I've been thinking about this for a while now and figured that I should blog my own thoughts on remastered. As some people may know, I lead BW coverage here on TeamLiquid and have for over 2 years now. Since then, I've had my hand in almost everything that has went out and I'd like to think that BW staff have done a pretty decent job keeping up with the ever changing world that BW is in. Keep in mind that these thoughts are mine alone.
When I came back to BW and started playing 1v1 and watching SRTs during the Sonic era, I quickly became a bigger fan of the game than even I anticipated. What was a small incursion into BW, a re-visitation of a game that I spent a long time in the past playing money maps in, became an invasion of a sort haha. Coming from Starcraft II and seeing competitive BW in a brand new light was something else. I was enthralled by the beauty of it all and followed the scene closely since.
From SRT and SSL to KSL, VNSL and now ASL, the scene has gradually grown since. BW even came back to OGN for 2 seasons in 2014/15 and even OGN was surprised by its reception. We've seen group selection ceremonies again, players playing their hearts out on new maps and to top things off, we even got a mini-proleague in ATB. BW was only going up and with the announcement of Starcraft Remastered, it was a time of extreme caution but it also seemed like the dev team and Blizzard as a whole finally understood BW's legacy.
Alas, I personally believe that remastered actually did a lot more harm to the scene than some folks realize. Sure, remastered gave the foreign scene a small boost. We had 2 LANs, more online tourneys running simultaneously than we've had in ages and we've had some new players/viewers who were interested in finally trying out the game or watching ASL. However, the cost was too great, too severe for the korean scene which was slowly building itself.
Since remastered went live, things haven't been as swell as anticipated. Remastered was released in a terrible state. There really can't be enough of an emphasis on this. Bugs, lag, simple commands or profiles not working and on top of that, SD graphics which were something that I love about BW seemed like a mere afterthought for the dev team. It's almost like no one thought that someone out there would like to continue playing with the older graphics but on a ladder or with MM. This doesn't even include some of the new errors that were introduced to a game that worked like a horse in the past. Nowadays, my computer steams if I try to play for even 15 minutes straight. I never had problems with 1.16.1, even when I was running other apps with it. Nevermind that the blizzard launcher is also drain that's honestly terrible and not needed imo.
The foreign base has gotten a bit split up between ICCup and the official servers while the Korean scene lost fish. Sure, they were not the greatest folks from what I hear but still a loss regardless. Some new, old and returning players quit due to the various bugs that were frustrating to deal with. Projects like Shieldbattery went on indefinite hiatus (still being worked on though!) and programs such as mcalauncher and canrep were now pretty useless to use which is ironic because these programs easily outdid what Blizzard was trying to implement by a milestone. How is it that Blizzard still hasn't managed to match or outdo some of this stuff is beyond me.
This doesn't even include the fact that some of the HD graphics such as marines and some of the death animations are totally different from the original and lack the same wow factor. Tanks blow up as if they were nukes, same goes for pylons etc...
Above all though, the biggest loss for the scene imo was our autonomy.
Previous tournaments ran without a hitch but with RM being released, we've lost Afreeca Team Battle which was a huge loss. Add in the fact that Blizzard is making it extremely difficult for Afreeca to run ASL and all of a sudden, things look extremely grim. The most important tournament for the current scene threatened by Blizzard, enough for their CEO to make a plea to the fans to help them out. Whether some find that distasteful is beyond the point here.
From my perspective, the Korean BW scene has taken a huge step back and that's extremely unfortunate. Our main tournament was threatened and it seems like Blizzard still doesn't seem to understand what the fans want or they are pretty terrible at finding ways to help their bottom line as well as make the fans happy. The dev team is trekking on and seem to be trying their best so props to them but close to half a year after the game was released, there are still ongoing issues.
Add in the fact that the Korean scene still hasn't recovered and has been affected quite severely and it's a nightmare. At this point, I keep wondering what'll happen next. In my mind, ATB is gone for good and there's no telling when ASL will be next as well. ASL5 should be starting sooner than later, considering they were accepting map submissions so I guess that's a positive note at least.
In the end, I don't believe that BW will ever die even if Blizzard took away ASL as well. We'll just go back to the old SRT days where there were a lot of smaller online tournaments. Slowly but surely, the scene will build itself up again but at what cost?
Well written! I'm one of those guys who came back with Remastered. For me it meant reviving the old love, as well as seeing other friends coming back to the game as well. However, my personal experience doesn't represent the community as a whole at all. So it's interesting to read about what's been going on and to more understand the deep frustration from those who've been around without the pause I've had.
I guess it's also easier for me as a low-level player to be content with the ladder, since I don't have to face laggy Koreans all the time. Although, I do wonder how severe the lag is at times. Sometimes I can play a game and maybe notice a little lag but nothing serious, just to have my opponent complain about it being unbearable lag. I assume the game runs equal for both in said game, but that we have very different criteria for what is unplayable lag or not?
Not sure where I'm going with this, but I guess the main point is that for me Remastered was the revival I'd always dreamed of. I tried coming back to BW a couple of times, but it was kinda hard when none of the good old friends were there. And then I realize that if I need friends to be here, I can't really complain about other people who need no lag, a certain amount of tournaments etc. in order to want to stay.
It'll be exciting to see how things evolve, though. Hoping for a future - maybe not a bright one, but a future we can build!
I remember watching the announcement of SC:R and just being absolutely a pessimist and killjoy. I said it was bad for Blizzard to have any influence over Fish, because Remastered could not and still cannot exist alongside pirate servers. People owning physical copies of Brood War allows those people to do things without having to go through Blizzard at all. Now, if any big competition occurs, they must go through Blizzard or risk legal repercussions. While Blizzard insisted that they had no intention of killing the Fish server, I have information that the opposite is the case. Because of that, I don't trust them at all.
What I do know is that the rule of US society is "Profits>People". When you take that into consideration, everything makes sense. ASL was doing really well, people were watching StarCraft, and streamers were getting crazy numbers of viewers for playing Brood War in 2016-2017. I believe that Blizzard there together a budget to develop the game from scratch. It's not the original Brood War code, which is why there are all these new bugs and weird things. I can't imagine the dev team being given adequate time to test the product and develop efficient webcode, but this wouldn't be the first time in the modern era of games that a AAA company has rushed an unfinished product to the market. Simply put, Blizzard pulled a half-assed product out of the trash, and said "Buy this." Everyone did, and now the market is saturated, which means Blizzard has made the money, and now is going to slash the budget to the Brood War team. They can't outright pull support for the game, because that would be a huge scandal, and they have to pretend to care about gamers.
Blizzard will absolutely not run a tournament. They probably would if they had any faith in their own game doing well, but a big tournament would only do well in Korea, where getting broadcasting rights would mean sharing profits with a company like OGN, and sharing money means LESS PROFITS!! Rather than dealing with other companies, they would rather cross their arms and say, "Well, you guys can dump your own money into your own tournaments, but we need to get a huge fucking cut of the money for doing nothing, and you have to put our logo on your shit, and also we're not going to work with certain sponsors." The Afreeca CEO is in an impossible situation where he has to get ASL5 going, but can't meet Blizzard's unreasonable demands. Absolutely no one in Korea wants to make a deal with Blizzard, because Blizzard is greedy, and the entities that want to facilitate a tournament want to make money themselves.
Blizzard does not care about this beautiful game, and millions of passionate fans. All they care about is the money, nothing else.
Edit: I wrote all that cynical shit, then I found out ASL5 is happening, lol. I'm a dumbass. Maybe I just needed to vent a little. Nowhere do I say "I hate this", and I wish Blizzard would stop being so fucky about supporting SC:R.
I was pessimistic about SC:R as well. I realized from the start that there was very little reason for Blizzard to put man hours into the game "in general". How would they make money from it?
I know they can take control away from Afreeca or ICCup to a certain degree... but still, how do you make money? Skins would be rather hated by Broodwar fans, meaning if they are forced and you cannot turn them off, people leave SC:R. In a way, ICCup, Afreeca and SC:R are competitors. And Gresham's law can be applied here. Good will drive out bad. Also, please note that even in time of release of SR:R Kor pros were asking Blizzard to fix issues. (Hell, I even got a bug that would not allow a High templar storm if it was "currently moving" for a while).
I am sad that this is the way it went but it was sort of expected since Blizzard has been making questionable decisions for a while now.
I was hyped as fuck about Remastered, I met a lot of old faces from back then again on B.Net. I didn't think a second before buying it. I didn't follow the pro scene after the last Proleague anymore, so I didn't know about what was at stake for the Koreans. And then I logged on for the first time and I was appalled: B.Net was uglier than B.Net 2.0, latency was trash, basic commands wouldn't work anymore, etc. I couldn't help but feel robbed.
I knew SC2 was dying, I mean I called it after I bought the game on release day and was let down maybe even worse than by Remastered lol. I think I played more games of Remastered than I ever did on SC2. Blizzard is just another EA nowadays and they couldn't give a fuck about what we want, as long as they can ride on the fame old Blizzard established with milestones like WC2, SC:BW, D2 or WC3. I never cared about WoW, MMOs just aren't my thing and paid subscription was and still is a no-go. D3 and SC2 were absolute shyte that had not much in common with their predecessors or the things that made them great and long lasting games and the business model behind both (marketplace in D3 and SC2 totaling in cost around like 150€ if bought on the respective release days) just reeked of cashgrab.
Blizzard, the company I revered in my youth and actively promoted to all my friends who cared about gaming, is dead to me and I doubt they can come back from that grave. For all I care they can stay there and rot. Fuck you Blizzard.
I'm in a similar boat to you. I mainly played money and UMS maps. I finally started doing 1v1 games when SC2 came out. With ASL 1 on wards I really got into the Brood War competitive scene. Been loving it ever since.
Shame ASL has had trouble getting tourneys started up. ATB not up and running anymore is a shame. I'd love to see it back.
The foreign base has gotten a bit split up between ICCup and the official servers while the Korean scene lost fish. Sure, they were not the greatest folks from what I hear but still a loss regardless. Some new, old and returning players quit due to the various bugs that were frustrating to deal with.
This part pretty much sums up my thoughts. Remastered could have been great if the release would have not been rushed. There were many known issues already during the beta testing period. Delaying the release date to make the game playable could have been a good idea. Anyways I'm still a fan and I'm waiting for the next ASL.
I personally wasn't too hyped by the release of SCR; my lack of commentary on it is mostly because I couldn't really be drawn back into it in the first place. At best it could serve to be the very same as before, at worst it would bring all of the demerits of Bnet 2.0 back to an old game that the community finally managed to create a workable patch job on top of. Any idea of reviving the scene and making it return to some semblance of former glory was a dead-on-arrival idea; I watched how the community slowly came apart and I saw no sign that that could ever be reversed. As unfortunate as it is, the meager community-driven fandom was really about the peak of what you could expect post-Kespa, and even that showed clear signs of stagnation if not full-out decline.
I have to say that the last time I actually enjoyed watching or playing BW was this game:
That was the last game before the hybrid proleague started and the competitive spirit of BW evaporated (both in individual and team leagues), making everything after it seem half-hearted and unenjoyable. It was trending that way as the shit-flinging contests with Blizzard killed off one team after another (and MBC), but that was really the turning point after which things just straight-up sucked. I can't really say I've consistently enjoyed any BW since then, only occasional bits and pieces in a sea of middling games. That vague, though definitely real, decline is not something Blizzard can possibly fix, but they sure as hell could kill off the tiny excuse for a scene that BW still had.
Well said, thank you for writing this. I remember watching the ASL3 finals and I was literally in tears because it felt like the BW pro scene was finally coming back. I may be overly cynical and negative but I'm really afraid that SC:R is going to kill it for good. Watching ASL4 (the first SC:R tournament), there was just something off about it, something was missing. The finals was sparsely attended, and so many people online were blaming Flash and saying he was ruining the pro scene by being too boring and dominant. I don't think that is true at all... when in the past have people stopped watching BW because a player was too good? In my mind, I think SC:R has had a major dampening effect on people's enthusiasm (except those who are only attracted temporarily to what is shiny and new). I hope I am wrong and that ASL5 will recapture the magic. But as a viewer, I really wish I could swap to the old graphics instead of this 3D stuff where it's hard to even distinguish a marine from a medic.
Best thing about remastered was the graphics and blizz didn't even do them, they were outsourced to some Chinese studio.The code and bnet stuff was basically in beta when they released fully back in August.
Must have been pressured by higher up executives like Morhaime to release early when it should have been announced later like at Blizzcon just gone and released for 20th anniversary next month.
If they had released 2v2 ladder off the bat without the bugs and bad lag we could have gotten a year or two out of it, there is no way a playerbase to support that anymore although 3v3 ladder may work depending on whether koreans use it or stick to custom lobbies.
It is infuriating to see just how careless Blizzard is being with SC:R... I agree that the release of Remastered pretty much hurt the BW scene more than it helped it. I am hoping that Blizzard will stop screwing up so much and really try hard to preserve what's left of the BW scene. And I hope they do this especially for South Korea since SK is the reason why they had so much success with BW in the first place.
DON'T SCREW OVER THE SCENE AND THE COMMUNITY THAT BROUGHT YOU GUYS SO MUCH FAME AND FORTUNE!
Tragic about shieldbattery, I'll give you that. I wasn't going to play Shieldbattery myself though. The official Blizzard release is really gonna bring the greatest quantity of original fans back to the game. I probably would not have returned if there had not been a Blizzard release.
I'm getting a lot out of it so far. It's an opportunity to use programming skills I didn't have in 2001. Maybe you're feeling prematurely panicky. SC:RE could turn out well.
Hopefully we'll get a commercial with the Pyeongchang games. This is the best way to get SC1 / BW players active for a short time. You can't do more than that outside of bounds.
I'm back, anyway.
can't knock the hustle
e: really miss the gambling scene of the earliy millenium. if there were more crypto or legislation reversal we could get something like what LP has going on with Daut.
SCBW was really "dark net financially motivated" is probably the phraseology we'd apply in the modern situation.
This is written from a perspective that focusses on Korea. I stopped following these kind of events with the end of the last OSL and even before mostly just tuned in whenever I had time. Therefore, I don't care much what's going on. Compared to 2005 or some other ancient year, I could still tune in any kind of Afreeca stream and watch if only I wanted to. So, for me personally, nothing really changed much there.
However, when it comes to foreign players, especially old friends and new faces, Remastered did bring a lot of them back or introduced them into a bug-infested server. Point is, whenever such a re-activation wave started (thinking of GIGA Grandslam ladders, TSL 1 Ladder phase, or lastly SCII WoL Beta), half of the "I'm such a huge fan, finally BW is rising bla bla" people would leave anyway. What's surprising is how many of the (re)activated people still stick around for longer than anticipated. Not only that, but the overall positivity towards each other is just mind blowing. I read a ton of positive opinions about ICCup from people that wrote me or fellow colleagues long-ass PMs, in which they either used very personal insults or even threatened with some kind of violence (you know, angry-12-year-nerd shit), stating they'd miss the server. Oh really. Now you don't get any of that shit, regardless of your choices, but always and constantly constructive feedback. A dream. Anyway, you also seem to underestimate the idiocy of the foreign players splitting between ICCup and FISH. Even if Shieldbattery would have been released in a dream state (not throwing accusations), there'd been dozends of people having shit on it for the most ridiculous reasons, some sticking to either FISH or ICCup, with the scene slowly drifting apart, leaving just Koreans with their own thing (obviously + China, but that's another story entirely).
Speaking of ICCup, the server had to die somewhen (due to no tech support with the admins trying to do what they possibly could on their own), with FISH not being a good alternative in many aspects, imo most importantly, because their admins never gave a shit about foreigners and would not have changed their opinion. Unless Shield Battery would have re-united the scene with giantic, uberenormous success, things for active players would have looked dire.
I grant you, Blizzard did their usual shit and they'll probably end up not doing 25% of what they promised, but we have something to work with that has a somewhat united player base and no option / split over various different pirate servers. I have the belief that there'll be enough dedicated fans, who'll help to fix and create new contet - projects like starlogg, RTL, SK-TL, this American league with the name I forgotten, Clash for Char and ZZZero.o are indicators that this is already happening. In contrast to before, I could see this to be true for the most part:
"We're a community of geniuses because we've found how to extract 95% of the feeling of doing something amazing without actually doing anything." -- Chill
This probably reads more like an accusation, when it really isn't. People who played, covered and organised (or simply watched, posted or lurked constantly) between 2010 and 2017 weren't doing things wrong (not that anyone else did either), but it the foreign community as whole started to run dry. This doesn't seem to be the case anymore, therefore I'm really fine with things for the moment and can't really share your opinion on the topic at hand.
Message to Blizzard: Just leave us alone. We've been doing this for years without you guys. And it was fine. Then you come back to "help" and look what happens. If you're going to try to help, then take community feedback. Look at what we want and implement it. Don't just run off on your own thing.
Unfortunately true... Lost a lot of guys that planned to come back but after the crappy state of the game they quit again. Actually i am still having technical trouble with the game (error 6:10) . I never had that problem with any other version of the game (1.16.1 and previous).
For those that wanted to come back with SCR, tell me this much: what actually would have changed about the experience that would make a game you thought wasn’t worth playing before (even if you liked it) suddenly worth playing again? The brief but inevitably temporary boost in player count? Promises of a more efficient match-making system? Just plain shininess? I just don’t see why it wouldn’t really be exactly the same experience.
On February 10 2018 23:49 LegalLord wrote: For those that wanted to come back with SCR, tell me this much: what actually would have changed about the experience that would make a game you thought wasn’t worth playing before (even if you liked it) suddenly worth playing again? The brief but inevitably temporary boost in player count? Promises of a more efficient match-making system? Just plain shininess? I just don’t see why it wouldn’t really be exactly the same experience.
My main reasons were: 1. meeting old bnet/clan friends 2. 16 : 9 resolution support 3. 2on2 matchmaking 4. new graphics
On February 10 2018 23:49 LegalLord wrote: For those that wanted to come back with SCR, tell me this much: what actually would have changed about the experience that would make a game you thought wasn’t worth playing before (even if you liked it) suddenly worth playing again? The brief but inevitably temporary boost in player count? Promises of a more efficient match-making system? Just plain shininess? I just don’t see why it wouldn’t really be exactly the same experience.
I was playing iccup before SCR released, kind of just got it into again by chance and then SCR released. Nothing has really changed, I just want to play BW. SCR MMR is fun and interesting. The release was awfully executed, that we can never get back / fix. The community is still going with new tournaments, and that's mostly what matters.
EPT
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