EPTBeginning:
Why does the foreign scene lag so far behind Korea? If you are of the belief that it doesn't at all, you may as well quit reading. The answer, quite simply, is that the Korean Scene revolves around Starcraft 2, and the foreign scene doesn't, at any level; from business to tournament organizers to team owners to their captains to the players, the foreign scene does not place Starcraft 2 as their primary concern.
ESPORTS. Starcraft 2 and everyone high placed in Starcraft 2 revolves around ESPORTS. There's an Artosis or two somewhere; Day[9] may or may not still have Starcraft in the center of his heart, NASL is our Starcraft league and they are devoted to Starcraft or fail - but that's it. Most other foreign tournaments ride on the backs of previous games and carry their loyalty with whichever is successful at the time. Our media people, our JPs and Kennigits, use Starcraft as a tool for a broader agenda: ESPORTS on tv, ESPORTS in our home, ESPORTS in our popular culture. A harmonious family of fighting games, FPS, RTS, MMOs, MOBAs, and every and anything else under one commonly accepted flag. Our teams put their sponsors above their players and our players put their popular image above their performance.
I am not going to sit and profess that there is anything wrong with loving ESPORTS, and I am not going to pretend that I wouldn't love to see ESPORTS as a whole as commonly accepted and as big as what a lot of people dream, because it is a common dream; a shared one even. What I am going to say is that it is happening at the cost of Starcraft 2, and that is completely unacceptable. Starcraft 2 is standing in every way on a bad foundation with bad support being bled out for the sake of ESPORTS, and it is critical that it be taken better care of.
Likewise, I am not suggesting that leagues stop giving attention to LoL, or the Fighting Game Community. I am not advocating that Starcraft 2 become bigger than anyone's view of ESPORTS or dream. What I'm asking is: Stop forcing ESPORTS down my throat. Stop forcing ESPORTS down my throat, and stop acting like you expect my game I love to crash at any point. Especially because, frankly I think the most likely thing to make it crash is your over-involvement with it. Chances that could be taken, attention that could be given, content that could be made for Starcraft isn't and aren't because people are too busy smothering everything with ESPORTS sucking the budding life out of Starcraft because there's been just enough growth to really start garnering attention to the foreign gaming scene to use Starcraft and its fanbase. If Starcraft 2 is to have a sustainable, awesome, awe-inspiring history it will not be because you've created a massive pedestal for it and hoisted it up; it will be great because it is great and it will have been allowed to attain greatness.
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Organizations
(Again, I am giving headings to give general guidelines, but really, everything flows and you can't just skip down)
Name me one foreign organization devoted to Starcraft 2. Name me one that, come hell or high water or any and everything else will stand by our game. IEM? Dreamhack? IPL? MLG? No. NASL? Yes. But if I were to then ask, "Which of those organizations is most crucial to Starcraft 2?" Would your answer be NASL? It should be, but it's not. There's this terrible idea that you can't actually power your dreams with just wishes and that money really is the end-all be-all for most things, and unfortunately, it is reality. There is the second problem that, unlike Broodwar, all games are enter-twined within leagues. MLG does not exist for Starcraft because it never did exist for Starcraft. It existed for games. To ask it to focus on just Starcraft, or prioritize Starcraft over any other game is actually just naive. They are a company for ESPORTS and they will remain a company for ESPORTS.
It isn't a flaw for IEM or Dreamhack or MLG or IPL to remain the organizations that they are. They are what they are. But in order for Starcraft 2 to truly grow they need to not depend upon leagues that do not depend upon it. Is NASL just as much out for profit as everyone else? Yes. But NASL is for Starcraft, and is about Starcraft, and is made up of supporters of Starcraft that want to see Starcraft succeed. Without Starcraft there is no NASL; without Starcraft there is more time and space for MLG to host the LoL final, and additional room to begin a Magic The Gathering scene. Again though, I would like to underline that it isn't a flaw of MLG or any other organization; they aren't the bad guy. Without them we wouldn't have a scene. Without them throwing more money at our game (because they have more) than anyone else we wouldn't be growing like we would (at the rate we are).
The reality still is though that they have the most money. In order for a Starcraft centric organization to grow they need support. Should that be NASL? I don't know. I don't know that they've proven themselves any more capable or worthy than anyone else. The Lonestar Clash hosted a kick-ass event. But they are a single event and it's really unknown what their goals are. Will another league rise up in the future? Yes, but who knows when or what?
How is the important part. The how is with community support. The how is with giving them feedback and if they're worth a damn they'll listen to it, and doing your communal best to get involved with them and behind them and help them, however, whenever. If they're worth it. If not, they'll fail. But if they are worth it and they aren't supported they'll still fail because they're standing beside absolute leviathans in the form of MLG and IPL. When it comes down to it, you could have the best single event in history, but when you're comparing it to an organization that can afford to lose money and hosts 18-something events a year and can host free and high quality and bonus content and everything in between and profit on it as a result, no one is going to expect you to succeed, and no one is really going to pay that much attention to you if you do anything less than absolute perfection, and players really aren't going to pay that much attention to you because again, the 18+ events a year is probably giving them a better chance at a decent paycheck, and attention, and sponsors, and everything else.
Why? Why is it important that the foreign scene prioritize Starcraft 2 first and foremost, at the organization level? Drive for success. That's really what it boils down to. An organization that does not need Starcraft will not act like an organization that needs Starcraft. An organization run by people that do not love Starcraft anymore than any other ESPORT are going to treat it like any other doing-well-at-the-moment ESPORT.
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Media
We don't really have a lot of media. Our media is our own gossip on reddit, maybe the occasional interesting post on TL, maybe even something on /vg/ for the masochists. Our journalism is near non-existent, and what does exist is an absolute mess. Anything that goes on allows for three sides of a story and three conclusions to a story and three well informed perfectly made un-disputable opinions on the story before an article is finally released that basically says that no one actually knows anything at the moment. The people in charge of hyping Starcraft are the same people in charge of hyping every other game and thing they're interested in, and use the same mediums for both (twitter, because we haven't found any successful way yet, in which case it will be the same situation, but not twitter, or in addition to it).
Why do we have no media? It is my genuine opinion that there are two reasons: 1. Most of the people in charge of it are more concerned with ESPORTS and direct equal attention to all aspects of it. 2. At some point they concluded that Starcraft really isn't interesting, or just aren't remotely sure how to best promote it and are still grasping at straws. Maybe they're getting zero cooperation. Maybe they aren't getting enough support when there isn't a fire and pitchforks and someone really fucking up associated with it.
To discuss the first point I would like to come back to priorities. If money is the driving force behind most things, image comes second. As a community we have failed to lift up content on non-personality players. If it isn't Huk, Incontrol, Idra, MC, Destiny, maybe Nony, or one of the major casters...it probably gets 100 views and no comments. If some random, no-name caster says something unprofessional during a game in a league almost no one pays any real attention to it will be talked about for a full internet week and will have 1000+ comment and page sections on it. We have shown that that is what we are most interested in. We are more interested in players that stand out than players who are good. At this point I can hardly blame the media people for not having a clue what to do, or concluding that our game itself just isn't interesting enough to make segments on, our unknown players worth spending time interviewing. It is as much our own fault as theirs, if not more.
At the same time I will emphasize that while we should support our content, while we should have patience, while we should do anything we can to support journalism and maybe not jump the gun so much in general, and not even give attention to drama in the first place...the people in charge of our media should be focused on Starcraft. The Artosis Hour was awesome. The Artosis Hour was run by a man with no free time whatsoever that occasionally will get a section of space to do anything with and decide "something starcraft" without taking the time to acknowledge that he doesn't have a prayer of doing it long term. But it was interesting and his viewer count reflected it. I'm sure there are a decent amount of people that would listen to Artosis talk about cabbage if he would let them, but I doubt it's that many. The Day9 Daily is and has continued to be successful to various groups of people as Sean has molded his image over and over into what he wants to cater to. FilterSC has made some great tutorials on Starcraft.
But if there was a series just going through random players and interviewing them about their lives would you watch it? If it weren't just big personalities? If it were going through random players' homes and discussing their practice life and what not, would that interest you as a viewer? If there was a show dedicated to getting a random pro and just talking about build orders, or talking about a specific build and the strengths and weaknesses and specific timings and important things...would you care? I'm not asking, "if the person hosting it had a tolerable voice and wasn't so cheesy it annoyed you?" I'm asking, does the content interest you? If it does, uplift those people. Uplift those people, and not the guy on twitter circle-jerking about UFC re-tweeting everything he feels like with ten other people night after night. Support them, reach out to them, contact them and let them know you want MORE content. And get off your ass and actually ask them for it, and then let people know about them. Abuse twitter. Make a reddit thread for everybody's twitter accounts and just share and friend eachother. Give our community more depth.
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Teams
When we talk about priorities foreign teams are faced with a dilemma: money. What is the best way to make money? I can't support my team without money. I can't send them to events, I can't generate revenue without investing. The question is, will I make more money and get more sponsorship with a successful team, or a popular one? If the answer is a popular one, my directive is going to be about making my players into interesting characters first and foremost, and if it is that and I choose that I'd rather be successful, I am basically saying that I will disregard money, which isn't feasible. If it is success truly, and popularity is just working currently because we don't have really any successful non-character foreigners, I have to dedicate to attempting to basically break the current mold of what's going on in the rest of the scene. Currently however, if I can get one Idra on my team I'm better off than I would be with five Nesteas. Sure I'd get more money in tournaments, but are sponsors going to jump behind the team with five of Nestea, or the guy that everyone in the community will make threads and talk about for days on end that sits around 9k viewers every time he logs on, that's opinionated, and on shows, and isn't afraid to knock someone down verbally?
Teams aren't at fault for this because it's their job to make their players as successful as they can in the world they exist in. The problem lies in that the world that foreign teams exist is one in which success is not measured by actual results, and they are rewarded more so by the popularity of the individuals on their teams than by those who exceed. It is a broken system and it is the reason that foreign players lag behind so much.
Players
Foreign players are driven to become the image of a professional gamer before actually being a professional player. Being Idra the pro-gamer is more important than being Idra the successful competitor (I'm using Idra as my example; that doesn't mean it's true for Idra, he's just a really easy example). Idra's team puts idra the personality before Idra as a player. Idra is successful and paid well as a personality before a player. Realistically if he focused more on performance it's likely his populary and pay could drop. I'm not saying he's not busting his ass. I'm not saying he's lazy. What I'm saying is, it isn't advantageous for him to put his play first. What I'm saying is, he can reap almost all of the rewards of being a successful gamer without actually being successful in the game he plays.
You can take that apart and get mad and say, "Well of course he is he's pro he's one of the best players in the world!" Every pro is one of the best players in the world; in itself it's a silly statement. Look at it within the context of the foreign pro scene though. And again, I'm using him as an example, I'm not trying to debate whether or not he deserves the attention or whether or not he should be classified as a pro-gamer or anything else. My point is that as a pro-player it is better for him to be a personality than an actual gamer. IMMVP the four time GSL champion gets 500ish viewers when he streams. Personality. It shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone why the foreign scene is so far behind in players. It isn't laziness, environment, team houses, proper practice, bad routines, or anything else. Those are all certainly problems but not the root: We don't want our players to do well, we want them to entertain us.
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If the entirety of this boils down to, focus on Starcraft more, Love Starcraft more, and support the right people more...why are you writing this? Why in all of god's name did you just spend that much space writing what basically boils down to a sentence?
I want my game to be successful. I want my game to thrive. It'd be cool if ESPORTS grew to something big. It'd be nice if LoL was in a giant stadium that was sold out. It'd be cool if the fighting game community as a whole could say, "hey that SC2 event was pretty awesome" and write articles about it. I revolve around Starcraft though. I want it to bloom. I don't want to create a giant podium of cracked broken plaster on a bed of gravel at the edge of a cliff to mount it up on and show the world it's great. I want the people who want what I want to get together and continue to support the game, and support it correctly, not just whomever happens to be there asking for support or money. I want my community to grow into a family, not an exclusive club or clique. So I guess that's cheesy; I've spent pages to be a bleedy heart for something most people won't get through. But that is it, this is my appeal: love the game we love, and support it. Do that and just that. Don't use it, don't mistreat it, don't take advantage of it for viewers or revolve your day around commenting on drama associated with it. Take all of it and uplift it so that rather than a flash in the pan, a decade from now and after that we still have something amazing. It is something great, and this community is great, so be great.
End.
