<3

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.

Same dude.

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.

This was one of the worst parts for sure. Although, saying that, at least we (production) had a say at when the games started during this time. The rest of the time we were guessing based on players in server, but it was a regular occurrence for a player to leave when there were 12 in server (kaidus pls).

Initially I think it was supposed to just be the guide and news site it once was. Removing the guides section was my first task when I joined the web dev team, and it was never high enough on the priority list given by wolf to add back.

Eventually he/they/we branched into production with a dreamhack I believe? Then TFTV didn't want to do i61, so here we are.

I don’t think your comments were deconstructive. They were pretty fair in my view.

If we can hold some kinda postmortem (maybe one for staff then a public one), we can effectively build off this LAN and make sure the same mistakes aren’t made again. This way time can be spent solely on improving the next event and not wasting it on building an event again from scratch. This can only happen if the core team stays together, as it changed too much this year for that to happen.

I think a second org would split the talent too much, and whichever one gets the big events would be the prime option for talent, regardless of personal afflictions. We need more community teamwork in my opinion is all.

There's no reason to not like what he's done, it's just something else to look at if you like. If not, no need to comment.

please leave

I hadn’t heard anything about this, I’ll speak to wolf.

The guy who dev’d (not designed) the overlays last year fell out with wolf or something, so requested we stopped using any of his work. Jon had to rewrite the whole overlay system, which is why it was very similar looking.

Producers (not camera techs) had to reframe cameras in very short transitions wherever possible, so the ended up getting untouched most of the time. I had to do it many times and know nothing about cameras.

I don’t think two orgs competing is a good idea if wolf is willing to open up the upper echelons of essentials staff to people like yourself and the community in general. The closed framework he’s going for is stifling.

Very true, although that was because the pro stage guys did all the audio mixing and cam work for us. The least stressful part for me was once the grand final had started, as we shared the workload with them.

Yep. Servers caused huge problems on Friday too. Twiikuu the server master saved the day.

All production machines were provided by essentials.

Lack of people power.

Again, really poor communication with players hindered this. There was also no one free to organise this stuff, so what stuff we did have was either organised by production or turbo/grumpy. We need someone else there.[/quote]

Yep. Lack of staff and severe lack of prep.

This is above me, but a valid problem.

We had the equipment, but a severe lack of production planning outside of what Jon did setup wise would be the cause here. I asked several times for at the very least a rundown of the production setup but got nothing. I found out what I was working with on Thursday.

100%

Jon, our most experienced producer, setup on Thursday, but had to leave then for something else we had known about beforehand, so this couldn’t be helped. Definitely would’ve been better with him there. Makes it doubly disappointing that I had little info pre-setup though.

I think Wolf worked on communicating with them in advance, but clearly there was not enough, idk from which end.

We rented cameras, and wolf brought all the other production stuff needed other than monitors, speakers and headsets.

We had 0 contact with players directly, outside of rcon say, so predicting when the game was going live was near impossible. This combined with imo too long map intros lead to often cutting to gameplay as demos reached mid.

This is one side of the story, we had people in chat and crowd often complaining it was too loud. Any time it was off completely though, that was obviously production’s fault.

The observers had so much to think about this lan. To do pip they had to have the game running twice, and manage when those were shown on screen with their own OBS setup. Observing TF2 is incredibly intense at the best of times, especially without a cheat feed or at least the minimap we had last year. Big credit to gemm and Sim who both did great.

Sometimes we just need something to allow casters to move from couch to desk where we’re not showing the cams. The alternative would have been cutting to (an empty) crowd cam with music for 2 minutes, and yet I don’t think you would have whinged about that?

TurboTabs had a no breaks policy, which was fine. The trouble was no one was monitoring desk during this time, checking on Grumpy, as we were so stretched planning the grand final logistics. I put this down to lack of staff and shit out of our control.

It's not "should we keep producing", it's "does anyone else wanna do it".

As the one who spent the most time on the desk (joined by ArchRhythm the rest of the time), I feel like I can provide answers for at least a few of the issues raised.

(this got really long so it's gonna be across a few messages)

Ah, thanks for clearing that up for us...