Final part today, so I won't flood SK Hot blogs anymore, so I'll talk about something we did but nobody understood.
It began at the end of the MCL 2 regular season. As I'm also a newser, I saw that ClanBase merged with Global Gaming League, involving CB to receive 50,000$ from the Americans. First, I didn't think of MCL but another admin, Fanspastic, who had already worked with CB in past spoke to me about that.
He gave the idea of joining CB. Let me explain you why I've been interested in following his idea. We had no real sponsor during season 1. Season 2, we got Steelpad but seriously it wasn't enough for players to get simple mousepads they can have thanks to their sponsors or whatever. So teaming up with CB could give us the opportunity to get a serious reward, cash prize.
Actually, it wasn't the main fact. We knew they wanted to launch an eurocup, team battle at war3. This would have meant a new competitor, plus coming from a company like CB, I thought MCL would die because every team would join CB Eurocup instead of playing an unrewarded competition. To be honest, I wouldn't have decided to go to ClanBase if CB didn't have opened a rewarded w3 team battle competition.
I knew their organisation staff is pretty reduced, especially in RTS games, this type of game they always more or less ignored. Those reasons are the CB merge explanations. It was definitely not a mistake, we just should have negotiated more, on CB page of course. A ClanBase sponsor could have been a better solution, I mean, keeping our old MCL website, and put some CB banners everywhere :p
Hardlife was involved in MCL organisation thanks to his website and I wanted to contact him about CB but he was in vacation so I wasn't able to get in touch with him though his point of view would have change my mind I think. I must say he also promised to upgrade MCL site by adding new features, such as community system, and brackets etc, he never did it unfortunately. So I thought he wouldn't do anything more for MCL, though he already had done many things^^ I've not been confident enough to continue MCL and not caring about other competitions. This is what I regret because finally I guess everything could have run fine without CB.
Well now, we can discuss if CB caused MCL's fall or not... I don't know, what I can say is that CB website, which is really really not good to admin in the best conditions gave me at least 3 times more work than before. For example, before, every replay was easily uploaded on hardlife's ftp via a simple script. You find the replay you want to upload, you click on upload, it's uploaded. The replay gets a unique ID, you only have to link that ID in the news refering to the match. With CB, .w3g files (replays) can't be uploaded in CB FTP, it only accepts .rar. That's a real joke. So as it would have taken too many time, I decided not to zip every replay but to upload them directly on my own provider ftp. That was long since I had to link them all in the main page, with full URLs. Not many differences with the previous website apparently....? Not really, only supervisor and co-supervisor can edit every news (edit to update with replays/scores). And cup admins can only edit their news. So, let's say tomorrow is 4K vs SK. If I and the co-sup can't be there for the match, nobody can update the news. Those things are really annoying and bother everyone in the staff. You can't work properly with such stupid features...
This can explain delays concerning real time updates during matches... And I don't even consider CB server lag, which is horrible.
I tried to contact them during the season to upgrade CB website, thinking it wouldn't be a problem because it's just some easy coding things to do. I only got non adapted answers.
So season 3 wasn't as good as season 2, even worse because some teams forfeited... oTp, Ownage "due to a lack of motivation" with zubie or zerter, don't remember, learning ownage left MCL in SK news lol -_-. The end was pretty funny too. Elakeduck who was still T64 had to sign his contract with SK at WC3L finals, not even one week after MCL semi finals. We set deadline for scheduling I think, one week after WC3L finals. But triMble was really angry because he wanted the final to be played before, otherwise he would lose his best player. SK wanted to play later of course... They could never agree on time. And as we knew T64 would disband, we asked SK if Duck could play for T64 a last time, they didn't want because of contracts/wc3l rule... Then T64 switched to fnatic, but many more players were in that team, and winner didn't join, so it was a different team. I knew trimble wanted to play the final with fnatic too so he didn't schedule in time and everything went crazy. With 64amd.ownitsch wanting T64 to play the final (don't know with which players since everyone left, only crimson was still there and inactive^^). And I didn't want fnatic to play so we finally gave mTw the opportunity to play the final and we gave fnatic the third place. SaSe was angry too because he said fnatic deserved second place money. I told him it was trimble's fault, who waited to create fnatic...
Well a bad ending, I just hope CB paid teams ^^ I think so because no one complained but how hard it was... I'm just wondering where CB spends its money on... Giving ennemy territory 1000 euros etc instead of paying for a new website really stuns me. I don't get it. Last things to say just before MCL's end were WC3L new announcments. I remember 2 weeks before I stopped, every day a new announcement lol :| 1) Register for qualifications 2) New format 4 1v1 1 2v2 3) WC3L to collaborate with Blizzard 4) Selected teams for qualifications 5) Brackets... Well every day i was more and more pissed off but I have already planned two or three months ago that I would stop after season 3. No offense to my MCL 3 staff but I think they weren't as motivated as previous staffs. (Yes, many things affect a staff league, such as social life xD or WoW and so on... all the time looking for new admins)
Now you know everything I know ^^ I'll just wish good luck to WC3L & WPL staff, because it's just so hard to run a league.