I guess you didn't watch the entire prelims, 'cause the commentator dropped out in that stream for a while as well. Someone in the live chat was able to call the commentator's nephew on the phone and notify him it wasn't working. The prelims were held online and the commentator presumably did his thing from home.

The finals were live... at the actual LAN event in Utah. The commentator was there for the live audience. The actual video stream was missing the commentary feed due to technical difficulties.

I agree. I would have preferred getting to hear commentary as well. It wasn't so bad during the live stream as you could chat with people while it was going on. But still, it would have been nice to have heard it.

You might have noticed also that the trailer at the start of the event was started over and over. This was due to issues getting audio at the event to work for the trailer.

These things happen.

The cams were custom cams by the authors of the tracks. Some cams bugged because the spectator feature in TM2 is still very buggy when changing between drivers in multiplayer. The guy doing the switching did the best he could with a buggy feature of the game. Some cams don't even activate and numerous outros had to be reworked to work online.

MediaTracker and Spectator still needs a lot of refinement in TM2.

The event itself was running late because the morning of the event they realized that they were having problems with colliding IPs in the LAN. So that took a couple hours to track down, and had a domino effect of pushing back all the events. That caused the TM2 tournament to start quite a bit later than scheduled. And of course the Gears of War tournament that was on stage prior to it was using XBoxes, so those had to be changed out for PCs for the TM2 tournament. That's 10 to 12 PCs that had to be brought on stage and hooked up. One of them had memory that got jostled loose and that had to be fixed.

There's so many moving parts when you put together an event like this. There's always some things that are going to go wrong, especially when you're not used to doing events like this regularly. It's maybe once a year, or once every couple years.

I think we have to give them a break and focus on the good that came from the tournament.

The tournament was held in North America. Everyone knows TrackMania is virtually unknown here, especially compared to other games. Stop and ask most people if they've heard of Modern Warfare 3... yes of course. Stop and ask most people if they've heard of TrackMania... most, if not all, will say they haven't.

So the event raised awareness for one of the best games on the planet in a place where almost no one has heard of it.

Plus some amazing prizes were given away (thanks to Intel and Ubisoft) and it provided a great opportunity for the burgeoning TM community here in North America to show what they're made of. Iceman, Fallout, and Kawa rocked those tracks.

And of course ultimately it was a LOT of fun for everyone involved. I think you can't focus on the technical difficulties and logistical problems that arise, but instead focus on the overall experience... which was nothing short of phenomenal.

TM2 will hopefully be included in more LAN events like this around North America if interest has been sparked. TrackMania is an awesome game for events like this and very exciting to watch. We'll see what the future brings.

I understand but everything worked so great in the prelims even got a few laugh. and i really look forward to the final and this is what happends, one day before the final everything was awesome . higher expectations on the first tm2 competition and as you sad that it was big prices so even more enoying that they cant do a good video with over 3000 $ in prices sad so iam a little dissipointed about it, but anyway i enjoyed 10 minutes or something ^^ except the sound problem.

yeah i agree tm2 is great for competition, but the fact this vid still sux big time but the prelims was awesome and i can see that again and ofc we can´t help that those things happens. but those people are expert or should be. imo

It be better next time i hope anyway.
thx eyebo

I'm pretty sure most everyone involved were volunteers, doing it because they love gaming. It doesn't mean they didn't know what they were doing, but you also can't hold them to the same standards as someone who does something like this every week.

I agree, maybe it'll be better for the people on the live stream next time.

It was kind of depressing to see 90% of the spectators leave when the tourney started.
At least is wasn't completely empty like last time.

I guess because it ended up being so late?

that was part of it... some stuff was closed by then
most people who watched where actually standing in a line that happened to be nearby
a couple of people who are involved with GEEX really like trackmania... and they're good at getting sponsors. If either of those wasn't true there probably wouldn't be a trackmania tournament at all.

Is there a winning ceremony photo somewhere? This would be a nice addition to end this Thread i guess

@SPIDER: Trust me, I was as frustrated as you. We were supposed to be the headliner tournament Friday night (the only finals competition of that day) -- so we were thrilled to have a 6:00pm start time. The technical difficulties we ran into and the 2-hour delay were discouraging.

I apologize, though that was all out of my control. Please understand there are quite a few people involved in an event such as this... in this case, there were GEEX employees, myself (the volunteer tournament organizer), a third-party audio/video outfit, Ubisoft and Intel.

Ubisoft and Intel sponsored the tournament and the prizes, and GEEX and the third-party audio/video outfit were responsible for the tournament stage. Everyone worked their hearts out trying to fix the problems as quick as they could... and we thought we had worked out the audio problem with the stream. Unfortunately, we only worked out the game audio part and not the mic for the shoutcaster (Royale - the same who did the prelims.)

And yes, because of the 2-hour delay, we lost a lot of our audience, which was very discouraging. Thankfully, there were still a lot of people in the LAN party that watched, and those that were still watching the Gears of War 3 prelims (that had moved from the stage to the LAN party) also watched our tournament... and I heard the stream was still full of people throughout, though I'm very sad that we missed those that originally tuned in who were excited about the event.

I was excited for the stream, thinking that we had the commentator audio there, but was sad when I came home to find it was gone.

Again, my apologies for the complications, though they were out of my control.

I feel the rest of the tournament was incredible... showing fully off (for those that got to hear the commentary too) all that is great about TrackMania: variety of styles of tracks, the community (the finals' tracks were designed by some of the best track authors in the world for GEEX), outros, and more.

I apologize that you I appeared "drunk" with the cameras. If you'd heard the commentary you'd know why I was switching so much. I was trying to follow the same player Royale was shoutcasting about... another reason it's a bummer his commentary isn't with the video.

I had really hoped for perfection that night, but despite the issues, it was a fun tournament. I hope that it will start a precedent for more TrackMania tournaments across the USA; and hopefully they'll have less technical hiccups.

But I thank everyone involved for helping make the tournament a success... and especially eyebo for jumping in on the chat that night to help keep people in-the-know about what was going on as much as possible. I had no way of communicating with him during the tournament, but he stepped up and explained to those that didn't know what was going on. That was so useful thanks to our extensive collaboration on this event.

And Spider, thanks for coming to support... sorry it was a disappointment.

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@Fallout: The reason Ubisoft and Intel were involved this year was all thanks to NADEO. They got me in touch with Ubisoft, who brought Intel with them; and they really came through for GEEX. They not only provided our TM2 tournament prizes, but also provided the awesome PCs for the tournament (2nd gen i7's with GTX570's)

Thanks for playing in the tournament... you played well. It was fun watching you and Iceman battle it out.