I completely agree. Post production 1/2 hour broadcast of the whole weekend in one show. Make sure it tells a story. At least as a way to get people interested. Then we can transition some of that audience to the live stream, if we ever get that audience.
I actually think it actually helps to have one one commentator representing the average person and asking questions like the viewers at home would. The audience relates to that person.
I watch curling. The broadcast team is always built of former champions, and one experienced sports broadcaster. 20 years ago, I would watch and think wow, Vic Rauter knows nothing about curling. But I now feel differently. After covering the Brier for 20-30 years, he understands curling, a lot. But he plays a role on the broadcast team and I think it is a critical role. Ever broadcast team needs a Vic Rauter as a counter point to the retired athletes.
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Quote from Rauter.
“A compliment for me today is when someone asks me if I will ever play the game. Thompson used to ask me prior to the start of every season what I knew about the game. I would say “nothing.’’ He would go “perfect,’’ because he always wanted me to be the eyes and the voice of the person watching at home. That’s why I would ask Linda “what are they doing here?’’ or Cheryl and Russ “why did they do that?’’ I’m more knowledgeable than that because I have played the game. At the same time, I have a gold medallist in Russ and a silver medallist in Cheryl, with all of their experience in the booth. Why would I want to be the expert when they are the experts? That’s the approach we’ve always taken. When someone asks me if I will ever play the game, that’s a compliment and it means I’m doing the right kind of directing.”
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This would be awesome…and I’m pretty sure this is being worked on. Or rather, third party hardware that would be capable of something like this is already in the works.
Are we eSports now?
I have so much that I want to say…
I came into pinball from an eSports background. Namely Starcraft. While I was never much of a competitive SC2 player, I’ve followed the Starcraft scene for a very long time. For those of you who aren’t up on your eSports history, Starcraft II was released in 2010 and is unanimously considered to be the game that ushered in the modern era of eSports. It was the #1 game on Twitch from its inception until 2012 or so. Being the early trend setter, Starcraft II had a number of growing pains that ultimately resulted in it losing the top spot and almost folding completely. But it survived, and today it is an active scene with a strong community to support it (and the game is better than ever!). Comparing pinball to the Starcraft scene obviously isn’t a 1:1 comparison, but there are definitely some lessons to be learned from the history of Starcraft as a modern day eSport.
I guess I’ll start with the prize pools. I think pinball is getting the distribution right. I was having a chat with an FGC friend earlier today about those prize distributions from EVO. My premise was mostly: “How can you say that out of a tournament of thousands of people, only the paying the top 8 is okay?” He said something along the lines of “What, do we want to reward people for being bad?” This opinion is wack. My first Tournament was PAPA 19. After watching Robert Gagno win, I looked up the prize pools, and I was shocked to see how little he actually won. Coming from Starcraft, where the prize for the World Champion, whether it be the one crowned at Blizzcon or the IEM World Championships, was basically fixed at $100,000. $10,000 was a typical prize at a small professional tournament. It seemed so weird to me that the winner of PAPA could win such a lowamount. But then I remembered that I won money in D division. My friend won a few hundred dollars for placing near the top of D. I remembered that I just watched @scoutpilgrim win a thousand dollars. It was the first time that had ever won some money from gaming, and my competitive gaming resume is very long. To this day, I have only ever won money from pinball. The prize distributions in pinball go so far down the line, I’ve never seen
anything like it.
Starcraft was the exact opposite for a long time. Skipping most of the finer points,
Koreans are generally viewed as superior at Starcraft due to the game’s long history in
South Korea, where it is recognized as a sport by the government and has been a staple of
Korean entertainment since the early 2000’s. People have gone to jail for fixing
Starcraft matches in South Korea. When SC2 exploded in popularity, Korean players began
flying to overseas tournaments en masse. The saturation of good players at every
tournament, coupled with very top heavy prize pools, resulted in a number of the
“foreign” (non-Korean) players basically being crushed out of existence. Because they
could not make ends meet playing the game professionally, they simply fell beind the
Koreans. Blizzard attempted to fix this by making leagues for EU and NA players, but
stupidly didn’t prevent Korean players from choosing to participate in the EU/NA leagues
instead of KR. Eventually, Blizzard got it right, and created a unified league for the
foreign players, with Koreans prevented from entering. Finally having something to play
for and some solid prize money to win, foreign players who were once clawing for peanuts
in the top 32, are now able to take on Koreans, and win! A Finnish player recently won a
Tournament in Korea, beating some of the best players in the game all the way to the
finals. There is serious debate as to whether or not he is the best player in the world
now.
Blizzard invested in the foreign Starcraft scene and planted plenty of seeds, some of
which now cast a massive shadow. Likewise, Pinball prize distributions (around here, at
least) almost universally invest in the up-and-coming players. By giving the newer
players legitimate tournaments to play in, as well as something to play for, interest and
investment in competitive pinball increases. Over the last few years I have seen plenty
of the people that I played with in D divion make increasingly bigger waves in the upper
eschelons of competitive pinball. That’s awesome, and I hope the prize distiributions are
never changed. Keep investing in the next generation of players. I’m all about junior
divions and women’s tournaments. The scene will only grow because of them. This was not
an argument for region-locking IFPA state championships.
Presentation is another aspect of Starcraft eSports that has evolved over the years. If you watched a recent professional SC2 game, it would look completely different from the way the game does when you play it. At first, the playable UI took up too much of the viewing area and information was not easily conveyed to viewers. Eventually, a community member developed a specific UI for use in professional games, called GameHeart, and it was an instant hit. Blizzard had the creator make them an official version of the UI, and decided to keep him on full-time after that. Nowadays, the SC2 observer UI conveys almost the entire game state of both players to the viewer at home, in a way that doesn’t feel overloading. Timers announce when important upgrades are about to complete, and the UI even has convenient spaces for each player’s series score.
Presentation for pinball has historically been a challenge, and I’m not entirely certain how to improve on all of the issues that make the game inherently hard to watch. I do agree with earlier posts, that the current standings of each player, as well as game order, who is currently playing, and current scores, should probably be on screen at all times. I’m not saying what’s currently being done is bad, but that we can probably still
improve in this area. I would also like to see tournament banks include a couple of spectator-friendly games. TRON LE comes to mind. Not only does TRON look nice, I think the way the game flows is also spectator friendly. If you have ideas, please don’t be afraid to share them with the community. When it comes to improved presentation, almost nothing can hurt.
Someone earlier on mentioned the issue of commentators not knowing the game in question
being a problem. While I can see where they’re coming from, Starcraft casters are put in this position all the time, and have developed ways to deal with it. Instead of saying “yeah, I don’t know a thing about this game.” it can be rephrased as something of a self-deprecating joke. “Because I’m bad and don’t do my homework, I don’t know how to play this game at all. I’m excited though, because I’m about to watch Keith Elwin teach us all how to play this game.” KME is the all-knowing pinball deity. Instead of the viewer scoffing at your incompetence, you and the viewer can relate as bad players and are about to discover this game together, by learning from the best player in the world/state/city/tournament. Obvious roadblocks to this always being done well are that commentators are often just eliminated players but hey, it’s never going to be perfect.
This situation can also just be avoided from the start by having @scoutpilgrim cast literally every game of competitive pinball, ever. Problem solved.
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Yeah that’s what I was getting at, well said.
Often pinball commentary is less enjoyable when it goes like this:
“So we’re playing Williams Flash, what are the player’s going to be shooting for?”
“lol, I’ve never played this before - erm… Um… Looks like you want to shoot that center bank. I think”
“Oh wait, weird, why is top player such and such shooting for that small spot target on the left, thats weird, must have been a missed shot”
“Oh now they are shooting the spinner - weird”
… zzzzz
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It’s always a team in the successful broadcast booth.
You have people behind the scenes feeding them relevant stats and updates…
You have researchers and prep teams doing background and filler pieces…
The broadcasters are all researched on the game and relevant principles…
You don’t need all world champs in the booth… nearly every makeup is the play by play… the color commentator… and often a third color type to play off the other commentary. Point being, it’s a mesh of different types to satisfy the different needs. But a good dynamic if when those pieces mesh together… and doing that takes time and practice. I applaud the organizers for trying different people from different mixes… but some have just been awful. The practice runs to try people out may need some more effort… or at least watch more tape on them.
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One mistake I see in a lot of streams is the commentators not following the chat. If the commentators don’t know the game, someone in the chat usually does. Acknowledging the chat folks also helps connect the viewers with the stream. Makes us feel like we’re almost there. If I’m watching a stream and the commentators are ignoring the chat, I’m far less inclined to comment.
The commentators are often someone we know. We want to help you guys (and gals), but if you don’t look at the chat, we can’t help.
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In my experience with streaming, the chat is typically on a delay, meaning that by the time a caster sees the helpful comment, there’s still been a healthy 30 seconds of “hmmm, uh, idk, let’s see what they go for.” As someone who would rather play off of the chat, that’s always bugged me, but it might be why some broadcasts don’t engage.
How long is the delay, would you guess?
Maybe in cases where there is a third commentator, their main role should be to follow chat.
I have been at several tournaments that had the stream on at the bar. It is long enough that when you drain, you can comfortably walk to the bar, look up and relive it.
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In Vegas this year, I got knocked out of Women’s Champs, walked into the next room en route to a defeat cigarette, and got to watch myself get eliminated all over again 
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I don’t think the chat that the commentators see has any lag. It’s not the same as pulling up the stream and watching it live. Could be wrong though.
It’s not that there’s lag in the chat delivery, but the path of camera -> computer -> twitch -> spectator -> typing the comment -> twitch -> chat log… it takes a while.
Okay yeah that makes sense. Well it’s definitely not long enough that having someone keeping an eye on chat wouldn’t benefit the stream experience.
You’re absolutely right, interacting with the viewers is a great part of streaming.
I’m partially guilty of this. But on that front, I’ll usually lead another commentator into explaining the game a little, even if I do know the rules simply because the rules knowledge is nice to go over, even if it’s brief. I also found a lot of value listening to those discussions when I was first starting to play competitively.
With that said, there is really nothing worse than:
“Uhhh, yeah. So he shot it up the right ramp again, let’s see what happens here. Did that activate the multib- no so it’s going to have to be the left - oh and he drained. On to the next game!”
this might be the number one thing that would make watching competitive pinball more compelling to me. However, it’s such an incredibly daunting task. I mean, the situation you are describing is incredibly easy and simplistic by comparison. he basically developed a UI on top of an existing game. But pinball has thousands of different games, none of which can digitally communicate with a UI overlay.
you know what would be kind of revolutionary? if the major manufacturers could get together and develop a standard API for third party apps to interact with their games, for the exact purpose of allowing a competition overlay like this for streaming or TV. I mean, just a service to request basic data from the game via bluetooth or wifi: number of players, current ball, score, current jackpot value for each player, etc, all the data about the game that could then be consumed and used by an overlay or other application to generate fancy Score Bars and other graphics and stats.
(and of course it could easily have countless other awesome applications as well cough iScored cough 
)
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Creating a static visual map/feature guide, like Gottliebs have on some instruction cards, where it’s a wireframe of the play field, with features labeled by number and a legend to explain what each feature does would go a long way towards ease of understanding, imo.
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It would be great if there were one of these for each machine, like can be found in the Theatre of Magic Manual. Would it be feasible to add a field to the OPDB for a vector graphic? Of course then it needs to be populated…
