Thoughts on WCS 2014 [audio blog] - Page 2

On November 22 2013 20:14 Liquid`Nazgul wrote:
Lots of similar thoughts on these issues. Overall clearly WCS made a lot of great changes so the mood should be positive. No system is ever perfect and thus it is good to talk about what could have been done differently. Clearly everyone feels the GSL prizepool is absurd and does not support the players at all. Blizzard chose to go the way of giving Korea freedom and maybe it was the right decision for the scene as a whole to cater to these relationships. The way GSL allocates the prize money is disappointing nonetheless.

There's a lot of good stuff in the plans and I'm really happy with the overall plans.

• Linear timeline
  
• No more seasonal finals (and hopefully like you said they do more for the ro8 with some live show with an audience)
  
• Put a significant halt to new Koreans entering the NA/EU system
  
• The few Koreans that do come through will have contributed hugely to the scene by laddering which is a win-win. Either they don't qualify or they do and did a lot to improve practice conditions for the local scene.
  
• GSL brand is back
  
• GSL has more prize money
  
• More space for other tournaments
  
• Losing in Challenger League still gets you $600
  
• Better WCS point distribution for non-Blizzard tournaments

Maps
I can write about this forever but I'll keep it short. In an ideal scene I absolutely think that ladder and all major events should use the same maps for a duration of three or so months.

It will allow players to prepare for all the maps they need to play and come up with more creative strategies. Some people seem to think that if you have a lot of new maps you will see a lot of creative strategies, but that is not how it works. Too many new maps, and/or new maps played in too few tournaments, will only see standard play (and vetoing) because players do not find it worth the effort to prepare. When given the opportunity players were mass downvoting new maps, simply because the maps were never widespread enough.

As far as viewers are concerned the same mappool for three months in major tournaments will allow the viewer, who may also be a casual player, the time to learn the maps and start to understand their significance. Too many maps spread across different tournaments leads to viewers not wanting to learn or memorize every single one of them.

TL pushes for the mapmaking scene more than anything. We want to see new maps. We want to see creative maps. We want to support for the mapmaking scene. What I don't think works is major tournaments experimenting without any consistency or understanding of what they're doing.

The most important factor to make tournaments sharing the same mappool work is having a level below (or above depending on how you view it) all these major tournaments where a mapmaking scene is supported. In BW there was a lot of consistency in maps. OSL and MSL basically picked their maps and stuck with them for a season. However the maps that they had were still creative and fresh. This is because below the top level tournaments there was an extremely healthy mapmaking scene where professionals were paid to create new maps and teams were paid (forced) to test them.

Every four months you need to be able to introduce 3-4 new maps that will then go into the mappool for the next season. If Blizzard does not start supporting the mapmaking scene it could really stifle any kind of map development to force every tournament to use the same maps. If they do want to support the mapmaking scene (ala BW or TLMC) then this scene could come up with the new maps on a seasonal basis and everybody wins by all tournaments using the same maps.

That or you pray Red Bull keeps doing what they're doing.