MLG (Major League Gaming) is the biggest US tournament series for competitive Starcraft II, Halo Reach and CoD Black Ops. Their first one this year in Dallas is a three-day event which has had six months to prepare since the last once. They raised $10 million in VC funding for this year's events, as well as huge sponsors and ticket sales.
The event has been terribly run, especially on the SC2 side.
Friday: Stream and website crash as soon as event starts, they don't fix it for three hours. Games are postponed but no attempt to catch up is made; there's still 30min downtime between games filled by adverts, and often no information about when the next game will be (since the schedule was blown apart). They vow that tomorrow will be better.
I'd say one in three of the important games are casted; and there's another huge amount of lesser open bracket games that will never be shown. Replays won't go up for weeks probably.
Saturday:They get one game done on the stream, then Battle.net crashes and they spend five hours with the game paused, the casters desperately trying to fill time but no official information about when it'll recover is ever given. Combined this with internet problems at the convention centre like yesterday.
Many more ads than would usually be shown are put up, the stream erratically switches between cameras with no info.
When battlenet recovers, TENS of EXCITING games are going on in the rest of the bracket, but the staff refuse to acyually put them on the stream instead waiting for the first game to recover (yes, five hours paused). When it does start again the internet goes down again and they take it off the main stage and conclude the game elsewhere fine. Instead of sending the feed to the casters or even just the stream, they DO NOTHING and the game concludes without anyone seeing it or even being aware it was ging on. Even the people who paid $10 for the high quality stream can't see the game that is on the schedule, been paid for, and actually is going on right as they watched ads and filler.
The only message is that the stream would come back in an hour. Meanwhile like yesterday tens of other games are going on in parallel that they also ignore. Despite being behind and the internet recovering, they don't bother to put the next scheduled game up when they could, instead having a worthless hour gap for everyone involved.
Oh, and they started wordfiltering "dispute" on the official support forum, as in credit card dispute so HQ buyers can get refunds. The CEO of MLG then denies publicly that they are filtering it, but you can try it yourself and see. No correction/apology has been made.
We'll see how it goes tomorrow, but I don't think investors will be so happy to give $10m to them again.
Update 2: You know the stream was going to be back in an hour? 15 minutes 2.5 hours after that and they are still running continuous ads with no information.
