Slashdot Mirror
The Logistics of an eSports Tournament
An anonymous reader writes: Wargaming's hugely popular World of Tanks game sees its biggest tournament of the year, The Grand Finals, taking place this weekend. In an interview published today, the developer's eSports director, Mohamed Fadl, reveals just what goes into preparing a tournament for both thousands of spectators at the venue, and millions more streaming online.
"The infrastructure behind such an event is the most challenging task," he reveals. "Ten highly qualified IT managers, 28 on-air casters and around 50 additional TV staff will be doing their best...A TV level production setup, 170 computers, a total of 1.3GB/s bandwidth and 16 cameras plus 14 player cameras." And all for just 12 teams playing one strategy game.
"The infrastructure behind such an event is the most challenging task," he reveals. "Ten highly qualified IT managers, 28 on-air casters and around 50 additional TV staff will be doing their best...A TV level production setup, 170 computers, a total of 1.3GB/s bandwidth and 16 cameras plus 14 player cameras." And all for just 12 teams playing one strategy game.
Sound like...real tanks may be easier to manage.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
It's a real-time third-and-first-person shooter with a modest attempt at realistic physics simulation for projectile ballistics, impact damage modeling, friction coefficients for different environments and even the individual tanks' mechanical differences (transmission efficiency, ground pressure, etc.).
'nuff said.
What? Athletes? Assholes? Aardvarks?
Sponsoring an esports event is one thing, but actually facilitating it is another thing entirely. You also need enough doritos and mountain dew to give the furnature diabetes.
Good people go to bed earlier.
So, the "biggest eSports" tournament isn't even as big or logistically complicated as a lightly attended baseball game here in my mid-sized market town?
Color me unimpressed.
Seriously, as far as "big" events goes, the "World Of Tanks Grand Finals" doesn't even make the needle twitch off the zero peg. And not even the "on a computer" aspect is very interesting here in 2015.
Ok, just like the robot wars (I like those, personally) that they tried to televise and failed miserably due to lack of viewership, the gamers are going to suffer the same fate. The mass appeal of watching someone play video games is just not there. It only appeals to other hardcore gamers and those that want to be hardcore gamers. That crowd is just not big enough to sustain something like this in the mainstream. Sure, you can have your local, regional and national level tournaments and they can be successful, just like chess tournaments. You'll have family and friends and some groupies at the tournaments, and they may number in the thousands, but the dream of "millions more streaming online" is just a dream.
Here's what NCAA basketball did for the Final Four, for an example of what you're up against: (and they have a lot more money and resources to throw at the problem)
In addition to the record-breaking television audience, more people tuned in using NCAA March Madness Live. Across online and mobile (tablets and smart phones) platforms, the two semifinal games netted 3.8 million live streams for an increase of 76 percent from last year. The doubleheader also combined to register more than one million hours of live video consumed, up 37 percent from 2013.
Throughout the course of the tournament, 9.9 million unique viewers (up 9 percent from 2013) streamed 70 million live video streams (up 42 percent from 2013). A total of 15.1 million live hours were watched (up 7 percent from 2013). The NCAA March Madness Live app was downloaded more than 4.5 million times.
I would like to see the numbers they have for their millions of streaming viewers. CSGO is a much bigger eSport and just recently, at Katowice, broke 1 million concurrent viewers.
I'm 38 years old. I've been gaming since as long as I can remember. From arcade games, home computers, consoles, and handhelds. I'm still a gamer today. But I can't imagine anything as boring as watching other people play a videogame. I'd rather watch golf and I don't even play.
Is one person with a vision to make a "dream team". That is, a boy-band with charming good looks and musical ability that also has the chops to make it in competitive sports.
Really??
I attend Fragapalooza on a yearly basis and they manage ~200 folks, I've volunteered a few times myself for setup / teardown and over the years some things have become apparent:
1. Power
Having stable power distribution is your top priority, no matter how much you've solved other problems when power goes down it's going to kill everything. Worse yet if you have rolling power issues that's going to put a real kink in your tournament scheduling. The main thing to consider when it comes to power distribution is what kind of hardware is going to show up, if you are using tournament machines where every build is identical then it shouldn't be a problem, if people are bringing their own machines you're going to have to sort out wildly fluctuating power configurations.
2. LAN
Your LAN setup needs to be flawless, monitored and set up to find and eliminate problems. That one person who shows up with DHCP turned on is going to be a cancer, the faster you can find problems like that and solve them the better. You'll also need people to keep an eye out for hacking, tournament play, it happens
3. WAN
Problem 1: You're hosting a LAN style event with a required WAN connection, you can do everything in your power to ensure that you've got the bandwidth to handle X number of simultaneous players as well as whatever the players who aren't in the tournament are playing, even if you handle this perfectly online-only games are a bitch to run tournaments for because if the servers you are connecting to go down your event is over or will drag on way too long. Even checking for potential maintenance windows to ensure there's not going to be downtime during your tournament hours is something important that's easily overlooked.
Other stuff you're going to need to consider is gate security and floor security, not just for things like theft but also for ... conflagrations between players. When people get mad you need to be able to deal with them quickly otherwise things start to escalate, it's bad for your event, it's bad for your attendees.
Anyway, all this stuff probably seems obvious but it's hard to achieve AND maintain
crazy dynamite monkey
The logistics of a league organized by a video game's publisher are one thing. The logistics of an independent league would be something else entirely. Let's compare with physical sports:
The difference is that in e-sports, nobody else can run a league because a video game's copyright owner has legal power to suppress live streams of the game.
QuakeCon's Bring Your Own Computer area can reach 2500+. 170 is nothing.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
I used to play, and enjoyed it a lot, but I ended up making an in-game purchase where there was a difference between what I thought would happen (from the docs and my possibly flawed understanding) and what actually happened, such that I would have to make another purchase to get what I originally wanted, and their customer support said it was my fault and refused to do anything - even though they could just as well have undone what mistakenly happened. That spoiled it for me.
Actually, after that, they sent me advertising emails for quite a long time - the opt-out didn't work (I hadn't opted-in, mind you, but IME most companies add pretty much every email address they get by whatever means to a mailing list, so they've failed to reach a low bar pretty much everyone fails to reach), and emailing them didn't work either. I think in the end I changed my email domain, as I do every so many years, and that solved the problem from my end.
eSports are not fucking sports.
I'm thinking most likely the first, possibly the second