Wings of Liberty Exodus

Loser777

1931 Posts

February 11 2013 06:49 GMT

Feast your eyes upon the this year's CSL finals, for it represents the pinnacle of collegiate StarCraft II spirit. With endless bootcamps from UW and the "CSL House" at Cal, I can only comment on the contrast between the scenes at the two giants of CSL and my own school.
In the 2011-2012 Academic year, the StarCraft II Club/CSL team at our school had roughly two dozen "full-time" members. I started becoming more active beginning in the summer of 2012, yet the route I took seems to be opposite in direction to the rest of the club. We went from having a handful of people who laddered and practiced regularily in 2011-2012 to having maybe one or two players who played competitively. Competitive intra-team play had always been nonexistent, and the lack of active players made those few "practice" matches nonexistent. At first, it blew my mind how we managed to make playoffs this year in CSL when everyone gave zero fucks, but then I began to realize that the only way that this could happen is if this lack of interest in WoL is the norm at many schools.
The number of people involved with the club relative to the entire school is an absurd statistic. With a total student population within a few hairs of 40,000, the fact that we have basically no active players at the moment associated with the club is mind boggling. Those who actually played enough where maybe I could get a game two weekends out of every month have since switched to LoL. We have since switched from having weekly meetings to having dinner meetings since no one is motivated enough to play. At the last dinner meeting I asked who wanted to go to the CSL finals this month--a few hands went up--my own, but not even that of the president of the club. I asked what prior commitment was stopping him, but as it turns out he just didn't have any interest. I will remark that the CSL finals are going to be a whopping 10 miles from our campus.
The last remaining hope is that possibly some interest will be rekindled when HotS is released, but given the amount of attention that the beta is getting at the moment from our members, it doesn't look that good. It could be possible that HotS will fizzle out even faster than WoL did at out school.

I'd like to know what other members of CSL/StarCraft Teams/Clubs at various schools are experiencing and if there's any way we can escape the plague of disinterest/LoL.

pinball777

United States134 Posts

February 11 2013 08:08 GMT

I can explain for our CSL team that interest has gone down drastically. Our top member had to go do military service, so we didn't have high hopes for our team. With the recruitment of someone new to replace that position, we did well and made it the farthest we have into the playoffs, but that probably has to do with declining interest at other schools as well.

We used to have meetups once every month or 2 back in 2011-2012 and could cast our games live. Sadly this wasn't possible this year and that hurt us as a group. We started off this season hoping to have many meetups, but that couldn't take off sadly due to disinterest or everyone being incredibly busy with real life things or school work. Many of our top players started playing Dota 2 or LoL as well. We used to bash LoL, but now about 1/2 our team plays it. There are also less people that can host a large meetup and watch tournaments live. The last full broodwar proleague finals was probably the greatest experience we had as a team and no tournament has come close to being as epic as that. As many of us grow older and get closer to graduation, we find ourselves busy and realize that its hard to continue playing the game we love when other things come in the way.

HotS might bring interest back into the club, but it will depend on others to adjust their schedules for us to become active again. I like what I've seen in HotS so far, but I know that I'm far to busy between now and the end of july to get any serious time to learn and play the game.

CSL can also be put to blame for killing some of the clubs. Having all games at once pretty much killed live streaming and with games starting at around noon for us on a weekend compared to the old 6 or 7 pm is also something that hurts viewing. The fact that CSL started in November and the playoffs were for the most part over in January has left a lot of time left to fill. Hopefully a longer spring season with HotS can bring the club back into action if done correctly. Sadly, I don't think that will be the case and it will be rushed again which isn't beneficial. We shall see in time if HotS and CSL can make something happen again.

rauk

United States2228 Posts

February 13 2013 06:02 GMT

familiar story

even with weekly meetings and over 50 regular attendees at esports club, no one new plays sc2, 99% of attendees play lol, and the old people who did play sc2 switched to dota2, lol, or just went back to bw

it's kind of sad but at the same time i can't really bring myself to care because sc2 is a bad game and blizz will never fix its fundamental problems, i quit being coordinator last season because of how bad the game got, and how few people wanted to play in CSL anyways.

Ktk

Korea (South)753 Posts

February 13 2013 08:17 GMT

For a second I thought you were from my school.

I don't really blame CSL 100% for loss of interest; yeah, simultaneous games was a bad idea, but that wasn't what killed it; some / a lot of people who simply lost interest in the game. It just lost its charm/fun-factor after a few years, personally.

Loser777

1931 Posts

February 13 2013 08:55 GMT

On February 13 2013 17:17 Ktk wrote:
For a second I thought you were from my school.

I don't really blame CSL 100% for loss of interest; yeah, simultaneous games was a bad idea, but that wasn't what killed it; some / a lot of people who simply lost interest in the game. It just lost its charm/fun-factor after a few years, personally.

I don't think CSL killed the club at our school because people didn't really care about CSL to begin with (no one was tryhard, our only GM got a girlfriend, etc). It's a lot harder to rally behind 5 Masters players who never practice than say a definitive best player on the team. I just used the CSL Finals to emphasize the discrepancy between the top "StarCraft schools" and my own. I thought SC2 had finally broken the barrier towards getting a mainstream interest in 1v1 competitive play, but that's not what I'm experiencing. I can't say that it's because of tournament results either. I'm pretty much the only person in the club who watches GSL/Proleague/[Insert Tournament Here] at least once a week, and it's been that way since at least the school year started.
My biggest fear (since I was a Brood War fan before I was an SC2 fan) is that SC2 pushed away all the would-be competitive 1v1 Brood War players at my school only to fill the gap with a larger mainstream audience that would inevitably move to LoL.

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