This is not a dissing nor bashing post.

I love everyone's effort who's supporting broadcasting, commentating etc.

But I'm a man of great physical potence and thus I'm forced to push you towards progress and greater success!

1..) We need multiple commentators (on the last EQL finals we did have)
2.) We need "buffer", someone who says "THIS IS QUAKEWORLD AND WE'RE LIVE" it can be done via .wavs though.
3.) I need to play Scorpions time to time and I hope we would have some music/fx sounds. (When I was doing commentary I did play Rocky soundtrack <3 )
4.) Camera runs and camera director, (ie. when Pent is due camera would be flying around and not just POVing).
5.) Strict starting schedules, even if we must force WOs to let people know that they're not going to WC/Phone/Epilepzing/whatever when they're supposed to play QW.

I suppose the real problem in QW broadcast is that QW is a very fast fps and there's alot going on. Commentator should be drawing the big picture and not just commentating the POV everyone's watching. Autotrack is not the best way to observe, broadcast should be picking the players who're hot or where the action is.

I'd say there should be one guy who's the main commentator and he would be watching SOLELY teaminfo to see what weapons/armors/PUs teams have. He would play the "buffs" and posible FX/music. The other commentator, "the expert" would be watching single players and commentating their effort and picking players who're hot. Then there should be "director" who would pick what is broadcasted, ie. who's POV or flying around. He should've binded every player in different keys and he should've scripted camera paths and spots.


These tips are approximately PRICELESS.


Btw. I'm more than willing to participate if I get this stupid Linux QW to work.

I'd agree with 1 and 5.

I like the commentating set-up where theres the guy who talks about whats generally going on and the commentator who gives insight to the game. This makes the commentary stream a lot more intresting to listen and gives it more substance (no more 5 second breaks because nothings happening). I don't agree with all the fancy fly-by's and such. I think fps is enough for anyone who actually wants to watch the game.

5 is pretty obvious. Unnecessary delays should be weeded out.

1) The problem here is, commentators are hard to get. Currently Peppe, Phil, Adde, Purity are the only guys who have experience doing this and seem to enjoy it. Sassa has experience and does it good but doesn't seem to enjoy doing it anymore. There are a lot of div 1 players like bps that have helped and does that in a great way, but most of them needs help from someone a bit more used to commentating.
If people actually started to contact people who makes sure things like this are set-up, like me or Zalon and told us they want to commentate a game, it would help a lot but currently this is not done.
We have tried asking people like DjWheat as well without much success.

2) I don't really see the need for that, but I don't really care anyway. Good news with the time and some pre-game chat is good enough.
3) Haha, Get back commentating then! Lets hear some nice sound fx!
4) This would take a lot of time and resources. Considering we even have problems getting enough commentators I doubt this can be made a reality.
5) This is possible, but some div1 delay is close to impossible to get away from. Just look at QNC.

Everything you say here, really can't be done because they require resource we don't have right now. At least as far as I know. I don't really agree with your point about a main commentator but besides that, if people aren't willing to sacrifice some of their time to help out its not going to happen. And I can even see some of your suggestions requiring equipment and when you involve money into it, well it just gets a lot harder.

I agree with 1 + 5. I strongly disagree with 2 + 3 + 4. Especially the music/effects idea, that sounds terrible.

I've seen the steady camera done in some other FPS broadcast and it was quite confusing because it wasn't done properly. The POV cam switched to steady cam on some (random to me) place where not much happened.

Instead the commentator should switch POV to the player who is going to fight for pent and comment that it's going to happen. From the player's POV you are able to see the whole fight for pent.
And yeah "don't comment what everyone can see on their screen" like the player is low on health, the player just picked up quad, the player just did fire 3 nails and 1 grenade.

Well, something like "Johhny_cz is low on health" is a reasonable observation to make as long as you say how that affects his, and his team's, decisions, and knowing who gets quad is important enough to have it stated out loud. Not everyone's going to be tracking the same players, and huge game-changing things like that should be announced even if it's obvious to anyone /following the commentator's pov.

1 and 5 sound great. Sound-effects = bg.

I like the music and effects idea.

I also like the idea of a separate conductor/director and expert.

The fact that we dont have resources, or that most viewers are currently satisfied with the very bare-bones broadcasts we do, may not be the effect of it being good, but the cause of us having such a small scene.

Years ago I wrote a piece explaining why e-sports is so "niche" and not as big as it can be, and I compared it e-sports to texas hold'em poker in the 1970s -- lots of enthusiasts, but nobody knew how to "sell" it to the masses. Simple things like hole-cam, statistical percentages, etc, made 8 guys sitting at a table interesting to watch for millions (its on all the big cable channels in america now) Some of what the original post says here may be a step in the right direction to do the same for QW

Would be nice to comment more often why they are acting like that, what should they do, whats the moving he is trying for, etc... Can be really good for understand the whole gameplay and not just what is doing the POV player.

1.) We need multiple commentators (on the last EQL finals we did have)
-This might come as a surprise (can't possible imagine that), but we have been searching for commentators for a very long time, almost all news posts about live commentary had a little note about the fact that we needed more commentators. Also all commentator packs has a readme, where I state that we are indeed still looking for commentators.

During the EQL finals, everyone who commentated, was someone I asked personally. Even after numerous attempts, .qw/newsposts/forumposts/etc I'm yet to get a query on irc from someone who wants to commentate matches.

2.) We need "buffer", someone who says "THIS IS QUAKEWORLD AND WE'RE LIVE" it can be done via .wavs though.
-This is easily done - usually in the past, when it was qw.nu crew members doing the commentary they always did some intro about qw.nu and some info about the league. This just takes a bit more preparation.

3.) I need to play Scorpions time to time and I hope we would have some music/fx sounds. (When I was doing commentary I did play Rocky soundtrack <3 )
-Sometimes music is cool, and especially the Rocky theme/soundtrack, but it might become trivial in the long run. However we did use sound effects in the past. I don't know if this is a good or a bad idea.

4.) Camera runs and camera director, (ie. when Pent is due camera would be flying around and not just POVing).
-As it is now, I don't think it's possible, the qw players watch the game using QTV, most switch around between players themselves, while others use the follow command to follow the commentator. For the live stream, we could switch to view important areas, this would then be something I had to do while streaming, and as it is now, I'm almost always pretty busy as it is, during the time the matches are streamed.

5.) Strict starting schedules, even if we must force WOs to let people know that they're not going to WC/Phone/Epilepzing/whatever when they're supposed to play QW.
-This is something thats entirely up to the players and the league admins, the league admins has to decide if their league is primarily for the spectators or for the players. But as it is now, I feel that the players/teams do take it a bit more serious when they have 300-400 people watching.

I would also love for us to do more matches with commentators and live streams, but it does take time and preparations. I can get the live stream running pretty fast, but we also have to schedule with the commentators and the teams. And even then we need some time to advertise it, it's a lot of work just to set up for the few who just might stumble by.

During the EQL finals, with advertising on SK/ESR/QWnu and numerous quake related irc channels, we had about 400+ viewers for all matches.
-And yes we can do it better, and we should - but it's a work in progress and I feel that so far we haven't gotten enough feedback to even try to improve. My recent post about what to improve about the livestream, only had questions about the compression quality. So I'm happy to see your post!

Also, I'll be bringing my streaming setup to DreamHack, and if Phil is up for it, we will be able to stream any important matches

I might not be the most experienced commentator ...
I interupted purity alot during the eql finals ...
but I am willing to learn how to be a better commentator...
if someone knows how to do it but dont have the time or feel like actually doing the commentary
just give me a few points and i will try and implement them....
practice is the best way to be a good commentator ... and for that i need games to commentate...
shouldn't really matter if it is a prac or a div3 game ...
all games make you improve and some people likes to have commentary to prac div1 games.
Just my 2 cents...
I am willing to do commentary ... but some takes a bit of preparation so a heads up would be nice.
I might not be the best option but atleast i provide an option

I think its very fun, and appreciated by many.
Instead of practicing commentating pracs you could start by doing demos of good matches and
uploading them with commentary on chtv.

I know that I enjoy those.

You could do demos. I mean you could commentate on demos then release them on chtv with the commentary included in the archive. That could be a good workout to improve on your commentary and would also be appreciated. There's tons of good duel demos without commentary at the moment, maybe start with those?

imo we need to have more top players commentating together with an experienced commentator. I often find myself listening to a commentator who are saying stuff like "WTF is he doing, what a bad move" when in fact it's a good move but beyond the skill level of the commentator so he doesn't understand the reason for it.

The commentary so far is good but I think it lack of analysis of decision making, situations and outcome.

give me some examples and url
and i can see what i can do

you could try the default included demos in nQuake, so we can put it in by default =)

the most important thing is to have commentary at all i think. it makes watching the game so much more interesting. it also brings the rest of the crowd closer together if they have one commentary the can all relate to. even if it's not perfect i wouldn't want to miss it.

I understand that you "appreciate" a commentary ... but i don't wanna do anything half-good .. if i am going to do this i wanna improve and hear opinions from views so I can improve and also get them to enjoy it more...
i mean .. if someone tune in to the live stream and there is someone there commentating and not doing a good job .. they will most likely not tune in again ....

dunno if this might be of any help but.... these are among the best amateur commentators I've ever heard, the Violetak is an account where they do tripple and dual commentary. the game is not quakeworld thou but maybe you can find something of help there.

http://www.youtube.com/user/CholeraSC
http://www.youtube.com/user/SC2GGRise
http://www.youtube.com/user/diggitySC
http://www.youtube.com/user/VioleTAK

adde, I'd be glad to join in on your commentary-prac contact me on irc when you're starting!

adde: I think you too often were commentating what was happening (like I mentioned above) without saying why it is important .. lot of the stuff seemed unimportant to me (who picked up what, especially if it was the player we all were just watching via autotrack, no need to say what's he doing, we can see that)

I've added new hud item to latest ezQuake "itemsclock", in mvd/qtv playback shows which items are going to spawn in the nearest future (with countdown) - maybe can help the commentators in some situations (im sure they know by themselves about most of the stuff, but it can be a sort of reminder).

Wow, that's quite a feature, Johnny_cz. Nice job!

that's a really nice feature imo.

Just comment some maches plz , like today div2 final ....

JohnNy_cz: itemsclock is really usefull for understand the game, but i just noticed, when somebody picks up a pack with gl, rl or lg the itemsclock starts a countdown of 30 seconds, i suppose this is a bug, and can be very confusing, take a look, if you can do something to fix that.

Thanks, i provide 2 sshots:
http://img13.imageshack.us/gal.php?g=ezquake004k.jpg

"new hud item "itemsclock": in mvd/qtv playback displays which items will spawn soon with ETA time displayed; doesn't distinguish rl-pack pickup from normal rl pickup, won't be fixed soon" by Johny

i have a lot of stuff that can be implemented in the ezquake client to help improve commentary and spectating ...
=D

itemsclock is a great idea, thanks!