Kripp Saving eSports!

I want to take a few moments out to share how much I enjoyed this weekend’s World Cyber Arena (WCA), casted by Kripparian on his Twitch channel.

Let’s be honest, the event was a mess. Internet issues, horrendous scheduling, last second rule changes, missed flights for 1 competitor and 1 caster. If it could have gone wrong, it did. So why did I enjoy it so much?

The cast was *amazing*. Kripp did a really great job at explaining the issues, and I’ve never enjoyed a cast so much as the downtime discussions between Kripp and the players who switched in and out to co-commentate.

It really irks me when tournaments who experience issues and have their casters come on and say “hey, we’re having some technical issues, so we’ll start the games as soon as possible”, and then, nothing. Production throws up a “We’ll be right back” screen and then music plays for anywhere from five to 90 minutes.

Even less often, someone throws up funny “we’re still working on it” or time updates on a ticker on the screen. I appreciate those, but they’re not used often. I want to say DreamHack and RedBull do it. Does anyone else?

So why was this so different? From the moment the stream came up (a bit late) Kripp was honest about the issues, his control over them, what was being done to help alleviate it, and then pretty much ignored them and did his best to provide an outstanding cast of an event with what was clearly minimal support by the event organizers. There were some “yeah, I know it’s bad, I can’t help it” moments that just made my heart break for him! But he soldiered on in a great way with a much better attitude than I would have had!

I want to be really clear here, as event organizers, WCA clearly failed on many fronts. It doesn’t matter if the issues stemmed from inexperience, translation issues, internet issues, DDOS, scheduling…..what made this event fun was Kripp.

He was handling the stream and casting for North America and he did a really great job at taking what must have been a stressful and overwhelming experience and turning it into a cast that is unrivaled in pure fun, interesting discussions!

I feel there was some uncomfortable moments between That’sAdmirable and Kripp - but everyone else fit in nicely and traded informations, jokes, bad manner, and killed time in such an enjoyable way that I feel a ton of esports casts could learn from this experience.

We never get to hear this kind of back and forth in events which many consider to have “good production”. They always wrap things up, go to a commercial, and then come right back to a game. Seeing a different way of doing things makes me wish we did it more often.

There was a Starcraft 2 event a while back, one of the first RedBull events, where Day9 and Husky talked for almost 30 minutes regarding everything from the best food they ate in the city they were in and the current meta of the game and how they expected it to shift with the new planned updates. It was fantastic! Why do we not do this anymore?

Regardless of how the games turned out (GREAT death-Shammy player!) in China, I am 100% certain I will tune into the next Kripp hosted event…..and sadly, I am hoping Trump misses his flight again. Kripp did a great job on his own, and the players switching in and out in between their matches gave me a great insight into their views of the games and the event as a whole that I never would have gotten had Trump been there to co-cast.

Great job Kripp. Saving esports!