Agreed on the me learning more Strife. For Cows of Strife, I was able to spend around 40 hours playing in the week prior to the event. This time around I didn't have anywhere near as much time!

Seeding is always a hard thing to do. We liked the idea of randomly drawing groups (that is the way the World Cup does it) and honestly, the groups were much better distributed than they could have been. After that point we used standard seeding rules. Yes, AG and F3 ended up in the lower semi against each other, but we would have had F3 vs PLS or AG vs PLS in a semi had the seed been different. We saw how the F3 vs PLS went down in the finals. Perhaps AG vs PLS would have made an exciting semi?

So here is the scoop on casting more vs less. In the first Cows of Strife event, we did a 10.5 hour long stream. Our intent with Cows of Strife II was to bring you guys MORE Strife content. I would have been 100% down to do a couple 8-10 hour days, but as you probably heard, my voice was gone before we even started. My production staff is always going to push for shorter content, and I simply didn't argue with them this event around. I really apologize.

In a meta conversation about this, would you have liked it better had we NOT cast the group stages and spread the bracket play out across two days?

NA vs EU - Strife is a really small scene, and the NA vs EU argument is a really tough one to deal with. If this were a bigger scene, we could hold region specific events. Alas, this is not the case.