Take: "We're trying to go back to our roots"

NAME: Dennis "Take" Gehlen
COUNTRY: Germany
OCCUPATION: Tournament organizer
ASSOCIATED EVENTS: HomeStory Cup, TeamStory Cup
 

Ok, so the new HomeStory is coming one week after BlizzCon. How are the preparations going?

Actually we are pretty much on time I’d say but, well, you can never have enough time to do cool stuff and make it better. But I feel it’s going well so far.

For this edition, you once again ran 3 qualifiers but extended invitations to winners only, as opposed to last year winner + runner-up. Why the change and the preference for invites?

To be honest, there were two reasons. First of all, HSC 8 doesn’t give WCS points [because it takes place after the grand finals]. Blizzard are fans of having 1/4 qualifier slots and we were not supposed to. The more important reason for me was to include players who would have bad chances to qualifying and who I really wanted to be here. We all know HomeStoryCup is a mix of not only skilled players but also about cool guys.

The last seasons you did a very elaborate “puzzle” campaign before revealing each player batch, giving the community hints and such in order to guess the next wave of invites. This year around, you’ve been doing it more quietly. Don’t you feel the community needs more hype, especially around BlizzCon?

Yes, it does. We did this puzzle for the previous two HSCs. This time we announced some with a riddle on smartchecker.de, announced some on shows, I spoiled a few and I did some videos for others. Right after BlizzCon is over, we’ll have the groups ready. All in all, it’s very hard to hype HSC with WCS Grand Finals around the corner so it’s after the event is over that we’ll be doing more promotion. [Interviewer’s note: this answer was given on November 6^th before WCS Grand Finals had begun]

The cool thing about HSC is that every year there's something new! What’s going to be special about this year’s?

Good question! It’s not that easy to always find new stuff! We try to go back to the roots more, have a better atmosphere than the last two HSCs. Which is becoming harder and harder because players feel stressed about having to play a lot (most of them), travel a lot and you get the feeling HSC is becoming just the next tournament.

For this season, I changed a lot of stuff around my flat. We made it friendlier, repainted the walls in more friendly colors, we have a new chill-out area which should be a lot more comfortable and enjoyable than before and we have a great B stream which is so much better than before. On top of that, the poker table will return on said B stream and I hope this will bring a lot of fun. We have all the editors moved to my private flat one floor above so that they have space to work. This will also make the players feel more comfortable with moving wherever they want.

Beside that, holy shit, I think we will have great casts with the players who are around and especially the casters. RotterdaM will attend who, I have to say, is one of the few people I love! Other than that we hope to just deliver an even better production, have some more "in between" non-game activities, more fun, bigger attendance in the pub… We want do some more stuff over there, involve the community and create a great atmosphere.

Did you know WCS Europe had White-Ra making cocktails and MC being a weatherman once? You'll have to pull out some big guns to top that!

Yeah I saw WCS with White-Ra, though I can’t remember MC. On this note, did you know MC was singing a cappella last HSC in Korean! What tops that? *laughs* You know that HSC is real when stuff happening spontaneously without planning. Then it feels even better!

I can’t believe I missed that particular part. What did he sing about? Like, did he give a translation?

It was a ballad in Korean. I couldn’t understand a single word but it sounded deep! *laughs*

Ok, on to more serious topics. I want to talk about the tournament scene of StarCraft 2. This year, there were eight tournaments that gave away WCS points, HSC VII being one of them. From the position of a tournament organizer, do you think the practice of incorporating third-party events into the Blizzard circuit should be expanded?

I think yes! Blizzard, however, needs to get a lot of work done and I am not sure if they have the manpower to deliver. I hope so, though, the communication between them and tournament organizers like me, i.e. who are not one of the biggest, is getting better. I hope this will also happen for other organizers so that WCS becomes even bigger and more important. SC2 can still be an important part of the eSports scene and will not die as some people suggest. That’s just not true.

How deep should such an expansion go? Do we stop at the premier events or try and include smaller brands such as the ESET Masters and RSL in Europe, the StarsWar league and TeSL in Asia, the G-Leagues in China, the Red Bull tournaments in the states, etc.?

That’s quite the good question also. Having more tournaments means a lot of problems, like scheduling conflicts for example. Furthermore, if you have a match like Taeja vs Innovation every day it stops being unique and the hype will be not the same.

So if I were to give you a good answer of how deep it should go, I feel like Blizzard should have a schedule with all possible weeks in the year, discuss it with tournament organizers and set a limit of events for every year. I can’t there are still weekend which have two or even three big SC2 tournaments at the same time; it’s unbelievable!

“How deep” is a question of scheduling conflicts and what the tournaments can deliver. It’ s not only about the 20-50k prize money but about your production, how you treat your 

players, etc. All in all, I think you need to have a checklist (which Blizzard should put in the license contracts) and then set a maximum of events for every year.

In a recent interview, Axslav mentioned that we need to tie in the scene more which reminded me how before 2013 there was often cooperation between various tournament organizers: HomeStory would partner with IEM, DreamHack would partner with MLG, etc. They would help “trade” players based on their performance and fly their stories from one tournament to another. This year, everything was feeding into WCS and there was hardly any link between the third-party tournaments themselves. Do you agree with Axslav’s words? Should this change in the future?

Oh yeah, this is something I would wholeheartedly suggest! I think most of the tournaments have a good relation to each other but they don’t take the time to talk about stuff like that or don’t do it enough when they do! I was always a friend to find solutions together so probably everyone needs to sit on a big table and talk about this from time to time. Then again, sponsors-wise everything is so fast that sometimes you close a deal before the event or you have to start to organize your event pretty late because you have a no-go on licenses, etc. But yeah if you have someone who can take care of that it could help so much and improve all tournaments!

Can the growth of such third-party networks diminish the effects of the widely discussed WCS region locking and help create storylines outside the Blizzard circuit?

From my perspective, I am pretty sure that it can. Players can be pushed and great stories can be created, stories developed on the grounds of DHs, MLGs, IEMs, HSCs. It was those stories that helped WCS a lot and if Blizzard extend their support back to those tournaments it could help not only the known but also the not so famous and upcoming players.

Photo: Fragster.de

Besides the HomeStory Cup, you’re also running the TeamStory league where StarCraft 2 teams go through a long season for $20,000 in cash. What are the troubles you most often encounter then trying to make ten teams commit to half a year of competition?

Actually, this season was not that rough compared to the last one where we had 16 games for each team. This time we run nine playdays for each team which is better but yeah you are right It’s still a problem to schedule everything and it keeps happening that other great games run at the same time as the ATC. Besides that, most of the players like to play team leagues because there are so few of them in the world. I think Happy is the only one I know who doesn’t like to play team leagues at all. *laughs*

Ha, why is that?

To be honest, I have no clue but I think he is just different to most of the other players and likes to do his "own" thing.

The downtime period between seasons one and two of ATC was less than a month. Was the first season that successful that you wanted to plunge right into the sequel?

ATC Season 1 was pretty cool! There is a lot we can and want to improve on but our partners were really happy with how it panned out and we discussed for quite some time how we want to go into the future. One should also not forget that there is quite some money needed to run such a league and to get them you need to deliver and make your partner satisfied. We got the information that Acer and Intel both like the ATC a lot and for what they invest it’s a great product for them.

You have no dates set for the remainder of the matches. When is the current season about to end, approximately?

We will have our final at the 14th to 15th of December and our season is about to end in around three weeks from now.

The events around last season’s playoffs did not go so smoothly. Axiom forfeited after the flight expenses debacle. MVP had to run a fundraiser to visit Krefeld. Retrospectively, do you think it was a good idea to have so many players and coaches attend the playoffs offline?

Well, MVP planned this fundraiser from the very first day that they signed up. With Axiom it was just a communication problem and it’s solved for this season. But yes, I think for sure it’s a good idea to have offline finals! We do not have a single team league in Europe/US with an offline finale! We learned from season 1 that $1,500 are not enough for the teams and their accommodation and so we raised it to $3,500, included catering, shuttle service, etc.

We can’t effort to cover 100% of all costs but I think this time we’ll help the teams a lot more and that was one of the things we discussed with our sponsors and really wanted to change. We even aimed to fully cover everything but the worst case scenario was just too expensive. I love the idea of having a team league finale and have the coaches and player around and as long as I can offer it somehow I’ll want to do it.

Currently, there are a lot of surprising results in the Season 2 standings. Teams like Liquid, Millenium and Mouz are below the top four, Western Wolves are leading the charge and brands like Quantic who had a terrible first season are experiencing resurgence. What is your favorite team story out of all?

As you mentioned, there were a lot of surprises in this ATC and I think Western Wolves is one of the biggest. Looking at their roster on paper, no one would have them as favorites. However, if you look more closely, their players improved the months leading to ATC and we should have known that they will have quite good chances for playoffs. That they managed to win so many games in a row was a big surprise for me.

As for Quantic, they’re all about HyuN to be honest and this season he took down so many players that they managed to almost qualify for the playoffs. They can still probably to it but their map score is horrible which happens if you only have one guy collecting most of the points. I think Mousesports did quite good in the end if they had won versus Axiom it would have been the story of the tournament because of their all-foreign line-up but. Right now, though, they have to be lucky with the last matches of Liquid, Axiom, Quantic and the others. About Liquid: they did not do as well as expected but I think they still have good chances to qualify – they have three games left – if  they bring their A line-up and focus on 100%.

Who do you root for to win the season?

Being an organizer, that’s a tough question but having a full foreigner team in the finals would be very cool.

?By the way, I saw the 500-range turret the other week. That was pretty cool! You should do something similar for one of the playoff games, I know a lot of people who would love to see their siege tanks shoot air!

That was hilarious! I didn’t even know about it before that.

Imagine how Vortix felt, as if widow mines are not enough for Zerg players.

On to the closing questions! We spoke about team leagues a bit so I want to continue on this topic a bit before we wrap it up. Compared to the fame of BroodWar’s Proleague, team leagues in particular can’t seem to attract the same attention. It goes for both viewership and media members who prefer to focus on individual leagues and the stories created there. Should something be done to change that?

I would love to see a bit more team leagues and I think if Blizzard would help it could be a pretty cool and big thing. I like the GSTL a lot – and I think a lot of other fans do, too - and there is still a lot of potential in Europe and America to improve. We focus so much on individual leagues because they are cheaper and easier to organize so we created huge characters but no huge teams. It would cost quite some time, work and money to improve this.

You mentioned Blizzard and that leads to my next questions. When Mike Morhaime announced the WCS 2013 season, he mentioned they wanted to incorporate team leagues in the system at some point in time. Do you think this is essential to the future of those tournaments?

I think this would open the market for team leagues a lot more and we all could benefit out of it because playing in a team is an extra motivation for all players.

When we talked last time at IEM CeBIT, you mentioned you had the intention of venturing into Dota 2. What happened to those plans?

Yeah, you are right, and we built a new Dota 2 stream which you will see at the HSC as our "B Stream". We’ve got three casters for it and it will feature more and more German Dota 2 casts in the future. We did a few already but it will change after HSC as we’ll start casting Starladder and others. The stream is led by Epi, SaGa and Templar and I hope they can make Dota2 big in Germany.

Some colleagues of mine said how breaking into a market that has so many tournaments with high production value will be difficult to say the least. And that any DotaStory tournament should cater to the international audience, not just the German one.

We think so too and if we would ever do a HomeStoryCup related to Dota we will do it in English. As you mentioned, the production value is pretty good in Dota already, but ours is decent as well. We have our knowledge acquired through StarCraft 2 tournaments. We’ve always had our focus on the cool content, the atmosphere in the flat and the cool personalities and I think would also work in Dota 2. Besides that, we want to create by far the best German Dota 2 stream for the daily business and having cool characters to work with makes it doable.

OK, last question! You have 8 words to hype HSC 8. Go!

The tournament with the most love in eSports. Luckily, it fits!

Photos: Christian Dreyer (first on the left), mySN UK (first on the right), WZ Newsline (second on the left), Fragster.de (second on the right)