As someone who does not enjoy actually playing SC2 but enjoys the hell out of watching the competitive scene, I find that
there are a few things that can make or break tournament enjoyment for
me. These three main items are casters, production value, and event
time.
As with all things important to any person, we have to choose the
things that are most important to us and those things get the majority
of our time. I enjoy owning our home and having nice things so the job
is pretty high up there. I enjoy having a happy husband and a clean home
with yummy food and a pleasant atmosphere, and that takes more time
than you'd think. Above all, a happy marriage takes work and a massive
amount of time. More work and more time than anyone could ever possibly
explain to you before you actually get into that situation....but I
digress.
I want to discuss both production value and casters in seperate postings, so we'll deal with casters in this one!
Casters
Casters for any particular tournament seem to be the main reason
I'm excited for an event before it occurs. I tend to enjoy casters who
don't spend 20 seconds yelling "OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH" and
then NOT explaining what is going on. For me as a non-player, I don't
understand what the yelling is about. Clearly, something important
happened. As a caster, your job is to tell me about it. You can get
loud, or even incoherent at times, but completely skipping over
commentating for yelling is simply unacceptable. I don't mind loud,
passionate, and insane yelling - ask my husband, it's my norm. So I tend
to be more forgiving of it when it's someone who brings a great view of
the game overall (looking at you Day9/Husky combo), but even then it
can easily get out of hand.
There are some casters who are working hard to learn their craft,
and they're trying to get better, but they're not my favorites, but
they're not casters who will turn me off of an event. For me, Frodan
falls into this category. In season 3 of the North American Star League (NASL)
finals Frodan gave an interview saying he was still getting used to the
camera, and was working to more clearly express himself - and it
showed. Both in his passion and clear desire for it, as well as maybe a
bit of hesitancy when reaching for words during a hectic battle. It made
me want to watch him, to see him improve and root for him. I'm looking
forward to watching the next NASL season, rather than just the finals.
Then there are the casters who make me want to not watch an event
or match they're covering at all. There's no need to mention specific
names, it's not that they're bad people, horrible at what they do and
they should quit and go do something else. It's just that for me,
personally, they don't make the matches exciting and make me want to
spend my whole day watching them. Other people obviously enjoy these
folks casting, or they wouldn't still be doing it.
For me, it comes down to time, as mentioned previously. I have to
choose how I spend my time wisely. Watching people who don't get me
interested in a match when I need to get stuff done in the house on my
precious days off...well, that's just not a choice I allow myself to
make. If I'm going to do something I don't particularly enjoy, it will
be cleaning, cooking, or prying my husband off whatever game he's
playing long enough to get him to do something productive.
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