I agree, and I don’t at the same time. There’s also a lot of points I’d like to cover, and I assume that only OP will really read all of this (lol).
Yes, I like being able to see everything on the field, but at the same time it’s nice to see a close-up view of a bot when they’re doing something useful, resourceful, etc. - Most of the time, though, I’ve noticed that they zoom in on things that are “appealing” but might not be useful to people really watching.
I’ve noticed that some people are saying that the action shots are good for casual viewers, but I’d like to disagree with that as well. My parents, they don’t really understand Power Up very much. They just respect that I really enjoy what I do, so they tuned in to our matches to see how we were doing. They got a better understanding when seeing everything going on, able to find our bot instead of being zoomed in on one bot for 30 seconds and not seeing what we were doing at all.
I’m perfectly fine with the camera zooming in on, let’s say, a team getting a two or three cube scale. My issue comes from the fact that, a lot of times, they zoom in on a bot that does a one cube switch while the other bot is doing a two or three cube scale. You’re left seeing maybe the side of that bot. Even casual viewers would like to see the bot that makes the most impact. Look at American Football, Soccer, Baseball, etc. - They don’t zoom in to the people who aren’t making the biggest impact. In American Football, they’re zoomed in on the ball usually. In Soccer, they’re following the ball as well. In Baseball, they’re following either the person who’s running or the batter. They aren’t zoomed in on someone standing at one of the bases, standing at the outskirts waiting to see if a ball is thrown at them, or waiting for a ball to get kicked toward them. They’re zoomed in on the highest action, and unfortunately it’s there that I feel like webcasts drops the ball (as almost everyone here has said).
I might be doing media production and marketing for our team, but because I’m so close to the field (media pass for LSR) I got a great view of each of our matches and helped out with strategy. That said, stream scouting is terrible and when I was waiting in the pits (watching the matches on the stream or on the TV (depending on what I was doing)) it was really hard or just impossible. When we were back at our hotel talking about strategy, we didn’t even bother viewing matches from the stream. I pulled up the matches on my camera from the SD card and we used that to see how bots were doing. If I didn’t have footage of the match, we’d go off of what we saw if we could.
I completely understand both views and both arguments. Full-view is personally the way I’d like to see it go, but that’s just because if I want to watch one specific bot, I have that choice. If you’re zooming in on something, you’re restricting my eyes. Who cares if I choose I want to watch something boring? I can rewind the stream on Twitch as a VOD after if I need to. I can record the stream on my own end if I’d like as well to re-watch if necessary. Restricting the viewer’s freedom to watch what they’d like is what I feel like drives a lot of casual viewers away.
As I said before, my parents would much rather focus on my bot and our alliance than some bot on the other alliance spinning in circles. They’d rather focus on those on our alliance who’re actually doing “action” than moving to the other side of the field to grab a cube while another bot is battling for scale possession with the other alliance.
tl;dr I feel like having a full-field view would benefit more people than it would hurt. Zooming in over and over is confusing, and allowing viewers to have the freedom to find what they’d like to watch and focus on themselves would be much better than forcing them to see what the directors “feel like” is the biggest point of action.
), but here are my thoughts.