but I concur on all of DanS' points. We will be having a post-mortem on production and discussions are already happening on how Essentials will be working for the future so for next year we can have a production and event both attendees and viewers at home can be happy with. We aren't aiming to throw on a show as extravagant as i55/58, but we aim to make a production that is sustainable, yet demonstrates the best we have to offer.

Only myself and Arch can answer the questions that I have so far. If the vacuum isn't filled in a few days then there's the problem.

I didn't watch too much of the tournament, but the games I did watch were fantastic so great job!

People need to realise TF2's golden LAN production age was fueled by passion, funding, competition and ever-growing experience. The first TF2 LAN events hosted by the same people who brought you some of the major i-events were riddled with problems and compared to the peak, they looked an absolute shambles.

The people involved were driven to improve and increase the quality each event. More people got involved, especially as things started to improve and once the feedback actually turned positive, the drive increase exponentially.

A large number of those people have since left the scene. TF2 has changed a lot and while some experience is handed down, a lot of it is simply lost. When the first generation of TF2 commentators hit their peak and then retired, a new batch came in. Most of these got quite a lot of abuse as they were simply not on the level of the previous generation, but they improved over time and some of them became some of the most loved commentators this game has ever known. The same goes with the production team. It doesn't happen overnight and the more events that are covered by any team, the better they will become. I still remember Beta and I casting our first ever LAN event. It was a CS tournament using a projector, HLTV and a karaoke microphone in a bar at the event (maybe i9?). Things have come a long way since then.

It's not easy to produce and manage a large event but a lot of people see individuals streaming flawlessly on twitch and believe it's as simple as that. There's so many more factors to take into account at LAN and even more when considering managing a larger team, delays, technical issues that you may have absolutely no control over etc...

Motivation is the key to producing a fantastic show yet so many are being counter-productive to their own interests by abusing those who did not deliver what they were looking for. Telling someone it's shit is not going to motivate them to make any improvements... it's going to make them tell you to go fuck yourself and do your own shit. Then they leave and you're back to a zero experience situation once more.

There needs to be positive encouragement to fuel people to improve. Understand that many people involved in this tournament were reasonably new to this environment and focus on what they actually did right. Chances are they are already very much aware of the mistakes and issues they had and are already looking to make sure they are improved upon for the next time round. Just be thankful you got a show at all, from people who gave up their time and effort for absolutely nothing in return. Constructive criticism is important but so is how you word that criticism. Don't demoralise people who are working hard for the community or those people will be driven out and that's the end of your broadcasted competitive scene, if not your entire competitive scene.

Keep up the good work lads... keep pushing for greater things!

<3

Feel i have to chime in here...

1st off the bat, a massive THANK YOU to essentials and the staff involved, without your dedication and hard work LAN would of been a bit "meh".

Directing a show is a very hard and stressful job, you are constantly talking to the admins, talent and everyone else involved so everyone knows what they should be doing and when. I have found from doing this roll for events in the past that it is the make or break part of it, not the technical skill. mixing Vision and Audio is an easy thing to do, you press the button! The Technical stuff is all handled the days running up to the event, that's when the framing, white balance, audio levels etc are all setup and locked in.

Now we get on to observing. This is where the real skill comes out. ZERO DELAY: The observers need to be mind readers to do this well and i can safely say that Gemm and Sim done an amazing job given the step back in technical aids (minimap and PiP automation) that they had last year. I feel that the observing could of been made easier with these technologies.

Once again. Thank you all for an amazing LAN <3

Ok I'm gonna write some random thoughts on my phone on this bus that might explain some things

• we had 4 total people (2 at a time) to observe, produce, balance sound (once it was tested before the stream), do replays, do pip, do scores, talk to talent, reframe cam shots, monitor chat for prod issues, monitor sound. A couple things could be done by random people but for the most part we were under-staffed which led to some sloppiness
  
• Observers were doing too much. If an issue came up on our machine it led to no observing for a minute while we fixed it. Plus the system I came up with last minute so we'd not have a big downgrade from last year in terms of pip/replay was unfamiliar, hence pip sometimes staying up too long. During the first game I was controlling the wrong instance so the cam was on cookiejake for a while
  
• sound bleed CAN be reduced in software but it takes time to get right and could introduce more issues
  
• production should have directed casters more but obviously they had other shit to do too
  
• I'm assuming the audio issues were casters being muted when they first started talking. On the first day these issues are expected, later on it shouldn't happen if casters are counted in properly
  
• servers were better than any Lan I've been to (i58/61, cpg). The last 2/5 games on the first day for open were on Lan severs, twiikuu worked tirelessly to sort that shit. Eventually they gave him what he asked for (direct ssh instead of a shitty control panel) and he got servers up within an hour
  
• Multiplay or whoever runs the Lan now have us all the equipment we asked for (and some extra pcs when we realised we needed it). Idk where this came from
  
• The stage final came down to a choice of do it in byoc at 8pm or do it on stage 2+ hours late. Neither option was very appealing but in the end people wanted the stage (players and crowd mainly)
  
• Whenever video content was played, it was because we didn't have anything else to show. We didn't push people off cam to show some underedited interview, we pushed super hard to have no breaks and Kirsty did a great job filming and editing it given the limited time there was. For the GF we had to run the stream off another pc while we moved stuff backstage, hence the dead stream for an hour or so. It's very annoying to see people complaining about this when the alternative is much worse