Profile of WhiteFlash

Jump back to quoted post26 Feb 2016, 22:22 PMMortar

I love the criticisms of a mapmaker by people who have never even attempted to make one.

Think you can do better?

Put up or shut up. Or at the very least show some damn manners.

Entitled whiny babies. Good lord.

Jump back to quoted post2 Feb 2016, 00:37 AMKyle_RE

Greetings All!

Definitely an interesting read, although it appears that the conclusions were derived from a lack of information so me being the giver that I am felt obligated to fill in some of the gaps.

Now I can only speak of what I've seen in the time that I've been with Relic so I will keep this limited to that but otherwise, let's talk ESL.

"announced understatedly/low-key announcement"
So not exactly sure what you meant by this so maybe you could explain or provide exampled of what you expected the announcement to be like? In any case, our announcement included a email blast to all users who have signed up for a Relic account, a press release from ESL, multiple social/blog posts and in-game banners encouraging sign-ups over the course of 3 - 4 weeks.

The $18,000 Commitment
So this is something I've seen coming up quite a bit since the tournament was announced and I apologize for not addressing it sooner. Now, there is a difference between a $18,000 prize pool and a $18,000 commitment and there is a possibility that potentially someone at Relic misspoke at one point regarding these terms but for that I am uncertain. Regardless, what we had is a $18,000 commitment. This means we are committing $18,000 towards running an ESL CoH2 tournament. So, believe it not, ESL does charge for their services and a significant chunk of this commitment went to pay to use their tournament running tools. What was left thus went into the prize pool.

As many have noticed, as of today we were able to significantly increase that prize pool due to some renegotiation of our original contract with ESL in which Relic took on a portion of the workload to free up some of the budget to go back to the players.

Rules
I just wanted to clarify that vet coh2 players and tournament organizers were indeed asked for feedback regarding the original rules and as you know the rules were amended after the first Go4Cup after soliciting additional feedback from the community until the majority of participants felt the rules were in a good place.

Official Caster "Prize"
For the Call for Casters competition, I do have to agree that "prize" was probably the wrong choice of words. Something along the lines of "grant exclusive rights" or something like that should have probably been used. In terms of valuing this, well Stormless, GG and A_E can speak more on it than I can but based off the spikes in views and followers they've received from becoming the "official ESL casters" it definitely has come with its rewards. Of course as A_E mentioned we did send them a Relic swag bag, coordinated with ESL to send them some swag as well. Not to mention we have a couple other exciting things in the works for them which all-in-all will hopefully make this endeavor worth it for them.

"experienced community members have been left on the side lines"
This I would have to strongly disagree with. Numerous "experienced community members" have been consulted both before and during this ESL tournament series for their feedback and opinions. Not to mention, we hoped to work strongly/closely with the founders of CoH2.org in running the ESL tournament. Although key members were notified approximately a couple months prior to announce of ESL and were asked to work directly with Relic to make this tournament as great as possible, offering exclusive casting rights and other benefits as well, we unfortunately never received a response to this offer.

Deflect the blame to ESL
So to be honest, I am not sure how this would even be possible. Let's be straight, ESL has been great and have given us access to some amazing tools. But when it comes down to it, Relic is the tournament organizer, ESL is just the host/tools for this tournament. If anyone were to be blamed for not running the tournament well it would be Relic and we would take ownership of that. That being said, I think the tournament has been a great success so far, with great match-ups, amazing casting and a decent level of participation considering the commitment level involved in playing a cup form start to finish. We also have high hopes that with the increased incentive that these things will continue to improve between now and the end of the competition.

Lastly, I just want to finish with Go4 Cups and Pro League cups are by no measure comparable as one is an entry level tournament format and the other, well as it suggests a pro level tournament with a budget of 10x or more to that of a Go4.

Thanks for raising these topics so clarification could be provided and thank you to everyone in the thread for your feedback!