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Starcraft requires a constant investment of time and effort to improve, like all activities. You will not improve without practicing Starcraft regularly, although practice does not necessarily mean playing. There's plenty to gain from pondering, watching and discussing. That said, the single biggest type of event missing from the foreign scene is the same critical blood sustaining life force in Korea: the 'consistent event'. GSL filled this role to an extent for a long time, but proleague has filled the void more accurately than any other event.
Consistent practice is required to improve, but without consistent events there is less incentive for consistent practice. Take WCS for example. As an eliminated player, I have nothing to actually participate in related to WCS for close to 3 months. Assuming a player is motivated and disciplined enough to practice consistently over that time frame, they still are not getting feedback on what they're doing. Of course there are small tournaments here and there to practice on, but unless you're already an established player who can travel, you won't have stakes nearly as high as in wcs until the next wcs. This situation feels like trying to code an entire program without actually stress testing it or putting it against the scenarios that are likely to 'break it'. Ladder only goes so far as players are much less likely to be specifically trying to destroy you. People tend to hold back in custom games as well as each player as their own agenda. My opponent is practicing a specific build while I do my own and we rarely are trying to counter each other like we would in a real match. The point is that while non-tournament practice is useful and vital, the best preparation for a tournament is to play in a tournament.
Proleague identified a long time ago that consistency is a critical component to high level games. By setting up weekly matches that lead up to an incredibly important final, they create a constant source of motivation and feedback for players while simultaneously reducing the stress and importance of any single match. Any single match for a team in proleague is less important than any single wcs match, but the matches are still important enough that players must practice for them. Proleague creates a system where players are constantly pressured to practice and prepare because there's always a match 'coming soon'. In addition, the frequency of matches ensure that players are getting the sort of consistent feedback they need to improve their preparation strategies. They have more opportunities to be in the booth, to play in front of a crowd, to have a 'match day' and so on and each iteration they can get a little bit better at the whole process.
Besides the consistent matches, proleague also does not feature eliminations until the very end of each round. This ensures that the same group of players are able to have consistent practice and feedback. Of course, if you're not in proleague to begin with it's probably quite hard to break in, but once you're on one of those teams there's so many matches to prepare for or to help others prepare for. Elimination tournaments are great for 'one of' type events, but a consistent format like proleague goes much farther toward increasing the overall skill of the people involved. Consistent events automatically breed consistent practice which will breed increased skill and so on over a long period of time. While WCS does what it does well, a foreign 'proleague' involving 4-8 of the top teams would be huge for filling the void of creating a consistent series of matches.
 
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i like this idea but which team participate?
A lot of wcs player's team don't have enough rolster to play on proleague style tournament.
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would be awsome to have a foreign proleague, wish TB's Clan wars could take that role
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Good point, hadn't thought about it that way yet.
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Hello - my name is qxc; you've probably heard of me - I am too cool to capitalize letters which one should capitalize.
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The thing you seem to wish for is the return of the NASL, because that would be even better than a team-based competition, because it would make room for players without a reasonable team.
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To add something:
For viewers who follow players, it sucks having them eliminated in tournaments. There's no reason to watch the remainder of the event if nobody you follow is still in it. Imagine if the NFL/NHL eliminated your home team the first week of the season!
Leagues > Tournaments for day to day programming, for the viewers as well as the players. Also, then the tourneys can be something you actually care about, rather than the 3 concurrent events that seem to be going on right now as I type this that I don't even care to look at.
(We need to stop streaming qualifiers btw, talk about oversaturation...)
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I would cry tear of joy if Blizzard creates an official foreigner proleague.
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I'm really curious about your thoughts for ways league organizers can make a tournament more important to players. The SC2ITL and Shoutcraft clan wars have relatively decent prize pools but see a bit of negligence from players through either not showing or very clearly not practicing. Granted, Shoutcraft has *very* strange maps, it feels like there is a problem with getting players to care enough to put in practice or even show up for the matches.
Do you feel like the solution is just larger prize pools? Is it a problem with the all-kill format making players feel like they don't have to be there? Can team leagues put more pressure on teams with more severe consequences for forfeiting matches? Or do you feel like it's not a problem at all?
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On May 07 2015 03:04 feardragon wrote:
I'm really curious about your thoughts for ways league organizers can make a tournament more important to players. The SC2ITL and Shoutcraft clan wars have relatively decent prize pools but see a bit of negligence from players through either not showing or very clearly not practicing. Granted, Shoutcraft has *very* strange maps, it feels like there is a problem with getting players to care enough to put in practice or even show up for the matches.
Do you feel like the solution is just larger prize pools? Is it a problem with the all-kill format making players feel like they don't have to be there? Can team leagues put more pressure on teams with more severe consequences for forfeiting matches? Or do you feel like it's not a problem at all?
The first problem comes from teams themselves imo. The sense of being in a team in foreign scene is not as strong as Korean scene.
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It's not like we didn't have those and many other clan leagues to begin with. I remember when we were first arguing over the WCS/MLG I came up with a format that would work; however it would be pricey to fly players out. We even had CL/CWs in BW which we tried to mimic. Did that actually help us? No and for the foreigners that do go to Korea they have a hard enough time keeping up.
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Even if there was a league, would players treat it as seriously as KeSPA teams treat Proleague? No. But would they treat it seriously enough? Maybe. Worth trying, but I'm not sure if Blizzard would do it just because Individual Leagues are more popular than Team Leagues outside Korea.
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I'm not sure it should be a team league, just an individual league with 20 players or so, 19 play days, everybody plays everyboy. Just like Bundesliga or EPS back then. Top 4 will play a final, bottom 10 drop out or something. TakeTV Lotus league will do this for LotV, but sadly it's almost invite only, which was needed since the balance is so fucked in LotV.
A Lotus league in HotS with with qualifier spots only would be perfect. And make it non proleague players only.
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On May 07 2015 03:07 Wildmoon wrote:Show nested quote +On May 07 2015 03:04 feardragon wrote:
I'm really curious about your thoughts for ways league organizers can make a tournament more important to players. The SC2ITL and Shoutcraft clan wars have relatively decent prize pools but see a bit of negligence from players through either not showing or very clearly not practicing. Granted, Shoutcraft has *very* strange maps, it feels like there is a problem with getting players to care enough to put in practice or even show up for the matches.
Do you feel like the solution is just larger prize pools? Is it a problem with the all-kill format making players feel like they don't have to be there? Can team leagues put more pressure on teams with more severe consequences for forfeiting matches? Or do you feel like it's not a problem at all? The first problem comes from teams themselves imo. The sense of being in a team in foreign scene is not as strong as Korean scene.
Maybe it's the other way around though, teams do not mean as much because there is no equivalent to the Proleague for foreign teams (SC2ITL and Clan Wars are not really comparable).
Also a foreign Proleague would most probably have to be played online, which would take away from the prestige of the tournament.
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Teams that could support a "foreign proleague" which i will call the:
SBENU TRANSATLANTICS (twitch meme)
- Team Liquid
- a collaboration of Millenium-Property-other C-Rank team
- Team Baguette
- ...
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As far as an actual implementation, it's hard to say. ATC, egmcsl, and other team leagues have existed and gone away. Highly profitable ventures don't go away for no reason so it's more likely that these events were operating at a loss. To have people care a lot about the matches they need to be high profile enough and with enough money on the line to warrant it. Shoutcraft suffers from having a relatively small prize pool where some players may just not care enough to prepare at the expense of other preparation. As shoutcraft is relatively unique in its maps and format, practicing for that feels like not practicing for anything else, which is fine, but a reason why many players seem unprepared.
Unfortunately, without a lot of experience on how these leagues work and the viewer count required to be profitable/sustainable I can't say too much on what teams/level of skill would be needed.
If someone were to pursue this idea I would start small and simple.
All numbers below are guesstimates.
5 qualifiers and top 2 of each move to group stage. You win $50 right away just by qualifying. There is a 10 man group where everyone plays everyone else. You get an appearance fee ($10) for playing your match. The winner gets an additional $10. If you forfeit or no show for a match, you forfeit your appearance fee. If you noshow twice, you're removed from the league. Each match is a bo5 and there are 2 match days per week where you have 5 bo3 on each day. Play continues for 9 weeks and then the top 4 go to a single elimination bracket. Top 1/2/3/4 get some additional prize money. Let's say $500/300/100/50.
Each match would cost $30 with this model and there's a total of 5 matches per week over 9 weeks. $150 / week. So just under $1000 for the regular season. Then an additional ~$1000 and you could do the entire thing for $2000 total. By adding appearance fees and having regularly scheduled matches you prompt people to actually show up and play and even if someone is doing quite poorly they still have a chance to make some money since each match is worth a bit of money on its own.
This would be my first attempt as it exemplfies most of the ideas mentioned above but on a much smaller scale. It's a good proof of concept to see if the idea can work. If a first season went well, it could go up to more players or try it with some number of teams rather than individuals.
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Team League organizer checking in. Seeing posts like these hurts me inside because it re-opens the wounds of trying to make Team Leagues work for foreign teams and just not being able to do it. I have laid awake at night a LOT trying to come up with a solution, but have yet to be able to pull one out.
On May 07 2015 05:05 qxc wrote:
5 qualifiers and top 2 of each move to group stage. You win $50 right away just by qualifying. There is a 10 man group where everyone plays everyone else. You get an appearance fee ($10) for playing your match. The winner gets an additional $10. If you forfeit or no show for a match, you forfeit your appearance fee. If you noshow twice, you're removed from the league. Each match is a bo5 and there are 2 match days per week where you have 5 bo3 on each day. Play continues for 9 weeks and then the top 4 go to a single elimination bracket. Top 1/2/3/4 get some additional prize money. Let's say $500/300/100/50.
Each match would cost $30 with this model and there's a total of 5 matches per week over 9 weeks. $150 / week. So just under $1000 for the regular season. Then an additional ~$1000 and you could do the entire thing for $2000 total. By adding appearance fees and having regularly scheduled matches you prompt people to actually show up and play and even if someone is doing quite poorly they still have a chance to make some money since each match is worth a bit of money on its own.
I don't really see solo-leagues being a solution here. You're a pro so your opinion is obviously better than mine on this aspect, but I believe that if a player really wants to improve and get better consistently, they need to go into custom games, and that's where the benefit of being on a team should come from. You have this dedicated set of practice partners. I think we can all agree that Teams practicing with themselves in NA just doesn't really happen much.
Something like a Proleague style league for teams in NA definitely could solve this problem, I believe, if you were able to get players to care about it. The appearance fee is definitely a good way to get them to care and is something that I have thought about and ran numbers on in the past. Unfortunately your numbers are solo-league. In a Proleague-style match say bo7 that means you have to pay 7 players on two teams appearance fees. Anything less than $10/player doesn't seem like enough to actually entice people to show up, so suddenly your cost per match balloons from $30 to $210.
Costs balloon quickly out of control and there just isn't a way to fund that in the foreign scene. For Team Leagues giving each player money just doesn't seem like a solution to the problem. It's a culture problem of players not caring about the matches, and I don't see this as a case where we have enough money to buy a culture change. I'd be interested to hear any other ideas that you might have to solve this, though, but I can't see a balance to be struck in the context of Team Leagues.
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QXC everything you say is so gosh darn smart. 5 stars!
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I just don't think foreign teamleagues are hype. Only TL and maybe Acer and mYi feel like real teams in sc2. Why have a teamleague when we will have team baguette, or digpix, or coldig or whatever partnership. Those teams have no real identity that fans can rally behind. So I think an individual would be way more successful than a team league. Partnerships are bad, but without them there aren't even enough teams with enough players.
But we don't need the whole team, we don't need EG to force iNcontrol to play so they have enough players, we just need JD and Huk in the individual league. I don't even know if Complexity has another player besides QXC and Hendralisk, most foreign teams just aren't real teams. At least not the sc2 sections.
The important part is that it's an ongoing league and not another weekend tournament. We shouldn't force the team part on the foreign sc2 scene, it just doesn't fit.
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There can only be one true proleague. but let me just take a minute to thank shoutcraft for being the best tournament i have ever seen. its brilliant! Its someting new and interesting compared to the run of the mill stuff out there. It made me laugh so hard  Great Job people, I really hope people take the time to appreciate the work put into making this awesome event.
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EPT
