Cheesadelphia was the largest StarCraft II LAN ever to be hosted in Philadelphia, and I had the pleasure and privilege of being heavily involved in making the whole event happen. Now that the event is over, and the dust has settled I wanted to take sometime to reflect on the event in hopes that I can shed some insight and perhaps provide some useful information for anyone who seeks to run their own events in the future.  

The Early Open Bracket Stages of Cheesadelphia

Before I jump too far into this I want to quickly go over my roles in helping to set up this tournament so you get an idea of the perspective I'm coming from in writing this article. I was brought into Cheesadelphia very early on, and was present at our first official meeting. I handled most of our outreach to organizations and players, wrote most of our advertisements and written content, helped with the organization side of things, and also casted at the actual event. The event I want to start by saying that myself and everybody else at N3rd Street Gamers (The organizers behind Cheesadelphia) believe the event was an unqualified success. Player turn out was significantly higher than we expected given that it was our first event. The organizers were nearly able to break even by sign up fees alone which is incredible given the fact that this was the first time that the folks at N3rd Street Gamers ran a StarCraft II event. The event also had a much higher player caliber than anyone was expecting. The primary reason we were able to attract such a high level play was that four strong North American teams (Psistorm, Flipsid3 Tactics, Endurance eSports, and Team Ascension) took it upon themselves to bring large portions of their professional rosters. I think Bails taking first prize was not a huge shock to anyone, he was after all the only player present to make it through the brutal gauntlet that is the WCS qualifiers, but it was awesome to see strong players like NoRegreT really make him work for his money.  

Bails Competing on the "Main Stage"

The player feedback was almost entirely positive. As far as I could tell people felt the tournament was well run, and were satisfied that the entrance fee was well spent. From the get go it was important to us that players felt like they were being taken care of, and that they had a positive experience. This led to decisions like providing food for attendees and cutting checks to players the day of the event. If you played or were otherwise present Cheesadelphia and have any type of constructive feedback to offer feel free to leave it in the comments, to tweet at me, or to get in touch any other way. If you have something to say I'll be sure to read it and all feedback will be incorporated into our next event.

Top 4 players from left to right: [EndEs]EJK, [F3]Silky,[PSISTM]NoRegreT,[F3]Bails

In terms of things we could have done better I think there were some really obvious issues. The event definitely dragged on significantly later than we expected going on till 11:00PM at night. I think part of that was our instincts to begin holding matches in the top eight were well intentioned but ultimately misguided. Gumming up the bracket too early really slowed everything down. On top of that a lot of downtime stemmed from players on stream waiting to be told to start their vetos etc, when the event staff had assumed the players had already started their veto process. Ideally in the future I think we would like to have a second admin that works explicitly with players whose matches are being streamed. There were also small changes in the rulebook I plan on making for future events. I had originally written our rulebook for use in online tournaments and simply adapted it slightly to use for Cheesadelphia. I think the fact our rulebook had its origin in online tournaments led to a few small issues that I would change for the next event. In hindsight I wish we'd had a rule instructing players to bring ear-buds. We had ear defenders for the players that were being casted to use, but some players had only brought large over ear headphones. We hadn't mandated that players bring ear-buds so we decided it was unfair to bar players from using their over ear headsets. I believe we made the best calls with the options available to us, but it was not a perfect situation. The casting I want to start this section by talking about the production. It was absolutely stellar and it was handled entirely by Rob. I was non-stop impressed by both the quality and endurance of his production work. Unlike the casting team production was a one man show, which meant that Rob's breaks were essentially limited to stream downtime. He was a complete pro throughout the event, giving us production notes onscreen right up the very last maps when JaKaTaK and I were truly losing our minds from StarCraft overload.

A Screengrab showing the stellar production

In terms of the actual casting we had JaKaTaK come down to the event as well a local walk on caster named Bob Brad, and myself. JaK absolutely killed it, I knew he had a lot of experience in front of a camera, but it was great to see it translate into some really fun casting. Bob also did very well for himself, and casting with him was a lot of fun, I hope he had as good of a time casting as we had having him there. I don't want to spend too much time talking about myself, but I will say I had an insanely good time casting Cheesadelphia, to the extent that I went out and bought a condenser mic so I can continue to cast any online league that might have me! The part where I give advice I have some advice to give to anyone that is looking to organize their own tournament or event, especially an offline one. Don't be afraid to bother everyone. If I hadn't been relentlessly obnoxious to a lot of team managers I doubt we would've gotten to see such a high level of play as we ended up happening. I also didn't have any special relationship or friendship with JaKaTaK before this event, I just knew that he lived closer to Philadelphia than most people in the scene and figured there was no harm in asking. Just remind yourself the absolute worst thing someone can do is say “No thanks” and then you're able to move along and talk to the next person! In terms of set up before the event you need to sit down the week before and calculate how long you think everything will take, and then double that amount of time. There's a pretty good chance that if something can go wrong it will go wrong. If you work a day job it's honestly worth taking the day before your event off work. JaKaTaK and I spent pretty much all of Friday setting up computers for the event, because issues with our imaging software forced us to manually install StarCraft II on all 20 computers, and if we had more than two or three downloading at once it would crash the venue's router. Everything ended up being fine by the day of the event, but if we'd left ourselves any less time than we did, then things could have ended very badly. Finally have a car on hand. That can really help to alleviate the pressure if you realized you've forgotten to get something that might not be transporatble in public transit. Special Thanks I want to say thanks to a lot of people but I'll start JaKaTaK who came down to the event and was a great sport about everything. He was willing to stay at my place so which I'm sure is kind of terrifying. He was also super helpful in dealing with all of the frustrations of getting everything set up beforehand, something he had absolutely no obligation to help with as we weren't paying him for that. I want to say thanks to Jeremy “Apophis” Hurst for bringing me into the project in the first place and helping to organize it.

Thanks to Rob for being the production hero we needed but not the one we deserved. Thanks to Kyle MacFarland our wonderful admin who made sure everything ran incredibly smoothly. And finally thanks to all the players and fans that came down to Cheesadelphia. Without you guys this tournament would never happen. I look forward to our next event! Finally a special thanks to Troly Gillis who let me use his photos for this article.  If you want to learn more about future events be sure to follow N3rd St Gamers on Twitter For more StarCraft and other eSports content you can follow Joe on Twitter @ploguidic3