TI, Observing and the future

Hey folks,



as you probably guessed already, TI invites are all settled by now and I'm not included.  Not a surprise to anyone who is familiar with the matter, but considering the tweets I've got in recent times asking if I'd be invited I just wanted to start clarifying this. 



I'm not angry or even disappointed, it's the logical conclusion and I don't blame Valve in the slightest (and if it comes across as that, sorry that's simply my horrible English).  There has been some serious horseshit pulled in the past by parties in Esports, but Valve is not one of them, I have the utmost respect for them. 



But enough with the past, let's talk about the future:



I'll gradually phase out observing.  Tournaments tend to have one observer who does up to 14h of work who also usually gets paid less than the casters that only do a series or two.  It's simply not a job that has enough potential to grow considering the work required. 



I've always prepped at least 2-3 hours to analyse impact lanes to better be able to tell the story and while I believe it did show, clearly Valve thinks otherwise.  And let's be real here, without Majors and TI, you simply can't sustain adequately.  I'll still obs from time to time for organisers I've done so in the past, but the main focus will shift. 



So, the future for me isn't observing, that much is clear. 



Given the immensely positive feedback bukka and me got from our ingame production suite layerth, I absolutely want to work even more on that project.  For Manila Masters, Epicenter and MDL, we focused on smaller things (courier indicator, aegis timer etc), but with the tournament drought around TI, we'll have time to work on bigger and better features. 



I'm not quite sure how far we want to go in Dota, but eventually, our goal is to provide a complete ingame production package.  Will take a few months or more to get this far, as it requires some pretty expensive hardware, but eventually, we want to provide that.  We have a Trello with loads of ideas which all are really promising, it's just a question of when we can code, design and deploy them. 



It's pretty ambitious, and I'm not entirely sure if the two of us can even pull this off, but we'll god damn try, that's for sure.  Personally, I haven't been this motivated and excited in years. 



Apart from layerth, I still do some production consulting for tournaments on the side and Moonduck is also not resting with more info on Midas Mode coming soon™ and more tournaments in the pipeline. 



And yes, of course I'll still help you with your PC questions, Dota 2 and streaming benchmarks when I have time. 



So yeah, exciting times ahead, keep an eye out on the layerth blog at medium.com/layerth where we'll post some concepts for ideas in the next weeks and we'd really appreciate your feedback on those. 



Also I finally got the @JJLiebig twitter handle, spelling the "muckl" part out was always a pain in the ass. 



Alright that's mostly it, see you all in Seattle! 

JJ

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