« IPW TOPIC OF THE WEEK: Go to West Coast Warzone, Get Blown Up »

Holy shit. What a weekend.

I just rolled in from SoCal safe and sound, back here in NorCal so I've had a lot of time to think about this weekend and everything that went oh so wrong, and everything that went so damn well. West Coast Warzone was a roller coaster of emotions from the stream, the matches, and everything else in between.

First off, I want to give a huge thanks to all of our supporters who have been with us since the start and those new to iPlayWinner. Reading the comments across the internet it's amazing to see how much you guys back us up even in our darkest hour to date. You guys know we give 110% everytime, and I'm so happy that so many of you see and understand that.

Now, next, I want to give a run down of the weekend and the issues we ran into to give everyone a clear picture of what happened.

I'll start off by saying this: None of the stream issues was Justin.tv's fault. That was our mistake.

We've been using Justin.tv for about 2-3 months now and not only is their service absolutley amazing, they are extremley personal and help us any chance they get. We used them for minor weekly events and also major events such as Hadocon all of which have gone off without a hitch. 

The internet at the venue, on both speed and ping tests appeared to be far better than we could have ever hoped for. With a 15MB upload we figured the internet was the least of our problems, and had no way of being able to pintpoint any of its issues. During Friday night and much of Saturday, up until the evening, we ran into no issues whatsoever. Our internet was up and running at all times. 

Once the pausing on the stream began we had no idea what the problem could have been. After double and triple checking every possible thing in our control we thought there may have been some server matinetance or something going on with Justin.tv. Again, this was not the case.

We decided to test ustream early Sunday morning around 2am and tested it for an hour and there were no hicups whatsoever, so we decided to move things over there on the final day to see if things got better.

They didn't. 

That's when I knew I made a mistake assuming it was Justin.tv and it had to be the internet, despite what all the tests were telling us. Turns out, even though we had a wired connection it would drop out about every 30 minutes. For whatever reason, it stayed stable through most of the Marvel vs Capcom 2 match between Cl0ckw0rk and Neo but was generally a disaster outside of that. 

Next up is the final round of the last match. What happened, in short, is the mouse stopped responding on my MacBook Pro for whatever reason. I've never encountered this problem and truly have no idea what happened, or why it chose to occur at that moment in time. There was just nothing I could do for a good 3-5 minutes except let the player cam rock.

We take full responsibility for the weekend and everything that happened, even though much of it was out of our control. We apologize if it sounded like a "bunch of excuses" but we were merely trying to keep people who were watching in the loop as we tried to pinpoint the problems. We felt that was a better approach rather than keep everyone in the dark while things were fucking up left and right.

The Grand Finals for SSF4 and many other matches will be online soon for everyone to check out, so I hope you guys enjoy those and will eventually forgive us for this fuck up of epic proportions. 

A word to everyone who wants us to never "stream another event" and anything remotely close to that:

You're shit out of luck. We aren't going anywhere.