EPTFrom there, I read all the relevant threads (except the SlayerS disbanding one, that was a major tl;dr) and watched the latest SotG and Pro Corner, both of which I recommend if you're in the mood for some cathartic SC2 bashing. Obviously, a lot of other people read those threads and watched those videos and began to think to themselves, "what can we do?" I, too, pondered this question and came up with the simplest answer: We need to stop being so fucking negative. I know I've been guilty of it, too, but It drives away existing players who are tired of hearing the same bullshit over and over, and it deters new players from investigating what, if they had given it a chance, might have ended up being their favorite game.
Now, I know there are nice people, professional and otherwise, who are more than happy to introduce newbies to SC2 and help them on their way. But how many people do you think check a game's fansites before buying it? How many go to that game's subreddit or read news about it? And how many of those people are going to want to put up 60 bucks to pay for a game where all they encounter from their forum scouting is negativity and bile, directed not only inwardly but outwardly as well.
Imagine you are a LoL player who is unfamiliar with SC2. (I use LoL as an example, but it could be from any game. God save the kid that wanders into a PC gaming forum and mentions a console game.) Anyway, you, the clueless LoL player, have heard through the grapevine that SC2 is the greatest esport ever. You know what esports is, cause Riot put a link to that tournament they had one day in the game client, and you clicked on it and watched some of it, and it was pretty cool. So, bored one day, you decide head over to the SC2 subreddit, click on the first link you see that isn't an incomprehensible meme and think to yourself, "Hm, I wonder what's going on here." What do you imagine you would think when you saw that it was just a morass of people bitching not only about their game, but shitting on your game? The game you like playing with your friends and have a great deal of fun with. You'd probably think, "well fuck this, then" and move on.
Now, I'm not saying we should not strive for SC2 to be a better game or for Battle.net to be a better game client. However, when we take out our anger on people who don't even know what the fuck is going on, it is far from helping improve anything. It is, dare I say that awful phrase, hurting esports.
LoL has a lot of the same problems SC2 does, like a shitty game client and no LAN for tournaments (they added it in for the final match of their world championships because some of the previous matches were interrupted midgame by an internet outage), and they have other issues, like the bugs and balance problems that arise from a 2-week patch cycle. And yet, people in the LoL community are genuinely happy, and, if they're not, they just stop playing the game. There's no feeling like they were let down or betrayed by the game's developers, and they never felt like they failed to do their part of some sort of esports "movement" or that their game is "failing." Of course, it helps that their game isn't failing, but still, there's no need for the SC2 community to be ignominious and self-defeating to themselves and hostile to others just because SC2 has less players than some other game.
A while ago, I wrote a rage blog about how I hated what the word "esports" had come to represent with regards to the SC2 community. Ultimately, I felt that too many in the community were concerned with progressing their game as an "esport" instead of just playing the game and enjoying it. LoL has this issue solved already; Riot takes care of the esports end of things. There's no obligation for fans to "support" something, they just tune in to watch if they want to.
Quote from Marc Merrill, president and co-founder of Riot Games and executive producer for LoL:
We lose a lot of money on e-sports," said Merrill. "It's not something, currently, that we do to drive return or profitability or whatnot. It's bringing value to our players. Maybe, down the road, that will change. This is something that we believe, as a company, philosophically, if we bring value to our players, they'll reward us with engagement.
Sure, there's always someone who complains about "professionalism," or some other such nonsense, but in general people are just excited to be watching pro gamers compete in the game they like. The biggest thing I see in the LoL community is that people are having fun. They're enjoying themselves. Rarely do you see a post about anything approximating "ladder anxiety," and there exist unranked game modes for that express purpose. Even though the LoL in-game community can be, at times, notoriously awful (I played a game last night where literally every single teammate of mine yelled at each other the whole game alongside the random, unwarranted, and oddly personal shittalk from the enemy jungler), their out of game community is miles ahead of the SC2 community in terms of friendliness and accessibility. I have not seriously browsed r/starcraft in a long time, but when I started going to r/leagueoflegends it was like a breath of fresh air. Compare the recent threads about Tasteless casting LoL for GOMTV.
r/leageoflegends:
Oh my God, Tasteless is casting Korean IPL5 qualifiers.
I'm so God damn excited. I loved watching him cast throughout all of his SC days, so to see him showing some interest in League is just awesome.
I'm so God damn excited. I loved watching him cast throughout all of his SC days, so to see him showing some interest in League is just awesome.
r/starcraft:
We're fucked. Tasteless casting LoL on GOMTV right now.
It's just one example, but I'm not going to trawl r/starcraft for negative, whiny posts. Yes, r/leagueoflegends has its share of annoyances. For example, because Riot is far more interactive with the community, some people feel a sense of entitlement and will post suggestions, many of which are rather outlandish, prefaced with "Riot please," instead of posting it on the Riot forums. But the overall atmosphere is so much more pleasant. Maybe some of it stems from game design. If you think something is overpowered in LoL, you simply ban that champion or pick it yourself, whereas in SC2 you feel somewhat locked into your choice of race. But the causes don't really matter, because there's no reason for the hatred that is spewed even if SC2 is a more frustrating game, which it obviously can be.
I've been talking about reddit, but it has affected TL, too. Just go read the thread about TL announcing their addition of Dota 2 content; it's littered with all sorts of unconstructive whining. Even whining that's only tangentially related, like "Well, at least it's not fucking LoL." It's like that mythic "Brood War elitism" rubbed off on the SC2 newcomers who then collectively shit on other games, without realizing the irony that they're just repeating the same pointless arguments that raged when people from BW started to switch to SC2. In fact, all the things the SC2 elitists lob at LoL (it's too casual, it has too low of a skill ceiling, it's no fun to watch) are the same shit the BW guys were saying about SC2! But I'm not even arguing the merits of the games. I'm talking about the communities. Why would anyone want to be a part of the SC2 community?
More to the point, why would anyone who is not currently playing Starcraft ever want to join the SC2 community and start playing the game for themselves? If the noobs of battle.net 1.0 who played "Strip the Girl" and "Ling Blood" eventually grew up to be hardcore SC2 fans, then why would those fans proceed to, a decade later, shit on people who are fans of LoL? How can we simultaneously hold the opinion that custom games suck in SC2 and that people who play LoL are casual trash who deserve only enmity? It's not like those casuals would want to play custom SC2 games, right? So wouldn't their LoL playing be more akin to a noob in WC3 playing Dota and maybe eventually giving 1v1 ladder a shot? It just happens that nowadays it has to be done across game platforms instead of in battle.net. If we're going to argue that Battle.net 2.0 feels like a graveyard, and then make the out-of-game communities even worse to be a part of, then it's no fucking wonder the game's numbers are dwindling. Some people would prefer a graveyard to some of the threads that end up receiving multiple mod notes here on TL. That whole "the Starcraft community is the most mature, well-mannered gaming community" spiel didn't make it much past 2010.
I am aware that TL does not have the god-like power to make everyone nice and well-mannered. But you can do your part and stop needlessly shitting on other people's games, especially ones you've never even played before. And if you already don't do that, you can call those people out and report them (at least on TL) to be moderated. Don't argue with them, just remind them that different people like different things. Don’t just let assholes ruin the reputation of the nice segment of the SC2 population. Even if you despise LoL for whatever reason, it does no fucking good to whine about its existence on a forum dedicated to an entirely different game. The insecurity of some segments of the SC2 community is showing, and it is not pretty. You cannot build up the community by shitting on other communities. You can build it up by making it a place a person would actually want to be a part of, which, oftentimes, it is not.
If we really want to save HotS, then we can start by not being such douchebags in WoL.
Edit:
+ Show Spoiler +
Imagine you live in an apartment. On the street outside your apartment, there is a pothole. Every day you go to check your mail and your neighbor from the apartment beside yours mentions "The pothole is still there." At first you think he's just trying to be helpful. Then, weeks go by. The pothole is still there. It seems to have gotten even bigger. Now your neighbor starts complaining about the city government, about how the mayor promised to increase the budget for the roads department, about how he's a crook and he wasn't going to vote for him next year, about how the whole political system is fucked beyond belief. This goes on and on for days and days until you eventually start to hate your irritating goddamn neighbor more than the actual pothole. You didn't make the pothole, and while you agree that it would be great if the city fixed it, you don't need some prick yelling about it to you every day.
Yes, SC2 has problems, but every fucking person in the community does not need to be constantly harping on it. WoL Thread: PvZvPvZvP, patch zergs, terran underpowered. HotS thread: Blizzard is retarded, game is broken, BW was better. Esports thread: Blizzard doesn't care about esports, casuals are killing esports with their shitty games. Any thread: player bashing, caster bashing, team bashing, bashing other games.
I haven't watched Day9's daily show in probably more than a year, but I decided to click on it yesterday and found that a bit more than 4000 people were watching him analyze a HotS game he was playing. Where are those 4000 people in the community who want to be better gamers? They aren't posting because any glimmer of positivity gets swallowed by the overwhelming blackness of hatred that a segement of the community has toward itself and others.
The easy thing to say is "well, just don't read threads, then." However, I like reading other people's opinions about shit. But when the only opinions that get through are the negative ones, not only is it hard to have any actual discussion, but the "discussion" that takes place ends up just making everyone feel miserable.
Yes, SC2 has problems, but every fucking person in the community does not need to be constantly harping on it. WoL Thread: PvZvPvZvP, patch zergs, terran underpowered. HotS thread: Blizzard is retarded, game is broken, BW was better. Esports thread: Blizzard doesn't care about esports, casuals are killing esports with their shitty games. Any thread: player bashing, caster bashing, team bashing, bashing other games.
I haven't watched Day9's daily show in probably more than a year, but I decided to click on it yesterday and found that a bit more than 4000 people were watching him analyze a HotS game he was playing. Where are those 4000 people in the community who want to be better gamers? They aren't posting because any glimmer of positivity gets swallowed by the overwhelming blackness of hatred that a segement of the community has toward itself and others.
The easy thing to say is "well, just don't read threads, then." However, I like reading other people's opinions about shit. But when the only opinions that get through are the negative ones, not only is it hard to have any actual discussion, but the "discussion" that takes place ends up just making everyone feel miserable.
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