EPTAnd don't say to me, "Who cares what anyone thinks?" because that's a bunch of mythological bullshit. Of course we care what people think. If we didn't care, society would break down, and people would be eating each other, and packs of wild feral cats would roam the streets, killing anyone who sets foot outside after sundown. The reason we have the nuclear weapons necessary to defend against feral cat invasion is because we worked together. Of course, people can work together to do some pretty awful shit, like electing Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States.
I was thinking about this recently because my friend Kyle (who is Jewish) kept hounding me to watch The Adventures of Rick and Morty. I felt a lot of peer pressure from him, because I made some risky choices when it came to watching movies and I am not proud to say that these choices ended in disasters. So I was like "You pick what we're gonna watch, then." but tee-bee-aytch, Rick and Morty had been on my watch list for awhile now. I saw a couple of clips from the show when season 2 was coming out, and I thought it looked good/funny, but I just didn't make the time before. I finally watched the show and really liked it. As fate would have it, now there is a huge movement of people who think Ricky and Morty sucks dicks and cocks, because the fandom turned toxic.
I just kind of binge-watched the series in a vacuum, so I just experienced the show without having any engagement with the fandom. I think if I was an Original Gangster fan, I might have a different perspective than I do now. I know this because I used to love Southpark (I still kind of do), but I hate how stupid shit from the show turns into memes. A grape example of this is "Member-berries". I've been making of people for nostalgia before it was mainstream, because I'm a fucking hipster piece of trash and this whole blog is me being a hipster elitist and if you read this whole blog from start to finish, you will actually get AIDS. Anyhoo, people would post a picture of "Rugrats" and go "REMEMBER RUGRATS? KIDS TODAY WOULDN'T UNDERSTAND HOW GOOD CARTOONS USED TO BE." and I'd start yelling "REMEMBER x!?" but now when I do it, people go "Member?" in the member-berry voice. So fuck the member-berries. I hope they get squished by a huge boot that stomps in the face of humanity forever.
This is what I refer to as "The curse of going mainstream". It's when something cool becomes heavily saturated by the stupidest people imaginable. Kind of like American Football. A bunch of dummies who are overweight and unathletic get together to drink terrible-tasting beer, while wearing shirts that look like the jerseys of their favorite team and yell at the screen. "Great job dropping that pass, idiot.", they'll say to the screen. Or like, a kicker has to kick a 60-yard field-goal, and misses, and the watchers are like, "Fucking idiot. It's your job to kick the football, and you missed that? Jesus christ on a bun, fire that piece of shit kicker and get someone who can actually do the job before I physically abuse my dog and treat people poorly at my place of employment out of sheer anger!"
This is precisely what you do NOT want to have happen to "E-Sports". If you like the idea of E-Sports at all, make damn sure it never becomes mainstream, or else, your old bones will ache, and you will no longer be able to hold up the wall that holds back a deluge of diarrhea from flooding the scene. Imagine if StarCraft: Brood War became mainstream tomorrow. The strategy forum would be flooded with posts like this:
Subject: pvz wut i did wrong??
hi i am 13 so im sorry 4 my spellin but nehow i been plain pvz n cant win a single game. wut did i do wrong? heres a link to my game
Response: You don't know what you're doing at all. Your build order is nonsensical, you have like 9 workers on minerals, and even then, your macro is terrible and you went up to 3000 minerals by the 14-minute mark. You need to work on basic mechanics.
OP: ok thx
ONE WEEK LATER
Subject: hi pvz again?
hi guys i am improving but i cant find any build orders because liiqupedia is shit and none of the builds there work and i herd all the builds on there are outdated and so fuck liqupedia give me some real bos
Response (which is from someone who is like C- / 1900 mmr): go ffe, get core, go tech, make gates, expo, 12 gate, take map, expo w/ reaver/cannon everywhere, gg ez
OP: when do i get sair
Response: after u get stargate
OP: ok
ONE WEEK LATER, AGAIN
Subject: pvz sucks ass
hi guys i fukn hate pvz this game is such a fukn joke i went to bisu to learn bos n shit and even he was dyin 2 hydra bust and its like unstopable so fuk blizzard and fuk protoss!! any advice my protoss bros n if you play z then fuk u peaces of shit.
Response: Yeah, he does the hydra bust at like 12 minutes into the game and you don't have high templar until 10 minutes, so you need to fix your timing badly.
OP: thats so fukd that i have 2 play perfect or else 2000000000000 hydra come into my nat n cuck my shit into ublivion. fuk i hate this game
Response: You need to practice, that's all. If you're not enjoying the game, you can always take a break to play something else, or play 2v2, 3v3 bgh or ums or something, so you can play a bit more casually and just enjoy playing without the pressure of playing 1v1.
OP: 2s are boring 3s are boring n ums is for peasants and im a 1s player but i think its pretty telling that ur advice is 2 stop playing the game; thatz pretty wack u fuckman. y do u waste my time with this nonadvice u gayfish (thats a southpark ref if u didnt no lol) im kind of kiddin dont take it 2 heart but srsly wut is this deal givin me advise that is udderly worthless
Response: You suck, uninstall the game and go back to playing Call of Duty, kiddo.
OP: listen here u stupid fuk i culd have ur computer filled 2 the brim w/ cp in like 2 minutes becuz i am a computer hacker n i will call the fbi on u and ruin ur life if u ever cross me u retard i am not even kiddin just shut up b4 i cuck u up the a*s u stupid fuk fuck u
Response: Fuck you, suck my dick.
OP: fuk u im fukn ur gf and i fuk ur mom n they love my big cock u cuck so eat my a*shole
Response: Get the fuck off this forum, you retarded 11-year-old. I have never considered beating up a kid until now, but I will eviscerate you if I ever get the chance. Jesus, what a retard. You don't know my girlfriend, and your IQ is probably single-digit.
OP: ur rite i dont no ur gf but i no wut her tongue feel like on my big cick u dumb fukcing giant stupid faggot i am hackin ur comp rite now but i will stop if u say sorry and offer to suck my giant ass dick rite in ur gay mouth u stupid
Response: You're a cunt, kid. You're not a computer hacker. You don't know my girlfriend, and suck my dick.
OP: i am in the mexican mafia n i got the cartel outside ur house u fuccman puto chinga tu mama tu eres un maricón hijo de puta me cago en todo lo que se menea qué cabrón yo cago en la leche de tu puta madre yo chinga tu hermana vete a la verga culero jode tu madre ayer noche... come mi choriza
Response: The wall just got 10 feet taller.
Me:
![[image loading]](https://i.imgur.com/oJMxde2.jpg)
Is this what you want? Constant balance whine, pseudo-intellectuals, arrogant idiots, etc., think mid-2000s TL. Of course, tons of dumb clueless fans. Millions of trolls, who think spamming ascii swastikas in twitch chats is the height of wit.
"Don't we have those now?"
NO. NOT ON THE SCALE THAT I AM PROPOSING. I am talking about some idiot girl who starts a game against the computer, but doesn't send her probes to mine minerals or anything, but immediately gets up and shows off her "sexy defiler cosplay" while her single building is burned down by the computer and she screeches laughter and yells in a high-pitched voice, "OH MY GOD I'M SO BAD HEHEHEHEHE BUT I'M CUTE SO THAT COUNTS, RIGHT?" and gets 27,000 concurrent viewers. And the twitch chat is just people spamming emotes and Ned Flanders with boobs so hard that the chat is literally a blur. Times one hundred. Thousand. I am talking about taking StarCraft down to the lowest common denominator, where everyone who "plays" is a douchebag. Everyone. There is literally no one worth talking to. You go on battle.net and anyone you talk to is simply there just to ruin your day.
This isn't Korea. Think of all the most popular things in the United States and Canada: Kim Kardashian, Justin Bieber, American Football, McDonald's cheeseburgers, fidget spinners, candy crush, Fast and Furious 7, twerking, Family Guy, Donald Trump's Twitter account, listening to Wiz Khalifa, selfies, and Adderall. As a society, we are really, really bad at liking things and not ruining them. Remember Myspace? Tom wishes he didn't. That's why he drinks and cries every night for not auto-banning every emo kid's account.
That's not the end of my rant.
I know, in the recent past, I've been critical of people jumping on the SC:R bandwagon. Boi, that was a mistake on my part. There's nothing wrong with being excited about SC:R, or loving StarCraft. It just annoys me when someone claims to be about that StarCraft life when they ain't about that life. It's not a game. It's a lifestyle. That's why I have a tattoo that says "Zerg Life" on my stomach. It's why I blast gats in these streets while practicing dank build orders and apm on my keyboard that I carry around with me. I slap cellphones right out of a 9-year-old's hand while he plays Clash of Clans and tell him to play a real fucking game right in front of his goddamn single mother.
So when people were like "Brood war back!!!" I was like "It never left." because it didn't go anywhere, but I know where people DID go. A little game called StarCraft 2: Revenge Of The Sith dropped in 2010. Everyone hopped on that dick-wagon for various reasons, but I'll give you hint why: it wasn't for the lit custom games.
It was a fresh start. Koreans were too gud, and the prospect of becoming a pro-gamer was an impossibility for all the inferior races of white people, and for like the five black guys who played. And a foreigner girl progamer? Nah. Not even possible. But with SC2, the scene was fresh. A foreigner could rise to the very tip-top. The dream of being the person on the stage getting into the booth became real. The result? A mass exodus from StarCraft: Brood War into SC2.
During this dark time, I was irritated by SC2 fans who openly advocated for killing Brood War so the "scene wouldn't be split". I definitely let them get under my skin, but I had invested so much time into BW that I was kind of emotionally invested. It had become my favorite game of all time, and if Taylor Swift won the award for "best game", I'd jump up on stage and say BW best waifu. Not a lot of people agreed with me. "Both games are good, but I prefer SC2, because that's where the people are." I'd hear. See, the same feeling I had... that feeling of emotional investment... a lot of people put that into SC2, and worked really hard to make it their game. I understand that. I also understand that when BW was shrinking exponentially, it was a really depressing time for a lot of people, and I don't blame anyone who put the game down at that point. I wish they hadn't, but it wasn't up to me. I don't want to quote someone if I can't get the exact quote, but Bakuryu said something like "Once you got high enough, there was nobody to play. You log on, and there is no one in A/B ladder."
I commend everyone who gutted it out and just kept playing. I even took a big break during 2015 to focus on school. I always knew I'd come back to play strictly "for fun", but there was no competitive route at that point. ICCup did a sort of disservice to their ranking system by altering the requirements for getting points, and making it easier to get a high rank. I saw people I would beat regularly hanging out on the server with B and A ranks. This artificial inflation of ranks basically made iccup ranks worth nothing. So, for that stupid correlation of new sc rm mmr to iccup ranking thread, not only are the estimates completely wrong, but it's a frivolous discussion. The iccup ranks got hyperinflated, and the mmr is in its infancy stage. I rmbr when SC2's highest league was Platinum. Then they added a Diamond league. Then they added Masters. Then they added Grandmasters. I'm surprised they didn't make an even higher league, like "God League". So, even now, I kind of see competitive play as something restricted to decent tournaments, so I wouldn't even bother playing on the SC:R ladder.
Now, everyone's back! After thousands of anti-success stories in SC2, people quit en masse and tried their hand in LoL, DotA2, Heroes of the Storm, Hearthstone, and so on, and then SC:R was announced! Everyone who jumped ship could "get hyped" (god, I hate this stupid phrase) about the new SC. Which is really just the old StarCraft. While I understand their excitement to see a lot of people coming back all at once, I have three qualms about this, which doctors are going hate me for:
1. Fair-weather fans are a bunch of ninnies. The same people who jumped ship before would probably do it again. There is no loyalty. There is NO BLOOD SACRIFICE. They must repent and sacrifice their best oxen to the StarCraft gods (Flash and Jaedong. Actually, just Flash.) or their crops will wither and die to locust swarms. I mean literal locusts, not that fuckman SC2 unit.
Actually, I just want them to acknowledge, that on some level, they thought SC2 was going to be big, and they made a mistake by abandoning their favorite game ever. I know this will not happen, nor do I expect it to. Nobody owes me anything, and nobody owes Brood War anything. Also, people are notoriously stubborn about admitting they fucked up. "I have no regrets," they say, "I had fun playing SC2 and now I'm never going to play it ever again or speak of it ever again because it was just so much fun."
If I were an SC2 fan, I'd feel incredibly upset right now. People leaving the game left and right, big community figures migrating to Brood War and other games, and Blizzard giving little attention to the game. I actually have a lot of empathy for the SC2 fandom, but they still have a huge playerbase, so I think they'll be fine. It's not going to be as big as it once was, but they have a lot of loyal fans and players.
2. I don't trust Blizzard to ever do the right thing. SC:R has been surprising to me. I sort of expected Blizzard to fuck it up bad. Whenever there's something I hate in the 1.18 - 1.20 patches, they fix it up. I'm surprised by how well they're doing at making the game more modern, but I feel like they're still behind where MCA launcher was in terms of making the interface, interactions with chat, and observer mode better. I also really liked Shieldbattery. I feel horrible because Tec27 spent years building it, and then Blizzard just stepped on it. Not intentionally, I would presume... but you never know. I'd need some definite proof of that before making such an accusation.
What I can accuse Blizzard of doing is as follows: Suing KeSPA, forcing players to switch to SC2, constantly fucking with the balance of SC2 by releasing tons and tons of patches, never letting players get comfortable with the game by constantly changing shit, making nonsensical changes to the game, fucking up Titanfall, fucking up Diablo 3, fucking up World of WarCraft, not learning from their mistakes and tinkering with the balance in Overwatch, waiting 20 years to pay any attention to Brood War, terrible terrible damage, and fucking up the StarCraft lore badly.
SC:R, to me, seems like an attempt by Blizzard to corporatize the StarCraft scene, which was reborn after several top BW players returned and began playing large-scale tournaments. The SSLs were a sugohabnida by Sonic, but it wasn't until ASL1 and ASL2 that SC:BW was getting Blizzard's attention. The stream numbers were like Shakira's hips: they don't lie. Seeing thousands of people tuning in to watch Brood War streams basically told Blizzard that there was still a huge market, and that's when they decided to get involved. That's the only reason Remastered even got made.
Blizzard is making the right moves to monopolize the Brood War market (which sounds weird, because they own the intellectual property rights to the game) by killing off iCCup, Shieldbattery, and asserting greater control over the Fish server. It would be suicidal for Blizzard to shut the Fish server entirely, but I would surmise that Blizzard will attempt to phase it out of existence. With no more pirate servers, Blizzard will control the scene with an iron fist. Will that be a good thing or a bad thing? Only time will tell. I've seen them do a lot of good things so far, which was a pleasant surprise to me, but I can't help but to be suspicious of them.
3. "For the community" is a bullshit line I've heard many times in the past. Everyone (some people, not literally everyone) says that money needs to be pumped into the community in order for it to grow. This is not true.
To quote the late Christopher Wallace, a poet and musician, "Mo money, mo problems". What Christopher Wallace was expressing here was the fact that money creates new dilemmas that did not exist before. Whenever there is money involved, there is the potential for greed and abuse to ruin everything. If sponsors hold the money, they can dictate the terms of conduct by which people must follow. They reserve the right to not distribute funds to anyone for any reason. This means that contracts will come into play, and attorneys will be needed to run a goddamn StarCraft tournament. If the organizers hold the money, they may pocket the money for themselves, and there would be no legal recourse for the players to pursue.
I find some organizers to be unfairly authoritarian just because they CAN be. For example, TotalBiscuit banned people FOR LIFE from certain leagues because they offended him. Granted, some of the offense was legitimate, but for more corrupt organizer who is emotionally unstable, and power-trippy, I see a huge opening for abuse. People should not be able to do whatever they want and make us little peasants dance to their tune just because they have money. I have no patience for people who are manipulative, greedy, corrupt, or power-hungry.
There is a sort-of "don't rock the boat" mentality among some people on Teamliquid. I'm really not talking about anyone specific here. Just in some cases, people would rather avoid confrontation than to deal with a potential problem. I get it, though. I actually hate getting into confrontations because I get really mad, and I hate letting my emotions get that out-of-control. But a confrontation doesn't always have to painful. It can be just a discussion where there are disagreements, and two parties are just ironing out some differences of opinion. There don't need to be any insults hurled or anything like that. But even when a legit discussion is going down, there are people on the sidelines who suddenly decide they are super-righteous and go "This is silly to debate this. You guys are being ridiculous." REALLY?
As long as people are being tactful and empathetic, I don't see a problemo with having a debate. Some things just need to be said. Sometimes, people just have feelings that they need to get out in a constructive way. I know there's a temptation at times to get impatient and lash out during a disagreement, but that's human nature, and that's where the mods will handle it. If someone calls another person a "fuckman", the mods will stop that nonsense... unless their old bones ache and they can't hold up the wall that is holding back an ocean of shit, and then they let go and the wall falls and a tsunami of shit rushes over the landscape to the point where no one can properly moderate the insanity.
Discussion Questions:
Do you think eSports going mainstream will ruin eSports or make them better?
How do you feel about people leaving Brood War and then coming back? Are they opportunists or just uncertain about where they want to go?
Do you see Blizzard's increased influence over Brood War as an overall positive or negative?
How do you feel about disagreements/drama/debates on forums? Have you ever had a productive debate, or is it all a waste of time?
