Hello everyone,
now, you know I generally don’t write anything about e-sports (simply because I don’t follow it), but in this case, I think it’s worth writing a few lines. Last three days, we had the possibility to see the WGL finals in Warsaw on stream and I think it was a good thing there actually was an official stream of this event.
At first, I had no intention of watching the stream itself (basically, I only considered it my duty to get as many codes for you, readers, as possible on time) but in the end, I did watch some of the matches and I would like to share some of my impressions from the entire event with you. My point of view is the point of view of a newbie, who knows nothing about the qualification, teams and such, I only identified the teams by their name and the flags on their sleeves.
What I liked in particular:
- the entire thing looked professional. Commentators, moderators, match analysis, guests… I really had the impression I am watching Champion’s League, not some local 3rd league with local pub dwellers acting as match experts. It was clean and neat.
- the English commentators during the matches were fantastic, I liked them a lot – especially the fact that they talked a lot and they talked fast, they genuinely created this “sports feeling”. The only small issue with them was the woman, who occasionally made strange sounds when the guy was talking
- the hall was relatively full, it seems the show did draw quite a lot of people. Of course, this varied from match to match, but still.
- some of the matches were amazing, specifically that one where Lemming Train was 1v1 with Synergy (I think) and that guy finished him with one shot, that was really cool. Lemming Train played really well I think, I decided at one point it was my favourite team (so of course they lost, next time, I cheer for Navi!), the “Batman” was funny as well – you might think it’s silly, but every sport needs such colourful characters, they make it fun (much more so than the sullen bored faces of some other teams)
- the “twitter girl” was really pretty (but she didn’t interact a lot, did she)
- great soundtrack during breaks, some of the songs I loved
What I didn’t like:
- well, first and foremost, the entire gold code screwup. Leaks, the idiotic QR code system, the fact that WG staff was saying something (“there will be codes, just watch!”) and it was a lie (Support: “There will be no codes” – ooops, next morning, two more codes). I don’t mind the fact that someone screwed up that much (after all, Wargaming EU…), I mind the fact they lied about it. Also, getting a code was pure lottery, not in the sense you had to be quick to catch it, but both WoT and WoWp portals collapsed and whoever managed to get on the page was the lucky one
- crowds of gold beggars on chat, rendering it unusable until the moderators deployed a bot – seriously, who is dumb enough to think that begging for codes will bring them any faster (or at all in this case)?
- the chat profanity, including some Hall of Shame material (“Poles, go to Auschwitz” during LTR matches)
- some matches were nasty campfests. Cnnk (moderator and e-sports expert) commented that it was because Russian rules were used and non-RU teams weren’t used to that – something about draws and points encouraging camping, I don’t know, can’t comment on that
- after Poland lost, a lot of people from the audience left (understandeable)
- sometimes, for a person who doesn’t know anything about WGL, some teams were hard to identify (at first I had no idea which country/league some of the teams were representing), specifically why the fuck is Virtus Pro (completely Russian team) considered to be “European”? That’s stupid. Some argue that a Russian team belongs to the European league because Russia is a part of UEFA too and whatnot. Yea well, so is Azerbaijan…
- the amount of NAVI worshipping – okay, I got it, these guys are good and deserve praise, but honestly, calling them “gods of WoT”, “titans” etc. all the time, over and over. Ugh.
Additionally, I heard the final ceremony was just weird, too short… don’t know, didn’t watch it (sorry, I just can’t bring myself to care about finals, where I have noone I could even remotely care about).
Overall however, it was a nice stream experience. Won’t make me follow e-sports (what’s with the term anyway, it’s a game, not a sport), but it was okay. Hopefully, next time it will be without the massive fails, maybe it would be wise not to post gold codes during the streams at all (and announce it), you’d get rid of the gold beggers.
By the way, the event was massively popular in Russia, I think the total peak for all WoT streams is 100k, with 80k being Russians.
