March 9th marked a rather significant event, it was the final day of the Kung Fu Cup Chinese qualifiers and signaled the completion of the first major event run and organized by eSports Heaven. Although we'd previously worked with our Chinese partners SCBoys NeoTV to provide English language broadcasts for Kung Fu Cup, GPL, and WCS China Challenger, our participation had always been limited to merely providing an English language stream. The non-Chinese qualifiers for the Kung Fu Cup are the first event we'd been directly responsible for organizing and managing. With that in mind I wanted to write a blog about how I think the event went, what we did right, and what we need to improve on for next time. This is going to be a little less formal and a little more candid then the stuff I typically write here, but given how invested I am in this project I don't think it's possible or appropriate for me to attempt to write about this event from a presumption of journalistic disinterest. 

The Event Itself

The event itself went fairly smoothly, and I think of it as an overall success, especially considering it was our debut event. We ran a total of 7 qualifiers across three different time zones in just over a week. This was taxing as hell on everyone's sleep schedule, but the European members of our team had it the worst. The NA qualifiers begin at 2AM their time and ran for up to four hours. I'm incredibly grateful for their commitment and passion, and I plan to go further in depth on them when I write about our team. Our viewership for the event was a great start, we peaked at just under five thousand concurrent viewers for our second Korean qualifier. We obviously hope to have better numbers going forwards, but we feel that this is absolutely a solid foundation that we can continue to build from.

Organizationally there is one major thing I'd change. Looking forwards we should have scheduled both the SEA and NA qualifiers an hour or two earlier. The NA qualifiers begin at 6:00PM PST but this meant that players on the East Coast weren't starting till 9:00PM their time. There were also some player feedback on the SEA front that 7:00PM AEST was too late to start. I'd like to make it clear to any players reading this that we have absolutely heard your feedback and we will incorporate it into our schedule planning for any further events that we may organize and run. Now onto some more specific aspects I want to talk about.

The Broadcast

I'm really proud of our broadcasts, but I cannot take credit for it. We were lucky enough to get the chance to work with Qruxel eSports Studios run by Ludvig Fjell. Ludvig provided production values that far outstripped anything we could have done without him. I think Ludvig's talents allowed us to deliver a premium stream that was really a special experience for people.

One issue that cropped up was our lack of transcoding options for most of our broadcasts. For those that do not know, transcoding options are only guaranteed for partnered streams. Twitch will often provide temporary transcode options for (non-partnered) streams that have high viewer counts (from past experience it usually only requires about +100 viewers), but for whatever reason transcode options eluded us for the vast majority of our broadcasts. Ludvig's studio has the gear and bandwidth necessary to output an absurdly high quality stream, but without transcoding options many of our viewers struggled to view the source quality we were broadcasting for our first qualifier. I was in constant communication with Twitch throughout the ordeal, and we were eventually partnered, but it came into effect the night after our final qualifier so sadly it didn't improve viewer experience for our qualifiers, but it will be in affect for the Kung Fu Cup main event! My advice to unpartnered channels that have any kind of upcoming major events, reach out to Twitch. Before we found out we'd been partnered they were open to the idea of providing transcode temporary options for our major events as long as we gave them a schedule in advance. You don't want a lack of transcode options impeding your ability to serve content to viewers with less than stellar internet. 

The final broadcast issue I wanted to address was that of a side stream. Rifkin of BaseTradeTV reached out to us before the first qualifier and asked if they could do a side stream for the qualifiers. We were initially wary of the idea of allowing a side stream. We were an unpartnered channel desperate for viewers in order to secure the much coveted transcode options. BaseTrade is obviously a much more established organization and we were well aware of the fact that their viewership would likely eclipse ours. Ultimately we decided to allow BaseTrade to do a stream so long as they agreed to hand off to us at the round of four, when we begin casting all games on our stream. I think this was the right decision, it was better for both the event and viewers to have more games casted, and working with BaseTrade certainly helped to increase exposure for the event.

Challenges

I want to go over some of the challenges we encountered and how we dealt with them. Some of them we probably could have dealt with better, but some were handled optimally.

Before the tournament started communication with players was a major issue. I was able to reach out to some managers, but the non-Korean qualifiers had rather underwhelming initial sign ups (the event organizer has KeSPA contacts so Koreans were easy to communicate with). Simply tweeting at players “Hey $21k tournament region locked qualifiers why aren't you signed up?” Seemed crass and spammy, but I often felt it was my only option. Going forwards I will try to do a better job of networking in advance in order to ensure that communicating information about our tournaments to potential players is easier.

The first issue we encountered was during the first American qualifier, it was a bracket breaking bug in Binary Beast. You can see the bugged bracket here (http://binarybeast.com/xHotS1502202). For some reason Binary Beast was advancing the “Free Win” to the Round of 32 rather than advancing Kiopas. This prevented us from reporting MajOr's win (it would say already reported when we attempted to report it), and there was zero documentation of this bug on the internet. We begin playing around with advance settings, while our admin tracked MajOr's run manually. Eventually I discovered it was possible to force MajOr's advancement by changing his bracket score under the “Edit” option next to his name on the player list. Looking back this seems like a minor incident, but at the time it felt like a rather daunting issue.

We also had issues with our foreign language stream. We discovered that our Russian caster was not using the delay he was told too. We gave him a warning and asked him to adjust the delay, but his delay was clearly insufficient even after we gave him a chance to adjust. Going forwards I'm not sure if giving him a second chance was reasonable considering we'd made it exceptionally clear that the delay was mandatory when we allowed him to broadcast a Russian stream. 

The final challenge was simply dealing with trolls. There were fake casters in the channel including a fake TaKeTV and someone impersonating our own caster Zeweig. Thankfully they were all identified and nothing came of their attempts to get into the games. That being said it certainly added another layer of stress ontop of an already high-tension environment.

The Channel

Our channel experienced unprecedented growth with this tournament. As stated above we had a peak viewership of 4,925, and according to Social Blade we experienced an absurdly high 119% growth rate for our followers during the course of this event. After our 2nd Korean qualifier Fuzic ranked us as the 13th most popular StarCraft stream. Our total views on the channel grew from less than 100,000 to 163,157, and our follower count climbed to nearly 2,000. We are very happy with the growth we experienced, but we're ambitious and hungry for more. 

In addition to Kung Fu Cup, The GPL, and WCS China, we're in talks with the organizers of multiple weekly events in order to further supplement our content. We love the direction our channel is going in and we look forward to continuing to provide the best content we can. 

Our Team

I'm honored to work with such a talented and hardworking team, and I want to highlight their skills and accomplishments here

Alex “Zeweig” Lind and Lucas “Tenshi” Collard: These guys are our casters, and you're very familiar with them if you've been following the KFC qualifiers. They've sacrificed their sleep for the event and were fueled entirely by passion and energy drinks that will hopefully sponsor us one day.

Andrazh “eLephaNt” Klevzhe: eLephaNt worked as the main admin throughout the event, he did an incredible job and I highly recommend hiring him if you need a thorough, professional, and patient admin for your tournament.

Ludvig Fjell: Ludvig is a genius. I cannot overstate this guy's level of talent and passion. He used his Qruxel studio to help us deliver a truly premium product and I think this was reflected in people's feelings about our content. If you need a whitebox production label to help boost your event's production values I cannot recommend Qruxel enough.

Hao “Digmouse” Wu: Digmouse has been an invaluable part of our team since we begin providing English language streams for Chinese events. He acts as our liaison with our Chinese partners, and is often the person who notices a problem or solution before anyone. We're incredibly fortunate to work with him. Digmouse had this to add

Frankly speaking, I wasn't sure about doing the whole international coverage thing. As many of you might know, China as a Starcraft scene is largely undiscovered and buried under various factors like a standalone battle.net or huge timezone difference. Last year's GPL and Kung Fu Cup broadcast ran into a lot of unforeseen difficulties and despite the joint effort by the ESH team, things do not always go according to plan.

For the guys at SCBoy, they are incredibly experienced at running events and doing broadcasts but when it comes to doing a full fledged international event, even if it is just online, is a new challenge. But for such a huge 21k$ prize pool, not doing qualifiers seems underwhelming, it soon became clear that doing qualifiers should always be a brainless decision.

Luckily I have the luxury to work with some of the best and humble people in the industry, Joe's connections ensures we have enough sign-ups for a relatively low-profile new event; Alex and Lucas devoted countless hours of their time to broadcast some of the finest Starcraft II games I've ever watched; Elephant's flawless admin skills means Kung Fu Cup has a solid reputation among players to go forward; last but not least, Ludwig's studio and his production skills are simply out of the world. I couldn't thank you guys enough for all of this.

Going forward, Kung Fu Cup and GPL/WCS China will continue to have awesome international coverage. For Chinese Starcraft, they are crucial parts of its revitalizing and expansion, hope all the western Starcraft fans enjoy the content we can provide!

And a special thanks to Kwame “Temp0” Mensah who filled in for Alex during the final qualifier. He was a pleasure to work with and a great guy to have around!

eSports Heaven will continue to provide English coverage of the Kung Fu Cup, but the SCBoys will running the tournament. Make sure to follow us on Esportshtv so you don't miss it!

Those are all my thoughts, but I'll keep an eye on the comments and try to answer any questions you may have. 

Be sure to follow Joe on Twitter for more breaking news and great eSports content! @ploguidic3