CyaSteve talks about the successes and trials of Kings of the Storm #1 :: Heroes of the Storm discussion on HeroesFire

We wrote about the Kings of the Storm tournament last week. The tournament was a great success and there will obviously be more of them in the future. Our very own, FourCourtJester, interviewed the tournament organizer, CyaSteve, about the good and bad things of the tournament along with a bunch more topics. The interview is about 12 minutes long and we have provided a transcript below for those that can't listen.

- Transcript -

Hey guys, FourCourtJester here from HeroesFire and I am talking to CyaSteve, organizer of the first Heroes of the Storm tournament. RIP, I got to say Steve.

CyaSteve: Yeah, it was fun while it lasted!

FCJ: Our one and only tournament! But you gathered some good data, we saw some amazing matches, we had a big spike in traffic actually for the Twitch category, as well as the Reddit because of all the postings and everything. Overall, your first tournament for this game, I know it isnâ€™t the first tournament in general.

CyaSteve: Correct, yeah this is nowhere near my first tournament. Itâ€™sâ€¦ uhâ€¦ I lost quite a while ago, it is probably in the 160 range somewhere. But yeah, Iâ€™ve done tournament across a whole variety of games, some of which weâ€™ve been involved with together.

FCJ: Yeah, Iâ€™m aware of your League of Legends past but what other games have you done in the past?

CyaSteve: So League was one of my most recent ones because it was a newer game. But I started on Halo, Smash, Gears of War, a little bit of Starcraft. All kinds of stuff! I did a lot of Magic the Gathering stuff. You name it, Iâ€™ve probably done something with it.

FCJ: The Kings of the Storm went over very smoothly. So we definitely saw that you had a lot of practice with dealing with this stuff, you were answering a lot of questions on the subreddit. Using all that experience, it looked very smooth.

CyaSteve: Yeah, I canâ€™t complain. It is definitely one of the better events that Iâ€™ve ever run that was a first time event; especially not knowing any of the people. I was really worried about the bans and how the setup was going to go. But it ended up going over pretty well and people actually were able to submit data to me. That is another thing that is kinda new to me and I think a lot of players; they actually had to take screenshots and send them into me. We were able to get some pretty good data. Iâ€™m happy!

FCJ: Sixteen teams, I believe.

CyaSteve: Yessir.

FCJ: So you actually hit the cap?

CyaSteve: Yes, actually I had 17 teams. But obviously Iâ€™m not going to run a 32 team bracket with 17 teams. I told them, â€œSorry, if somebody drops, you can come in.â€ But everyone did end up showing up on time, another basically first. Everyone played through their matches and it was good.

FCJ: So Iâ€™m just looking at, I mean it was capped at 16 and you had 17 teams. That is more than I wouldâ€™ve assumed would show up for this because it is Alpha and a reasonably low user base and not everyone will be aiming to be competitive in this game.

CyaSteve: Yeah, I think when I went into it, the first couple of days I had three teams. That is actually kind of high. Wow, I already have three teams signed up! Okay, maybe Iâ€™ll get an eight team bracket. Like four days later, which means we had like 5 days left before sign-ups ended, I was like, â€œOh my god! I have 12 teams. What is happening?â€ Then it stalled out for a little bit, then the day came and we had a full bracket. I was like, â€œOh man! This is hype! Iâ€™m down for this!â€ So, it was awesome! I was very excited to see how it was going to go and kind of terrified at the same time. Always get those jitters.

FCJ: Some of the CMs just tweeted that they have a hype jar. So every time you say hype you have to put in a donation in there. So be careful around those CMs. There was a lot of hype actually generated around this, you are right. We did have a few teams but eventually you did fill. The last time I saw the bracket before we actually went live you had kind of a staggered system. I think you had 12 teams.

CyaSteve: Yes, I had 4 teams that had byes. In a 16 team bracket that will happen if you only have 12 teams. It confused a lot of people at first but I was like, â€œDonâ€™t worry the brackets will get reset. We will be doing something else, donâ€™t worry.â€ We didnâ€™t even have any byes because full bracket. So it ended up working out pretty well.

FCJ: Iâ€™m very happy to see the success in this initiative. I know Blizzard says they donâ€™t want to have these big things but you did address that, you did go forward, and you did it with their blessing. They allowed it obviously. But now, of course, custom games RIP today.

CyaSteve: Itâ€™s okay. For technical reasons they took them out. Weâ€™re in Alpha. I canâ€™t really fault them for it; it is their game, their still working on it. The fact that you can even play it right now is pretty awesome. So it is what it is.

FCJ: So letâ€™s talk a little about how the games actually went. It was best of 3; you already had a static map rotation setup. Correct?

CyaSteve: Yep, we had different map selection.

FCJ: So one ban per team?

CyaSteve: Yes, so one ban per team draft.

FCJ: Who had first pick, first ban?

CyaSteve: The bracket was generated with random seeding. The team that was given the higher seed per round, at least in the first round, was the team that got first pick first ban. Eventually, it just ended up being, everybody just adopted the team with the higher seed took first pick, first ban. If you lost a game, then you got first pick, first ban on the next map. So that is how it went. It went with a standard draft of 1st ban, 2nd ban, 1st pick, two picks, two picks, back and forth until there is only one left.

FCJ: The ABBAABBAAB

CyaSteve: Yeah the ABAB. That went over a lot smoother than I thought it would. I had to answer maybe two teams on how it worked and they were really new to the scene. They picked it up really quickly. The only thing that sort of hung us up was there was a bit of a time delay because some teams were taking a really long time to draft. That is to be expected for the first event where people have no idea what they want to run for comps, they are just kind of like figuring thing out. This has to be the first event where we didnâ€™t have double picks. I mean, it is the only event, so itâ€™s obviously the first event. I donâ€™t think many people were really used to not having the ability to play mirror matches in the game. I mean, you couldnâ€™t have two Stiches in a game.

FCJ: I can definitely appreciate the issues that you run into there, going all the way back to the League of Legends days where they didnâ€™t have any of that either. We are kind of duplicating that into this. We only got the custom; we donâ€™t have any kind of drafting, no spec mode. There are a lot of similarities, right there. More or less, what was the time limit that you had to implement? Or did you just let them feel it out themselves.

CyaSteve: For the most part I let them go. One team came up to me and they were like, â€œHey, this is taking a really long time for them to do draft. Is there a thing we need to say?â€ and I was like, â€œTell them they have 1 minute per round of draft and then you are good to go. â€œ and they were like â€œOk, yeah that sounds great!â€ They went through with it and it seemed to work out. I didnâ€™t hear any more complaints the rest for the rest of the day. The only thing that did happen in terms of time constraints was there was one game where players were disconnecting before they got into the game, so they had to restart a couple of times.

FCJ: I think I actually watched one of those. That was Zoia that had at least one of those games.

CyaSteve: Yeah, Zoiaâ€™s client, for whatever reason, is always kind of buggy. The other one was DdayDrasin, he had a couple of issues with his client. None of them actually affected the games themselves. So it went over pretty well, we got really lucky in that regard. Knock on wood. Hopefully it stays with us.

FCJ: Overall, I think the tournament had a big impression on the community. You even took the time to compile some data for us. Looking at some of the data, there is a Reddit thread out there guys hosted here by CyaSteve, and Raynor was kind of like the big, hot item in this tournament.

CyaSteve: Yeah, he had basically a 93% pick/ban rate over 27 games. So he was picked or banned 25 times.

FCJ: 25 out of 27, pretty impressive.

CyaSteve: Yeah, pretty good. For notables, Kerrigan, Tassadar are right up there at 24. It is not just Raynor but he was the big one that received the brunt of the bans. He took 19 bans out of 27 games.

FCJ: By far the leader of the bans. 6 picks, 19 bans for a total of 25. That also tells me that two games he wasnâ€™t actually even talked about.

CyaSteve: He went unbanned, unpicked for two of the games. [Iâ€™m] still not really sure why, because both of those games had a Valla or something in them where a Raynor is pretty much always better. Maybe they just didnâ€™t feel comfortable on him.

FCJ: Or possibly they didnâ€™t even own him because we do have to buy heroes in this current Alpha.

CyaSteve: I think Raynor is free in general right now. I think they did that, I donâ€™t know. Maybe they finally switched over to practice. Regardless, that is a possibility. Iâ€™m not too sure on that.

FCJ: To accompany Raynor, Kerrigan, and Tassadar, Uther was up there as well. Falstad, another big mobile type of hero, especially with the Bribe nerfs now going into effect, weâ€™ll have to see if on your next tournament if that hits the pick/ban rate at all. But Malfurion, Illidan, Valla, it is very close all the way until about halfway through where Stitches hits the 50% mark, down all the way to Muradin at the 7% mark.

CyaSteve: Yeah Muradin got picked twice, total out of 27 games. 0 bans. Nobody felt like he was really worth playing. If I remember off the top of my head, I believe he won both of the games that he was in.

FCJ: The win rate wasnâ€™t reflected on the data that you collected.

CyaSteve: We are slowly working on that because we have to cross-reference a bunch of games to make sure we get our stats right.

FCJ: I wonder if that is hidden OP then, not picked but 100% win rate.

CyaSteve: I think it is really comp dependent. You have to know what is going on and what the other team picked for their comp. Muradin is a really good pick up against an E.T.C. or somebody that needs to be constantly CCâ€™d.

FCJ: The data didnâ€™t bring up too many surprises I thought. I do remember when the game came out I was like: Abathur, Uther, Raynor top 3. You put any combination of those three together and you basically have a really strong comp out of that. Two of those three did survive but Abathur kinda fell way into the bottom; picked three times, banned once for a total of four games participation. Raynor did just get a bit of a nerf with the latest patch, Illidan going forth with his Metamorphisis health nerf a little bit as well. The bribe going to be affecting Falstad, as well as Stitches and anyone else that has the Bribe going forth. It will be very interesting to see picks and bans from tournament 1 to 2 to 3 whenever those do occur.

CyaSteve: I think there is kind of a blessing in disguise here that we wonâ€™t have custom games for an undetermined amount of time because we have this initial data so we know what we are looking at right now and now we are going to have a pretty sizeable amount of time for people to feel the meta out and allow the game to shift in a certain direction. When we get that next set of data we will be able to look back and go, â€œWow, things really changed!â€ or theyâ€™re just like, â€œNope, didnâ€™t change at all they are exactly the same.â€ So, being able to look back on this is going to be great and will let us have a benchmark to see what happened.

FCJ: I wonder if it will be where you see a Zeratul take a void prism instead of shadow assault or if it will be an incremental amount of changes. Congratulations on your first tournament sir, we are looking forward to more. We did a news post here on HeroesFire as well alluding to your successes. All the best to all the upcoming ones.

CyaSteve: Thank you, I definitely look forward to it and Iâ€™m planning on running as many as I can. When customs come back, I know some people werenâ€™t able to make it on the weekends, so Iâ€™m going to try and run some during the week as well. Not really sure how Iâ€™m going to format that, but keep an eye out for that.

FCJ: Iâ€™m going to keep an eye out for the spectator mode, which we will talk again sir. Alright, well thanks so much for your time dude, and keep on out there.

CyaSteve: Alright thank you! Have a good one!