Thoughts on 2012

G'day folks - some of you may or may not have seen this earlier on my site, but I wanted to post here because I was hoping to hear more peoples thoughts

2012 is going to be an interesting year, there are many things which can be improved – some can simply be adapted – but it is certainly going to be a big year. I am obviously going to focus specifically on the esports side of things – centering around Starcraft2, as you’d expect. One thing I was thinking about while writing this is that according to Mayan mythology, December 21, 2012 – will mark the end of civilisation as we know it. In short (this is purely from what I understand, if there are any Mayan culture buffs out there, feel free to correct me) – Mayan literature states that “the gods” created three failed worlds, which was then followed by a fourth successful world (sound like they play Terran and do Marine/SCV all-ins). Humans were placed on this 4th world, and as per the previous world, there was an “End Date” set, at 13 b’ak’tuns – roughly 5,125 years.

I would like to think that the Maya culture had it right to some extent, but with a different end game. Humanity will not end – but a period in which esports has been in the dark will end – with the light shining from our magnificent game known as Starcraft 2.

We have already seen the start of this revolution in gaming – starting with MLG reaching ridiculously huge viewer and attendance numbers at this years events, not to mention the slow but steady surge of SC2 in Korea – the home of esports. The prize pools have been out of control, growing with each event – this year culminating with a massive $USD50,000 going to a young Zerg player from Korea who flew halfway across the world to play – and he is not even old enough to buy a beer to celebrate.

It was bigger than him

Many people have said that “2011 is the big year” – to an extent I believe they are correct, we have had some big things happen – but I think 2012 will be the telling year in which we find out if the esports community has what it takes to kick this revolution into overdrive. Lets delve deeper, and talk about some thoughts and musings I have had in regards to how next year could see that light of esports shine through the dark, and explode into mainstream.

If we build it, they will come
It has been an interesting topic especially as of late – what is happening with venues? We saw MLG’s early in the year starting out in event complexes, slowly getting bigger and bigger. We saw Dreamhack starting out in tents intially, and then moving to tents and a small theatre for the main action – finally finishing up with the main content of Dreamhack Winter being shown in a damn ice-hockey venue. Luckily there was no ice, most of the nerds there would have died in the cold – not to mention half the PC gear would have died too. Point being – as the events grew, as crowds grew and as the investments into the content grew – the venues themselves started to grow. Even NASL in all it’s infamy grew from NASL finals season 1 – with the season 2 finals being held in a much bigger venue – although in hindsight this could have been a grave error.

I would love to see at least 1 event again held in a sporting arena of some kind – whether it be in another ice hockey arena like a Dreamhack, or who knows, perhaps with enough marketing investment and preparation we can see something in a football stadium. I don’t think that’s exactly viable right now – but aim high and you never know. What type of venues would suit for the current state of attendance? I’m not exactly sure, perhaps some smaller-end basketball stadiums could be converted to fit a bunch of people? We’ll see, once someone tries it; because we all know if there’s one thing you can count on in the esports community – someone will try it.

Everyone in the Day9 tent!

The place where we all started – now an innovative idea
Dreamhack Winter 2011 brought us probably one of the most talked about innovations in all of the SC2 tournaments this year. MLG Quad view? You can only watch 1 thing at a time anyway, we aren’t Chameleons. GSL SQ, paid SQ and HQ? Laughable “features”, given that the HQ of GSL was a a spec of nothingness compared to Dreamhack’s free high quality stream. NASL “one booth, 2 players”? Not even sure how that went down.

What I do know that went down, was a couch. It went down on a stage. 4 casters (perhaps 1 too many) plonked themselves on the couch, and after some matches would discuss and analyse the previous match just seen. I thought this was a magnificent addition to the setting, providing the casters with a short break in that hectic time when you need to create a game, get the players in, AND fill time on the camera. The casters didn’t have to do anything besides throw to the couch, and bam, you’ve got 5 minutes of filler. MLG did something a little like this back at… Raleigh I believe – where they had a short interview with the players on a couch with JP/Milkis – it wasn’t the same style, but the idea was there. I would assume given the popularity of the caster-couch (as I believe it is known…) will make it a sure-fire bet that it will be present next year during the 2012 MLG season and beyond.

Rumours are, this is the couch for the next MLG

It is these types of fun ideas that help in many ways – it solves a problem experienced at events (setting up games AND filling time is not a super-easy task) and it is also entertaining to the fans. Obviously refinements can be made – I would have thought with the caster couch at DHW that they could have made it 3 people, not 4. Having 4 people on the couch seems a little cumbersome, because you get to a point where either the last person has nothing to say because everyone else has already said what he/she was going to say – or you’ll just have people repeating points already made – with just a slightly different flavour. Make it 3, perhaps even (if possible) make it people from each race just for a slightly different perspective? One thing that people LOVED about the HomeStoryCup is that the casters were suddenly the pros – and you rarely get to hear proper dedicated casting from pro gamers who know EXACTLY what is going on. We as commentators can provide insight and play-by-play descriptions, but I’ll even admit as a commentator – there are some things that we just cannot provide. Perhaps put 2 casters and a pro on the couch, and then you’ll have a situation with massive entertainment value that gives the active commentators a short break to prepare themselves for the next match.

Fighting is the spice of life. Or something like that
We all love a good rivalry. It provides a reason to get even more passionate about a match. That’s in no way saying that SC2 fans don’t get passionate – a quick look at the GSL tweets during the Leenock v Jjakji shows how hardcore we love our esports – but real rivalries promote passion, they evoke emotions, and they give you more reason to get into a game. Whether it be purely as a netizen spectating a game, yelling at your screen – or if it is something that makes you want to go to the event so much because you want to cheer on “your player”.

I think it is a huge part of the SC2 scene that is missing right now – to be fair however, it’s not an easy thing to do given the way this community works. To form a rivalry you really do need to have a lot of games being played between two people/teams and have things “heat up” for some reason. I think a part of the reason behind this not happening so far is that it can be hard for players to actually match up against the same people often – sure we do see things like Idra v Huk earlier back in the day (Damn you SirScoots for ruining that one!), Idra v MC (noticing a trend here…) and more recently, Puma v Hero comes to mind – but these seem to be very small when compared to some things. If you take a step back and look at your local football/baseball/cricket/hockey team, there is always “that team” that they have to play which gets you a little more fired up than usual – this needs to become a part of the SC2 scene for players, teams and to an extent sponsors to help promote themselves. Do you remember back to the time when Huk first joined EG? That was MASSIVE. The PR work done by EG was incredibly clever – not to mention funny… “This is not a hallucination” – but it spurred people up. It spurred up Liquid fans, it made EG fans ecstatic that they would soon have a massive Protoss force on their team. Those were true passionate feelings about the game that were fulled by a rivalry. Sure, because of the signing the rivalry was effectively dead – but hey, that’s the emotional charged atmosphere that teams and players should aim for.

Love this kind of stuff!

I’m not saying that players need to go out and start shouting “your momma” jokes at each other – just provide some friendly-yet-sparking pokes at some players to help build a rivalry. It’s not something purely for the fans either – sponsors and teams will start drowning in fans in the competitive atmosphere. Up until a few months ago I never really had a “favourite team” to speak of. I loved seeing all the various players win (even Terrans) because it was all for the sport of it. But now that the stage has been set this year with events starting to beef up – I think that providing some rivalries will really help accelerate the growth of the scene. During NASL S2 finals we saw an interesting banter between the Mouseports and EG twitters, as you can see on the right. This was great fun, on Teamliquid and on Reddit the fans were starting up conversations and we saw fans rallying behind their favourite team and/or player from the respective teams. It was fun, and passionate – without being overbearing. I really think that teams should dig deeper into this a little bit more.

“Recorded live” – broadcast 3 weeks later
This practice needs to be reviewed. There are certain reasons for people wanting to do this – technical limitations, players having hectic schedules (looking at you Huk, take a rest son) – but realistically, recording a game and broadcasting it anywhere later than a week after is pushing the limit of the feasibility of watching SC2. We saw with NASL and to a limited extent IPL, that when you broadcast games weeks after they have been played, some of the “magic” is removed in the process. I suppose it’s a hard thing to explain unless you have watched and understood the feeling of watching live games which I’m sure you all have, it’s just hard to put it in writing. It’s not something new either; if you jump on YouTube and watch old Brood War videos you’ll see what I mean – a finals series of an OSL/MSL just doesn’t have the same “atmosphere” in a vod than what it does when you watch it live. It’s incredibly weird, but it just is, and it’s something that event mangers really need to take into consideration moving forward.

There are a bunch of things like this which we can all assist with – Incontrol said it best on his blog post – if you can provide a service/tool/skill to the community, do so. Help us get the recognition for esports that it deserves, and hopefully more of a mainstream following will come shortly after. I guess I just want to echo that, and I’d love to see what you guys think about some of the things I have mentioned above, and if you have your own ideas please feel free to post below, Tweet me or even email me. I hope this rant wasn’t too long – but as they say “you gotta do what ya gotta do!”.

Thanks to the folks in the wellplayed IRC for reminding me of a few things jenzebubble, Adebisii, cp_, Phenom and any others!

DUCKVILLE

IMO 2011 was the breakout year. I had picked up SC2 out of curiosity over the summer...Day[9] and his hilarious funday mondays and informative newbie tuesdays along with match breakdown helped keep me in the community. When I got to watching my first pro-toruney (MLG Raleigh) it was so cool to see so many different styles of play and amazing mechanics. I couldn't say I studied the actual macro, I didn't go get the vods to see what the pros were clicking on when, but I studied their decision making, the amazing micro and reaction times. It was FUN to watch, even with a bronze-at-the-time skill level.

This hook, for a relatively isolated gamer from this scene, was what really kept me in. The small (or large, as of late) amounts of drama and meta-gaming pro trying to take BOX series rather than single ladder games was addicting. As I got more friends who played the game at high levels, we watched all of MLG Providence together and I learned a lot of what makes the pros....pro. More importantly, I was a part of a community not involved with Providence but still watched the entire weekend live. The communal aspect is what can really make this game improve. If Blizz wants to up their rep with another patch or on HotS release, they will make it easy to make teams in-game (ie EG, SlayerS, etc) to group players who want to challenge each other to do better or just hang out and watch the tournaments.

'12 will be a telling year, but I can only say that eSports will expand in the U.S. When I was watching GOM tv at work for GSL matches, many people who passed by and asked "who is playing now?! Did I miss it?" I would have never expected as many people to know SC2 let alone be aware of the GSL.

Maybe we can get some more mini-MLGs, regional qualifiers or something, to hit more dense populations that are far away from current locations (ala Kansas City, St. Louis, Portland, Chicago). That'll really set it off.

One thing the community has to do, including the professional community, is make SC2 model ESPN when casting tournaments. Make it smooth, fill in details, make analysis, give statistics, and limit awkward mistakes. The more professional the media is around the events the more the scene will grow in popularity and in respect.

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