GvG Commentary Stress Test - Your help is needed!

As many of you may know, in the last two months a select group of individuals here on Guru have put together an amazing GvG commentary event for the monthly mAT finals and semi-finals which was spurned on by a a thread entitled GvG in Crisis. (For those of you that missed out, you can view the match commentary and interviews on Apok's YouTube channel.) The first month we had a total of 71 people on the free Guru Mumble server and in November - thanks in large part by ArenaNet's in-game announcement - we had a total of 117 Guild Wars players come and join us!

While the event was deemed an overall success because of how much interest it garnered, we came to realize later on in the commentary that there was a 100-player cap in observer mode and thus some of the commentary became desynced with what was actually happening in real time. Since then, there has been discussion amongst the event leaders on how to involve the entire Guild Wars community as best as possible without the 100-player obs mode restriction.

What they have come up with is this: The official Guild Wars Guru LIVE video stream on justin.tv!

This is where we need your help. Please help us spread the word that tomorrow, December 4th, we need as MANY people as possible to login at 2PM PST to help us stress test the stream. If you have any questions, feel free to send me a PM!

I hope to see you there and thank you in advance for all your help!

Just as a reminder, this is going on right now and will continue until the top of the hour. Please support it at http://www.justin.tv/guildwarsguru.

Regretfully, we only got 41 viewers. Better luck next time.

Peak viewer count during the stream was 54, total of a couple hundred unique viewers according to views.

Please post with any feedback regarding the stream.

I stayed for one match and it seems there were a bit of pauses. That's all.

By a bit, I mean like 5 times (a second or two of it) over the course of a match.

Mine lags when i had GW open but was fine when i closed it so i guess my bandwidth was pretty bollocks as it's peak time atm.

Definitely very watchable once i cut down bandwidth use.

Edit: Lags a fair bit when full screened, but doesnt if not.

I was around for about 20 minutes and left myself logged on even while afk. The lag seemed almost on the video and not the audio. I could hear commentary by the guys but the video would freeze every so often. Commentary was good. Thanks for the feed. Cheers.

I've heard we gotta work on our camerawork.

Yeah, some things that would be nice is if a ranger rupts something to change camera to the interrupted target so you can see what was rupted. And in split situations maybe the commentators can call what's going outside of camera range because the 'U' map is very hard to see on the stream.


I couldn't make it yesterday for the test, but I just watched the stream and I gotta say it's looking pretty good.

This is true, the first match in particular the commentators are often discussing things that are not being shown. I think the camera was being run by someone who wasn't commentating though? It was hard to tell.

Overall however, this is excellent. I'm not quite finished yet but it's good stuff. Congrats.

You guys all do a great job of making the more arcane tactical and build decisions seem obvious and logical btw. It's clear that it is because it's pretty standard stuff to you, but things like emphasizing pressure when the runner is away are not immediately apparent to those like me who have no experience with gvg. Once its stated though, you kinda feel a bit stupid for not having realised something so obvious

If the test was announced earlier beforehand I would've joined from the start instead of at the end.

Also, I'd still prefer the live commentary with sync's in observer mode because I can then manipulate the camera myself and see it in higher quality.

Imho, it's not a good replacement for the live commentary in observer mode, unless you expect more than 100 people from now on every time. Even in that case, I would only run the live stream as a backup for those who didn't join the first 100.

I am taking all these suggestions to heart.

(Oh god, my heart....)

I was trying to get all the important instances onto the stream, but from now on, to avoid misdirection, I am devoting myself entirely to following the commentators as swiftly as possible.

better to get Anet to help on your cause. Make all obs mode rooms have same time for first day

Server/functionality changes are not an option, we are collaborating with them every step of the way with this.


Unrelated: Several people have messaged me with requests for more commentary streams for Daily ATs, depending on the specific interest level and the amount of casters we have, we may be able to do several days a week.

An update, we did some practice today on focusing the camera on the action.

http://www.justin.tv/guildwarsguru/b/275253474

Really good cast you made there, the SSS vs Boo one. Nice background information and the camera work was pretty good aswell. There wasn't really a moment where the commentary kinda stopped and you did a good job calling out openings in the tactics and motivations of certain skill choices etc. Very nice.

Thank you , we tried to work on the camera work but I thought my commentary in that was overall pretty solid, for the mAT you will have Ensign and Asp, two great guys who I know are going to talk forever so you will not have that issue