Beitrag von: Aura am November 20, 2012, 01:07:34 Vormittag
Quote of the Week honors this week goes to CCP Soundwave, who pretty much hammered CCP Dolan yesterday:
Are you smarter than a piece of metal?...he asked of Dolan. Context will help. By the time the day was about half over, Soundwave, Dolan, and CCP Fozzie were all having a somewhat difficult time predicting the winners of matches. There were a lot of upsets! Soundwave and Fozzie took this in stride, but CCP Dolan started flipping a coin before each match to predict the winner.
And he was serious.
He'd flip the coin, then write down what the coin told him to write on his prediction page. Soundwave became somewhat less of his laconic self as the day wore on and Dolan kept doing this. And he finally asked in exasperation if Dolan felt he was smarter than a piece of metal! It was a classic moment. Even funnier: Dolan responded by tossing his coin across the studio! Kudos to Soundwave for controlling his facial expression at this moment, but you could tell he was not happy.
It wasn't the only time that Soundwave got a little exasperated with Dolan, either. At another point, Dolan was about to launch into an irrelevant side note and did so by saying "Funny story about that..." Soundwave snapped, "Is it actually funny?" Dolan had to admit that maybe it wasn't and lapsed into silence.
The point here is that CCP Dolan is supposed to be a tournament match expert.(1) And it's a bit disconcerting to have an expert commentator choosing winners based on a coin toss. Any moron can toss a coin. If the coin toss had been part of a gimmick that would have been one thing, but it wasn't. It was used in earnest. The tournament commentators in the booth are supposed to use intelligent analysis to predict a tournament match winner and then explain why they're making the choice to the viewers. The reason doesn't have to be serious, but it does have to be non-random.
Speaking of non-random: irrelevant commentary at several points today actually prevented intelligent commentary on the match in question.
At one point in a match between Kronoses and Machariels, a Kronos managed to web down a Machariel and the match looked likely to turn on this moment. Problem was during that time, Dolan had Fozzie involved in a conversation about... I can't even remember. But it definitely wasn't relevant, nor was it important enough to remember. Meanwhile, a great piece of EVE Online piloting was happening in the actual match. The Mach pilot called on a friendly Griffin to jam out the webbing Kronos, which was apparently successful and this allowed the Mach to escape tackle and side-step a second enemy Kronos.
Both commentators missed the whole thing.
That's not to say that Dolan was bad all day. At another point, he used a very interesting analogy to compare the many, many Kronoses we saw today to tar pits. It wasn't all that terrible of an analogy for a new player because in essence that's what a Kronos or a Vindicator is: a tar pit that will drag you in closer and closer and eventually kill you. But then encouraged by this small success, Dolan launched into a steady stream of irrelevant stories and analogies. Included in this was one very uncomfortable moment where he talked about two Curses involved in sexual relations, and some months later some baby Sentinels would appear--
I swear I am not making this up.
Anyway, all in all it would not surprise me if Dolan found himself having "technical difficulties" next weekend. At the very least, he's likely to get a bit of a talking to this morning... If he returns, let's hope he dials this behavior back some because today, he was virtually unwatchable.
(1) Laugh later. He is.
Source: Quote of the Week: Piece of metal (http://jestertrek.blogspot.com/2012/11/quote-of-week-piece-of-metal.html)