[LP] Gold Coin Mega Blog

About three years ago a mad Dutch asked publicly for Brood War „Historians“, or in other words, people who could help out on Lickypiddy Brood Wars. In his original post he demaded a ludicrous number of requirements, such as knowledge about the game, the urge to play eDective and some sort of general interest/experience in coding. I'm not entirely sure if I included the standard „I do know coding“ phrase, everyone always adds, like you would add „expert MS Office Knowledge“ once you opened up MS Word. I guess I did, because things like that amuse me.

Actually, I thought I met a lot of the requirements. I started to play Brood War early on, followed the scene once I owned a 56k Modem and worked on several community pages, including, but not limited to: a mucho league (Possi, Fastest), broodwar.de, almost two days of being the substitute of the German A Team leader Knusperzergling, a few weeks of BW4Ever and BWCL news support, Team ALTERNATE „editor“, guest writer at mystracraft.de (I think; they mostly copy and pasted my content without asking, so I feel like adding it to my eBiography), and eventually ICCup. I never was any good at the game, barely hit C on ICCup years ago and achieved C2/C+ on WGT and PGT respectively – but what did that matter for Brood War. Most important for my decision I'd be able to try to add „bits of information“ was that I already published more than two hundred news posts in the past ten years or so. Whenever I had to update the German strategy sections of broodwar.de, or look up some needed background on Koreans, I'd stroll over at the new Liquipedia, TLPD and/or the TL.net strategy forums to inform myself. Thanks to Chill I even had the permission to do so – meaning to just translate what I found and to share it with the German subcommunity. Now, I did feel a little like a leech, as it was a really one sided transfer of knowledge. Hence, giving back seemed to be a good way of showing we (I) did not try to steal. This was never the spirit of broodwar.de, nor my own, this was how smaller German community pages operated shortly before the SCII Beta had its way with the Brood War scene.

Even though this was most likely my entrance into Liquipedia, it wasn't what kept me there. Another motivation, a big one even, was to promote post-foreign-SCII content done by the Russians. This page was full with English speaking tournaments, small ones even, while the Russians did so much without being thanked for at all.

Eventually, I ended up not only adding a few bits here and there (as Pholon suggested when recruiting editors), but created something about roughly 300+ new articles and about ten times the number in corrections of various other articles. Here's the list, +- two (or ten) articles I might have missed. The articles enlarged in size (in the spoilers) are the ones which I spent quite a lot of time on. The number „300“ explains itself if you look at portals like Defiler Tournaments/Results or BW4Ever.


+ Show Spoiler [Events] +

+ Show Spoiler [Players - Teams] +

+ Show Spoiler [Misc] +

+ Show Spoiler [Make Overs] +

My first few glimpses at Liquipedia, TLPD and other TL.net resources while still being an active staff member on different sites suggested that these were ample, flawless and well written. This was the grey theory, so my expectations to be a valueable asset to the Wiki was small. I was expecting to only be able to add minor German cups. Turns out I was very, very wrong.

A few weeks ago I had a long talk with the current boss, salle, the go-to guy for my annoying issues, about how stupid and pointless hundreds of articles were. This resulted in a public topic. To elaborate: There are in fact almost 700 empty pages for no-name Koreans. Until this very blog I could not point my finger on why that could possibly bother me. Now I can. For some reason, years ago, some guy, or several of them, had enough spare time to add them. Be it via script transferred from TLPD, or be it manually, or with the help of a bot, it does not matter. This pages clog up a ton of space, are most likely never visited, and serve no purpose at all right now.

Meanwhile, after my first look-out for potential edits, I discovered that almost all of Liquipedia focussed on Korean Strategy and Meta Game, Korean Tournaments, Foreign Tournaments involving Koreans, Foreigners being in Korea, Korean and Blizzard Maps, No-Name Koreans, Foreign Tournaments hosted by Teamliquid. There was no article about FiSheYe, huge and very important tournaments missed: prime examples were Sandlot or the WGTour Speed Ladder; no information about bugs, or Shortcuts. Foreign history as a whole, the one big thing which still connected me to the scene, was losely described as the small, ugly sister of Korea.

Theory and reality differed greatly. And it still does. It is a false positive to assume Liquipedia features even half of what happened for Brood War. About one hundred added tournaments later, the huge and most important pillars of the Brood War society are still not there – try to read up on the Pro Gaming Tour or the World Gaming Tour. The new SOSPA scene on Afreeca has no portal either.

This reads very negatively. It is not meant to be. I understand that the release of SCII probably stopped Liquipedia BW's evolution, that the single most driving factor of the old editors was Korea , understandably that they focussed archiving their most loved subjects. Instead of hating on the older articles, I'd rather like to stress out I did not agree with the one sidedness the articles had. If I do not agree with something and it bothers me to a certain extent, I try to change it.

It's magical, really. One thing lead to another, I started adding FiSheYe and ended up, most recently, adding more and more WGTour events. Before ranting on and getting lost, I'll do a lickypiddy thing.

      See also: Flowchart, Gecko Editing

It seems like a really weird and pointless way to spend time to edit Wikis. I can't say it was a pleasure all the way, but it helped me to learn a few things and learn some new stuff.

The probably most usefuly „real life“ related thing I got into was a new language: Russian. I thought about learning a fourth language in total, but can't say I suceeded, mainly because time is lacking for me, and there's not really an option to improve Russian in rural Germany. However, I did learn to read cyrillic, a few basic sentences, built a small vocabulary and now I am able to understand the very basic meaning of longer texts, if not written with a ton of typos. I did try to learn Russian before editing, but editing itself and the research that goes with it gave me a final push to actually improve a little, even learning the Russian keyboard outlay (чв at Largo). Can't say that any Russian would understand me if I was to ask him something; everytime I try I get a „4TO?“ in return. Well...


Another „skill“ which improved doing edits was to research a special topic. I, like many other students I guess, had to do literature (and other) research for my studies. Thanks to broken archives and offline sources, I learned how to really use Google's full list of commands. It actually was more fun than work, something I did not anticipate. It's amazing what you can dig out, if you know how to alter key words, use syntax and pages like archive.org. Finding scattered information and put it together is surprisingly similar to solve riddles. Being a detective isn't that far off. Not to mention which kind of things you find, but more to that later.


Mainly thanks to itsjustatank, I learned a lot about tournament design, and more importantly, about Copyrights. I never thought anyone would really care to complain if his/her „artwork“ / „photos“ are uploaded to Liquipedia, until I did. Personally, I had banners I did remove from Liquipedia; some of which were used by special users for special tournaments, they never gave me credit for, but blamed myself. Now I know better and I learned to respect the effort some community members put into taking these photographs. I really do have a lot of respect for people like NeverGG and Ayumi. Without these two a ton of articles would look like shit and empty. Thanks to you two in particular from Liquipedia BW!


One last helpful skill to improve was categorizing and presenting data in an optimal way. I was forced to learn this and that about coverage, text presentation and such, be it for school or universtiy, but most baffling for BW related topics. I had to endure a ton of speeches by (no names) Russians and „serious eSport people“, who tried to teach me what I should write and how I should phrase my articles. Most of that was pure gobshite, it doesn't matter which color a name has, nor does it make sense to highlight every second word by making it bold. Persons like broodwar.de's webmaster GeneralMengsk (and his side-kick Quint) however taught me well before I laid hands on articles. They had helpful advice, which did not only improve my style, but also paid off in terms of viewer hits.
      Liquipedia taught me more advanced things. A lot of typos have been stressed out by both Pholon, itsjustatank and lately Endy – I got rid of Elemination, date formats, and the likes – that does matter sometimes. Moreover and more importantly, structuring articles helped me writing university related essays. I learned to think how a first time reader would read it and how to narrow down content to a few words if need be; to just get the basic message delivered, how to exclude personal opinion from facts (hai salle), how to source it and so on and so forth. I'm still light years away from being good at it, but I definitely learned.


The last thing „I improved in“ were strategies. Barely a thing you can extrapolate and use in real life at all. However, I read tons and tons of strategy guides on Liquipedia, most of which I found to be horrible. Not horrible, because featuring wrong advice, but horrible, because horribly phrased and/or horribly presented. Again, no offense to the original authors; another remainder of Liquipedias first days. I know read literally any strategy related article there is. I can't use it, but I know things know. Hell yeah.

I received feedback every now and then, compared to the effort and time put in, it was really small though. Most recently Mondragon messaged me and asked for more information on things he read on; however, unrelated to my Wiki edits, more related to my blog. While talking, he was more or less positive about Liquipedia as a whole. Another German player to give a subtile positive response was Socke showing the Portal: Protoss Strategy in a teaser, also memorable was Dashwriter's brother commenting on several articles at bw.de. To mention as well was YelloAnts general interest in several articles, or ex-community members like WGT-Baal being pleased to read about their work.

Not every positive I received was positive though. Apparently, one more prominent user being sceptical of Liquipedia's use as strategy resource is Chef; another very prominent Polish Player complained about misinterpreted details about his career I added in a larger edit; small discussion I head with fellow editors and TL staff members could be added, as well as several people who didn't like at all what I had added.

At first I was convinced the quality of my edits were really good, I added sources whereever I could or left out statements, like Salle tought me. However, the criticism added by all of the mentioned people above were an eye opener, especially the details I got wrong. I did take that personal, in the context of wanting to avoid these mistakes in the future. I hopefully did better for more recent edits.

When I added my first articles, FiSheYe, Sandlot and Pimpest Plays, I had something in mind. Creating a througouh history of foreign BW. In the past ten days or so, I added more than 300.000 characters to the Wiki and couldn't help but realize that this might turn out to be a futile effort. There's so much offline, so much history I missed, while still playing Possi in 2002, tournaments not being covered well enough to catch my eyes.

I'm not satisfied at all, I gave up on writing giant profiles like the one Mondragon or FiSheYe have. Look at Dissy's result tab – it lists a long, long list of event finishes, but it's nowhere close to what he really played. I rather realize, that the best thing I can do for now is to spam as much results as I can find and change the quality of player profiles bit by bit. That may take years.

To stress out how easy it is to write „wrong“ things (Rule #1: Lickypiddy is never wrong), was my previous blog: I asked who the best foreign Terrans aside from professionals were in the eyes of the TL.net population. Turns out, everyone but the Americans (too few observations) nominates Russians. My guess is, mainly because Russians were covered the most. But is that proof that they were this good? I don't know, a few months before I would have been certain. There are tons of Terrans missing, who were also great in their time – Odin, Fenix, Super – just to drop three arbitrary names from non-Russian speaking countries.

Don't take this paragraph the wrong way, I won't stop editing, nor will I stop trying to archive as much as possible, I just learned to write more carefully. Apologies to Draco for mixing up news comments under a fake name with statements he did an interview.

Only one question/demand/advice to Teamliquid Staff, mainly at the highest ups: You introduced TL+ and someone gave me a TL+ subscription. There's this one feature you added, the „Show All“ post „button“ in threads, which is apparently limited to TL+ users for longer threads, I'd like to have big time Liquipedia contributors. I realize it isn't that important in most cases (even dangerous thinking about the Pic Threads), but you have no idea how helpful it can be. I looked up several Korean who-is-who threads to improve articles, which is a lot easier if you do not have to browse 15+ pages of a thread manually. Or finding who hacked when in the „Fade into Oblivion“ thread. There are examples. Please give this feature to people with a Gold Coin and/or Reviewers. It is such a great thing!


Personally, I think any organizer should be happy to have his or her own Liquipedia page for his/her event. You gain more exposure, it is good for overview and for the community it's great to be able to quickly look up results, history or whatever. That being said, please consider to archive your own shit. This goes out to all genres Liquipedia covers – Brood War, SCII, Hearthstone, the new one I can't recall and DotA 2. If your organization is called World Cyber Games print out this paragraph. If your organization is called GosuGamers, shame on you!

You, dear organizers, might think that whatever you write or publish now will be there in the future. You are motivated, you know what you are doing and you might think of yourself as professionals. Well, time has proven that almost no page exists forever. The better you preserve your own history, the easier it is for a portal like Liquipedia to correct wrong things or add your content in the first place.

Seriously, there are tons of examples I could list why your minor tournament you host right now is worth to be preserved; consider the WGTour Speed Ladder for example. There was this relatively good amateur JulyZerg participating, yet not the player coverage focussed on. Hell, this is a good piece to remember when writing about JulyZerg later on. You never know when and why something becomes important, until it does. Hence, every information is good to have archived.

To stress out what I mean, consider GosuGamers. I was a huge fan of this page and I really liked it before they raped their own design. I have no clue who came up with the idea to use „News Was Written 10 Years 43 Weeks Ago“ as date. I mean seriously, what the shit does that tell you? Also, search bars are there for a reason – I want to search a topic, I do. I do not want to click page by page in a 310 page archive looking for updates you did or did not provide. If so-called minor pages like reps.ru can manage to give me this feature, why can't you? Also, stop bombing Google, I do not want to get six identical results in your Poker, DotA, SCII, <I dont know> section, I want ONE. This is not limited to GG, hello dear ICCup, stop restructuring your page and get rid of archives. For fucks sake, give Unk more coffee to keep him operational.</rant>

To stop the ongoing negativity (excuse: It stresses me and other BW editors), a few positive highlights:

• Emerald: Terrific archiving, well structured tournament overviews, good tone of wording, neat battle reports, overall probably one of the best organizers of Scandinavia
  
• Mazor: I hope you are the GG.net guy I had in mind. You used to have a great way to cover things, I wish your page would have kept it like this
  
• DKnight: Thanks for covering even small time events and keeping the overview on WGTour. Always providing sources to help with futher investigation
  
• Ilvy: No words describe the quality of the coverage. Great, great stuff.
  
• Spacemarine: I wish your events were anything but not-notable, also good archiving. Also thanks for entertaining me with your English (I SAY: SO NOT MY FRIEND)
  
• GeneralMengsk/bw.de Editors who-are-not-NacktNasenWombi-or-zZzZ: Best archives by far. BY FAR. Not a lot of things covered, but if they were, everything is still there. Probably the best VOD/Replay archive for a „minor“ site.
  
• Ger-Team-Leaders except KnupserZergling and zZzZ: Terrific Nation War archive, helped out A TON to figure B-teamer flags and races, as well as results not listed by archive.org
  
• Reps.Ru / Cyberwars.ru: same as for bw.de/GeneralMengsk. Just terrific. Only takes the second place because of a smaller VOD archive.
  
• Xeris/PuertoRican: Thanks for the live updates and delivering results, even if it wasn't on your pages.
  
• YelloAnt/Pat/Sarah: Even though the quality of archives declined a lot, great start and great coverage of own PGT/ICCup related events in the early history of your ladders
  

Being a Brood War editors in the Liquipedia overall community is strange. You're different, so much is true. All the other Liquipedias face very different problems from yours. If you want to add your own tournament, which you just played in or organized recently, there's no big problem. Just add it. You're fine, that's basically what happens everywhere else on the Wikis.

However, if you try to expand the old Brood War history articles, you'll face so much unrelated things, which simply do not matter (yet) for SCII, DotA or Hearthstone. You have problems stating sources, especially if you recall things from your memory, theoretically legit, if you're an ex-admin. You have problems finding information at all, while what you added a few weeks ago, needs to be worked over thanks to new InfoBoxes or new policies. While you're still trying to fix a portal's complete focus (e.g. Strategies), SCII people will debate which article should be featured next. It's hard to add quality articles, while the general overall-wiki-portal changes so rapidly. Don't think it's easy to communicate your problems, the other contributors are mostly into other gaming titles. Also, most of them are experienced code cracks and are well informed about the newest wiki-syntax-trends, while you're not. Also, there are gazillions of Silver Coin Editors, while there's only a handful of BW-only editors – like Mewka or Endy. The other portals have a lot more content added by a lot more editors, while Brood War (go help out), relies on very few to expand. At this point, I'd like to stress out that especially the two aforementioned, as well as Epoxide, KristofferAG and others added most likely more to the Wiki than my Data Spam.


This sounds demotivating, but it isn't. I can't say I ever met an idiot in the LP community, instead I found tons of willing helpers. They don't care if it doesn't profit their own game, they will help. Other than with my experiences on ICCup, the staff unrelated to Brood War will actually fix Brood War related bugs; it might be delayed, but it does happen in a reasonable time frame. Also, even though you don't understand the cracks if you're not really into computer sciences, they will dumb it down for you. A particularly big hero of the LP Community is ChapatiyaqPTSM , who even hands out great tools like a Bracket Generator. If you need graphics, they will be given to you, or at least explained to you how you can improve your own Photoshop skills – e.g. by Fusefuse.

I'm not sure if is wanted, but the spirit doesn't stop at discussions. Apparently there have been communtiy events for Editors (like Status: Editor, not „I-once-wrote-therefore-I'm-an-editor) – gaming nights and such. It's great. Currently people bash Ronadlo for World Cup.

TL;DR: help BW Lickypiddy and edit. Also, thanks to all the other editors, who were this helpful.

After my teslaesque biography earlier on, you might understand that I sometimes found myself reading up really, really, really old discussions about this and that. You can't help it, you want to know how the community felt, even if it doesn't matter at all. Funny how some things will never change. A few selected pieces, which make our community so ... robust.

      Exhibit 1: Moderators are assholes

[...]Do not ever confuse a WGTour fan with a "wgtour admin." The formers are just good StarCraft fans, the latters are no lifers, power happy hyenas, for the most part mean, useless or dumb who are dead set on destroying their community. - UrbanDictionary Definition: WGTour

I do realize, myself included, that staff members can't possibly do the right thing, the right call, deliver the perfect presentation, or whatever. And it always makes people angry. It doesn't matter what you're looking at, even the most notable and argueably best administrators of the past fourteen years were blamed for <insert issue here>. It is always the same.

More interestingly though, the second the administration changes, e.g. in the case of the WGTour founders leaving WGTour, the entire situation changes. Everyone's mourning, they want the old crew back, while the new crew gets blamed. Everytime. It lasts for about two weeks, then you get the same shit all over. Apparently that's normal.


      Exhibit 2: Strategy Advice & APM

Apparently, according to almost all strategy topics, ten community pages can't lie, the only fault of a Brood War defeat lies within a too low APM. It's not that the people to hand out the advice, a certain MYM administrator with a D- 15% winratio comes to mind, are underqualified; it's because the APM is not good.

Now, if you want to give good strategy advice and maybe want to disguise your "moar apm lol" post as non-spam, you have to drop the term eAPM. This is important. Effective APM is a much better skill indicator than anything, because it removes the "SPAM" from "APM".

Don't bother to tell the eAPM horde, that eAPM is just a different definition of APM; Mutalisk Micro with useless attack commands are real APM, thus eAPM, so shut the fuck up non-Zerg User.


      Exhibit 3: Strategy Advice & Race

Aside from APM, advice people to play Protoss. Wait for Protoss to blame Zerg. Wait for Zerg to blame Protoss. Then announce you play Terran and therefore all other posters are idiots. Feel superior, because you're right due to moral and higher (e)APM demands.


      Exihibit 4: Hackers, Cheaters

Hackers and Cheaters are bad. Get your pitchforks ready. Wait until you get undeniable proof of the hack / the cheat. Remember, in theory, hack worse than cheat, in reality, cheat worse than hack.

Now for the crucial bit: If there is undeniable proof say the proof is absurd, remember that admins are assholes and imbeciles and that they were never good players (e.g. deny YelloAnt was a WCG UA Qualificant); defend the hacker. The more often a hacker was convicted, the harder defend him. Remember Selector, a guy like him simply can't cheat.

If there is only little proof and even admins just wanted to inform you it might be a fuck-up of the AH software, thus tournament games were delayed, go into ultra brutal hardcore mode. Unlike hackers who "only used hacks to observer 1v1 games", alleged hackers are automatically convicted.

If you hack yourself, report yourself. That has tradition on ICCup, WGTour, PGTour. Insist you did not hack, but in fact the other party did. (honestly, there are tons of examples across various ladders that the guys to blame hackers hacked themselves more often than clean users reporting fraud)


      Exhibit 5: Brood War (SCII) is dead

It died in: 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014


      Exhibit 6: Bisu is good

Bisu is always the underdog, despite having 3 MSL Gold Medals. Replace Bisu with: Flash, JaeDong, July, NaDa, [...], <Korean currently being #1>.


      Exhibit 7: eSport buiz, serious buiz

Hate everyone who does not agree.


      Exhibit 8: Controversies and Discussion Culture

You need to realize quickly if something is controversial. Simple flowchart:

1. Are there two sides to the OP?
   
2. No (Spam a Post) <-> Yes (continue in the list)
   
3. How many (=n) already complained about how bad the side being protrayed negatively in the OP is? (n<10, complain yourself)(n>10, say the OP is wrong, don't list reasons, be negative)
   
4. TL;DR: Form two sides, never agree, wait for mod to close
   
5. If closed: Write angry shit in the feedback forums
   
6. special tipp: On April 1st, change your opinion radically and hope the other side does as well
   

      Exhibit 9: You don't beat Brood War

As much as you hate everyone in the scene, and if your hate almost feels good, you do unite as soon as you have to. If there is a poll about "best game", you spam like a dickhead. If you hate the French, but the French need help in a poll to get a bigger prize pool, you vote. If you don't, you're not a Brood War fan. If there's a news paper article on a player, you go and comment on it - positively, even if it is Idra and you don't like Idra.