Essentially TLS shows there is hope with the numbers shown for the BW community. How can we replicate them for the future of BW to increase overall player skill, viewer numbers and regain some of our community.

feel free to discuss. Feel free to criticize I'm interested in what people think also how big of an idiot I sound like ^_^.

ninazerg

United States7291 Posts

February 08 2013 00:46 GMT

ENGLISH!?

Now imagine the guy in the chair is a StarCraft server. We need Samuel L. Jackson to save BroodWar.

Also, not to be a bitch, but you really should spell-check your stuff. I really thought this video was going to be about conciliation between BW and SC2, but it was, rather, about consolidation. The problem, however, is that Korea is the gatekeeper to BroodWar. The Fish server is huge, and Koreans love playing on it, and they will not simply let it die for the sake of foreigners. The Korean-to-foreigner player ratio is at least 100 to 1. Again, tens of thousands of Koreans will not simply migrate to a foreign server for the sake of a few hundred non-koreans.

Therefore, the only solution, from your point of view, would be to suicide iCCup. Not only would that cause hundreds of players to quit BroodWar entirely, but it would have the opposite affect of your intentions, and the remaining foreigners would have to learn Korean.

It should be noted that Sayle's stream used to get at least double the number of viewers he gets now. There has definitely been a big drop in viewership for BroodWar since he started casting. Something like over 2,000 viewers tuned in for the ISL finals to watch Sayle broadcast it. Many of the pre-ISL casts also got large numbers of viewers, and many of those viewers used to play BroodWar, but who decided to play SC2 competitively, are coming back to watch the TLS. Additionally, there are many casual gamers who are tuning into BroodWar for the first time, but only to watch.

If any of those viewers wants to try BroodWar, it is incredibly easy to find D ranked games on iccup if they take the 10 minutes to set up their router to host games. The initial amount of difficulty may be off-putting though, especially if there is little to no monetary incentive.

Also, A/B tours on iCCup happen in one day, not 3 weeks. The announcement to play comes beforehand, but the actual tour takes place in one day. Because iCCup and Teamliquid are separate entities, if an organizer decides to start a tournament hosted on the iCCup server, but advertises it on Teamliquid, it is his/her responsibility to conduct that specific tournament to the standard that they have put themselves to. As far as A/B money tours go, Defiler.ru hosts open tournaments that pay out cash prizes to the winners. Considering that a vast majority of the top gamers outside of Korea are Europeans and Chinese players, the Defiler Tours are hosted to their convenience, and not necessarily to North America.

This brings us to the Gambit Cup. As much as I think Eywa is a sub-human, incapable of emotion or intelligence, somehow, he was able to host a league for high-level players for a short amount of time. This league was casted mainly by Hacklebeast, who, for a short while, carried the torch in Sayle's absence, effectively making him Sayle's successor, not EleGant. The reason the league worked was simple: ICC-CL used to offer monetary prizes for the top teams in StarCraft, and once this model was abandoned, naturally, another entity was bound to take it's place. Besides some absolutely bogus calls by the organizer, the Gambit Cup had it's day. I really think another clan league should be put together (SPL was one of the best pro-Korea events to watch, so it made sense to have something similar for foreigners) that's another discussion for another time and another place.

Right now, I need to eat this hamburger.

GeckoVOD

Germany814 Posts

February 08 2013 00:51 GMT

That Vlog had a certain (Wiki)

Fighting Spirit to it.

+ Show Spoiler +

get back to work iccup slaves

fabiano

Brazil4644 Posts

February 08 2013 00:55 GMT

I think you inflated the viewer numbers a little bit

TLS gets massive viewership due to the large TL community (BW+SC2+LOL+Dota) and privileged exposure on the website. The BW folks obviously know what's up, but many fans from other games come check out the stream out of curiosity ("if TL is sponsoring it, it must be good!").

This is very cool as we get to expose BW to people who never had seen it before. And at this point I've to applaud those from the SC2+LoL+Dota community who politely come to watch the stream and stay for a little while to judge if they are interested or not in the game.

This is one of the reasons I felt a little sad when too many zergs qualified, as many people will join the stream to check it out and will likely get to watch ZvZ most of the time, which makes it unlikely they will comeback if they didn't like the matchup and therefore won't watch matchups they would potentially enjoy

Also, the Russian community and the Korean community (I guess the Chinese too?) are self-sustained and are very stabilished/active. The reason we don't get more involved is due to language barrier I guess, and those scenes aren't very well integrated with TL.

What could we do to keep 6k people constantly watching BW? I've no idea... The only thing I can think off is BW getting its old pro-scene back. Or at least give some reason to people check out the BW events.

I suspect many non-BW people keep watching the TLS due to the Sayle awesomeness. People go check the stream out of curiosity and Sayle get their attention. They find themselves enjoying the cast too much to leave, and then they start "getting" into BW, little by little, and the more they learn the better Sayle's commentary get.

Producing hype videos, maintaining a high production quality, having great casters who can grab the common folk's attention and creating storylines are what I believe to be essential to keep viewers, at least in the short term. If you want a long term relationship, then we need all of that + the finest quality game BW can offer.

And as a final note, I all that I said is purely my uneducated opinion on the matter.

Falling

Canada11592 Posts

February 08 2013 01:20 GMT

I thought it was going to be about consoling ourselves (consolation), but I see it is actually about consolidation.

The problem is simply practical- how would you go about consolidating it? Realistically it won't happen unless one of the servers has some tremendous innovations that makes it vastly superior than all the others. Fixing the port forward/ ip conflict problems for one and maybe auto-match making for another. One has to be vastly superior to the others to actually have consolidation rather than capitulation and abandonment.

WolfintheSheep

Canada14127 Posts

February 08 2013 02:21 GMT

Awesome Games Done Quick was pulling 20-40k viewers for an entire week, seems like a much better choice.

In all seriousness, though, there is massive difference between a one-time novelty and a sustainable market.

pebble444

Italy2503 Posts

February 08 2013 05:53 GMT

I think that people can' t be pushed into servers. I think the biggest problem that limits player to playing is their ability to HOST games. Port Fowarding whould be an absolut priority.

Btw i actually found that laddering on Fish you always meet someone of your rank, on iccup no

Harem

United States11393 Posts

February 08 2013 06:09 GMT

On February 08 2013 14:53 pebble444 wrote:
Btw i actually found that laddering on Fish you always meet someone of your rank, on iccup no

This isn't necessarily true.

If you are say ~1000-1050 then you could just be playing new accounts all day as the higher level can't get games at their own rank.

GeckoVOD

Germany814 Posts

February 08 2013 10:44 GMT

On February 08 2013 15:09 Harem wrote:

Show nested quote +

This isn't necessarily true.

If you are say ~1000-1050 then you could just be playing new accounts all day as the higher level can't get games at their own rank.

I don't understand, how would that work? You don't know anything about the mean or the median, even if it was at exactly 1.000 pts, you'd go up half of the time (assuming half of the 'new accounts' drop), facing equally skilled opponents in 50% of your time or at least get closer to your range? What are the assumptions here? Like - you assume that there are plenty 'new' accounts per season? Infinite growth? Or limited to the first days after the new season? Sounds like an argument for argument's sake.

Also to the rest - just don't worry if you organize/cast/stream/promote. The more you try to act professional, the more you lose in my opinion. The best events are still these that you do because you're doing them out of passion, not to get your name out, promote a game or whatever. Seeing people having fun with what they do is a bigger motivation to tune in again for strangers, than a big artificially professional set-up with screaming casters for the sake of hype. Look at how yoda / plumbum casts get a lot of foreign viewers, even though you don't understand shit; same was true (for me) for the Korean commentators at OSL/MSL/PL. Not 'cause the players wore fancy space suits and sat in a booth in front of some people, but because it seemed to actually be fun.

Pucca

Taiwan1280 Posts

February 09 2013 03:12 GMT

#10

So port-forwarding is the issue? Could someone simply make a regedit profile to allow this?

chrisolo

Germany2610 Posts

February 09 2013 06:08 GMT

#11

You cannot just make a regedit file to edit the configuration of your router, otherwise Hackers would have an easy job, lol.

It isn't that hard to forward your ports, even for total computer noobs, tbh. There are step-by-step tutorials for like every router out there. Shouldn't be too hard for someone who intends to play a nearly 15 year old game, imho.

haduken

Australia8267 Posts

February 09 2013 06:19 GMT

#12

You know if you really really can't figure out how to do port forwarding...

Then just put your computer on the DMZ zone. It will be insecure but who gives a fuck when you can host am I right?