Another season of the GSL Starcraft II Open is upon us and with it comes another $90,000 USD(approx) grand prize for the winner. Oh, did I mention the tournament was even better this time around? It is.
GOMtv has gone to great lengths to improve the production value of this tournament is quite a number of ways, paying special attention to areas that viewers had been
What GOMtv Did Right
Season 2 Discount - GOMtv decided to offer a 25% discount to those viewers who purchased the Season 1 season ticket. I was more than willing to pay $19.95, but $14.95 is even better. Plus, if you were one of those people who decided against watching the GSL, GOMtv has a package for you too! For $24.95 USD, you get Season 1 VODs(Video on Demand) and Season 2 Live+VOD. That's $15.00 off what they'd be seperately! Full details here.
Better Resolutions - The live stream in High Quality seems significantly smoother than it did in Season 1, at least for me while Standard Quality(free) looks about the same. The biggest change was to the VOD resolutions. You can now watch the full replays of the games in 720p! During Season 1, no one could really read any of the numbers in the production tabs or the game time. Now, everything is easily readable and it's almost like you're observing the game yourself. Bravo on this change!
New Chat Function - About midway through the first season, GOMtv disabled the chat feature on the website due both to stupid spammers and idiots as well as the cumbersome nature of the program. It was like chatting using Facebook status updates. Now we get a slick new chat feature with the ability to create public and private rooms and monitored by GOMtv personnel to keep the junk to a minimum.
What They Didn't Do
Learn From Their Mistakes - Day 1 of the first season saw most viewers unable to watch the opening ceremonies due to issues with the HQ feed. The SQ feed was working, but since it was free and user-capped, it was full a minute past start time. I myself couldn't start watching until almost two hours into it.
This season I expected to be better. I mean, they knew what was going to happen and they prepared for it, right? Right? No. The first game was over before most could access either the HQ or SQ feeds. Seems the servers couldn't handle the amount of people trying to connect at once. I wonder how hard it is to compare the number of paying customers to the number of open connections and make sure they match.
Lack of Forum Presence - What made the above issue even more irritating is the 4-5 pages of posts on the GOMtv tournament forums detailing this issue and all the people stating they couldn't connect. Where was GOMtv? Apparently not looking at the forums, the only means their customers can communicate with them in some semblance of a speedy fashion.
It wasn't until after the issue had been fixed that we heard anything from GOMtv. They issues a brief news post saying that they had fixed the problem and to try now. This was long after everyone had realized it was working and was happily watching the games. They could really use someone watching those forums and tasked with keeping their viewers in the loop. A simple "We're working on it" would have been fine.
Lack of iPhone/iPod Support - Promised in Season 1 but never delivered(despite many people purchasing the tickets just for this feature). Not even mentioned on the Season 2 website. Not that this is a bad thing; better to not say anything than to get people's hopes up. Just would be a nice thing to be able to access while I'm sitting around waiting for an appointment or something.
The Final Word
All in all, the pros outweigh the cons by an Ultralisk or two. The streams are steady now, they're even better quality than before, and the games are just as, if not more, competitive and exciting to watch. If you haven't even considered watching these games, I say go check out the site. Watch one of the VODs and see for yourself what all the fuss is about. For future reference, the fuss is about this.
Im so glad i got that discounted ticket from watching the GSL S1. S1 was awesome, i bought the ticket mainly for the VoDs and i defo got my moneys worth there, but S2 has been insane from the off, really enjoying it atm, and i think they are going to get better and better
ReplyDelete@Sean: I completely agree with you about S2 being insane. The competition level has jumped tremendously with the influx of old Starcraft I pro gamers just now deciding Starcraft II is here to stay. I can't wait until we get down to R8 or so and it really heats up!
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