I like seeing a lot of these two particularly but it's also extremely time consuming to dig through all the participants and all the maps and assemble a proper set of notes on them for use in commentating. To aid in this perhaps next year we could have a place where community members could contribute information on specific players (perhaps like a thread per team) and a place for discussion of each map (or pool). That way commentators would be able to probe the thoughts and experiences of the community without having to actually ask around. For each lesser known player there are probably people who they are friends with that could provide a lot of information.Railey2 wrote:
SPOILERB) 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.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.
- 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?
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 hood 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.Lots of this is done already, and that is one of the reasons why I enjoyed the commentary so much this time around.
- 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?
I said something about this on one of the group info videos - it's hard to be hyped up about matches involving players you don't know or a map pool you are unfamiliar with. It might just be me, but I care more about the individuals playing than the specific country/team they are playing for.
Semi-finals tiebreaker isnt as awesome as united 
