ESOCommunity

Hey everyone!

As you should all know, we've ran 5 major events and 5 minor events over the last two-and-a-half-ish years, and collaborated with other community groups and members for several other events as well. Our format has evolved over time, in large part do to your feedback!

As we look to wrap up another successful event with the finals of the Spring Championship between LordRaphael and BlackStar_OP later this weekend, we'd like to hear your feedback as both a player and spectator so we can look to improve future events!

Be sure to comment about anything, be it rules, prizes, maps, timeframes, casting, etc.—you name it!—we want to hear your thoughts! But please take a moment to answer at least these couple of questions, regardless of whether you actually plan to play in the next tournament or just to watch:

1) What would it take to get you excited to play in the next event? What would it take to get you excited to watch it?
2) What do you think works best about our events currently? What doesn't work?

Aw, I suck at giving feedbacks. (Shit post #1)

I think there should be less frequent 1v1 tourneys like this one. I believe this will draw more people of high level into them.
The team tourney was a nice idea, it is just a bit sad that the series were so decisive towards one team.
I liked the strong world event as well, its pretty sad it couldn't be organised. Maybe the 1v1 event should be the main event of the year and then some other smaller events like invitationals can me organised in between. I just think that one tourney where all the good players (or most of them) are participating is better than many tourneys where some top players are competing.

Personally I prefer that there are plenty of tournament 1v1 with the favorite players who are present each time ... I would like to be a spectator of a tournament featuring
-H2O-bsop-lordraphael-samwise12-snowww-princeofkabul-goongoon-mitoe-diarouga-garja etc.
After that remains my simple opinion

make a tourney on normal patch i think more people will join

1) If I didn't live in Australia and worked, I could schedule a game, now that'd be exciting! As for being excited to watch, just need good quality players trying to play at their best. I'd personally like a wider variety of casters but I know people also have lives and I'll always be happy to just have it casted by anyone.

2)What works is pretty much everything that I don't mention next. What doesn't work is probably not letting games be streamed at certain times ie Mondays or well it seemed like that despite the rules. Also looking at our authorised casters, it seems half of them haven't casted or streamed a game all tourney which is fine, but we also have people wanting to stream and cast earlier in the tourney and being denied the right to do so. if my memory serves me correctly. Maybe our media team could approach anyone who isn't on the authorised list, that streams and get them on the list. I'm not sure how to go about getting more games streamed and ensure a high quality is kept but a look at it would be good.

Some map diversification would be great. I liked the idea of the veto rule but it seems it has just resulted in more stale mu's and denied different play styles from being successful.

Other random thoughts: A high lvl invitational tourney with like 4 groups of 4 going into elimination or something over a weekend would be dope if you got a few players to clear there schedules for a weekend. Or just a like day single elim tourney would also be cool. Line a few casters up, heaps of people could stream their own games, and ESOC just casts the games they think would be best.

1) Becuase of good players like BlackStar_OP , H20 ,Raphael, IrishFaithful etc I'm excited to watch how they play!
2)Probably the events are successful becuase of the prize pool and the fame you get when u play in the tournament!
Feedback:
1) Would like to see minor DM tourney
2)I Think the map pool for players should have 50% land and water maps becuase a player must know to play in all styles.

Overall its a good thing and really interesting. Especially with the patch where each tourney has different strats. Besides that Id prefer if there are more watermaps. I know most of the people think sea play is boring but still its an interesting strat and very hard to execute properly. Probably not as Marco said 50% water maps because it would be a little bit too much but 25% would be nice.

more 1 weekend events, only 1-2 big tournaments like this one a year. winning the small events should get you better seed at the big ones

Tournaments are nice so far. I agree it's better one big tournament for a year, and other small tournaments to test new things out. Like water maps tournament, team matches, invitationals, ffa's, card games etc. Also when i miss streams the videos on youtube are uploaded pretty late, i would like to see videos in a shorter period of time.

I really liked the organization of the few last tournament. I think this site is build very well, it's ez to shedul, bet event is a lot of fun too... A big thank you to the people who make it possible : developpement team, media team, @Goodspeed, donator etc

There is still 3 points I think about that could improve my feeling :

1-The lack of water map as people said. Tbh I dislike the idea of map veto, because itbresult with only standard maps.

2-(Not very important) I don't know the statistic and you have probably more information than me about this, but the check in 2 weeks before tourney seems irrelevant to me. It wasn't a bad idea, but it failed Imo, because the amount of game played remind unchanged.

3-The most important point in my opinion :
The is much too much top players that don't play because of problems with the staff :
Diarouga, goongoon, japancommunity (think boneng, nagayumi...), kynesie, musketJr...
That's huge for the viewer. And that's not new, because we missed bsop and snowww until this tourney. I think you should try to bring back as many of them as you can for the next tourney because the hype would be huge !

National cup？

bwinner1 Has reason more there will be competent player come (diarouga goongoon etc) this will be better

bwinner1 wrote:I really liked the organization of the few last tournament. I think this site is build very well, it's ez to shedul, bet event is a lot of fun too... A big thank you to the people who make it possible : developpement team, media team, @Goodspeed, donator etc

There is still 3 points I think about that could improve my feeling :

1-The lack of water map as people said. Tbh I dislike the idea of map veto, because itbresult with only standard maps.

2-(Not very important) I don't know the statistic and you have probably more information than me about this, but the check in 2 weeks before tourney seems irrelevant to me. It wasn't a bad idea, but it failed Imo, because the amount of game played remind unchanged.

3-The most important point in my opinion :
The is much too much top players that don't play because of problems with the staff :
Diarouga, goongoon, japancommunity (think boneng, nagayumi...), kynesie, musketJr...
That's huge for the viewer. And that's not new, because we missed bsop and snowww until this tourney. I think you should try to bring back as many of them as you can for the next tourney because the hype would be huge !

agree with point 3 especially. Probably leave the personal problems out and try to convince them to join,.. Will give the tournament more depth. Ofc I cant be ending in insultings during the tournament.

try to sweet talk some japanese players on these tournaments. more events. split the prize for top 4 players.

I'd also like to see more water mapsh and some diversification in comparison with the 2nd Chance Tournament, which is basically played on the same pools
There was a complaint where Spring 2017 was announced that the prize pool was not divided fairly, the fourth place receives no money as of right now, so you may want to look at it next time.
About the tournament frequency — definitely keep it up, don't decrease the number of main events. Donations are coming and we have money to spend, so really 2 main events per year look like the absolute minimum, but I'm glad there are smaller tourneys being hosted in between the ASC ones. I, as a proud captain, have a chance to compete in many circumstances. Since August 2016, it was: Starvation Tournament, ASC Autumn, Team Treaty Brawl, Autumn Second Chance, Insight Invitational, Diplomunion Tournament, ASC Spring, Spring Second Chance. Super cool!
On the other hand, I encountered rather negative comments from better players, like I think WickedCossack, as they get to play like 2/3 times a year just a couple of series in the main event to be eliminated eventually and wait a some more months to try again.

For me the best thing is probably the map veto, since it allows people to not play on a map they dislike. And so, we do not see random "omg this map sucks" which is pleasant when you make maps.
I don't think the map veto changed drastically the matches into standard ones. I think it's not something about tourney especially, but esoc maps pool, which is really "standard". I would say that only 4 maps out of 27 are quite unorthodox overall : Cascade Range, Klondike, Indonesia, and Bonnie Springs. And since tourneys are played on it, we see standard games. You can open a topic about this issue on the esoc patch subforum, I think it will be really worth it to discuss about esoc maps variety for the next map patch release for instance.

Yeah sadly, the double check-in didn't work although it was a good idea in theory.

I think top players aren't playing in the tourney because they aren't playing at all. For what I know, the only player which is not currently accepted in esoc events is diarouga (please don't start the 36th debate whether he should be or not, i'm just saying it for the information). All other top players are of course welcome, and esoc can not do much than saying they are welcome and there are prizepools > 1000$

1. No water games, 4 whales is not enough and one of the players always banning indonesia.
2. Get japan players, maybe listen what they want to change in patch and stop buffing the admin's favourite dutch
3. Cut half of the Riki's maps because they are horrible. Garja could make some new ones and replace.
4. Nobody wants to watch replays. So start casting also mondays instead of saying it's a bad day to cast.

1) I'd like to propose that ESOC uses a medal or trophy system and the way for get them could be like: -Do the craziest strategy in the tournament and win. -Win the most longest game in the whole tournament, etc...
We could use this system for the forum too, like: -The most active player and things like that.
I also would like to go too far in a point system, wich will work for trade them for an ESO account or a map dedicated for him or things like that. You'll earn points posting, receiving likes, and joining tournaments/events, also we could mix this with @Goodspeed 's bets, we could use those points for bets too.

2) What works best for me, is the veto system, pretty cool, it gives you the feeling that you can interact in the tournament aside playing and it gives you more freedom. You can't obligate a player to play in a map that he doesn't want to, so this is pretty nice.

3) About the Diarouga case xD... In my opinion we should let him play the tournaments for the good of the competitive community, cuz this last tournament was one of the weakest in level. We should separate the tournaments and the forums, i mean, you all can keep Diarouga as banned and don't let him comment or post something, but let him play the tournament and schedule at least.

I want to watch replays

A better version of Somppu's 3rd point: Let's collectively donate $200 to Garja to give him motivation to make 10 new competitive maps.

Just wanted to comment on the Japanese community. I got their feedback on the first iteration of the EP and they liked it a lot. I also got feedback from them to have more diversity in the maps which I agreed with.

Then next tournament boneng didn't like that there were too many new maps to learn. In the end, we had to choose between doing new things and keeping two players from Japanese community who were not compromising and weren't ever going to make it to the finals. Those two are also just inactive today, it's not like they are in QS waiting to play, and if only the ESOC staff would talk to them. They are just being rolled in to make a list of 3 people seem bigger. Boneng also told me that there was not much out reach we could do as the Japanese community was on a continual decline. I'm guessing he also just moved on.

Diarouga - would be nice to have back.
Kynesie - lag to RO4, always welcome to play if he decides to fix his internet. Every game he's in and freezing up the game is completely unfair to his opponent.
Goongoon - Would be nice to have back. Been friends with him for a long time. Just talked to him on skype. He doesn't play because it is hard to find games during EU mornings. He says the game is objectively empty and also is not sure he wants to put the time in to practice for tournaments. He is not boycotting ESOC events.
Musketjr - would be nice to have back. is he around? I haven't seen him. Last I remember was from the winter tournament.

That puts the list at two people "boycotting" the events.

That also puts the list of people barred from events at one. Yes there is literally one person who is banned from entry. I have also talked to that one person many times to try and improve things. But when you have flamed half of the staff (of ~20 people) and won't stop, why would you expect to be playing in the event.

When you look at the message above the summary is this:
3 Players have stopped playing the game as much. Not because of ESOC. 1 Player lags too much to play in tournaments. 1 Player is banned (diarouga). 1 Player is boycotting (musketjr?).

In regards to the other feedback, thank you for that. We are always looking to make the events better. Please do keep giving this feedback. This is how things like the group stage and map veto have come about. We are only able to think about adding these features because of all the things we have already done.

So far I am seeing a few themes.

1. Water Maps (We tried this before, turns out that players are against it. Viewers are also against it when they are playing their own games personally. Seems people enjoy watching the top player suffer with the aoe3 water design! )

2. More awards (we have the badge system now, we are playing catch up making winners badges before we can start doing cool ideas. Always a possibility for next event).

3. Add a small fourth place prize (we are raising more money than we have in the past so this is more sensible now)

Rikikipu wrote:For me the best thing is probably the map veto, since it allows people to not play on a map they dislike. And so, we do not see random "omg this map sucks" which is pleasant when you make maps.
I don't think the map veto changed drastically the matches into standard ones. I think it's not something about tourney especially, but esoc maps pool, which is really "standard". I would say that only 4 maps out of 27 are quite unorthodox overall : Cascade Range, Klondike, Indonesia, and Bonnie Springs. And since tourneys are played on it, we see standard games. You can open a topic about this issue on the esoc patch subforum, I think it will be really worth it to discuss about esoc maps variety for the next map patch release for instance.

Yeah, that's why I dislike the veto option: we will never have a unstandard map again.

First of all let me say that I am very pleased with the current state of ESOC. The fact that such a small comunity is able to fund such a tournament and that a group of unpaid people is able to organize an event with players around the globe amazes me. Also 2nd Chance Tourney is great for players of my skill level, please keep that.

In terms of room for improvement i will have to echo a lot of previous posts:
1. more water maps (maybe remove map veto again)
2. allow casts during the week (I really do not get the reasoning behind not doing that)
3. maybe cut down the finals to BO7 (BO9 seems excessive to me)
4. most importantly more small inivtational events (1v1, 2v2, something gimmicky like Starvation)
4.1 A set of continentel cups where the Top 8 of the last main tournament is banned. Scheduling should be much easier here and the winner harder to predict. (You could do N-America, S-America, Asia/Oceania, Western Europe, Eastern Europe (maybe put Germany here if there are not enough players), I don't know if we have enough African players so you might wanna add them to one of the European ones. And as Umeu suggested have the winners earn top 16 seeds with that.)