Written by Glenn | 07 November 2011

I had a feeling that fighting game fans would wake up on Monday not to talk about the great action from the weekend, but rather the overwhelming amount of advertisements that came up during the broadcast.

I plan to talk about it later in the week, either here or somewhere else. But for now, enjoy some commentary from other people, who popped off right after the tournament was over.

From Darry at iPLAYWINNER:

I feel absolutely no sympathy for what may befall Vesper Arcade in the aftermath of this tournament. They may be fortunate. Stream Monster Nation has a notoriously-short memory. Perhaps next year, when another Canada Cup is announced, we’ll all settle down in front of our monitors like a shuffling mass of Alzheimer’s victims. I hope not. 

What we witnessed today is sunlight in a dark corner that has concerned some of us working along the edge of new media within the fighting game community. What you spent the weekend consuming was a product engineered by a group eagerly exploiting both its audience and its participating talent in the name of simple, potent greed. The team responsible for casting this event extorted everyone involved, spectators and fighters alike.

From Paul aka SouperFX:

Is this what we really want to move onto as a community? While I agree that it certainly is a great way to force people into buying your premium stream, it’s also a great way to convince me to never support your bullshit business practices. And I am someone who fully supports paid viewing as a way to reward streaming groups for all their hard work and help recoup the money they put into their equipment. Even if it is not the direct fault of the streaming group because of delay issues between what they see and what viewers see, it’s just another issue that should have been dealt with from the start. Never have I seen such problems from Spooky or anyone else who runs ads.

Someone started a thread on the JustinTV forums:

Canada Cup's stream was already terrible before this, but they're just making it worse and giving a bad reputation to Twitch as a whole. It's actions like these that make me want to say you guys should stay away from Fighting Game Streams and stick to Starcraft if you're going to turn the internet into a Communist nation. Right before I typed this thread, one staff member set slow mode to 5 minutes. Our stream chat's slow modes usually don't go over 30 seconds to a minute. Also, Markyochoa set a macro to ban anyone typing in caps or the phrase "$8.95". This isn't golf, it's the most hype fighting game at a major international tournament. People are going to get excited, and a 5 minute slow mode defeats the purpose of the chat. "Well, I was going to type about Justin Wong losing to Leslie, but so much time has passed that it's not relevant anymore." JTV community leaders, please tell your staff to stop abusing their power. They're ruining everything we enjoy about our streams.

And I'll end it by mentioning what I said on Google Plus (I put it there because it wasn't directly stat related, but oh well, it's relevant now):

I mentioned it on Twitter, and it was copied here, but for everyone bitching about what seemed to be an overabundance of advertisements on today's broadcast, I did some number crunching this morning and double checked them just now. 

They seemed to run a 30-second ad after every match save the team tourney (FULL DISCLOSURE: I watched a lot of the HD Remix tourney where this was happening, and I had to work the rest of the day, so I dunno if it continued through the day; I'm guessing it did based on the reaction on Twitter). 

If an average match was 3 minutes, and a 30-second commercial aired after that, then there were 16 blocs of commercials an hour. So in total, that's 8 minutes of commercials and 52 minutes of "game" time.

Compare that to MLB, which averages about 3 hours a game. If there are no in-game pitching changes, then there's an average of 5 blocs an hour. 10 minutes commercials, 50 minutes game.

NFL's average game is 3 hours. They're required to do 20 commercials a game. Could be anywhere from 30 seconds to 2 minutes. Let's say it's 2 minutes and they add one extra, to make it even. So that's 7 blocs, 14 minutes commercials, 46 minutes game.

NBA is about 2 1/2 hours, with about 5 mandatory commercials per half. So if coaches don't go nucking futs, then it's 5 blocs, 10 minutes commercials, 50 minutes game.

CONCLUSION: Today's broadcast still had LESS commercial time on average than any pro event. Bottom line is, perception diluted reality, because it's obvious the amount of blocs was way over the average of a pro event, nearing triple the amount.

I said on Twitter that pay walls can work, but it's got to be spot on. Perhaps if there was a way to have less blocs of more time (8 of 1 minute each, or 4 of 2 minutes), then it won't be a problem. 30 seconds, you have to stay or else you miss the next match. 

At least, with 2 minutes, I can do something like hit up the fridge, go to the bathroom, etc.