|
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.
 
|
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.
|
would be awsome to have a foreign proleague, wish TB's Clan wars could take that role
|
Good point, hadn't thought about it that way yet.
|
Hello - my name is qxc; you've probably heard of me - I am too cool to capitalize letters which one should capitalize.
|
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.
|
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...)
|
I would cry tear of joy if Blizzard creates an official foreigner proleague.
|
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?
|
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.
|
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.
|
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.
|
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.
|
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.
|
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
- ...
|
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.
|
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.
|
QXC everything you say is so gosh darn smart. 5 stars!
|
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.
|
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.
|
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.
|
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.
|
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.
|
United Kingdom36158 Posts
love qxc's blogposts, always good food for thought without being moany.
|
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.
|
8748 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.
|
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.
|
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.
|
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
|
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.
|
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.
|
|
|
|
|
|
EPT
