Saturday, February 25, 2012

Minor MLG Frustrations

I'm spending the weekend watching the MLG StarCraft II Winter Arena and there have been some pretty spectacular games so far. Base trades, worker all-ins, dark templars, motherships... Huk and MarineKing remain undefeated which is pretty sweet. Idra lost his first two matches and is eliminated. Oh well. I've always hated Zerg anyway!

The games have been great and the commentators have been on the ball (Tumba is really starting to grow on me). I can't complain about any of that at all. I do have some complaints about the technical setup. Some are minor things but others are so frustration to make me think I won't want to buy a pass for the next one if they're not fixed.


  • There are 5 streams going at once and they have a neat little webpage set up which lets you switch between streams and lay out any number of them at one time. This lets you figure out which stream has a game going on and swap to it. It's a pretty great concept. I can sit in my chair away from the computer with my wireless mouse and 'channel surf'. Unfortunately they haven't done a good job with authentication. I should have to log in one time and be good to go. Instead I have to log in to each stream individually. And it seems to time out my log in, so I've had to keep logging in over and over again. I probably had to log in 30 times last night. And because I want to watch on my big tv and sit in a non-computer chair I wasn't near my keyboard and had to keep getting up to type in my info. 
  • Enter changes between streams even when filling in a log-in form. So I'd be trying to log in and hit enter which works in every log in window ever. Except this one, which switches which stream I'm watching.
  • They've done a bad job of normalizing the volume levels of the streams. I need to crank up the volume on the first two streams. But each time I switch streams it resets back to default so I'm constantly having to adjust the volume.
  • They offer 1080P resolution but don't seem to have the bandwidth to actually provide it. I get big lag spikes when using it. So I switched to 720P which worked great last night but also is lagging today. So now I'm down to 480P. Which still lets me see what's going on but isn't quite as crisp and awesome. I don't know if it's irrational or not but I feel like if I'm paying I should be able to watch in the higher definitions.

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