Edit: added #17.
So these are just tidbits from the interview that Malganyr made with him. If you’re wondering why I’m only posting tidbits, it’s because the interview is 8 hours long, and I have a life. I’ll make a follow up topic if I ever get around watching the whole thing. (I watched about half)
Fabien was Event Manager for Hots Esports among other things. He currently works as head of gaming operations for Cometh, a blockchain gaming studio.
Fun fact: In one of his first events, there was a shot in the video when Team Dignitas raises the trophy, where you can see the price tag on the trophy (They had forgotten to remove it). That was one of his first face palms
Tidbits
1. A lot of people, teams included, had complained about the format of the events because they were unsustainble. There were qualifiers going on every week. You were doing qualifiers for the next event before having qualified for the first one. (and yes, teams could be qualified for the 2nd event before qualifying for the first one)
2. As Mamekan mentionned. There was a will to catch up with leading MoBAs number of playable characters. This clashed wih the vision they had for the game, as well as making the metagame very volatile, as it shifted with ever hero, which were coming out very fast. (Personal observation, but it also made players feel entitled to fast releases)
3. The priority put on hero releases came at the detriment of a lot of other things. Bans for example, were not added until much later, which was not fun for the players in a stun dominated meta (and stuns lasted longer back then) The draft system was so badly made, that it took 25 minutes between when the caster announced the start of the draft, and the game actually starting. (This was changed fairly quickly, hero draft timers for example were reduced from 50 secs to 30 secs)
3.5 As the E sports organizer, Fabien had to make rulings during the events. One time, the captain of Dignitas came to see him to tell him that there was a bug where a talent made Artanis’s Twin blades hit three times (no, not triple strike). Same thing if there was an issue with a map. But he had to do that knowing that every decision created a precedent, and if there was another event before the next patch, the same rulings would have to be applied to them.
4. Blizzard pays the production team, and production pays the casters. One time, the organisers asked for a specific caster to handle the finals, and production said, no. The reason was that prod had paid pretty high for one of the casters, so they wanted to maximize their investment by giving him as much screentime as they could. Needless to say, it created some fiction at the time.
5. Fabien mentionned he had to plan the game times, for example by having Korean teams play earliler, so that it would be prime time in Korea’s time zone and fans there could watch it when they came back from work. Same for other regions.
6. Fabien met with his boss to ask him to change the format of the Esports games to Best of two with loser brackets. He was told he would need two more days, but that they wouldn’t give him any more money. He said he would make it work (He didn’t know at the time if he could ) This format allows you to know with more precision how much time the event would last. Easier planning, and better when you need to sell advertisement time.
7. Riot was inspired by HotS when they created Dragonsouls and the Herald. This was confirmed to Fabien by other event organisers and players. Blizzard (or rather Fabien) took the LoL format when they changed the Eastern and Western Clashes so that the winning theam would obtain an extra slot for their region.(Players previously complained that the event was disconnected from the rest of Esport.)
Same for the talents in DotA.
8. Every Blizzard employee had to do at least an 8 hour work shift at Blizzcon. No exceptions. Chris Sigati actually was in charge of bringing refreshments. This guy was in charge of Heroes and SC2 Executive producer
9. Blizzard employees do not get free unlocks, or free anything when they get a Blizzard game. They do get an allocation that they can use to buy stuff in-game, but Fabien noted that it wouldn’t even cover a hearthstone expansion. If they have technical issues, they have to go through customer support like eveyone else, they don’t get a backdoor or a shortcut. Their ticket is treated like every other ticket.
He said it teaches himility for the devs, as they don’t feel above the players, and the employees who handle tickets know they might be handling the ticket of a VP, so it encourages them to treat all customers fairly.
10. He noted that viewers might have seen some games where pro players on both sides made a lot of mistakes. That was because sometimes, the schedule forced them to have them play a LOT of games in a row, which the viewer would not be aware of, or have to play very late, or both. So the players were playing while exhausted.
11. Immediately after Blizzcon, there is often a period where not much happens, and significant issues (Like the Raynor Hyperion bug) are not addressed. That’s because there is usually a post Blizzcon break, where a lot of employees are actually on break.
12. There was sometime toxicity even within pro play in HGC. They had to expel people, ban people or give fines. Every subsequent offense saw the fine go up. So players who did not fix their behavior saw their salaries melt.
Trivia: During a disruption in a tournament (one of the casters plugged in a kettle which blew up everything) They disovered that if you are disconected from a game for at least 30 minutes, the servers will not let you back into the game no matter what. From that day on, they used dedicated local servers for organized games. (Also, on that day one team, MVP Black, said that they considered that they had won the game, and refused to replay it.)
13. To get broadcasting rights, content creators had to agree on contract to moderate their chat on Stream. But in 2018, it became moot, as Blizzard customer service employees actually moderated the chats during events.
14. The team that came out of losers bracket was disadvantaged because they had just played a bunch of games in a row, then had to face the top team in the finals. They couldn’t pause the event to give them time to rest. So Fabien decided to add an all star event, where players would vote for which players they’d like to see.
This gave the team a break, created something the audience would look forward to as well as having a higher quality for the final, since one of the team wouldn’t be exhausted. He took this idea from Riot. (Players taking part in the final would not be included in the all star)
Most of the casters weren’t big fans of the all star, because they were mostly interested in the finals. But Malganyr admitted it was a good idea when he was told why they did it.
15. Fabien mentionned that, in his opinion, everything that blizzard was accused of, the bad behaviors described, the culture etc, is founded. He said it was in the company as a whole, but the worse of it was on the U.S. side. He beleives the entire company needs to be cleaned up.
16. Some people in upper management did not actually commit reprehensible acts, but protected those who did. (mike morhaime for example)
17., It was metionned that almost all the people that had committed reprehensible acts have left the company. So boycotting the company now mostly harms the employees, who have suffered harships already.