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An Opinion Piece #13![[image loading]](http://www.teamliquid.net/userfiles/17318.jpg?1254589689) Gather 'round children while uncle Chef rambles to himself
I'm not crazy
I don't see sunshine and rainbows when I read articles about matchfixing, MBC shutting down, three teams disbanding, Team Eight not finding a sponsor, OSL beginning without a sponsor or any number of disheartening things. When I say Brood War isn't dead, it's not because I'm telling you things look great. They look bad and in the mind of every person on this site there's a sense of wanting to have a final answer to what is going to happen to Brood War.
That isn't how real sports work though, is it? It's not how life works. For every Brood War fan who is looking for closure and to move on I point to Chess, Go, Hockey and Football. I point to anything where if you lose interest you know that the sport will go on and be waiting there for you if you ever come back. You don't worry about it at all.
I think that Brood War fans feel a weird sense of responsibility to stay with this game in its darkest days and to watch as much of it as they can even if they're really ready for a break. There's a feeling that if you don't watch the games and show OGN there's still interest in Brood War, then Brood War is going to be gone. I am a huge Brood War fan, but for the longest time I only followed the individual leagues, and then when I wanted more Brood War I'd watch my favourite players in Proleague. Proleague just didn't matter to me and now it's all that matters because it's all that's left. I watched every game this season, something I haven't done with Proleague since 2005-06. There was literally so much StarCraft to watch in 2007 that I didn't have enough bandwidth to watch it all, I had to pick and choose. It was just like a real sport. I didn't have to care about every player and every team, I could just follow who I liked. If I felt like I'd had enough of StarCraft for a bit, I could stop watching for two months and come back, the scene much the same as I had left it.
What will happen if there's no more Proscene?
It's not dead yet, it's not inevitable, it's not even particularly easy to predict. I certainly wouldn't put money on it. But if it actually happens, then it happens. I consider Brood War to be a great experiment, the answer to the question: Can a video game be taken seriously as a sport and transcend its nature as a commercial product?
Blizzard never made Brood War officially freeware. They turned their heads from PGTour, iCCup and other servers which violated their policies and allowed the game to become more than a game (especially since many of these sites blatantly allow you to download the game and play for free), but they never abandoned their rights to it. That is the one chain that has kept Brood War from becoming property of the public, who in every other aspect has taken ownership of it. When Blizzard went to court with KeSPA and negotiated new terms of broadcasting for a game that had been played as a sport for ten years, we saw the power Blizzard still has over a game we thought was ours.
We have seen Brood War played by people who practiced ten hours a day for years. If the Proscene left, we would have the memories of that level of play whilst we watched online amateur tournaments. Don't believe for a second that Brood War would suddenly cease to exist without the Proscene. Many people who watch the Proscene say that they trade their time they could have spent playing watching it. I believe that there would be a strong Brood War community for many years to come even without the Proscene. New names would emerge of people who play merely in their spare time. It wouldn't be as clean as we'd seen Brood War played, but it would still be there. What's more, is that because this scene will exist, there will always be the possibility of a resurgence, especially if Blizzard ever loosed its grasp of the game (however unlikely).
That's it.
In my colloquial style I often write "I mean" and "I don't know" and "this is probably not quite right" a lot, but of this I'm very firm. It's been fourteen years since Brood War was released. It's been very nearly as long since it started being televised and played professionally. It's grown immensely and become more than Blizzard's game all on its own, to a point where it seemed unjust for Blizzard to think they had any right to it. I won't ever be able to give fourteen years of my life to another game. If Brood War can't survive what has happened the last two years, then it is too frail to be a professional sport. If it does survive, then it is the ultimate success to have overcome one of the toughest trials anyone could have imagined for a video game. Time, not Milkis, will tell 
 
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The BW scene, as we once knew it, is already long gone, and it continues to struggle and take new shapes, understandably. Blizzard has shaken its chains, broken its neck, and fed its limbs to its new pet.
The community is struggling all the same, having to watch the changes ongoing in the professional scene, the exodus towards new games, and an all-round, once unimaginable schism of E-sports and Brood War. On the members of the community, this is often marked by an existential drama of disappointment, despair, petty grudges and naivety, and the question is whether we will be able to overcome that in order to survive as a community.
That weird sense of responsibility you mention is well justified - as the official and professional foundation is slowly dissipating from under BW, it will be up to the amateur scene (both foreign and korean) to build something new, and see if BW is strong and interesting enough to carry on in that new form - without the unmatched professionalism of the korean proscene. As the scene shrinks, individual responsibility grows. This sense of obligation is of course also fueled by fear of losing what we've been loving for so long, but that's not necessarily a bad motivator. If we are too hopeful, and fail to face the fragility of things, we might not be driven enough to do something about it.
I enjoy the current state of the foreign scene - there are a decent number of BW streams (a relatively new addition in the grand scale of things), there's ISL3, the Gambit Cup, amateur iccup leagues on various levels, korean ladders opening up to foreign players - and as you said, with my viewing "duties" diminishing, I have as much time to actually play the game as I haven't in years. Add in a drop of PL and an upcoming OSL, and you can spend several hours following BW every day still.
There are obvious dark clouds above, but I'm honestly looking forward to see how things will turn out. Never again will a game capture so much of my time and attention - simply because I cannot afford that anymore in my life. If the scene keeps living in some tiny underground fashion, I'll try to stick around as long as it does. We'll have to scavenge the wasteland, but that has its own charm.
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Seems like you're speaking of an 'underground' BW scene will rise once the 'official' scene dies. A scene that will be purely funded by the viewers and their passion. Sounds awesome IMO
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United Kingdom1708 Posts
I was going to make a post like this in general, to make people stop spelling doom, and just play! That keeps things going, that's fun, there's no worry there. As long as people play, we make tourneys, we joke and ladder and theorycraft, there is still BW. Besides, the Korean scene is not gone like people say. It's still there in many ways, from top pros to tens of thousands of amateurs on fish- who knows what will happen!
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This line really defined my feelings towards BW a few months ago:
"I think that Brood War fans feel a weird sense of responsibility to stay with this game in its darkest days and to watch as much of it as they can even if they're really ready for a break."
I love BW too much to simply let it pass. I was at the point of following BW simply because I felt that I had to do it morally, because if it failed, I would feel guilty for not putting forth at least the minimal effort needed to simply watch the games. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed watching the games that I did watch, but I simply wouldn't allow myself to have a break from BW. I eventually came to this very conclusion:
"If Brood War can't survive what has happened the last two years, then it is too frail to be a professional sport."
and
"I believe that there would be a strong Brood War community for many years to come even without the Proscene."
With the only exception being that my definition of the word strong would not fit that status of the community at said point. I think it would turn into a Brawl/SF type community, where tournaments are available, but it is still rather local.
At this point I am just waiting to see what will transpire, I don't feel that I am obligated to fight the change any longer.
I rather enjoyed this blog chef, it really helped me identify my perspective on the state of BW more clearly.
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On March 27 2012 07:41 Azera wrote:
Seems like you're speaking of an 'underground' BW scene will rise once the 'official' scene dies. A scene that will be purely funded by the viewers and their passion. Sounds awesome IMO
It's what happens (and has happened) to most games that were previously played at a competitive level, though obviously not to Brood War's immense capacity. So long as there is a passionate community still playing the game, some form of scene, no matter how underground, will remain. As stated above me, it would probably turn into something akin to the fighting game communities for Street Fight/Smash Bros, where we'd have some small "local" [can't think of a better word] tournaments such as ISL and Gambit's Cup + ICCup leagues.
Basically, so long as there's still a TL to come to everyday, and a love of Brood War in me, I'll still continue to play and be apart of this community. I personally don't understand all the people who are prepared to leave our dear game and community behind just because our scene is going through harsh times.
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Good to know that there is some comforting words to turn to when everywhere I look it's " BW is dying and Sc2 is the best " and I hate about this natural order where the sc2 scene think it's okay to be vultures and wanting to take our hard working bw players in to sc2 to magically turn their game into some form of that BW magic . I don't want to get their hopes up, TBLS moving to sc2 ain't going to change anything when the problem is with the game design .
I will say it again if boxer and genius terran Nada couldn't make your game awesome after being there for 2 years, how will Stork an friends moving in to the game will do anything to make it any better ? . Bw unit's can be micro to make the full use of it and unit's will stay alive longer to deal their maximum damage . In sc2 the lifespan of each unit is so low that the need to mass the units up to increase their time in game and to do mass damage while the units are still alive.
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EPT
