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Starcraft 2, DotA, LoL, Warcraft 3 and Chess are all pretty good games if you ask me.
The competition and population of Starcraft 2 however, is constantly growing and it's a good sign.
I used to dislike Starcraft 2 a lot before (I played mostly Warcraft 3 and DotA then) because I thought it was boring, but after watching a few games and Husky I started to love Starcraft 2, and even saved up lunch money just to get Wings of Liberity.
As a DotA player for 7 years (And counting), I find that Starcraft 2 has a lot of excitement in it even in simple matches, because of the fact that even 1 mistake can easily cost you the entire game (For team games, 1 mistake/death from 1 player is still costly, but in Starcraft 2, 1 wrong move and it's thousands of dollars gone), something that's pretty rare to see in many games. Also, the skill level required in a Starcraft 2 game is simply amazing, and what better way than to see players duke it out in a 1v1.
Comparing Starcraft 2 to DotA is very much like comparing two different things in my opinion.
Comparing Starcraft 2 To DotA Is Pretty Much Like Comparing Two Completely Different Things:
DotA: Controlling 1 Hero and possibly some extra Units
Starcraft 2: Controlling all 'Heroes', all Units, all Creep Spawns, Income, etc.
Both games are quite awesome though, they just have different aspects.
Just like the time I started watching Warcraft 3, it looked boring at first, but after a while it actually became more interesting than watching other types of games.
That's probably what drawn me to the Starcraft 2 too, plus it helped improved my DotA skills.
PS: My friends and I watch a lot of Starcraft 2 streams almost daily, compared to other streams so it's pretty much the other way around for me.
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I kind of agree, but i don't think it's a problem, that's the nature of a triple A rts and starcraft 2 i a damn good one.
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You can play football without purchasing a ball, now thats impressive.
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United Kingdom14103 Posts
lol I find both SC2 and DotA incredibly interesting to watch.
I've also been watching both SC2 and DotA since before I knew how to play Edit: actually started playing properly (watching TI 1 and watching earlier MLGs and BW).
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Personally, I found SC2 boring to watch quite quickly. It's not that you have to be super invested in trying to improve or anything, you can watch SC2 as a casual player, far more so than MOBAs IMO where you have to know the heroes to understand the compositions, SC2 you can pretty much go "More red dots, this is going well for red".
SC2 is boring to watch because the game plays out in a boring way. I haven't watched much since HotS so maybe it's better now, but it was so boring at the end of WoL. One player passive macro, other player doing 100% standard harass. If the harass failed, passive player wins in eventual A-move battle. If harasser succeeds, macro player economy falls apart and GGs.
I always found BW far more interesting to watch competitive games in, and I was never even close to good at it. SC2 I was at least high platinum at.
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On June 11 2013 08:36 LlamaNamedOsama wrote:Show nested quote +On June 11 2013 04:14 Incze wrote:
dota 1 + dota 2 easily surpasses sc2 in numbers.
Personally, I got bored of sc2 after a few months, but continued to watch for like a year. He's talking about viewership, and I don't see any dota 1 streams. Streamwise, I'm pretty sure sc2 surpasses dota 2. As for the OP, I've only watched SC2 for entertainment, never for study. I also find LoL boring to watch (and I've played a decent number of games in LoL, maybe a little over 100). People are entertained by different things, and for many, SC2 is obviously entertaining.
Dota 2 is USUALLY surpassed by SC2, but during huge Dota 2 events or during random super hype matches it shoots up and passes SC2. We got up to 80k for a Liquid vs Na'vi match that was just in a fairly small online cup. And The International 2, last year's biggest Dota 2 tournament, was 567,000 concurrent viewers including in-client, all Twitch streams, and the Chinese stream. This year's TI will beat that pretty considerably.
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On June 11 2013 04:53 Sn0_Man wrote:Show nested quote +On June 11 2013 04:47 jrkirby wrote:On June 11 2013 04:04 Sn0_Man wrote:What are the numbers on SC2 players (not viewers) these days? Just curious because Dota2 has 3.5Million "unique" players every month  I put unique in quotations because I think that that probably includes people with multiple accounts. E: I believe max concurrent players is around 1/10 of that, a bit less. Over 300,000 though. You're saying the average dota 2 player has 10 accounts? What what whaaaaaaat? No, I'm saying over the course of the last month 3.5 Million players have played dota 2 (although I think this particular figure is mildly inflated by secondary accounts etc). The MOST players on Dota 2 at a specific instant in the last month was somewhere between 300,00 and 350,000.
midly inflated. lol. i have like 7 accounts or so, and im not even playing a whole lot.
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On June 11 2013 21:00 KalWarkov wrote:Show nested quote +On June 11 2013 04:53 Sn0_Man wrote:On June 11 2013 04:47 jrkirby wrote:On June 11 2013 04:04 Sn0_Man wrote:What are the numbers on SC2 players (not viewers) these days? Just curious because Dota2 has 3.5Million "unique" players every month I put unique in quotations because I think that that probably includes people with multiple accounts. E: I believe max concurrent players is around 1/10 of that, a bit less. Over 300,000 though. You're saying the average dota 2 player has 10 accounts? What what whaaaaaaat? No, I'm saying over the course of the last month 3.5 Million players have played dota 2 (although I think this particular figure is mildly inflated by secondary accounts etc). The MOST players on Dota 2 at a specific instant in the last month was somewhere between 300,00 and 350,000. midly inflated. lol. i have like 7 accounts or so, and im not even playing a whole lot.
And did you use all those 7 accounts last month even though you don't play a whole lot? Then no, it's not midly inflated. I bet the vast majority only have one account, and I bet most of the people with many account very rarely use several of them.
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On June 11 2013 17:51 ShiroKaisen wrote:Show nested quote +On June 11 2013 08:36 LlamaNamedOsama wrote:On June 11 2013 04:14 Incze wrote:
dota 1 + dota 2 easily surpasses sc2 in numbers.
Personally, I got bored of sc2 after a few months, but continued to watch for like a year. He's talking about viewership, and I don't see any dota 1 streams. Streamwise, I'm pretty sure sc2 surpasses dota 2. As for the OP, I've only watched SC2 for entertainment, never for study. I also find LoL boring to watch (and I've played a decent number of games in LoL, maybe a little over 100). People are entertained by different things, and for many, SC2 is obviously entertaining. Dota 2 is USUALLY surpassed by SC2, but during huge Dota 2 events or during random super hype matches it shoots up and passes SC2. We got up to 80k for a Liquid vs Na'vi match that was just in a fairly small online cup. And The International 2, last year's biggest Dota 2 tournament, was 567,000 concurrent viewers including in-client, all Twitch streams, and the Chinese stream. This year's TI will beat that pretty considerably.
or if Dendi is streaming... I guess that's a big event for a lot of people though lol.
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I agree, SC2 is really boring 
Still, I don't think it's necessary that you have to not play the game at all and still enjoy watching it for it to be a big thing. I think as long as you don't have to be competitive, but you still have a passing interest in playing sometimes, that's enough to make something big. To be honest, when sports get so big people who don't understand them at all and have never played them at all will watch them, that is more a cult phenomenon than anything entertaining about the sport itself. Hockey and sports like it, in my opinion, survive solely on nationalism-like tendencies. People care more about the score than the game.
I don't know about DOTA being appealing to people who have never really played it. I have never really played it and I found the two or three vods I watched to be not terribly enticing. Or it might have been League of Legends, or one and then the other. They're the same game to an uninitiated person like me. I only know that people TELL me DOTA is more complicated and LoL has been simplified.
BW was a great game because even if you only played very casually, you could basically understand what was going on. A lot of the things in that game feel like an actually semi-decent simulation of warfare. Not hyper-realism, but in terms of tactics. You can pull a lot of stuff out of Sun Tzu and apply it easily to BW, more so than a lot of other games. SC2 is kind of in its own microcosm and half the things that happen in that game happen behind the scenes. The whole game is unit composition and being anal about macro and build orders. A viewer can't really see that. Even with Tastosis explaining it, it isn't really interesting. "Oh, so that guy won because he chose better units?" On the other hand, a good flank in BW was easy to understand by anyone. One guys army got caught in the open and surrounded. Or he escaped narrowly. That's something you can see as long as you understand that one player has units this colour and race, and the other has units of that colour and race. Sounds also, play a big part in the spectator experience. But I am digressing seriously into an argument that has been had a million times since the release of SC2.
I thought this thread would be speaking more generally about esports vs other sports. On that topic I really have to say that since esports started taking a focus on popularising the newest releases of games, throwing out the old, and generally just being a paper-thin veil over a dumb marketing tactic, I don't think esports can ever surpass any sport that is allowed to have a history and go on for several decades. No matter how skill based or good players can become within the 5-6 year period (for the most prolonged esports) the game is marketed and supported. In that sense, how can esports ever really surpass something like chess or go, which though having little visual stimulation at least have endurance? Endurance is key to anything's popularity imo.
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Are you seriously saying that Dota is more fun to watch for a Casual than starcraft? There is so much random shit happening all the time in Dota, that imo it's impossible for a casual to know what's even going on, and thats not fun. Whereas sc can be easy to follow even if you have never played it.
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On June 11 2013 22:32 tuoli9 wrote:
Are you seriously saying that Dota is more fun to watch for a Casual than starcraft? There is so much random shit happening all the time in Dota, that imo it's impossible for a casual to know what's even going on, and thats not fun. Whereas sc can be easy to follow even if you have never played it.
As a total nab at DotA I agree with this it's so incredibly boring to watch lol. I think that's the case with most sports though since I doubt a lot of people actually like for example football when they don't know any of the rules.
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EPT
