Personally, while I think that the commentary started out rather weak, I found it to be very enjoyable later on. Particularly the last block on Saturday was more than I could have ever asked for (
amazing job, ztrot and all the others, forgive me for not knowing all of your names already).
Especially the playful banter between the commentators has led the commentary to be very dynamic, interesting, funny and enjoyable.
If you continue in that manner, there is nothing to fear on that front. Well done.
The things that went wrong and can potentially go wrong are rather obvious, so I won't go in depth here. Instead, I have a couple ideas for the commentary, as it seems to run out of ideas some times. Having more things to talk about would obviously make their job significantly easier.
So here it is, Ideas to improve the commentary:A) Increasing the interactivity with audience and participants
- Involving the participants.
- Invite the captain from a team or any player on chat after the game has ended to discuss the game. I am unsure if they did that yet, since I didn't get to watch all the games, but they didn't do that on the ones that I watched. It would be great to get some comments on the game itself by someone who played it himself.
- Invite the captain from a team or any player on chat before the game has started, to discuss their expectations and possibly how they want to play this game. Then wish them good luck and off they go! - Involving the audience
- Answering questions from chat. Excellent idea, was already done to some degree today. Keep that up, its a great way to make things more enjoyable.
- Strawpolls! Those are easy to make, and can be the starting point for interesting discussions. What team do you root for? Who do you think will win? Etc.
- I bet there are many more things to do with the audience. This might be something worth thinking about for a longer time. - Involving some of the other staff?
- This is a very broad one, basically includes all sort of people that are related to the development of osu. Might be cool for breaks.
B) Information about the players.
There are at least 8 players present per game, so theres lots of information the commentators could draw out from that.
- Did some of the players compete in prior OWC's?
- Are they well-known mappers, maybe? If yes, what are some of their most famous maps?
- Were they in the top10 at some point?
- Is there anything notable about their top-plays? Do they have a top-performance on the map that is currently played, maybe?
- When did they join osu?
- Are they mods themselves, or BAT's or maybe even QAT's?
- What are their strong points, are they hidden or hardrock players, or nomod or DT, or allrounders? What are their weaknesses?
Theres lots of things to be said, in fact there are so many things to be said that someone who did all the research would probably not run out throughout a 1 hour game.
The commentators already mention many things, but there still is a lot more to say about the people that participate - or about the people that
don't participate.
C) Information about the maps.
Doomsday did a good job at giving a quick analysis of the map-pool for the upcoming round. Theres lots of things to be said about maps, and lots of it already gets said, but for the sake of completeness I'll make another list here.
- How old are the maps? Are they ahead of their time?
- Who mapped them? Is the mapper known for other, famous maps?
- What about the song? Do we have famous maps that include songs of the same artist? What genre is the song? Is it well known?
- How popular is the map?
- Who holds the top-score on the map? Anything notable about it? Any other famous plays on that map?
- With what mod-combinations is the map popular?
- If it is part of a map-set, is there something to say about the other difficulties?
- Is the map technical, does it have scary jumps or particularly hard parts that many people choke on?
Lots of this is done already, and that is one of the reasons why I enjoyed the commentary so much this time around.
D) Information about the tournament.
Everything viewed on a larger scale.
- If team A wins now, who will the most likely face next? What are their chances next round?
- Who is the underdog in this match, who is expected to win? Or is it even, maybe?
- Take a look at past tournaments. How far did the teams get back then? Did they even participate? Is this currently their "best" tournament?
- What is the role of a team in the whole tournament. Are they popular or unknown? Serious title-contender? Underdog? How was their role in past tournaments?
- Everything about the tournaments organization, schedule, prize-money, the "I support team"-tags that I don't think were advertised at all, so far, the people that are involved with it..
- How does loser-bracket work? (many people don't know how it works. Many many people.)
Commentary is first and foremost a task that relies on smart, thorough and accurate research.
First know what you can talk about -> know where to acquire the information that you miss -> acquire and organize the information -> find the right opportunity to include it in your commentary.
Everyone can pull of commentating what happens at the very moment (
"oooh he missed, no! thats gonna be it for team X if they can't turn this around, here comes the long slider!"). Don't get me wrong, at-the-present commentating IS an important part, but it leaves little room for improvement. It's mostly about having a good vocabulary and nice sounding phrases to keep things interesting (its the worst when someone uses the same words over and over again).
Theres quite a bit people can do with their voice too. As a negative example, one of the commentators goes up and down with his voice all the time (the one with the heavy accent, again I apologize for not knowing his name), which I find rather irritating.
Overall, I have been very happy with how this played out. If you could include some of the things that I mentioned, and stay consistent with the things that you already include, this can turn out to be really great.
Alright, thats all I have for now, or rather I don't want to keep writing and eat something instead. Surely theres more to be said or discussed. Have a good one!