EPTI met him in Providence at MLG back in 2011, where I remembered him as, “that guy that bought us food” - I was a poor college student that was hungry. A couple of months later, he was tweeting out that he was looking for volunteers for this site he had made, SC2Ratings. I was an avid StarCraft watcher, and after helping out with stuff in the New England SC2 League, I wanted to help out more, and decided to ask Neal if I could help in any way. The SC2 scene was still growing, and it was my pleasure to help out with a site that was unlike any other. I saw a lot of changes in the SC2 landscape as time went on, and we had our ups and downs along the way.
When I wasn’t working fulltime, I really had the weekend-long events down. We would update the match VODs as soon as they came up, refresh twitch VODs every half hour and updating the site for anyone that missed a match or wanted to watch again. I would try to make sure people would know about us by posting on Reddit, tweeting, and pretty much anything to get people to find out about the site. We were doing really well when SC2 Proleague started up, and were getting pretty good numbers for a while. Unfortunately for me, when I got my internship and Neal started streaming more, I couldn’t keep up all the time. I tried to keep up, but there was just too much going on and looking at the metrics didn’t help morale at all, especially with the size of the community now.
We tried a lot of things to garner more interest, like contests and trying to promote the site at live events, but with a lot of changes recently I haven’t been able to keep up. The twitch/GOM changes also affected my decision to leave as well, as the point of the site was to have VODs of even the oldest tournaments, so people could go back and watch them. Obviously that can’t happen now. The last few months has been mostly me trying to get stuff updated since our other volunteers have also been busy. While knowing nobody is looking, and that everyone is busy with real life, I’ve decided that it’s time to leave SC2Ratings and see where I go next.
Lastly, I’d like to thank Neal for the opportunity he gave me. Being a scrub that didn’t have many connections in eSports, I want to thank him for giving me the opportunity to expand my connections and attend the events I have in the capacity I was able to. If it wasn’t for Neal, I probably wouldn’t have had the opportunity to go to events, and eventually become a writer for Clarity (and now Solaris!). He’s always been supportive and understanding when I couldn’t get stuff done for the site, and now he’s a successful streamer in his own right (unfortunately not SC2 but that’s okay :D)! I hope he can become even more successful and follow the streamer dream! He’s actually in a contest right now called Intel’s Next Top Livestreamer which can be found at http://intl.gg/ . Sorry for leaving man, I hope you understand
. PS: I will still be contributing to /r/spoilerfreesc from time to time, and definitely feel free to check me out @a9azn2 for all the other cool stuff I’ll be up to! I made a hat that says SC2Ratings on it, and I'll still be wearing it at events, so be sure to come to Red Bull DC or Blizzcon and say hi!
) and Blizzcon!~
