MLG Dallas was the first Major North American SCII tournament of 2011. It is leading in to several even larger events. The NASL starts a week from today, as well as the newly announced IGN tournaments ( Information on that can be found here: http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=209144). And it probably went very well for the players. Naniwa, the beast from Europe put on an incredible performance. Select showed some amazing multitasking, pulling poor players like iNcontroL apart. Kiwikaki put on his usually epic showing. Liquid was something of a disappointment and FXOMoonan was the Dark Horse, doing incredibly well given his low profile.
But it should be noted that the story of MLG Dallas has nothing to do with the players. It isn't how iNcontroL proved he hasn't lost his touch. It wasn't Naniwa's nearly perfect record, or Liquid's cannibalism in the upper part of the gauntlet bracket. It wasn't Idra vs HuK or Moonan's run through the gauntlet rounds.It wasn't dignitas's incredible showing or Root's general dominance. Nor was it Sheth actually appearing at a tournament.
The story of MLG Dallas was its incredible failure. Problems started early Friday night, with general complaints of bad quality. It worsened after the first match up with the stream dying for well over an hour. Already MLG lost much of their European audience, as well as those simply unwilling to wait for hours for the stream to come back up. Eventually they got it back up and running, and it remained so for the rest of the night.
The stream returned Saturday, and I remained hopeful. I hoped that the stream wouldn't die on us again, and that I could watch good Starcraft for the day. The first match up proved to be a very one sided affair between HuK and Moonan. They started dde versus Grubby. And the lag began. It destroyed all the MLG streams and stopped the Starcraft competition for hours. After several hours, the games returned. The Starcraft stream did not. For a good six hours (11am to 5pm local time) the stream was dead. I don't know why I sat their reading the Teamliquid LR thread and hitting f5. But I did. For six hours. Finally Day9 and DJwheat came back to commentate replays.
It appeared to be that the local internet was being a tool, and MLG couldn't stream live games without them lagging horribly. Whatever the cause, it appeared MLG didn't have anything resembling a back up plan. Rather than giving us the replays from the start (and given the pool play going on, their should have been many many good replays.) we sat and waited. And when the stream did come back it was very disjointed and not very well put together. Destiny vs. Response here. 2/3rds of HuK versus Gretorp there. It was not very entertaining to watch.
Even by Sunday morning they didn't have their shit together. More stream isues started off the day, something they managed to quickly fix by hacking the High Quality stream (Although by all accounts we missed an excellent qxc vs Sheth matchup). But by this time I, for one was burned out. And all the housework I delayed to Sunday I still had to do. I caught probably two thirds of the games, but I just didn't care anymore.
This should serve as a warning to the other tournaments out there. MLG lost a bunch of viewers, a lot of respect, and was forced to offer refunds for the high quality stream. You have to make sure your streams are working, and your prepared for what is coming at you. And you should certainly have a back-up plan or three. Much of Saturday could have been salvaged if MLG had gotten us watching replays three hours earlier. Maybe replays aren't as good as live, but they are a hell of a lot better than nothing, and you can feed us them until you get your problems under control. Or get someone out there doing interviews. And above all make sure we, the views know what is going on.
Players to Watch:
Naniwa
Moonan
Kiwikaki
Select
Poor showings:
Gretorp
Fenix
Team Liquid except for TLO
Epic Games:
Select vs iNcontroL Game 2
(supposedly) Sheth vs qxc both games
Kiwikaki vs Idra Game 2
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