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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.
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.).
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.
10 IT managers and however many technicians for 170 computers AND millions of people trying to livestream the event, its likely justified.
Personally I'd rather have my idiots at home glued to the TV than out doing idiotic things
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.
From the League of Legends World Championship (season 3)
"Over 32 million fans watched SK Telecom T1 earn the Summoner's Cup in front of a sold-out Staples Center. At peak, more than 8.5 million fans were watching at the same time."
and season 4:
"During the final showdown between Samsung White and Royal Club, the peak concurrent viewers (the highest number of fans watching at once) was 11.2 million - a climb from 8.7 million in 2013. Overall total unique viewer count for the finals came in at 27 million, from 32 million in 2013."
So apparently international E-Sports competition is larger than the NBA world cup, and the crowd is definitely big enough to sustain something like this...unless you are saying that live sports markets aren't big enough to be sustainable either?
There can be some interest in watching if you are interested in certain strategies and those strategies are displayed in that way. That, however, is highly dependent on the game and how it is played.
If it is just a bunch of players who are better at micromanagement than the other players are while using some bland tactics, then yeah, there's nothing to see. That's why watching RTS bores the crap out of me. It's a bunch of people who are better at micro than others.
FPS team games can be more interesting, especially if they somehow switch up the maps so that they aren't the same maps everyone else plays and possibly even a surprise to the teams. Then you rely on team tactics and recon to figure out how to get the objective or use terrain to your advantage. That can be very interesting to watch a well executed game of that. Anything that breaks the game out of the same, run at the door, throw the flashbang over the wall, rush objective A, rinse and repeat, every single time.
LoL and Starcraft have been doing esports for many many years now. LoL in particular has been growing quite a bit even as SC2 tapers off in enthusiasm.
Heck, check the page for LoL eSports' Spring 2015 playoffs. Playoff games are getting 250,000 viewers.
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
Strong this.
I watch League of Legends professional play fairly regularly.
I'm personally Platinum-ranked in League of Legends myself. This means I'm (barely) in the top 10% of LoL players.
The pros know SO MUCH more than I do, the way they develop and execute strategies, the little tricks they use to get the most out of their champions, it's all on a whole other level from what I know/do. So I watch them to learn from them. For those who play League, I mean things like using flash during Gragas bodyslam or Vi vaultbreaker to instant-hit the spell before your enemy can dodge, stuff like that. Before I watched LCS I didn't know you could flash mid-spell without interrupting the spell. I became a better player because I adapted what I watched into my own repertoire.
I don't honestly care very much who wins, although some teams are known for more innovation than others, so I tend to root for them >_>