Dreamhack has come and gone, and while it left us with fond memories of great battles taking place on the gaming fields, it also left both viewers and attendants with somewhat of a bitter taste in their mouth about how the presentation was handled.
Now, I’m not saying Dreamhack wasn’t a phenomenal show because it really was, I’m just saying that some of the things Corsair did in their coverage could potentially be done better next time. Remember that Dreamhack provided Dota 2 an exclusive stage to perform on, but just how this stage was set up could’ve been done better.
Here a sampling of the list of steps I would take were I to be in charge of organizing the coverage on the next major Dota 2 event.
The First: Have more than one caster
While Tobi did simply amazing work through Dreamhack, the community needs to step back and realize that he basically solo-casted the entire show, putting in what amounted to a 15 hour day on the final day of the tournament. (Started casting around 9am, wrapped up the finals of the tourney close to midnight.) While Tobi is a caster with enough talent to do this, it’s still an exuberant amount of work to require of him when it would not be a stretch to add a second caster to the mix. Maybe even let him pick who he wants to work with, develop a little bit of charisma in the boot and fans will get an even better show with a pair of entertaining casters instead of a single one calling everything.
Plus, this addition will allow for casters to take breaks without having to pause coverage. Basically, anytime Tobi needed a break video coverage got a lovely standby screen while he went and took care of business. Compare this to the Starcraft 2 coverage which had 2 show hosts and 2 casters for gameplay, the job Tobi pulled Dreamhack weekend is simply legendary.
The Second: Display the game in a Picture-in-Picture mode
My entire gripe with this is that displaying the game in this fashion is not hard to pull off, and doing so would’ve not made for the few embarrassing moments we had at Dreamhack because of it. Basically, too many times during the event to remind online viewers that it was live, the production crew would set aside the gameplay to show the audience reaction in the stream. What this did most notably is not only cause a lapse in the gameplay stream, but cause online viewers to miss key moments such as follow up-kills and post teamfight pushes.
Stage this size: No picture in picture. For shame.
Had the crew simply had picture in picture, gameplay could’ve been seen the entire time it was occurring with an audience reaction in a smaller window that the viewer could look at if they chose. Really simple ideal that is already seen in some twitch streams (IE, when a player has a cam of themselves in the bottom corner of their stream) so why this was not used in a major stream I simply have no idea.
The Third: Pay more attention to the attendees
Dreamhack had a lot of on floor coverage by press, and knew it wou
ld as these seats were reserved specifically for them. But that is all the press got. Seats. Not a space to work, not any room for their things, not even close access to a power outlet to be able to cover the entire event. Just seats. A lot of press members were found struggling to be able to update in a timely manner, as their main area to have their laptop / notebook was their lap. (if it wasn’t already dead from the lack of power outlets)
The work area given to the press
Come on guys, you can set up the area better for people you invited to be there. These are just some of the ideas I had and things I noticed regarding how Dreamhack was presented to us, and while it was great for Dota 2 to have its own stage it surely can be brought to us in a better way the next time.
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About the author: Kinowolf |
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