Battle at Ministry of Win: I got outPlayed?

Soon after the whole tournament was over, there were many voices of disapproval: the stream didn't work as it was supposed to, the schedule wasn't convenient even for the Europeans and so on and so forth. Luckily enough, you guys liked our GosuGamers coverage...

Thank god - I am not going to be kicked out.

It's been almost a week now, the emotions are gone and it's time to present the subject as objectively as possible, which might be really difficult taking into consideration my involvement with the house at that time, but I promise that I will do my best.

Stream issues

During the playoffs on Sunday, there were around 4000 concurrent viewers on the English stream throughout the whole day, which is not bad when one takes into consideration the fact that on both Friday and Saturday MoW's streams were practically dead due to... exactly. There were some technical difficulties sponsored by our computers that couldn't handle the 1080p stream for some reason, so on Sunday it was decided that the streams are going to be 720p. A valid decision and during the last day of the tournament was lag-free 99% of the time.

Ministry of Win wanted to give its aurience the best possible viewing experience by making sure that 1080p streams will actually work, but unfortunately they didn't. A good try nevertheless.

Schedule

For the very first time in my life, I attended a tournament that was running according to schedule. What is more, there was around four or five additional hours saved up due to quick games and seven players who didn't show up. I have to give big props to the MoW team for that. Unfortunately, this was detrimental to many viewers who weren't sure when exactly do the games start due to the constant changes in the schedule. For those who visited Ministry of Win to watch the games live it was great; there was much more time to drink or discuss the games after they were finished, but for those at home it might have been annoying.

The Ministry of Win house

If you liked what you've seen on pictures you should have seen MoW's house in person. It's huge! Amazing place with many rooms and a sweet backyard where both the players and spectators were chilling after or before the next game. I loved it. I fell in love with food they served as well. We will try to make a long video tour around the house once we get our hands on some decent video camera, but from what I heard some of the players were planning to do this on their own, so follow reddit and MoW's residents facebook pages and twitters.

We took a lot of pictures for you guys. You can check them out below if you haven't already seen the gallery:

Day 1 Day 2 Day 3
General thoughts

I felt that for their first event Ministry of Win did "ok." Nothing really spectacular happened, but at the same time no people were killed. Despite problems with the streams, the last day was almost perfect and the number of viewers was good too. Organization-wise some things could've been done differently; in fact many things could've been done differently, but the guys did their best. According to the players themselves the tournament had a few slips, but overall it met their expectations and mine as well. I had a lot of fun helping out the guys at MoW, doing live coverage for GosuGamers and working on liquipedia profile, so I could barely find time for myself, but hey that's how every tournament should look like for the "press." Although, next time I will be doing only one thing at the time.

GG.net Coverage and MoW's exclusives

For those of you who want to catch-up on the live coverage updates and interviews follow this link that will take you to our Battle at Ministry of Win: get outPlayed live blog.

For those of you who want to learn about the group stage results and playoffs click here to visit our coverage hub.

If you are interested in watching the replays from group stage 1 and 2 we have prepared an exclusive replay pack thanks to Ministry of Win. Follow this link to download around 250 replays.

Thanks to Snute we also have this exclusive replay pack with all of his games. Credit to mamoz.no, gamersleague.no and Ministry of Win. You can get it here.