people should also check out the column of gnnr, seems kinda overlooked

that's actually from gnnr

oh yeah, very true

spinny logo blog?

ok coverage, bad info ! ! :z

any news about the demos?

QuakeCon is in charge of demos not QLTV. When they are posted they will be on the quakecon site.

More specifically, the tourney admins have them and are sorting through them. We'll keep bugging the right people until they're posted.

What means "sorting through"? Can't they just upload them first and then "sort them through"? Or progressively upload whatever they already "sorted"?

nice writing, I was there at quakecon and thoroughly enjoyed your ctf commentary.

You can also read my perspective on the post-QuakeCon blog here.

You did a great job too, thanks for keeping the community updated
kudos!

HEY! I have a real job! :P I work 50 hours a week with benefit. Hehe, good post!

Okay so we have 3 people with jobs.... :P

Hehe, and I am still broke as a joke :D

sneaky mother fucker

The stream was horrible, low framerate and the graphics were set to ugly. Seriously if you want to attract more players and viewers to QL, don't make it look like shit next time.

IMHO, you were doing pretty terrible job:
1. No information on stream whatsoever about what & when should the next game be, how much it is delayed, etc. Even if you don't know yourself, you still have to write SOMETHING on the stream each 5-10 minutes so that spectators know you're not completely dead. I know you sometimes updated your twitter, but how the hell someone watching the stream could know that the status updates are on some twitter by some dude? They have to be displayed directly on stream.
2. No promised restreaming of coverage at better hours for european viewers
3. One week has passed and still no VODs, while even stream viewers were able to record your stream and upload it in several hours. This is very indicative of how bad you are if a random person from the internet does way better job than you.
4. No live interviews with players.
5. Stream quality was awful, though I don't know how much it was a fault of QL.TV and how much of used CDN.

So, you have a lot of things to improve on. Your main mistake IMHO is that you didn't put enough emphasis on immediacy of content availability. If, for example, 100 people are interested in QCon coverage while it's happening, probably only 1 or so remains interested after it's over. So every VOD, every interview, everything MUST be available immediately after it was recorded. There must be ZERO of "will be available later", "will upload later", etc. And this is the main point you should work on.

1. No information on stream whatsoever about what & when should the next game be, how much it is delayed, etc.

I very much agree this was a huge problem.

2. No promised restreaming of coverage at better hours for european viewers

Actually, we did have restreaming for European players on the evenings when the net was available overnight.

3. One week has passed and still no VODs....

We have to coordinate with the joint owners of the content before it can be published. This is out of our hands until then.

4. No live interviews with players.

We chose to do recorded interviews instead of live ones and have several. They will be posted as soon as possible.

5. Stream quality was awful.

It did not meet my standards but, sadly, we were required to use it.

Actually, we did have restreaming for European players on the evenings when the net was available overnight.

The most important part of the tourney was not restreamed, only a few uninteresting games from the 1st day were, including long pauses between them. So to me this is the same as no restreaming at all.

We chose to do recorded interviews instead of live ones

Exactly. It was a bad choice, please never discard the opportunity of live pre/post-game interviews again.

We have to coordinate with the joint owners of the content before it can be published.

Who exactly are these owners?

If you would've read instead of jumped to a conclusion. I'll make it easier for you though. What he said came down to this: "The one night the internet was up we streamed vods all night"

those joint owners are strange people. don't they realize that the more time passes after the event without their precious content being released, the less interest this content is liable to generate.

Props to Greased for even responding to this incredibly retarded post. I guess some people are just really are dumb. For real.

What do you find retarded about it?

who/what is responsible for the DNS issues faced at (seemingly) every quakecon in the last few years?

I explain this year's DNS troubles in part 3. Prep your "naughty naughty" finger waggling.

lol, okay.

BTW, who were the QLTV guys who were on air for like an hour at 2am on ustream?

That would be Mattc0m and nKane making a... "surprise" appearance....

lol alright.... haven't been able to watch very many QLTV streams so i wasn't familiar with your casters. Thanks

Mattc0m and I were the ones on the stream. We were editing and rending videos all night long . We decided to use our BYOC set up while waiting for the videos to complete. You can read about it @ www.quake-live.tv I have an article up.

thanks dude.

<3 QL.TV

Thanks for the logistics report.

Man, I totally forgot about all the sound/video sync issue and buffering issues.

In retrospect, its a miracle we had a stream at all D:

We had a stream because of hard work and dedication everyone put in. Nothing was a miracle...

What exacly was the reason?

Where are the VODs? Why is it taking so long? ESL has them up the same day.

I guess you can't figure out alone that they have to be encoded and uploaded by people who had to go back home, probably to go back to work the very next day and that those people have pretty regular internet connections?

I'm sure they'd be glad to upload them faster if you paid them though.

ESL are encoding on old pentium 2's and uploading via dialup. Stop making excuses.

The crew doing the coverage did a pretty good job this year considering the circumstances.

Certainly there are areas for improvement, such as a reliable internet connection, shoutcasters that are quake experts and making a live feed that doesn't look ugly (pro configs are great for players, but spectating should be done with a 'pretty' config so that new players to Quake don't think its an ancient POS not worth playing).

As far as "community" coverage they did great, but for an event like QuakeCon, the coverage needs to be like QuakeLive and Go Pro.

- Patrick

QLTV did a good job for a volunteer group of casters, given their circumstances and restrictions. I'm not saying it's perfect, but we got a reasonable amount, coverage of most of the important matches at the event, etc.

The professional tournament coverage needs to be treated as an important part of Quakecon though, and not just excused as a volunteer effort. The organisation behind the tournament coverage and streaming should be a priority - it's the image of Quakecon to everyone on the Internet who isn't attending.

Every demo should be uploaded within an hour. Every broadcasted video should be uploaded within an hour. The upcoming schedule of play should be available on the site showing the stream (and not hidden on the Quakecon site). The site should have daily news snippets on the most exciting bits of the day - something Slasher managed to do even though he was banned from the event.

It's absolutely vital to have the right media coverage released as soon as possible. European viewers had to struggle to find a recording the following morning because the official source had uploaded nothing. Some kind users have managed to upload some ripped stream, but they shouldn't have to resort to this!

The organisers of the Quakecon tournaments need to decide on what sort of coverage they want for 2011 and plan accordingly. If they don't mind an average quality volunteer effort then that's fine, however in my opinion they should try and aim for the best coverage possible - make the Quakecon tournaments the best covered events of the year.

There are definitely a lot of improvements that can be made for next year regardless of which crew is broadcasting. Things that you mentioned above are universal and it's something that given time to plan can be easily pulled off.

I want to say even though we are completely volunteer based we do have high standards and by nature we are our harshest critics. After we were done on the final day at 3am we met at our booth and discussed what went right and more importantly what went wrong and how it could be improved.

For those that are asking about the VODs, the streaming service provider didn't have a recording option so we had to record VODs locally on-site.

The raw data spans about 9 DVDs and will be re-encoded and compressed so it's suitable for Internet consumption. This will take time.

I'll also note that id Software, not QLTV, will choose when, how and where the VODs are released.

Fuck them all, one weak after event we still have not demos.
Fuck you QC amateurs

We aren't in charge of QuakeCon demos. We are gently prodding the people who are to release them, though.

Very insightful read. As one streamer to another, I think you guys did an amazing job given all the circumstances, props to you. And that rant of SirScoots was totally uncalled for, I would even say it was pretty damn lame!

This is a learning curve and like you said, you can only learn from your mistakes. Good luck for next year and thank you for the coverage.

No, it wasn't uncalled for.

Yes it was.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6fYpoHqOq2E
no, it wasnt rapha who failed most there

vendor had done something really naughty with a network switch and essentially created a bridge between the BYOC, the tournament network and the hotel's Internet. This caused a loop and very serious DNS lookup problems

That doesn't make sense at all.

loop that was still lurking

o_O

You don't make sense too.

Ever though about that Greased is a shoutcaster and not a network professional? Network was down/lagged because someone who wasn't allowed to tamper with the network at all did something really stupid. Thats about all you need to know.

From what the network crew told me was that a vendor bridged the hotel network, tournament network and BYOC by plugging in all three to their given switch. Technologically speaking I don't know the specific issue it caused with the routing but it caused a feed back loop on at least 1 of the networks.

Also not that Greased wouldn't have understood what the specific issue was, it was simply that he was not involved in the networking.

warsow not warsaw )

Hah. Spelled it right the first instance, not the second. Fixed!

where demos and who incharge?

;/

I see myself as a fairly patient and understanding dude, but c'mon...this must be one of the most f* up gamingevents in recorded history.

No information (at least not easily accessible), horrible stream quality, huge tech-issues, ridiculous official site, and NO F* VODs?! I guess they deleted it or something...

Was it all just some stunt to promote Rage, Brink and Carmack's rocket-bullshit?! The lack of respect for the gamers are repulsive.

I think you guys are doing a great job, Greased - but i'd be ashamed to have my name on it if i were you.

C'mon where the f* are the demos. At least demos should be somewhere. I really start hating id for this. What on earth are they thinking? I can't think of a single reason of why the are not publishing these VODs and Demos. They annoy their fans and they do not get any new ones either.

This event could have been such a great publicity success for QL. As they just started the premium accounts that cost money, they should really care about good publicity and getting new people to start playing. But obviously they just trying to do anything to prevent QL from being a success. Its plain sad.