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Somewhat inspired by the MLG Anaheim write-up. Just an opinion on probably the least expensive and most accelerated method of "revamping" the foreign SC2 scene to try to get on par with the Koreans, because as much as I'd love to do away with that distinction the results of tournaments speak for themselves. Unfortunately as mentioned with some people in IRC this is mostly a pipedream...
Step 1: The Team
Probably the most disappointing thing that has come out of the SC2 inflation is the dilution of talent and, this is a harsh way to put it, but a lot of mediocre players cashing in. Unfortunately a significant amount of resources are tied up by your 34-year old career minor-league players, whom probably are hitting the ceilings of potential at this point, don't really have any hope of actually breaking through, and usually aren't even putting in that much effort anymore. We desperately need a team composed of the absolute cream of the crop. Even if they're not necessarily players with the most potential, that can come later. Right now we need a single team with some of the best players in the world that the foreign scene can offer, under the same banner and roof. Logistically, the number of players you can assemble is probably low at the moment without the proper means to pay a salary, something I'd imagine would be 15-20k USD as start-up per year (living expenses being paid for means it's still a fairly good amount of pay).
1. Ideally this would be a better sponsorship draw. A team with the best should be able to make splashes in tournaments and leagues on a regular basis, and as players have name value their branding value also rises. That means it should theoretically be better for locking up sponsorships, which is crucial for providing some sort of regular stipend. You know stuff like the FXO House stream? If it can become a big enough namevalue, you could do creative stuff like license naming rights to that sort of house stream. Little stuff like that add up, but requires a "draw," and whether you like it or not, teams like the Miami Heat create buzz and viewership.
2. Superior practice. As Naniwa said:
I am slowly learning that I need a lot higher level practice partners to compete at the same level and I think most of the top players know that as well.
If you can get the best players together under one house, you create an environment where there is always an accessible, committed, high-level practice partner. Make all the players treat this as a regular job (an attitude that tends to be lacking) - 6-8 hours a day of dedicated practice. There should also be a list of regular "on-line" practice partners, and it should be a point of pride to be on that list of players that this team routinely calls on for practice, as these players need to be commodities as practice partners. This is similar to BW teams where you had the team, and then random online practice partners and such, most being B-Teamers or highly-rated amateur players, and it's considered quite an achievement to be such a regular practice partner. This creates a...
3. Goal. For aspiring players there is no infrastructure currently in place to make breakthroughs, become known, et cetera. This is particularly the case IMO in the post-beta period where there're "established players" and then everyone else. And I'd imagine it's incredibly difficult for some of these potential young players to really get anywhere. A Yankees-type team would become the end-game for players, and the existence of such a team would essentially automatically create the infrastructure - you have the team itself, regular practice partners, and then acquaintances. Obviously this can get more and more detailed depending on the level of team support provided, but I'll touch on that later.
4. Consolidation of the best resources available. Suffice it to say I think the foreign scene has terrible resources and are terrible dilution of whatever stuff we have. The best players are scattered on different teams practicing with relatively bad players. Some teams have a clear sense of direction yet have a bunch of mediocre/bad players, some teams have good players but don't seem to have any idea what they're doing, etc. Gather the best players. Grab the best environment. Get the best managers. Get the best staff. Make the One Stud Foreign Team that can walk into GSTL and tear things up. THEN we can get to expanding into other teams, slowly, especially after a team infrastructure model has been established. Right now it just feels like random businesses decide to have a team one day and sign a handful of mediocre players and call it a team, with it only being a team due to name and some money.
Step 2: Dedicated coaching staff. Something that's rarely mentioned in the foreign scene is the coaching staff - right now it seems like every team has players, and some manager, without any sort of competitive support. I don't know what the coaching staff of BW teams do, but I'd imagine they take up a lot of the menial labor required to finetune strategies. I remember a Nony or Idra interview back in the day where they mention how when you first enter a pro team, they deconstruct your play and beat the fundamentals into your play, to make you a much more crisp player. This is the sort of thing that needs to e done. I'd imagine there're things like coaches looking closely at VODs to record as much timing information as humanly possible, then recreating the timings in build order testers etc. to discern exactly what other players are doing, then comparing such timings with existing build orders/replays of players to see where they're screwing up, etc. Similar to what Stylish did with I believe the double armory Flash build some time ago in BW, which was considered quite a breakthrough in the TL community. Yes, the players themselves could do it, but why waste valuable time when you can have a coach/dedicated support staff take up that job and break things down instead? That's why sports always have coaches.
There also need to be scouts. Something like what Korean teams do, where they have amateur ranking tournaments, et cetera. But not just pick up the top rankers in the amateur scene. Some pretty good BW pro in an interview a long time ago mentioned how he went winless in an amateur tournament, but the coaches saw enough in him and liked his spunk that he was recruited into the team. And after getting coached up, bam, pretty good player. This is a sorely lacking element in the foreign scene, as I feel like it's impossible to get noticed, and teams have no idea what they're doing when signing players - they just sign big names, many of whom are, no offense, career minor league players.
If teams need to wave around money to try to lure Korean coaches (even ex-BW ones, or current BW assistant coaches, et cetera) then so be it. With how far behind the foreign scene is, it really wouldn't hurt to learn the inner workings of competitive teams from the scene that actually has an established one.
Step 3: Willingness to evolve and change
Also known as the willingness to do the dirty work and cut a player who's not performing/giving the best effort/etc. Astonishingly, better players will (hopefully) burst onto the scene, especially if the scene generates proper infrastructure. Especially because currently in the foreign scene there's such a generation void in the post-BW/WC3 crowd - I can't think of any current player who's not already an established name in some other RTS game prior to SC2. If a Flash shows up, you honestly just have to be willing to let go of Boxer to sign him. And if Boxer leaves and decides to create a new, similar team in the same structural vein, then all the power to him, and that's the right way to grow the scene. At the moment though it feels like teams keep ties with fading players, when they don't have that much money/resources to throw around. Keep the cycle going, make sure there's incentive for new generations to aspire to get up there, and most importantly make sure the team maintains (or attempts to, in the event of a number of teams) its elite, star-studded status.
Can you imagine a team of like, Stephano Nerchio Dimaga Kas Thorzain Strelok Whitera Naniwa Mana all living in the Razor Champs House in Europe, practicing 8 hours a weekday and streaming the Steelseries SC2 Stream and such? Would be insane. But alas... it's still probably too much in terms of costs for any one team, and I feel like players are pretty loyal to their teams :[
 
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5/5 articulate and well researched.
In some sort of short summary combined with my opinion:
Players need to play with the goal of improving. With good practice partners they can practice what they need to whenever they want. With a dedicated coaching staff they can locate their weaknesses, strategies to fix them, and be motivated to follow through.
You can ladder 24h 365days and not beat nestea.
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I think step 1 and 3 are completely unnecessary...
I mean look at BW teams for example, none of them have "all of the best players". Sure, it would be cool if Jaedong, Flash, and (insert other numerous amazing broodwar players) were on the same team, but having them be on different teams contributes to a competitive spirit. If one team was basically an all-star team, it is more likely to draw sponsors away from other teams that are not as highly skilled at that moment.
As for Step 3, so you're saying Jinro should be dropped? After all, he has not been performing as much as he did a while back. The thing is, doing this would only play into people's inherent greed, and then they would have no loyalty to their team.
Lastly, I think (am not sure at all), the money to put this kind of plan into action would be too much for any team at the moment.
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The BW scene was buoyed heavily by SKT and KTF, both of which sported megastars throughout their lineups. It's why their rivalry is legendary, and why they're also two of the most popular teams. Certainly SKT in particular is considered one of the forefathers to established competitive BW teams, which is one of the reasons why Boxer is revered so much - he passed up a huge individual salary so that his team could get paid, as he understood that what was needed was a set of high-level training partners.
With that one established, other rival players whom were not part of that team needed to follow suit, establishing KTF (IIRC some of the original KTF players used to be on SKT), and as the success of "teams" grew more and more teams were created. And each of these teams started off with lesser talent, but with hard work and dedication would slowly produce one or two stars, at which their success began snowballing (ie. CJ with Xellos).
That leads us to now, where BW teams don't always have "all the best players" but the scene has been established enough that there is a structured "farm system," and so most of the players in these teams are "the best of the best" from a probability standpoint. This is why the Korean ladders (in both BW and SC2) are filled with players who can play with the best of the foreign scene, and why the players in the teams actually ARE the best of the best, and can generally crush foreign players. Hence, you end up with 1% of like 10000 players on pro teams, which is still a sizable number but one based on the sheer amount of talent that has been created. It's not that Korean people are all naturally more gifted at Starcraft 2, there's just an established community that has been driven by the existence of a professional scene, spearheaded by its teams.
By contrast the foreign scene has no real professional team, beyond those that call themselves one but don't really have much in terms of infrastructure - and I don't mean a house by that. So you're looking at needing to take the top 1% from a pool of like 500 and... you end up with significantly fewer "best" players. Really, if you created, how many Korean teams are there currently, 8? And filled each of them with like 12 foreign players right now, how many of the players on teams do you think ACTUALLY can compete with Korean players, now and in the future?
Edit:
Casting off is primarily a funding issue. BW teams tend to have more leniency with fading/underperforming players (lets not mix that up with slumping though), because they pay their players significantly less, and even fading/underperforming players tend to outperform amateur/B-Team counterparts. But yes, with Jinro's slide it'd be very difficult to justify paying him 10-20k per year, because he's simply not producing, for whatever reason. Obviously a coach could then look at his play, sit down and talk to him, and assess whether the guy simply has lost the drive or is a smidgen away from re-establishing himself as a powerhouse. That's the beauty of a coaching staff.
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This is actually a pretty well done post. I was expecting troll bait.
In all seriousness though - I think the most important thing is a really solid practice schedule and a really good coach. That can make even a shitty team play way better.
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There's definitely a possibility that the coaching staff and practice is more important than I realize. I obviously ended up placing a lot more stock on practice partners because of Naniwa's point, but we may just be sleeping on a lot of players with potential who simply don't have the practice structure and guidance to kick it up to the next level :o
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The problem is the number of players in a region. Korea is small but has about a 50-100 players in teams.
The rest of the world is huge but also has just 50-100 players in teams and those players are spread all over the world.
The teams have to centralize a lot more and move the players into a practice house to really have success. Coaching over the internet is just not as effective on that high level, you need to be physically close with a dedicated coach being able to look over your shoulder when you play.
Then you need about 3 players per race in that house to bounce ideas off.
EGs and TLOs teamhouse are not really effective enough, they are a step in the right direction but there is still a long way to go, though if Naniwa, Thorzain and Ret would move into TLOs house, too, it might work.
EDIT:
As for the above post about coaches being important:
They are not important - they are essential. Though in the short term a player might fill the same role until a real coach is found.
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Foreign players should go on break for a year and learn Korean.
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On August 16 2011 00:57 Morfildur wrote:
The problem is the number of players in a region. Korea is small but has about a 50-100 players in teams.
The rest of the world is huge but also has just 50-100 players in teams and those players are spread all over the world.
The teams have to centralize a lot more and move the players into a practice house to really have success. Coaching over the internet is just not as effective on that high level, you need to be physically close with a dedicated coach being able to look over your shoulder when you play.
Then you need about 3 players per race in that house to bounce ideas off.
EGs and TLOs teamhouse are not really effective enough, they are a step in the right direction but there is still a long way to go, though if Naniwa, Thorzain and Ret would move into TLOs house, too, it might work.
EDIT:
As for the above post about coaches being important:
They are not important - they are essential. Though in the short term a player might fill the same role until a real coach is found.
The thing is the coach would have to give up on his own career, which would mean no income for him. I don't see many sc2 players paying for coaching, sure they'd love to coach you for $80-200/hr but I doubt they'd ever pay that.
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We mean a coach coach, like coach of basketball team type coach 
I don't know what the coaching staff of BW teams do, but I'd imagine they take up a lot of the menial labor required to finetune strategies. I remember a Nony or Idra interview back in the day where they mention how when you first enter a pro team, they deconstruct your play and beat the fundamentals into your play, to make you a much more crisp player. This is the sort of thing that needs to e done. I'd imagine there're things like coaches looking closely at VODs to record as much timing information as humanly possible, then recreating the timings in build order testers etc. to discern exactly what other players are doing, then comparing such timings with existing build orders/replays of players to see where they're screwing up, etc. Similar to what Stylish did with I believe the double armory Flash build some time ago in BW, which was considered quite a breakthrough in the TL community. Yes, the players themselves could do it, but why waste valuable time when you can have a coach/dedicated support staff take up that job and break things down instead? That's why sports always have coaches.
Like that sort. Yes, the coach is probably going to be either an ex-SC2 player or someone with some sort of sport coaching experience (not sure how coaches became coaches in BW).
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Bumping me own blog but now if EG can sign like 3 more top players (1 more of each race) we're talking business :>
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Great insightful post, definitely 5/5. We may actually see EG rise as a leading powerhouse in the near future... and time will tell whether other prominent teams (like our own Liquid) can do what it takes to rise to the challenge.
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EPT
