EPTI've been bringing myself into the community through four different avenues:
1) A website I run: sc2ratings.com
2) Attending live events
3) Trying to start up a business in the industry.
4) Posting on TeamLiquid & reddit.com/r/starcraft
I will address each of the first three topics in their own post. These topics have a lot of overlap, so there will be some cross talk, and I may cover some events more than once.
So, without further ado, let’s start!
Getting involved: Part 1
Building a community website: SC2Ratings.com
Let’s start with some context. I am 25 years old, which means I was 13 when SC1 came out, so I've grown up playing Broodwar. When I say I grew up playing Starcraft, I really mean I grew up playing "3v3 BGH", and "3v3 BGH no rush 15 min" on battl.net. For those of you who are new to Starcraft, BGH (Big Game Hunters) was an 8 player map, with one natural for each player, and infinite money on each mineral patch and geyser. Almost nobody expanded, everybody massed one unit (we didn't call it monobattles, but it's basically what it was), and teammate backstabbing was rampant. Still, it was fun, and I was the best amongst my friends because I had amazing macro (...relative to my friends...).
During the Beta, Blizzard's facebook mentioned this thing called "The HDH Invitational". This was my first real exposure to professional Starcraft, and I instantly fell in love. My friends and I consumed everything Husky and HD had to offer, but soon ran out of material; which is when we discovered the GSL (Open Season 1). I watched every match, often staying up all night to catch them, and still had time to watch all of Husky's stuff.
Then, at the beginning of 2011, I got a full time job and suddenly there was simply no way I could keep up with the GSL. I found myself spending my precious free time watching worthless games, and needing a way to sort through all the games, from all the tournaments, and find the ones that were worth watching. Since it wasn't available, I decided to make it. The concept of SC2Ratings was born. By day, I do front end web development, so I had some of the skills needed to build it, but I didn't know enough about backend development to build what I needed. After reading, and studying up on a few new languages, I jumped in and started writing SC2Ratings.
After a buggy launch into beta (this is why we have Betas, right?), I was in full dev mode: Adding new content, building new features, fixing old ones, expanding the scope of tournaments, and chatting with other SC2 community devs. Sometimes something would be broken for weeks or months before it would get caught (Registration was broken for a long time, and nobody let me know), but I made progress anyway - balancing watching, playing, work, and a girlfriend.
While talking to my sister one evening about the site, and how to market it, she suggested I do interviews with people to draw interest, and since I was on my way to NASL finals 1 anyway, I decided to pick up a camera, and see what I could do. My very first interview was with Artosis, and before I go into the train wreck that was the interview let me say that I had never operated a camera before, never been on camera before, and never given an interview to anybody. Oh, and I didn't have all my questions memorized. So, as you can imagine, it was bad. Real bad. So bad, I'm not even going to show it to anybody ever - but Artosis was a champ, and acted like a true professional during the whole thing. After another awkward interview with Ret, and some decent stuff from iNcontroL and Gretop, I had one of my friends conduct the interviews, and she was great. With no prep or forewarning whatsoever, she busted out six interviews that were ten times as good as what I had been doing. Come MLG Anaheim, the four of us got together to do interviews again (Me: leader, Elsea: interviewer, PianoForte: knowledge base, Frosty: player fetcher), and they went really well. We asked Sir Scoots for a five minute interview, and he took off, giving us an amazing 20+ minute chunk of gold.
Unfortunately, I also cant edit video, and so things never really got going on the interviews. I was having trouble implementing them the way I wanted to on the site too, so I stopped working to process some of the really good stuff we did. Some of our lesser works made it up and are online right now (http://www.youtube.com/user/sc2ratings). What these interviews did do, is help to build contacts, so that when I went to MLG Orlando, Blizzcon, and MLG Providence, I could get more familiar with player and staff, which has lead to some remarkable marketing opportunities. I'm not going to spoil what's to come, but there are a few places SC2Ratigns might start popping up pretty soon.
While at MLG Orlando, I decided that I wanted to push the site to production as soon as I could. I hired a designer while I was there, and redoubled my efforts (which had started to slack since other things in life demanded attention). After going back and forth with the designer, who had a great concept, but was not very good at executing it - often not responding for days, ignoring certain essential parts of the site, and delivering partial content - we finally got a full set of designs. Thanksgiving weekend, SC2Ratigns.com was finally finished (or at least in version 1.0, there's still a lot to come), and we pushed to production.
So, how many people work on this site? 2. I do all the development, and add most of the content, but I really couldn't have made it without another person: LotsOfLuck. This guy has spent countless hours adding content, sorting through vods, and helping to contribute to an unfinished product without asking for anything in return. If not for LotsOfLuck, we'd almost never be up to date, which would sink the whole site - so if you think SC2Ratings is something useful, be sure to PM LotsOfLuck here on TL and thank him for working tirelessly and thanklessly.
Full list of SC2Ratings "staff":
PianoForte: Human Liquidpedia - With an almost dyadic memory, GentlemanCaller always knows who is who, on which team, what games they've played, their strategies, and any little quick a player has.
Elsea: Interviewer - She has a lovely speaking voice, a remarkable professionalism, and the seemingly effortless conversation skills that makes an interview engaging, funny, and still relaxed.
Frotsy: Contacts guy - I don't know how he does it, but this guy has an amazing ability to get pro players to talk to us, and do interviews with us. He walks away from the group to find a player, and comes back with Destiny's phone number so we can get in touch later.
LotsOfLuck: Content - I said it before, and I'll say it again, LotsOfLuck keeps most of our icontent up to date. I'm terrible at maintenance, which is why his contributions are so badly needed, and so greatly appreciated.
Koibu0: That's me! I do just about everything else - development of the site, large content dumps, long term contact maintenance, and financial backing the site and any equipment.
If there's any way I can help, let me.
