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I agree wholeheartedly with the OP. The hard part is figuring out a cost-effective way of running a meaningful team league or ongoing solo league where players play every week.
I don't think the cheap options ever turn into something meaningful. All of these weekly cups and online team-leagues can't seem to generate a significant audience which means they can't generate money and players won't dedicate to them, which then results in a poor audience. It's a bad cycle. I think the idea of slowly building an audience for a league from almost nothing is a pipe dream.
Even NASL, with big name players, a big prize pool, and a lot of hype, couldn't build a major audience for their online portion. Sure, they made mistakes, but no league will be perfect and I think even a league with some decent funding will go down in flames if you try to run it online.
In order to be prestigious enough to draw eyeballs, you need big name players *and* a live setting. Unfortunately , there is currently no place in the foreigner world with a high concentration of top foreign SC2 players.
In order to succeed, I really think someone somewhere needs to set up a studio and say to the world, "Here we are, come play." Someone needs to be willing to pick a winning location and just plop their studio down there. It could be San Francisco, LA, Chicago, New York, Stockholm, Paris, Berlin, London, or anywhere else.
Then you build up the prestige by hosting ongoing individual leagues, just like GSL has done. Eventually, when enough people have moved to city X and team houses are all local, then you create the team-league.
Unfortunately, it'd be a huge investment on the hope that "If you build it, they will come". I know I'm not willing to make that investment, but maybe someone out there is.
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Katowice25012 Posts
Good post. I always felt like the most important aspect of Proleague is that its essentially a training ground for new talent, a place where a dude trying to come up and get his time in the spotlight to try and prove his worth. That's extremely hard with the sort of GSL/WCS type league systems.
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On May 07 2015 07:42 Musicus wrote:
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.
As a french sc2 fan, I definitely rally behind Team Baguette !
But I get your point, you don't really have a "team" feeling for foreign teams (except for a very small number of them). Partnerships don't really solve this issue, except in rare cases. For example, a partnership like team Baguette does make sense to me since all the players are French. I mean you can rally behind them, love (or hate) them for that. This gives them an identity, a defining feature.
But again, I agree with you: most partnerships don't have that "common identity", so you cannot identify yourself to them, cannot relate, and thus can't really get emotionnally involved in supporting them.
Basically, most foreign teams (and partnerships between them) lack personnality and identity.
Edit: that was slightly off-topic, sorry.
More to the point: I agree, having a consistent league would help foster and grow foreign talent, and generally be a good thing. The problem really comes from implementing it in real life.
Doing it offline does not seem like a possibility in Europe+USA, since all players are scattered around and not just in one big city. Online does not have the same appeal.
And then you have the whole "individual or team" debate.
The scheduling could also be a problem, although I think there are still open slots, especially around EU/US prime time since all the korean leagues are around korean prime time.
So in principle, a very good idea ! But making it happen is a whole other story...
Edit 2: actually, thinking back to team baguette, some kind of PL competition based on the "Nation Wars" concept could do very well. In Europe at least.
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United Kingdom36161 Posts
love qxc's blogposts, always good food for thought without being moany.
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What about a league structure for WCS (or a parallel individual tournament, since, as a spectator, I quite like the current WCS iteration and would hate to see it go) similar to what TakeTV is doing with their Lotv Beta tournament. It's similar to that of football leagues.
Have say 4-8 parallel groups of 20 or so players and have them play out a big round robin over the course of a season which last 3-4 months. Then at the end of a season have a big off line weekend event were the top 4-8 (for a total of 32) players from every league play in the traditional bracket style playoffs.
Award some small price money for every match won during the round robin phase, with a big paycheck and WCS points or so for the offline part.
This would achieve the goal of having every player in the league having something to do that matters at a competitive level during the entire season.
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8751 Posts
I think the best way for you to prepare for the next WCS, without having to rely on anyone else or anything new, is to play ladder on KR and participate in OlimoLeague as well as whatever random qualifiers/events pop up.
I don't think money incentives have been effective in SC2. If the joy of competition and gaining a competitive advantage for WCS are not incentives enough for taking custom games seriously, I don't see how relatively small amounts of money will help.
Funny thing is if you had private four man weekly tournaments with you and three practice partners, or a king of the hill or whatever, you could probably start streaming the games and get some crowd-funded cash prizes. If you compete without caring about money, then the money would come. The custom games that we used to play for SC:BW... if that was replicated in SC2 today and streamed, it'd get plenty of donations.
Should the money or the competition come first? The only good way this works is if there's so much competitive spirit out there bouncing around for an outlet between WCS's that it's just looking for a way to express itself, so you give it a format and stream it, and people like it so money starts coming in. SC2 is past the time in a game's life where fronting money for a tournament to see what kind of competition and attention it can stir up is a reasonable thing to do. Maybe a little of that will coincide with LotV, but in general no.
You're framing this in terms of players needing a steady flow of competitive games and them needing money to rouse them to compete. I think that's all wrong. There should be an inherent desire to compete. That should be what SC2 players just want to do. They should get paid when they compete publicly in front of a crowd. If there are players who want to compete and an audience who wants to watch them, then sure talk about logistics and connecting these two desires and get some money flowing. But with players who don't want to compete unless there's money, when it's not even clear that there is a sufficient audience and sufficient money, you have no solution.
I think the fact is that a lot of players are satisfied with the amount of competitions that already exist. Luring with money to get more competition going is not good... Think about something you really don't want to do, a whole career you despise or just one nasty task or whatever, and then imagine a rich guy who keeps offering you more and more money until you simply can't refuse. Is that what you want happening here? That's just not a healthy thing for the scene. If people don't want to compete, they don't want to compete. Making them feel obligated to do it because there's money and SC2 players have such a hard time making money that they gotta chase every opportunity is just wrong.
Final pragmatic advice: If you just want to be ready for season three, do what I said in the first paragraph. If you really want to get something else going, then follow the general idea in the third paragraph. Get players who can hold a conversation while obsing if the final goal is to stream it.
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yeah having a foreign "GSL" "proleague" would def help a lot for consistent practice. Thing is i think a lot of it will be better when LotV releases or i at least hope it will.... People needs something to practice for in order to get better.
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I'd like to see some sort of online team league thing similar to ProLeague that everyone can participate in.
TL, MYi, Acer, etc could all participate
May even encourage some people to group up and form a team for this league. Should be open to Korean teams too.
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On paper this is very cool. Consider though, a big part of proleague is that its offline, and everyone is in team houses. We know that many players on foreign teams remain at their own homes. I'm pretty sure Rain is still in Korea. So we know that a foreign proleague would most likely be online, and not all the players on a team could work together, greatly diminishing the quality of the tournament and the games. Despite this, I feel like something like this would be immensely beneficial for foreigners
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NASL was the closest thing the US ever saw to a proleague and it couldn't operate due to lack of interest. Maybe if they had done other games, like LoL or DotA2, along with SC2 it might have survived to continue operations.
But someone here mentioned that teams outside the USA in SC2 do not bond the same way as Korea teams. Even when I was at the first house in Arizona with Machine, etc, we never practiced with each other. The EG guys never really practiced with each other in the house (Didn't help that two of the players gave up SC2, one returning to BW/Poker and one moving on to HoN and I had moved on to LoL) sat down, talked about games, watched replays. Not really. Not like how Korean teams have analysts and ex-pros coaching them etc.
BUT! MOBA teams are starting to head that way outside Asia so that gives me hope that it will eventually spill over into other eSports areas but I fear it is too late for SC2 and who knows if Blizzard will gamble on another RTS for a long, long time.
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NonY's plan seems much more doable. The logistics of a non-korean proleague just don't seem reasonable.
However it might be possible to create and run a mock starleague. If it works out and there's interest, maybe some adaptation of the starleague format could work.
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EPT
