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*Ahem* Before I begin any of this blog keep in mind this is 100% an opinion post. Anything said after this point should be taken with a grain of salt as these are my OPINIONS and nothing more. If you can't handle a small dose of truth and a wake-up call, stop reading right now. This is out of pure concern and love for the foreign BW scene that I write this.
(TL:DR)<-- shortcut for skipping the "recap" portion and going straight to the current issues.
The Height of iCCup
Before I begin the long road of tearing the current scene a new one, lets look back at the heights of iCCup. Mostly, this is before SC2 came out and screwed everything up.
I wasn't around for most of it, but anybody remember when 2-3k people used to be online at any given time of day? You could always find games. The early season was what anybody expected, chaos, but that was ok! You could get on after 3-4 weeks of it settling down and start figuring out where you fit in in the new season! Clans were more active than ever, and the gaming lifestyle was looking pretty bright. Then Activision-Blizzard released the game we came to call, "Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty".
This game did more damage to the scene than we initially realized. Almost immediately after its release, foreign communities everywhere flocked to its shiny graphics, revamped system, and legalized hacks (multi-hack, command-hack, statues for temporary maphack, rally-hacks, auto-mining, auto-gas, and more). This made the game very appealing as it greatly lowered the skill bar necessary to become one of the "greats". Soon people everywhere were streaming it, playing it, and it began to take over the phenomenon that Starcraft: Brood War had laid out.
The Attempted Recovery
Many started spouting "BW is dead!", "SC2 is going to completely replace it!", and other such ignorant comments as I've come to expect from children and people of lesser intelligence. The BW scene was far from dead, but it was, in fact, damaged far more than we realized. At first, we claimed "NO! BW is not dead! We shall revive it and cause a second wave to become interested!". We somewhat succeeded in this and more proof of this has shown up as of late since iCCup's average playerbase has become 200-300 greater than it was at its lowest (300-400 online PM my time, 700-800 online in the mornings now to 500-600 PM and 1000-1200 AM). I, myself, have started to contribute to this "revitalization movement" and intend to continue as long as possible. However, I will now discuss the major issues surrounding our now-damaged scene that we face.
(TL:DR)
The Stat Abuse
Not to badmouth any of the players I mention, as I still have respect for you guys as you are indeed the top foreigners on iCCup right now, but most of these ranks are nothing more than stat-abuse-inflated. This includes several of the Koreans that were on the top 10 this past season. This isn't to say that many of them weren't already high-ranking players, but they used stat abuse to get 1-3 levels higher than they actually are. If you're on this list, just stop doing cheap shit and you wouldn't be here. You have nobody but yourselves to blame.
Just to give you an idea:
1v1 ladder stat abuse accounts
sjskahtdlru 369-31 Match List
qjxjvmffkdl 242-56 Match List
[KidCanada] 145-96 Match List
2v2 ladder stat abuse accounts
Belladona 357-33 Match List
LRM)Semih 248-36 Match List
I'm not sure what's worse. The fact that these people do these sorts of things, or the fact that they actually get recognition for it. End-of-Season iCCup News Write-up. I blame iccup staff partially for not doing anything against this obvious and blatant spitting at the rules and at sportsmanship in general. No professional sports association would allow this sort of action to go unpunished (or reward it).
Koreans who play seriously on servers like Brainclan, Mapzine, and Fish literally take their own smurfs/stat-abusers and tell them they should go to iCCup if they want to do such things because we're now known as "The n00b Stomping Grounds". Personally, I find this title a bit insulting, but as I've clearly shown, we've brought it upon ourselves. If nobody takes iCCup with any degree of seriousness, how are we supposed to mount any sort of resurgence if the only server that hosts good players is considered a complete and utter joke?
Well that's great, you whistle-blowing prick. What do you want us to do about it?
Simple. Crack down on this sort of behavior and dammit, get our Koreans back. I know it was frustrating as hell to have the top 200 being 197 Koreans but you know what? I liked having B-teamers, semi-pros, and active progamers visiting and playing on iCCup. Even Nal_Ra famously played on iCCup for a while during the filming of his TV Show, "Oldboy"! It meant there was some real difficulty to the server. All but perhaps 5-10 semi-pro/B-team Koreans are gone from the server. iCCup's level of competition has suffered greatly because of the lack of higher level players existing.
That being said, I want the BW scene to thrive for a long time. Who cares if its in WCG or not. I'll keep watching Proleague and MSL/OSL for as long as they exist. If you have any love for the scene, or any respect for progaming as a whole, this blog should hit some buttons for you. Any opposed to the things I've said might as well just say "fuck the scene, fuck my fanbase, and fuck sportsmanship".
  
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With the guide that was posted about playing on Brain/Fish, I don't ever see myself going back to iccup to be honest, 40000 people on fish at all times is hard to beat...
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On February 27 2011 02:47 Megaliskuu wrote:
With the guide that was posted about playing on Brain/Fish, I don't ever see myself going back to iccup to be honest, 40000 people on fish at all times is hard to beat...
Seriously???
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On February 27 2011 02:47 Saturnize wrote:Show nested quote +On February 27 2011 02:47 Megaliskuu wrote:
With the guide that was posted about playing on Brain/Fish, I don't ever see myself going back to iccup to be honest, 40000 people on fish at all times is hard to beat... Seriously???
Well Brain is down atm so everyone is on fish, but yeah yesterday there was 40k people during kor hours.
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Australia7069 Posts
the match list is insane. Every refresh brings up like 40 more games
and they all fill INSTANTLY. Its kinda hard to make it over the language barrier and the skill levels until u get into ladder are pretty random. but its pretty awesome. I'll probably still play iccup tho because i'm a scardeycat
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How are any of those people you listed stat abusers.
A) I didn't realize that playing a re was stat abusing.
B) You do realize that at any given point in time theres < 10 people in the ladder a-b channel? Who else are they going to play? Even when iccup was at its height, a- and b ranked always played against each other. This isn't something new, its just the fact that there aren't enough players to play against. and there's even a set limit of games that a and b players can play against each other, which none of those players have broken. I would assume as an iccup admin you would know them.
Rules---
15 Games between B- and B+
A- and Olympic — No more than 1200 points gained from 1 player.
They don't even break the limit for d- to d games which is 6 games.
Stat abusing is sitting there and playing against yourself on a diff computer or a friend and getting free points, which this isn't.
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Dude i watched the match list of the top Koreans and you have no idea lol.
They are playing B and B- because there are too few A and A- ( 18 ) ...
When you get only +13pts for playing a B- i don't think it is abusing. If you lose you lose like 250 or something.
Also what's wrong with Kid[Canada] match list ? He played a couple of D players for 13pts but all his other games are vs B-/B/B+.
You are seriously making a blog because of 4 games vs D players for 50 points ?
Also i'm laughing so hard at "bring the Koreans back" i mean what the Iccup team can do ? They can't force people to play on their server. The only thing they could do is to add proleague maps to the ladder faster.
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On February 27 2011 03:12 guMmiwormz wrote:
How are any of those people you listed stat abusers.
A) I didn't realize that playing a re was stat abusing.
B) You do realize that at any given point in time theres < 10 people in the ladder a-b channel? Who else are they going to play? Even when iccup was at its height, a- and b ranked always played against each other. This isn't something new, its just the fact that there aren't enough players to play against. and there's even a set limit of games that a and b players can play against each other, which none of those players have broken. I would assume as an iccup admin you would know them.
Rules---
15 Games between B- and B+
A- and Olympic — No more than 1200 points gained from 1 player.
They don't even break the limit for d- to d games which is 6 games.
Stat abusing is sitting there and playing against yourself on a diff computer or a friend and getting free points, which this isn't.
I'm glad someone mentioned this, it really confused me in the main post.
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Hi, iccup head admin here.
Some points I'd like to address:
First off, I'm not sure how you can label yourself as an admin. You were given an account to do castings for us, but I've seen 0 result thus far.
Second, due to the dwindling number of a-b players, people who are dedicated towards reaching that high rank must grind through d-c opponents. Did they dodge a-b teams? No. Did they break any of our rules? No. Yet the fact that their hard work is met with ignorant criticism bothers me a lot. These players get 13 points for winning a game, and lose 280 if they lose.
Next point: While koreans are beneficial to iccup, it's only natural that they reside on a server that is a) closer to them, b) is full of people who speak their own language, and c) have players that are physically close to them, therefore greatly reducing lag. I mean no insult to you, but I think you may underestimate the difference between a game on high latency and a game on low latency. iCCup does not and can not offer any sort of perks to these players past concrete abuse control, so it is unrealistic to expect them to return. Rather, our efforts should be focused on maintaining us as the greatest foreigner sc server.
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On February 27 2011 03:12 guMmiwormz wrote:
How are any of those people you listed stat abusers.
A) I didn't realize that playing a re was stat abusing.
B) You do realize that at any given point in time theres < 10 people in the ladder a-b channel? Who else are they going to play? Even when iccup was at its height, a- and b ranked always played against each other. This isn't something new, its just the fact that there aren't enough players to play against.
Bs playing against Cs and Ds is stat abuse. Playing 10 "re"s in a row isn't necessarily stat abuse but come on. If you were smart enough to read the actual links, you'd see that I didn't include a lot of the players who were B+ vs B-, etc. I only included ones that played mass games with people more than 2-3 ranks below them.
Boblion wrote:
Also what's wrong with Kid[Canada] match list ? He played a couple of D players for 13pts but all his other games are vs B-/B/B+.
You are seriously making a blog because of 4 games vs D players for 50 points ?
Also i'm laughing so hard at "bring the Koreans back" i mean what the Iccup can do ? They can't force people to play or their server. The only thing they could do is to add proleague maps to the ladder faster.
Look past the first page. He played a lot of matches vs Cs on that page too. Learn to be more thorough.
You also don't understand even a little bit of why Koreans left. Its because iCCup is in fact a joke to them. Back when we cracked down harder, they were more willing to give iCCup a shot. Also the anti-Korean atmosphere there isn't helping.
Deus aka iCCup.nOoNe
First off, I'm not sure how you can label yourself as an admin. You were given an account to do castings for us, but I've seen 0 result thus far.
Second, due to the dwindling number of a-b players, people who are dedicated towards reaching that high rank must grind through d-c opponents.
First off, you must not watch my stream. I've been casting almost every day. I'm easily online as much as Sayle. I, however, am never invited or asked to do any other castings even though I am perfectly willing to do so. Its not a lack of effort on my part in the least.
Second, the answer to your "dwindling numbers" is simple. Attract more. The whole anti-Korean bullshit on things like ISL and whatnot are what keep Koreans from wanting to play there; NOT the ping or the distance. If what you said was true, why did Koreans USED to massgame there and not anymore? Explain that please. Nobody has to mass games at B ranks vs D/C just so they feel fuzzy with a fake A-/A. Any respectable player would be satisfied just being at the top.
I know that you love throwing around your shiny new head admin title and I know you're proud of iCCup, but if there weren't obvious problems, this blog wouldn't exist. There's always room for improvement. I didn't flat-out insult anybody, just pointed out some issues that even others have posted on our iCCup forums about but got no action. If I didn't like iCCup and want to see it flourish, I wouldn't have contributed to ISL, I wouldn't have made this blog, and I certainly wouldn't be keeping up with it.
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5 / 5 , wow I didn't realize all these people were stat abusers... why aren't they banned on iCCup for abusing? Awesome read and man you really helped me to see the light 
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[B]On February 27 2011 04:08 sCCrooked wrote: I didn't flat-out insult anybody
You insulted quite a few people in your replies. Also, you are very wrong about the stat abusing. i would also suggest maybe taking a chill pill, it's just Starcraft who cares where they are playing it as long as they are playing it.
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Kidcanada plays no d players in 7 pages of matches, except one who he loses to. and once again, what everyone has been saying, there are very little players to play against in the a + b range. none of the players are intentionally looking to play people lower then their rank just to get "easy" wins.
everything your saying about "stat abusing" is pretty wrong.
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On February 27 2011 04:11 7000bitches wrote:Show nested quote +[B]On February 27 2011 04:08 sCCrooked wrote: I didn't flat-out insult anybody You insulted quite a few people in your replies. Also, you are very wrong about the stat abusing. i would also suggest maybe taking a chill pill, it's just Starcraft who cares where they are playing it as long as they are playing it.
If telling the truth is insulting, then fine I'm about to insult a lot more people in the coming years. I would also recommend you take a chill pill since I stated at the very beginning its an opinion blog.
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On February 27 2011 04:23 sCCrooked wrote:Show nested quote +On February 27 2011 04:11 7000bitches wrote:[B]On February 27 2011 04:08 sCCrooked wrote: I didn't flat-out insult anybody You insulted quite a few people in your replies. Also, you are very wrong about the stat abusing. i would also suggest maybe taking a chill pill, it's just Starcraft who cares where they are playing it as long as they are playing it. If telling the truth is insulting, then fine I'm about to insult a lot more people in the coming years. I would also recommend you take a chill pill since I stated at the very beginning its an opinion blog.
Well your goal to just stir up a shitstorm for no reason is becoming more and more apparent, so i'm not going to reply after this.
But I would like to say that whatever point you are trying to make is being completely lost in your mightier than thou tone of talking. Try some respect it goes a long way.
Have a good one.
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I'm tempted to go back but its been a month. No sc2 since beta, no bw for a month. I've been so productive it hurts to go back, but it hurts to know noobs are getting away with bullshit I would punish them for. haha.
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On February 27 2011 04:23 sCCrooked wrote:Show nested quote +On February 27 2011 04:11 7000bitches wrote:On February 27 2011 04:08 sCCrooked wrote: I didn't flat-out insult anybody You insulted quite a few people in your replies. Also, you are very wrong about the stat abusing. i would also suggest maybe taking a chill pill, it's just Starcraft who cares where they are playing it as long as they are playing it. If telling the truth is insulting, then fine I'm about to insult a lot more people in the coming years. I would also recommend you take a chill pill since I stated at the very beginning its an opinion blog.
You are not telling the truth, you are just talking shit.
On February 27 2011 04:08 sCCrooked wrote:
Boblion wrote:
Also what's wrong with Kid[Canada] match list ? He played a couple of D players for 13pts but all his other games are vs B-/B/B+.
You are seriously making a blog because of 4 games vs D players for 50 points ?
Also i'm laughing so hard at "bring the Koreans back" i mean what the Iccup can do ? They can't force people to play or their server. The only thing they could do is to add proleague maps to the ladder faster.
Look past the first page. He played a lot of matches vs Cs on that page too. Learn to be more thorough.
Well he was barely above B and he played some C, C+ B- and B and he also lost 200 points vs a D+
What's your problem man ? Maybe he was just playing the people available in the channel ?
[B]On February 27 2011 04:08 sCCrooked wrote:
You also don't understand even a little bit of why Koreans left. Its because iCCup is in fact a joke to them. Back when we cracked down harder, they were more willing to give iCCup a shot. Also the anti-Korean atmosphere there isn't helping.
Koreans left because the Iccup team was late to update the map pool with the new proleague maps, that's the only reason.
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On February 27 2011 04:26 7000bitches wrote:
Well your goal to just stir up a shitstorm for no reason is becoming more and more apparent, so i'm not going to reply after this.
But I would like to say that whatever point you are trying to make is being completely lost in your mightier than thou tone of talking. Try some respect it goes a long way.
Have a good one.
You're not a bad troll, but sorry I'm kind of immune to trolling. Whatever you're saying is lost in the fact you don't research or read. An American trying to lecture a Korean about "respect". How "lol".
Boblion wrote:
You are not telling the truth, you are just talking shit.
gg :/ Trolling ends when you take it personally.
Boblion wrote:
Koreans left because the Iccup team was late to update the map pool with the new proleague maps, that's the only reason.
You, sir, are not qualified to speak on Koreans since you apparently don't stay active in the Korean private server scene.
User was temp banned for this post.
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On February 27 2011 03:55 DeuS wrote:
Second, due to the dwindling number of a-b players, people who are dedicated towards reaching that high rank must grind through d-c opponents.
I always say iccup shouldn't reset scores at new season, just halve them or something. Higher level players playing on D rank scare away newbies and the lack of a semi-persistent score is really bad for A/B players.
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EPT
