I AM Ralf Reichert CEO of Turtle Entertainment (ESL) AMA

Is it true that for your birthday you received a mirror that said "DotA player of the month" from your friends?

Figure yourself! http://t.co/VwjpuvoJOa :)

Don't want to be cocky but...

your esl homepage http://www.esl.eu/de/ still is a mess. how does it come that a bunch of nerds are not able to get a proper page together for like over 10 years now?

Hehe I am asking myslef the same question every second day. There are two reasons. Number one legacy code, number two priorities (we did the matchmakings first Versus, A-Series). But it needs to be done...

ahh good to hear you feel the same.

we just need easy access to current tournaments, brackets and streams :)

couldnt agree more

GIVE PLUTO A JOB!

We just employed Saturn and Jupiter, he has to wait

Any chance to see jatt shoutcasting with deman at lcs?

yes :)

Who's idea was it for the cosplay dancers @ IEM Katowice?

not mine!

Can we expect more cooperation with TV channels? I'm kinda missing FTW from zdfkultur in the last months, I really liked the show.

Now, with Dreamhack broadcasting their matches in swedish TV, do you have any plans to do the same?

Yes and its getting easier day by day as eSport grows. Our priority though is to have the IPTV / Twitch broadcast as big as possible

TBH I prefer Streams on my Computer because last time i watched FTW the quality was kinda bad, I could hardly make out the Items players bought aswell as the stats like gold and cs. But maybe that's just because I have a shitty TV

And you are not alone :)

I know ESL is clearing its rather large backlog of owed prize money at the end of this month. But, is there any guarantee that ESL will pay within 90 days as stated from now on? I'm sure you can understand players trepidation given waiting 2 years for prize money in the past.

Hey KingJah, the impression seems to be that we clear a rather big backlog which is actually not true. The backlog is/was recently around 100k Euro, in 2012 I think we payed out 1.3 Million Euro. So we were barelay 1,5 month behind looking at the total sum. And we opayed out more than 12 Million since we started.

To make it clear I am not saying at all that paying late is okay, just trying to put that in the right perspective.

Coming back to the question there are no guarantees, but I can ensure you its our TOP 1 priority company wide as the feedback from the community was and is pretty clear and we have improved our process and will be better at coping with paying out large amounts of money and to large amounts of people going forward.

Sorry to be clear, I didn't mean the actual sum of money. Rather the length of time.

For example our outstanding prize money got paid last week, but was almost 2 years overdue.

Glad to hear things are improving, the gaming scene is definitely much better off with ESL's presence.

Thanks for pointing that out!

What decisions go into adding a new game to your roster?

How do you pick and choose which to accept and reject?

Biggest pet peeve in gaming?

Though to answer in a few lines.

Top 3: How big will the game be? How easy to access and hard to master? How good of an experience to watch (streaming is just the top of what I am referring too). And then we take it from there.

The flaming attitude of a small percentage of the community.

Is it true you once fired someone for calling you Ralph?

lmao I do it to troll him ;)

This is the REAL Ralph Reichert http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pI6eM61G2gs

Fuck you both??? :)

Which country do you think is closer to reach the e-sports exposure that happens in korea?

Poland is in terms of exposure the no.1

If you had eleven fingers, how would you use your extra finger to your advantage?

I would hope it would include a small additional brain which I could use as a coprocessor to time armors and weapons in quake

What is your opinion on the technical issues that plagued EU LCS?

What steps have you taken to make sure it won't happen again?

Its three things:

A) Encoding (upgraded to a redundant infrastructure) B) Local Internet Line (added a second sychrounus line C) The EU Twitch network (they changed tons in their streaming farm)

Games streaming to the internet is still a new thing and everyone who does big events has been hit in the past. We just make more events but were on our way so I am confident that there will be close to 0 problems with LCS moving forward. The last weekend was already close to flawless!

Can confirm, as first week was disaster the second one was lagless for me

glad to hear!

can esl stop with those awkward cosplays and rappers and such things at events? or at least dont bring it on stream? i like the idea of it and the effort put in but most of the times it just looks silly. :/

obligatory question: Dota / LoL / HoN ?! favorite game?

Hehe thanks for your feedback ill bring it up. We are a bit in trouble there working with a local stage production where the stream is based of. So sometimes we need to fullfill some local requirements. So please bear a interruption here and then okay?

Dota and LoL :)

Thanks guys was a pleasure! Will come back tonight and do a final check. Hope you liked it as much as I did and lets do this again sometime :)

Three questions.

1) Did Riot/LoL really save the ESL during 2012 from almost bankrupcy? (which is the common thought in the esports business/management community)

2) What is the relationship/where the relationship with SK-Gaming at the founding of the ESL?

3) Have you ever sold broadcasting rights for a ESL tournament to a broadcasting partner/caster/casting company? (not twitch i.e)

1) who told you this? absolutley no! :) 2) I am the founder of SK and moved from there to ESL. Alex Slash Müller actually moved from ESL to SK. In the early days ESL SK and a couple of other clans used the same sales representatives. Since years there is no operational nor financial link between SK and ESL 3) many many times actually

I'm currently a first year university student living in the UK. Once I go into my second year I have the choice to make of continuing university to my final year, or doing a placement year at a company. Are there/do you think there will be any opportunities at Turtle?

Absolutley send us your CV to [email protected]. Placement year experience overall I feel is priceless

What is it like entertaining turtles for a living? Are they a good audience?

at daytimes they are slow at nights they go crazy

Any future plans to host an IEM tournament in the UK??

Plans and hopes yes but the UK is a very difficult market for putting up big events in terms of costs vs possible attendance. The UK market is much more console driven than probably any other market.

Aww :/ I always feel like the UK is so abandoned because of costs. I honestly think the attendance would be good just because we have pretty much nothing in esports to attend (besides iseries which if i'm being totally honest isn't that great). And despite the notion that we are all console driven, there's still tons of people here that prefer PC Gaming. For example we had one of the best showings for Blizzards SC2 UK qualifiers.

I can understand the business side of why we don't get events, just sad from a fans perspective and makes me feel like our scene will never grow.

Ive read Richard Lewis thingy on Cadred recently about Epic Lan? Well sooner or later the UK will be back. Great country, great people. Just since Quake went down it feels a bit behind. You have to remember around 1998 - 2000 it was basically the leading european esports country

Now that IPL is up for sale, will you be making a bid to buy them out and expand your tournament reach into North America?

No we dont have any plans to bid for IPL and with our announcement last year where we revealed working closer with MLG and Dreamhack there are no plans to increase our NA presence drastically. Still its very very likely that IEM will be back next season and we will start quite some new games on National ESL and never say never :)

Used ESL in the past quite a bit, no easy way to say this. But your site navigation, UI and general HCI need a complete overhaul. It's horrendous to navigate.

I considering myself a self-confessed geek, but even I struggled to find my way round it. Seriously, assemble a team to fix it.

It is assembled and I agree :)

Please nail me down at my next AMA :)

WIth international events becoming more important for you, is there a chance that local events like EPS will die out?

There is always a chance but its very unlikely. National competitions will always play a role, just with the internationalization of the games and scene the impact of national tournaments decreased the last few years. I dont think that this is good or bad at all. If they would dissapear I think it would be really bad though in terms of talent building, story telling and so on :)

Are you guys going to hire any more international casters ;)

We dont have any particular open position as skjokz eefje, paul redeye, jarrett kawa just joined in the last 4 weeks, but we are always always looking for new talent. Make sure you send some stuff to paul and [email protected]

Back in the Warcraft days (nostalgy) ESL held the ENC ( European nations cup ) any plans to do something similar for another game ? ( mostly interested about sc2 ) : )

We all want, no we would ove it, but it needs to be solidly financed

Bleh I've got lots of questions that probably are better suited as discussions, not just Q&A, but anyway.

• Do you think that if ESL pushed the EPS in Germany more it could've evolved into a Korea-like scene? Outside of Germany (I'm not German though) I don't think many people saw the importance of the EPS, but I think that it is the closest thing to creating a real localised scene similar to that of Korea. And if it did grow to this (like, all of the players living in Cologne and playing matches at the Turtle studios every week or whatever) do you think it would've had other countries adopting similar real league formats as opposed to the nomad type of tournaments at the moment?

• It feels like, to me at least, at the moment the SC2 players and community are still acting like the 'boss' of the scene, while shunning LoL/everyone else regardless of everything, do you agree and why do you think that is?

• Do you think CS:GO will reach the levels of players/competition/legend that 1.6 did? And what do you think of Shootmania as a replacement of sorts of Quake?

• Do you miss WC3L and NGL-One? I sure do :(

1. There is a significant difference. Korea is a little bit more isolated thats one of the main reasons for their type of developement. Nontheless the national EPS was set back due to the financial crisis and the still low viewership back than. There is a scenario that it still would be much bigger.

2. I think that communities who where there first (Quake over CS, CS over Warcraft and now SC2 over LoL) act based on the feeling that they have rights of the first born. Simply natural

3. I hope but it really needs the help of the community and Valve to get there

4. Shootmania though. The Nadeo guys are committed with every piece of the body they have but its a huge challenge! Personally I would love to see that happening

5. WC3L yes! :)

(4.) We, the European ShootMania section, try to get the game popular in the ESL. If you have any suggestions or ideas for us to make that happen even better... we're open for it ;)

And I am very thankful for all the free team you put in there! :)

Im I not turtley enough for your turtle club?

learn to sing that song and you are http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bojx9BDpJks

What's your favorite flavor of ice cream?

Hehe wasnt expecting that anyone cares :) Cherry and Straciatella

Hello there! Do you have plans for smaller countries which have an ESL section? Let's say Greece :) Can we expect more events?

Events are the most expensive and complex thing to do. But especially for countries which dont have had big international eSports events I do believe we did the most in the past and will do in the future. Just look at Katowice, Warsaw, Sao Paolo (and alot of other countries the years before) and more to come!

But it does takes time...

Can we expect any exciting changes or news with ESL?

We are changing so much every year so absolutley yes. We try to keep the good stuff and get rid of the bad :) So an esl.eu refresh is much needed :)

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If i would know... I would be much happier. Coming from an FPS background (Quake World, damn I am old!) I would love to see a shooter with the potential to be at the top again. Firefall is promising but we need to see, Warface looks quite good and hopefully there are many more potential titles which I havent played yet :)

How excited should I be to hop on the train to the studios in a couple of hours to watch LCS?

You should be VERY excited I have loved every single LCS I have been to (3 in total so far)

Why does NESL not have the resources to have paid shoutcasters and have to use mostly volunteer staff?

Thats how we started in every country. We usually take the slow approach and only invest what we earn.

How long does that process usually take to reach the point where that country is hosting its own LANs (I mean more than just the occasional IEM hosted by ESL but an actual NESL LAN event)?

Are there plans for Turtle Entertainment/ESL to help grow NESL?

My concern is that there is a very large opportunity for growth in North America which seems like it's being largely neglected. The only direct competitor MLG had on the NA scene was IPL and now even IPL's future is uncertain.

Does ESL/Turtle not feel there is a good enough opportunity for esports growth in the North American scene to more aggressively pursue it?

We feel that there is alot going on in eSports in NA and the existing players including NESL do a gfood job! (improvement always possible).

So our focus is more on markets which are much earlier in the cycle like Poland (and now its there!), Brazil, Russia...

At first thanks for this AMA.

so I'm registered on esl.eu and got Trusted Player two times. And my name is irl Lukas but i registered me as Luke. One day i got a letter from the GEZ (i live in Germany) and they want me to pay. But they took my fake name "Luke" instead of my Real Name Lukas. ESL is the only adress where I use this name. So my question is: Do you guys work with GEZ together? And how can my information be send to 3rd.

Haha thats a CRAZY story.

We absolutley DONT. I have not the slightly idea of what happened there.

Maybe GEZ uses the public ESL accounts?

Thanks for the answer.

I dont know if they looked it up. But i hope u can understand that i was a little bit upset ;)

I absolutly understand. As I said crazy story! :)

[deleted]

A bit easier than for an outsider but basically your quality, experience and ambitions decide :)

Why do you feature LoL hardcore but not Dota? And also nice job in Katowice, I already feared ESL giving up SC2 cause of the money in LoL.

We already support Dota 2 with the Raidcall EMS One. LoL though has been a tremendous success story and fantastic support by Riot from day 1 . Viewership and amateur (Go4) activity proofs it.

Thanks that you liked Katowice its certainly been a milestone for us. And only 1.5 weeks to the first ever major offline tournament with HoTS at the IEM World Finals in Hannover :)

thanks for the quick answer ^_^ I am looking forward to Hannover

me too!

Have you looked into the community based 'CSPromod' for the Counter-Strike franchise? How do you feel about one of the biggest ever worldwide eSports titles/franchises falling into obscurity? (especially one that was instrumental in ESL's growth)

We evaluated this alot, though a mod which doesnt really change the gamestyle (e.g. CS was a HL mod) and which rather changes maps/settings/weapon/movement only hasnt been successfull in the past. There have been various tries to make Q3 like QW, CS:S like CS 1.6 and so on.

So our conculison is dont touch these type of mods but who knows? If it gets traction we would love to be on board

What kind of car do you drive?

Will sound odd but I dont have a car as you dont need one in Cologne really. My wife has a VW Caddy Maxi :)

Whats your favorite song by The Beatles

Help!

How hard is it to run an E-Sports business?

It was VERY hard 10 years ago as it was a totally new culture. Nowadays its only hard ! :)

What kind of paid positions do you guys have at ESL? I've always been interested in wroking with e-Sports! thank you for doing this AMA. :)

http://www.turtle-entertainment.com/career/

Thank you for taking part

Why Turtle Entertainment, why Turtle ? ( I mean why you/they choose that name?)

When we founded it the Entertainment was set. Blizzard, Lion, Tiger etc. all were taken or too obvious.

The Turtle stands for a long live, it moves slowly and stubborn usually but actually can move really fast when its needed :)

So far we are still there and better than ever after 13 years of eSport :)

As an ESL Admin, my only question is how to drive exposure into a nation that will not try? What can I, as an admin do to further change the minds of players?
The gaming scene in the UK seems to be declining due to the attitude towards playing against players that are high skilled as they are the only opposition.

Well there is only a tough answer.

Either try harder and get one person at a time or look for easier challenges :( I know its awful

hi,

are u SK griff ? i used your quake3 config back in the days :D Props for staying in the esports industry, greetings from bottrop

Haha yes I am. Cool Want to see some really oldschool Quake Stuff?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6OSa1wdelW0

your prediction of LCS EU spring winner?

Gambit Gaming why? Cause they always win ;)

Hello Ralf,

A ) in the US the CEO's of the e-sports organizations are more public figures than in EU. You rarely see CEO's of DH, ESL, ESWC, .. do interviews etc. Often Carmac is seen as some kind of 'owner' of Turtle. Jens used to be a more outgoing public figure for Turtle. So why are you not as popular as Sundance? Why no spotlights or interviews?

B ) You have seen many people, organisations, clans, companies, casters come and go in e-Sports. For you, is it Turtle for life and is their a person/company/clan/org that you miss the most?

C ) What were the positive things that happened for Turtle during the crisis?

a) well its a mentality difference. I do not take myself that important. The company / people are more. And we have a lot of shoulders where that publicty is shared on. Though this AMA is a first step or? :) b) You never know but I have no plans to change my life at all however only rarely something is forever? As long as its a challenging task with great people and nowadays its more then ever and people want me I think it will work out. 1v1 shooter action I miss most and the pioneer spirit of exploring a new world (we still have that with a Singapore event and more to come though) c) We focused our selfs and were reminded that you shouldnt take anything for granted. Plus that to run a business you need a diversified income basis :)

Hah, sweet! The turtleboard forums was one of the first online communities I've ever registered on (and subsequently spent way too much time on...)

Thanks for the memories!

which user account number? :)

i leik yore name.

thank you :)

why is there still a 2v2 in the esl clanwars? (i dont know if im asking the right person but it annoys me)

you referring to sc2?

yes

Its like we always did since W3CL and I personally love 2v2 and because there is close to 0 2v2 pro activity I think its another reason. Do you disagree?

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svAQ6BCIgxg

oh there is an update! :) http://www.youtube.com/watch?annotation_id=annotation_285872&feature=iv&src_vid=svAQ6BCIgxg&v=vQQLgkeuuu4

Hi, is there any possibility to see some transnational smaller events, like last year's Balkan League, but with more consistency and schedule over the whole year and not just a Summer Tournament?

Phew, I think with eSports growing these will increase. But the big international events like IEM, MLG or leagues like LCS, WoT Pro league and EMS One will be more in the focus.

Our national ESL partners are working on quite some activities as you mentioned though

We haven't heard too much about ESL-MLG-DH Partership besides the official statement in November. Could you tell us something about it? What are the exact plans?

Well it has been tough timewise we all prepared our new season. Hopefully soooooonish!

if you could do sc2 all over again what would you do different?

no offense but iem was huge in sc2 in 2010 with the eurosport docu etc. but now iem is hardly considered a major tournament in sc2.

please answer the question with the mindset of not knowing how big lol is today.

Well the Cebit Worldfinals 2012 were one of the biggest SC2 events in 2012 but the mindset is usually on the later events.

What would I do different? Even higher quality and more players travel support.

We will continue to try to put out the best events we can, but we will not overspend or overinvest.

IPL did a great job but seeing what is happening now you need to ask yourself if it was worth it dont you agree?

What are possible positions as ESL that are neither technical nor economical centered?

Designer? He would need CSS knowledge but best check below the Turtle careers section

where do you see the future of the ESL in terms of other gaming companies and how do you think you will fare?

I think we are in awesome shape. Financially stable and independent with a great team and great recent additions in stadd, great competitions around the world and an awesome studio / event infrastructure which we build in the last 12 month and you hopefully all have seen and enjoy (pictures here: https://plus.google.com/photos/101315200894375960962/albums/5846966465657827617 and https://plus.google.com/photos/101315200894375960962/albums/5726756838297978049)

And last but not least we know our weaknesses and work to improve every day

Can we get an IEM in the UK? :)

Next week? :)

What do you think of the scene (or lack thereof) in the UK and are you looking into the possibility of an event over here in the rainy isles?

Answered below

What tools do you think need be available to make twitch\iptv more popular or accessible?

Twitch is doing a grteat job with their SDK already. Consoles will be a major thing aswell. I think a one click software for PCs and inbuild app for Consoles!

[deleted]

1v1 Quakeworld! :)

Regarding ESL Wire and its Anti-Cheat, can you tell us something more about its development status and ETA than "affentod" did several weeks ago in the ESL forums? The distrust in the CS:GO section is on a very high level, people are starting to write timetables for everything. Also: Would you mind asking the Anti-Cheat team to give some tips on how to analyse a demo properly? This may lead to higher quality timetables in the future.

It is really right around the corner so weeks not month. Just to put that in the right perspective we have been basically cheat proof for the last 1,5 years and since 4 month there is a private hack. It will be always an uphill fight but I can assure you that we intend to fight back unlike a punkbuster which basically gave up years ago

Is Nik Adams still with Turtle Entertainment? If so, how is working with him?

Yes he is our VP of Sale. Working with him is horrible as he is a pain in the ass! (joke aside hes a great guy and its a pleasure to have him on our team as always)

Hi Ralf,

Is running an Esports club/team still a passion project (IE: Unprofitable for the most part)?

I know someone who has the capital and the passion but is a little murky on the idea of getting a return on his investment even though he loves Esports

I think its on the verge. Still you will need LOTS of passion and probably need some people who rather work for passion than money. Though its same for any other sport including football

I asked some followup questions to your answers about CSP, but I feel like they might've been buried so I'm gonna ask it in a new post aswell :)

Don't you think that gameplay consistency would be the very best thing? How can we make esports huge when we reset the players starpower and the fanbase with a gamechange every couple of years?

Ask the 1.6 pros whether they like the 1.6 gameplay better than the GO-gameplay and 9/10 will say yes, same goes for the fans. CS viewership is significantly smaller after the gamechange. Also, the CSP-devs wants the game to be a resource for organizers, have a dialogue about it etc. Head of CSP is Alex Garfield, he kind of know esports so that's a huge plus. Isn't that better than having a game where the devs basically doesn't care that much about esports? And isn't it better to have one game instead of switching to CS:Source 2 and so on after a couple of years? :p Also, it feels like you described GO more than CSP. GO changes those things, CSP is an exact copy. Also it's going standalone and the project now has financial backing, CSP isn't a hobbyproject anymore :)

Thanks for the AMA btw, interesting read :)

Well I love CSP and I know Alex well and he is more than a smart guy :)

I disagree that total game consistency is the biggest success factor. Its actually how many people play the game and how easy it is to follow.

So my counter question how big is the daily active playerbase of CSP?

As of now, very small unfortunately. It's kind of big during betareleases, there where like 20k downloads or something like that last time around, I hope the playerbase will grow now when the autoupdater comes in the next patch.

CSP isn't going to succeed overnight, you guys would be crazy if you picked it up now but I do have hope for it long-term as it is getting serious now with the financial backing and the plans the guys have for it :) I guess my point about game consistency was that if we find a game that is easy to follow with many players (i hope and believe that CSP will reach that point in the future) it's better to keep that game rather than using every new title from a big companys franchise. :) I see CSP as a way for the esports community as a whole to control the game rather than an "outsider" company doing it.

Yeah I like the idea of it being "independent". But there are alot of questionmarks without a big marketing budget... And then you again have an ownership issue :)

2 questions somehow related:

• 1. IEM World Finals will miss NA and China/TW teams. Do you think you can fix this for Season VIII next year ?
• 2. Do you guys have deals with Riot like MLG/IPL so you can't have LCS teams for Season VIII other than exhibition games ?

Good luck with IEM Hanover !

1. yes its a priority
2. The planning of S8 is ongoing so sorry nothing to share today about that

Are you satisfied with the viewership for RaidCall EMS One's Dota2 tournament so far?

No I am thrilled! But the more the better :)

As an ESL admin I would like to point out that IEM should make stops in many other countries. Is this something you are thinking about?

Yes very much actually. The worst thing is that we only can make so many stops (5-7) a season for now..

Hopefully we can suprise you and the community with a new country to go to for Season 8!

No promises made though

'STRAYA

??

Nope, our time zones are just not good for european/american viewers.

Not to mention, they already completed failed at attracting top-tier teams to IEM Singapore. I can't imagine that travel to Australia from Europe/NA to be much cheaper; perhaps it would be even more, since Australia is such a popular country for tourism.

Well we have a global approach and will try to support the teams more. Its much easier to do events at the same place over and over but we do feel our global events bring alot of value to esports

A few weeks ago CPH Games, annonced no sc2 tournament, due to lack of sponser intrest for Sc2, is this an issue your havning aswell?

And if not, any surggestions what CPH games might could do to pick up sponsers ?

Getting sponsors in general is not an easy task to do. Maybe the timing of the end of WoL made it tougher for them?

I always dreamed to work in eSport industry, in your opinion what is best way to start doing anything in that matter?

figure out what you good at start doing it and make yourself known. People will hire you. Look at Carmack, Joe Miller, Stuart Saw, Kaelaris, Affentod, FlyingDJ, Eefje, Tobias Grieser Neok etc...

ESL has always been a host for premier tournamnets but at least for the SC2 scene your shows have been competing with such great brands as MLG/IPL/DH. How do you think ESL will compare to MLG/Dreamhack/IPL events in the comming year? Is ESL trying to rival those events and make itself more prestigous?

Thanks, well as IPL being sold there is a good chance that you will only compare ESL to MLG / DH.

Both do a fantastic job and we plan to do awesome events too. But we did events on 3 continents last year which is a different kind of challenge and we try to have them on 4 soon! :)

I think we all try to do better than each other at every event so its good to have competition as it improves the show every time, just look at Katowice which I personally would rate of the best eSports events ever!

As a Pole I must agree, keep up the good work :)

were working hard to do so!

Any reason of the slowly death of ESL France ?

Actually ESL France is doing fine and will do some biiig event right after Cebit. If you talking about esl.eu/fr we will step up this year

What will it take for the ESL, to bring an event to a place where a lot of gamers gather http://wp.lametroproject.com/wp/tenerife-lan-party-2010-lametroproject.jpg , in the Canary islands?

Redeye agrees and told me multiple times that we need to go there so its my duty to make it happen ;)

IEM Guangzhou did not happen last year due to some reason. Can we expect the new IEM guangzhou or better Shanghai :) this year?? Thanks sir.

Yes you can expect but its not confirmed until announced :)

How long is typical respond time for job application at Turtle? ^{^}

3 days to 3 weeks depending on how difficult the internal discussion is :(

That means the discussion is really tough this time :D

What did you apply for?

will the intel friday night games ever come back ?

no plans but never say never :)

Hey Turtle, how are Vince and Drama?

Great, though dont tell E I am making out with Sloane as we speak

Do you think the LSC europe finals can fill this season the Lanxessarena ? And do u prefer a big crowd over a big stream numbers?

I think it could! :)

I think both are evenly important, though as big events are a huge logistical challenge I do love the way we do all of our studio productions (of course in combination with big events)

Where will the finals of the EMS dota2 tournament be played?

I CANT spoil sorry! Our productmanagers will kill me! But its not in germany

What do you feel is lacking in eSports on the business side of things?

I see much being said of the lack of marketing, finance, and project management professionals in the scene. What sort of skills-sets have you been looking for? How would you find these people and/or how would they find you?

What is lacking to some extend is structure, consitency and we need to better understand the commercial side of the business / scene. Putting it into the right perspectiv eSports is still a VERY young sport!

There are generally two approaches to get the right "people". We look for supersmart or superexperienced people, both with the right attitude and self motivation. Ideally everything combined! (urgs impossible to find)

So specialized "skill" is most of the time only a secondary aspect we look at

Hey there,

how are you plans of releasing/selling tickets for the upcoming LCS-Events at the ESL-Arena in Cologne, let's say starting off at March or later? Because i'm looking forward for my trip to Cologne and I already want to purchase the tickets for LCS.

How are your plans of resolution of streams for IEMs or other ESL-Tournaments with SC and other games, after Riot stated, they will stream in HD for free every time?
Just to clear out, i had no problems in the past to pay something to support eSport, still just going to GamesCom to visit the IEM events.

Last but not least a question about the upcoming IEMs. Are the any plans to make them bigger? I know that at GamesCom you couldn't place more seats because of safety regulations. When i remind last year, 50% of the people stood to watch League of Legends.

1. yes they should go live next week! if not make sure you tweet https://twitter.com/ESLTV_SHoffmann

2. Were honestly not sure but it looks like FreeHD for everyone :)

3. Yes we expanded seating and stage size for Hannover IEM WC dramatically. You will be suprised!

Do think eSports have a real chance to one day be broadcast on tv? If so how long do you think it will take?

For a fact we are there since quite sometime. ESL / IEM has been broadcasted to ZDF and Eurosport, DH to SVT and every major TV channel worldwide had pieces of eSport.

If you mean full event live TV coverage not so long in the future.

BUT growing IPTV / Twitch I feel is more important!

There tends to be a vocal minority who (unfairly) bash ESL on a regular basis. Why do you think that ESL has developed this reputation in comparison to other eSports organisations? Also, what would you say to that minority of people?

Well there is two reasons. a) we have a broader approach with amateur and local competitions, globally therefore so much more touchpoints b) we have been there longer than the rest so a legacy to challenge :) c) we fucked up on a small % of the price money payments

What Id say, if you are angry shout its the right way, we do listen and improve. Promised.

If you hate nothing I / we can do haters gonna hate right?

True dat! I think ESL do great work and their involvement in LCS only goes to show how professional they are. Really looking forward to seeing what else they can bring to the table in Season 3!

Thanks were working hard and are very happy with the LCS EU quality (apart from week 1 lag issues)

Hey, are you a shareholder of Turtle entertainment? Who or what are your biggest owners? How much do they want to affect how things are run?

I am a significant shareholder. The biggest owner is still the group of founders. We do have some investors aswell who helped us in the late 2000s to professionalize and expand the business globally.

They want ESL to be a growing healthy business its my and our core teams job of how to do it.

What steps do you take to guarantee some sort of quality in your events? I'm curious since i'm a business major and really like how esports is growing into something new every week/month.

Also, why do you think this growth is happening so quickly (compared to other sports/activities/whatever)?

Its always a mixture of process, personell and equipement quality. So we will simultaneously quality check and improve on these three areas. Growth and change is the biggest challenge running a business and running Turtle :)

I dont think its too fast or too slow. It started 1995-1997 so it has been 18 years :)

I remember when you guys used to play football at rwo and i saw you playing :). Also do you still visit Oberhausen from time to time?

Who are you??? :)

Well my whole family is there so yes. Not as much as I want cause I am flying through the world to eSports event but thats my burden to take!

Hi

I work for another gaming company. I'd like to know why after I sent emails to [email protected] requesting some general info you guys dont even bother to answer. But hey you can do an AMA here and get lots of twitter followers!

Let me investigate, can you PM me with your email adress and what the email was about?

Your remark of using Reddit and Twitter but not answering an email still makes no sense to me. If you send me a personal Email I will answer, if you write to my personal Twitter I will answer. If the ESL Twitter doesnt reply it sucks and you should tell me as you did with the mail.

I know ESL owes a lot of its success to partnering with trade shows and such. Is there any chance that ESL will ever leave this comfort zone and start to produce its own eSports-only content?

Yes and we did just recently with HUGE success with Katowice just a few weeks ago. And I would certainly not say its about leaving a comfort zone. Tradefairs bring alot of value and exposure to us and we are greatful for that!

I got a small problem that you could maybe help me with, I delited my ESL account and was about to register a new one, but then i read it said that i should make a ticket and get my old one reactivated, so i made the ticket, but i can't see it's progress cause i don't have a current account and #esl.support on irc is afk and dead. Could you help me please?

phew tricky one!

Can you check the ESL Twitter? I am sure they gonna help

What can we expect for the LAN events on Dota 2 and CS:GO on EMS? Where it will happen?

My colleagues would kill me if id spoil there announcements but its gonna rock :)

Why all ESL events lag as hell every time and you always take a while to fix them? It's so hard to learn from mistakes? The concern to not be forced to scale down makes you choose the scale up method if needed?

I know it's cheaper scaling up, but that should be ready at a click after all this starting events where we se almost nothing from the first game. Miss the 2nd or part of the 2nd and if we are lucky we see the 3rd game as bearable compared to the 1st 2.

PS: see IEMs and LCS EU start. I understand the IEMs in different locations, but LCS should have been flawless especially since IEM Koln took place there.

Internet streaming has multiple points of failure.

The last weeks we have worked even closer with Twitch as it seemed to be a European issue at superhigh viewership events (which we most of the times run) and therefore we improved the efficency of the European Twitch nodes and our cionnectivity there.

Not blaming everyone but its not always our fault :)

P.S. and we havent changed anything for these two events which not proves but helps the stuff I wrote above

What is being done to bring the EU League of Legends LCS up to par with the NA LCS?

Can you specify where do you think NA is better than EU and vice versa? Then its MUCH easier to answer :) Thanks

how do sponsors react to the international audience you have. i heard somewhere, that sponsors are liking national audiences, because they have national budgets for marketing. is that still the case or did that changed?

Its a split answer.

Its much easier to approach national marketing departments who as you pointed out are mainly interested in national audience. And the american ecosystem due to the huge homemarket have an obvious advantage there.

Saying that IEM for example is run in cooperation with the Global Marketing and Events group at Intel. Which is obvious interested in a global.

Going forward eSports will make its way to the Global Marketing departments and will be fine, aswell as local activities run with local partners / divisions

I want to quickly ask if anything is being done about the League of Legends LCS EU stream quality? It was dropping and lagging constantly, the quality itself was pretty low, with no sign of improvement throughout the stream.

Is anything being done for the upcoming LCS streams to put them on par with the standard of quality that the NA streams are getting?

Hey, see earlier. We are aware of the first weekend issues but last week should have been fine? Do you have problems with any other big Twitch streams?

With many North American teams and players using your event qualifiers as glorified scrims with no intention of going due to non break even prize pool vs cost of travel to Europe and no North American LAN events from your org, is ESL and NESL still relevant to NA? If so how?

Of course it is very relevant. We will 99% be coming back with an IEM event in Season 8 and due to the weak team ecosystem we plan to support more on the travel side for the overseas events and I am quite confident that we will be able to get that done :)

With Katowice looking like a success for an outsider, could we possibly see more standalone events in the future? They're far more interesting to follow as a spectator due to a bigger or more involved audience and none of the limitations that come with being at a tradeshow.

It was a tryout for us and we share the feeling that it was a huge success. Dont expect our whole model to change to standalone events but we will of course try to have more Katowices as it was for me personally the best eSports event I ever attended (havent been to League S2 finals or Blizzcon 2011 though)

Do you have an ESL profile?

yes http://www.esl.eu/de/player/30/

And I am actually quite proud about the useraccount 30 which based on my signup of a superold messaging board names turtleboard which was the basis for the ESL accounts

Would you rather fight 1 horse-sized duck or 100 duck-sized horses?

Do they even lift?

Will CS:GO ever be on IEM? I really like the IEM Events and im a big LoL Fan, but IEM without a CS Title just doesnt feel the same.

Its Carmacks call in the end of the day but....

CS:GO in terms of spectators, active players and overall community buzz is not close to the top games in IEM now. We are trying for example with Raidcall EMS One and GO4CSGO to do our part on getting it there but ultimately it needs more support from the community

Dota 2 has the support from the community :)

Thats why we started the Dota 2 Raidcall EMS One just 4 weeks ago!

How do you think the NA LCS is being run compared to your own broadcasts? I think Riot's done a high quality job.

I think that both NA and EU are awesome. The first week with the streaming issue NA was clear ahead, second week I would say they were on par, what do you think?

Both with a minimal different style but thats how it should be with EU / US being slightly different.

Who is your favourite SC2 player? For each race respectively if it makes it easier.

Parting, Grubby, Violet and Socke

and Hasuobs, Scarlett, White Ra...

and Carmack!

What are your plans with IEM lol tournaments if viewership drops because pro teams in LCS are forbidden from attending?

We are woirking closely with Riot that we make sure viewership is as great as it can be. Saying that I wouldnt even be worried if it would drop a bit as its so rocket high these days and we are more than thankful for everyone tuning in.

why didnt you pay players for over 2 years and didnt even tell them in before? just making excuses and keeping information low.. that wasnt even legally correct

they were waiting and messaging you over and over (i read all the tl-threads).. esl became my least favorite big esportscompany because of this, pretty sad :(

We are truly sorry, though only a VERY small percentage of players have been hit by this its bad. And we will do anything that this wont happen again (including some process changes and some contract changes with partners). There is no money owed that is older than 90 days (other than some small payments which we are waiting on information from players)

Sorry, stupid question but I have to ask. Do you even lift?

unregularly but steady

How do you plan on growing and (more importantly) monetizing ESL to keep it afloat? It's obviously a hard business out there (cf the selling of IPL).

We are in this business since more than 12 years, so if one thing we learned is to constantly adapt to the changing landscape and to some extend diversify. Thats one of the reasons why we are doing not only professional tournaments but alot of services, advertisement sales and country diversification. And last but not least we are quite cautious.

Cause in the end it doesnt help anyone if we overspend to have the best event ever and then go down with this.

Sometimes we earn some critizism for this strategy but on long run we think were good :)

I think one of your national admins don't do his job as he should do.Where can I contact you about this issue?

Best figure my mail and send me one? :)

So let me write an essay about the issue and i will try to figure mail afterwards :)

hehe okay :)

What do you think about those Pro-Gamer statements about the payments you have denied so far? http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=379012

As quoted earlier in this AMA its payed and done and we are truly sorry.

Do you have a spare HotS key by any chance? :)

Yes if you can figure my email youll get one :)

Hope I'll get an answer, how come ESL was (still is?) so terribly slow at handing out prizemoney?

We were late and are now on time, please see earlier questions. So I think we are there :)

There were to many irrational decisions regarding banning people or hiring random people as admins. Which ruined the image of ESL in general for years. The overdue payments concerned mostly the smaller teams/clans. The focus were more about gaining draining money from the players instead of paying out. That's my and all of my colleagues impression we have gained over the years.

I am sorry for your impression but I can absolutley ensure you its not the truth or way we want to handle stuff. I hope we can prove you wrong going forward!

If IPL disappears, would you look into organizing events outside LCS?

Can you specify?

choose 1 game: LoL or Starcraft 2?

Its my job to love all all eSports games and I actually do sorry :)