First off, the level of view-count fraud was absolutely out of control today. The bullshit today (ht: darrenoc on reddit) isn’t particularly different than the bullshit they pulled with the Mythic Invitational, but the actual viewership today was anemic to begin with. From the time I first checked, around the start of round 2, until the end of round 8, the number of people in chat (chat being sub-only is ~irrelevant to this) was between 9,000 and 11,500. Since 70-75% of viewers in most large channels are logged in to chat, that’s a real viewership of 12k-16k. Going slightly above that isn’t impossible, but not by too much.
The nominal viewership I saw got as high as 65k, which means that literally 75-80%, or very close, of the reported viewer count was completely fake. Once WotC stopped paying for new fake views, and the numbers started decaying as the day wound down, total views dropped from the 60-thousands to the 20-thousands while the actual people logged into chat- representative of real viewers- stayed in the same 9k-11.5k range. It’s utterly and blatantly fraudulent. There’s a long section about WotC’s viewer fraud in this Kotaku article (open it and ctrl-f magic), and if it’s correct, WotC is spending *hundreds of thousands of dollars per event* for the sole purpose of creating transparently fraudulent viewer numbers.
That’s utterly disgusting.
On to the actual day 1 results.. I’m sure there will be several metagame breakdowns posted elsewhere, so I’m not bothering with that, especially since I had to go derive and input round 7 and 8 results by hand because the official page had this……………..
and round 8 results still aren’t up, but I was mainly curious how the different kinds of players did.
I classified the players into 4 groups: MPL members, pros/ex-pros, challengers, and invited personalities from the extra 16 invites (lists at the bottom of the post). The only questionable classification was former PT champion Simon Görtzen, who does commentary now instead of playing. I put him with the pros/ex-pros based on his pro history and that he wasn’t one of the extra invites. These are the performances of each group vs. each other group.
| left vs. top | MPL | Pro/ex-pro | Challenger | Personality |
| MPL | 42-42 | 19-22 | 27-18 | 18-12 |
| Pro/ex-pro | 22-19 | 11-11 | 7-6 | 6-3 |
| Challenger | 18-27 | 6-7 | 8-8 | 5-5 |
| Personality | 12-18 | 3-6 | 5-5 | 9-9 |
.
Combining the group performances and looking at day 2 conversion rates (not counting the 4 MPL players with byes into day 2) gives
| vs. out of group | out of group win% | day 2 | day 2 advance | |
| MPL | 64-52 | 55.2% | 6/28 | 21.4% |
| Pro/ex-pro | 35-28 | 55.6% | 5/13 | 38.5% |
| Challenger | 29-39 | 42.6% | 1/13 | 7.7% |
| Personality | 20-29 | 40.8% | 0/10 | 0% |
Looks like the pros crushed it, taking it to the MPL 22-19 while the MPL went 45-30 against the challengers and personalities. There’s a marked difference between those who are/have been at the top of the game and those who’ve never come close.
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Player lists (Bold = day 2)
MPL:
Alexander Hayne
Andrea Mengucci
Andrew Cuneo
Autumn Burchett
Ben Stark
Carlos Romao
Christian Hauck
Eric Froehlich
Grzegorz Kowalski
Janne Mikkonen
Javier Dominguez
Jean Emmanuel Depraz
Jessica Estephan
John Rolf
Lee Shi Tian
Lucas Esper Berthoud
Luis Salvatto
Marcio Carvalho
Martin Juza
Matthew Nass
Mike Sigrist
Paulo Vitor Damo da Rosa
Piotr Glogowski
Reid Duke
Seth Manfield
Shahar Shenhar
Shota Yasooka
William Jensen
Pros/ex-pros:
Allen Wu
Andrew Elenbogen
Ben Hull
Corey Burkhart
Greg Orange
Kai Budde
Kentaro Yamamoto
Luis Scott Vargas
Noah Walker
Ondrej Strasky
Raphaël Lévy
Simon Görtzen
Wyatt Darby
Challengers:
Alexey Shashov
André Santos
CJ Steele
Eric Oresick
Evan Gascoyne
Marcin Tokajuk
Matias Leveratto
Montserrat Ayensa
Nicholas Carlson
Patrick Fernandes
Takashi Iwasaki
Yuki Matsuda
Yuma Koizumi
Personalities:
Amy Demicco
Ashley Espinoza
Audrey Zoschak
Emma Handy
Giana Kaplan
Jason Chan
Jeffrey Brusi
Nhi Pham
Teresa Pho
Vanessa Hinostroza
Hareeb's Hangout 