Interview: General Mengsk

Please introduce yourself. Who are you and what do you do? (Name, Age, Position at broodwar.de)

I'm Andreas, better known as General Mengsk, 30 years old and Webmaster / Editor in Charge at broodwar.de.


Webmaster is a very vague word, especially when broodwar.de is discussed. Can you explain what the position does mean in reality and what you actually did and still do?


Of course. Usually the term Webmaster is associated with more technical aspects. Naturally, this part of the job does matter, but since we're not only part but also the founding site of the larger ingame-Network [ E/N: ingame hosts a bunch of gaming related pages, e.g. indiablo ], I'm not forced to work on all technical aspects. The hosting and finances – namely advertisment – as well as a certain coding frame work (e.g. CMS, forum software) is taken care of by the network. Everything else we do on our site. As Webmaster I am the person in charge on the level of broodwar.de alone. I coordinate the the staff, write news and articles, make decisions regarding the structure and administratoin of the forums and work on the local implementation of code. This, for example, means the specific adaption of functions for our site like the presentation of news, but also the developement and improvement of entire scripts for things like the clan league or our cup system. The offers an ample scope, which in turn means a lot of work, but also a lot of variety as well.

Obviously this can't be done on my own, but in cooperation with all other staff members. And even with me theoretically holding the highest position on the site, I do not make decisions on my own, but in reality come to an agreement with the entire group of staff members; at the end of the day we're working with volunteers.


That sounds like a rather complex job. When did you start with your work exactly? Directly after playing, or did it take some years for you to find that position?


Indeed, it took a while. If I remember correctly, I did only learn about StarCraft around 2000 from a friend of mine. Back then we only had a modem at home and it was quite expensive to just dial up to the internet. Hence, I did not start out on Battle.net, but played the campaigns and later made own scenarios and maps. To watch and read things about StarCraft online was an exception and only became a more regular thing for me around the middle of 2001. Before I started to create a – to this day unfinished – campaign featuring more than 90 missions by abusing a ton of tricks in the editor.

2002 we had DSL [high speed internet] and ever since I was regularly online. My start (and already every now and then in 2001) I was mostly involved in the mapping- and modding scene, especially Camelot Systems was the platform to visit in regards to StarCraft-Moddingtools. Then I started to develope their tools futher to create modifications for the mapping editor. This way the StarCraft X-tra Editor (SCXE) was created, a set of editormods, that allowed to get more out of the standard editor – for example to manipulate the placement of buildings or to adjust the number of upgradelevels. The trick was that every map done with this tool were still playable with the standard version of Brood War – so without the requirement of using a mod – which meant you could share the map with anyone.

Via way of mapping and modding I started to visit broodwar.de's forums. Back then there was a curiosity: Moderators could promote other users to moderators. Thanks to this I suddenly, without a warning, became a moderator in the conversion-forum, which was the old name of the modding forum. Not much later the leader of the map section retired and I showed interested in the open vacancy. So I ended up on that position towards the end of 2002. In march 2003 the webmaster retired and suggested me as replacement. This came as a bit of a surprise and I wasn't entirely thrilled about it, as I had to write my final high school exams [the German Abitur] only a few days later. I still took that job and ever since hold that position.


Not many people might associate you with maps and mods. You already mentioned the software – what else did you develope for that purpose? Are there other related maps/projects, which are equally unknown to the public?


Aside from the SCXE editor not much of my work is known, I did not publish that much. The SCXE was used by a lot more people than just the fun- and campaign mappers, meaning also for tournaments, however. I went as far as modding allowed with SCXE, whereas ScmDraft by Suicuial Insanity wrote a completely new editor.

The older Brood War Veterans might perhaps know my RPG map „Die vergessene Welt von Uridas“ [the lost world of Uridas], which I published back then. Also, the start of my campaign „Ultra-Galaxis-Epos“ I did publish, but only insiders might have played that. Aside from that a few minor things could be mentioned, like the updates of the FreezeTag-Funmap or slight changes of Random Fight. I made less and less maps, since time was simply missing. The entire eSports world was news to me. Suddenly I did not only have one section to supverize, but an entire page. So I started to write articles, always trying to focus on the story when I had time. Once my PHP knowledge allowed it, I started to work on the technical framework of the page. Today's clan league script for BWCL and SC2CL, which was started by a group of coders but was left alone for long, I finished. Since the last re-design for the release of Heart of the Swarm there's also a new page code frame work [I sincerely hope that's the word here], which was made by me. This would be two relatively known examples, but that's already coding.


That allows us to switch to the next topic: The BWCL. The league was one of the biggest ever and existed longer than many of the international alternatives like the WGTCL. How did that league develope, what did you contribute to it? What were your personal highlights of more than a decade of BWCL?


BWCL was established in 2001, which means long before I was really active on broodwar.de, so I can't really say much in regards of its foundation. Since I never played in a more competitive clan, I never really did participate in the league myself. My StarCraft skills are not worth speaking of anyway. [He did beat a Masters SCII players in the WoL Beta with a Cannon Rush in a 3v3 game though]

BWCL was a project of broodwar.de since the beginning, first German only, later also available in English. As section it was one of our most interesting ones and over the years one of our top sellers. Because the requirements for the clanleague were rather special, the framework was never located or administrated by the network, but by the site. The code did change time and time again over the years, which caused some headaches in the long run. The last implementation prior to today's one was still written in perl, which meant an increasing amount of problems, because nobody was left who really did know the code or could understand the most frequent bugs. A few coders started to re-write the clan league with PHP and add a lot of features – an ambitious project.The entire thing was object orientated [I have no idea whatsoever] and should not only support multiple squads, but also multiple games. Sadly, most coders retired because of age – that was around 2008/2009. Since the bug pressured us more and more to re-work the old BWCL script, I finished it on my own. It turned out to be a lot of extra work, due to the requirements growing larger and larger. In the end it did work out and the BWCL could successfully migrate. The script was so powerful, that we could use it to run the SC2CL with it as well.

In regards to sporting highlights I'm probably the wrong person to ask, but I really did enjoy that we sometimes managed to attract sponsors for BWCL and SC2CL. That's really hard to pull of for a project run by volunteers only – that's why I want to take the opportunity to thank all of those, who administrated the clan league and turned out to be realiable coworkers. Naturally, also a thanks goes out to all interantional teams who participated. It's always great to experience and to see how something, which you contributed to as a person, suddenly attracts StarCraft-Fans world wide.


Let's move on. The page [broodwar.de] offered a lot more under your supervision other than leagues and forums – VODs, cooking recipies [Korean stuff mostly], a giant replay database, map downloads etc. Are there features your especially proud of?


That's a good question. I think the Beginner's Help section should be mentioned, which we indeed only offered in today's form [an own dedicated server, guides, etc] after the announce of StarCraft II, but which also enabled a lot of interested people a good start into Brood War. Also, our eSports coverage used to be tremendous in our prime. However, stuff like that depends on having willing team of helpers available. If that's the case a project is successful, if not it the section dies. That's a trend which caused major problem in the past years – but which also seems to be a general trend, other pages using volunteers experience. A personal highlight for me is still our story section. The StarCraft storyline always fascinated me and we, without a doubt, do have the best content regarding this topic. Prior to Heart of the Swarm I took the time to write articles about all three races, summarizing their story, including information from the handbooks, the novels and the games. Obviously, you can't go into detail, but it allows a more global view of the central aspects. If you do not know these articles and if you do speak German, I suggest you read them.


For StarCraft II the Deutschlandpokal has to be mentioned. For the tournament page we achieved to attract basically the German who-is-who. It took a lot of preparation for each tournament, but thanks to the complex, yet sensible qualification system, it paid off.


For Brood War we did have the BW4eVeR Kerrigan Cup (BKC), which even offered prizes in 2007. This was a classic, weekly tournament, which is more or less standard stuff in SCII and other games. However, back then they presented something extraordinary and they did feature top players.


Leaving broodwar.de's context – you also took part in the organization of the German WCGs. What did you do there? And related to that: The WCG was critized a lot – justified so?


Indeed, I worked as admin at the latest stages of the German qualifications. I came to that position, because two of my colleagues from the broodwar.de staff – Justafanatic and Disruptor – worked there; one of these two I knew for a long time, from childhood actually. Because of that I had the opportunity to learn more about the internal processes of the German WCG organisation. As tournament admins the three of us (Justy, Disruptor and me) we only could influence the concrete administration of the final rounds, in which the last 16 players fought for the three places, which would actually win a spot at the global finals.

The criticism, which was voiced frequently, for example the composition of the qualifying spots (games), was justified. However, if you have insights the situation presents itself to be more complex, than you might have thought as external observer. You have to keep in mind that eSports in Germany isn't that established and hence it's not easy to find investors/sponsors. Just think of the ghastly „killer games“ discussions. The WCG therefore were always a huge compromise between wishes of sponsors, who wanted to see their current games presented. Other than today Blizzard didn't put itself out there financially, which resulted in other sponsor's games having more money, although not having exactly a lot of eSports potential. Aside from that, streaming as technology and opportunity was massively underestimated – there was only one stream showing all games in rotation. However, this was a question of finances as well, as providers like Twitch.tv and related pioneers were not around. This in turn meant you had to pay costs for streaming servers on your own, which was simply enormous amounts of money for videos. So, even with the criticism having its justification, there simply often wasn't a rational solution for problems in terms of organisation and implementation. Especially in Germany the risk capital was missing.

As admin at the tournament you just try to get the maximum out of the situatoin. This, for example, meant detailed text coverage and timely uploading of replays to broodwar.de if we couldn't offer a permanent stream.


Since you dropped Blizzard's name – you also had contact to the publisher. Not only once StarCraft II was announced, but also before. Events like Sandlot come to mind. What are your impressions of Blizzard? Did the relationship change? Did you experience the exchange more positvely or negatively?


Personally, I only had regular contact with Blizzard after the announcement of StarCraft II; Sandlot was just a small event and wasn't managed by those employees, who later were responsible for the SCII community exchange. Over the years the relationship with Blizzard changes naturally, partly because you got to know each other, party because the SCII community is a lot bigger and complex than the Brood War community. My impression is rather positive [some from of polite understatement, it actually means very positive] all in all. That doesn't mean I appreciate every decision. I always was a harsh critic of the Battle.net 2.0 strategy and I never held back my opinion. I was there at the interview myself, when Pardo explain to the surprise of all, that no LAN Mode was planned for the new Battle.net.

Aside from everything else, it's very positive that you always get invitations to events regardless of your coverage. After articles like „Der Sündenfall“ [Fall of Mankind; lengthy article about KeSPA and Blizzard fighting for power over the eSports market in South Korea with tons of valueable insights] I never felt any negative impacts or anything. I also share the negative stereotypes people have about developers like Dustin Bowder. I conducted many interviews with him and I have witnessed, over and over again, that they know of problems and try to improve the situation. The developers themselves were always glad if someone with knowledge asked questions, instead of demanding answers about a fourth race.


Another positive mention is that Blizzard takes feedback seriously. There always were suggestions from our articles, which later got implemented. Obviously, it's not as if we were the only ones to suggest a thing, but that a variety of sources had the same thing in mind. However, you do see and do know of concrete details which later got changed – which shows the community was heard.


What makes things complicated ist he time scale. Blizzard needs time for developement and internal tests. This means, while they work on a task, the community already pointed more problems out: With the new system in which chat channels missed at first, Blizzard tried to gain full control, especially in the context of third party servers like ICCup, which enabled software pirates to play online. From a human and economical standpoint it is understandable, but with full control some form of dynamic was lost, which usually was caused by the communities ability to autonomously develope on its own. As consequence some things were just not there and tons of mappers and casuals were lost right from the start [beginning of SCII]. That's in some way a birth defect still effecting us today. That's something I do critize, but aside from that my personal experiences with Blizzard remain rather positive. The phenomeneon, that games are considered to be boring, does depend on the feedback itself. There was a ton of feedback, but the difficulty was to smartly filter it. For someone who doesn't play well, it's hard to judge if a concern of a player makes sense or not. That's something Blizzard had to spend some effort on to learn probably. It was tried to find an objective way by using statistical figures, but even that method has downsides, as could be seen since the Heart of the Swarm release.


Let's try to compare – how was the cooepration with other pages before SCII? Was bw.de isolated for a long time, or were there joint ventures? Did this change with SCII?


Before StarCraft II, broodwar.de was the only remaining German StarCraft page for a long time. If you want to call that isolated is a question of how to define isolated. For example, the already mentioned BKC was a shared project of brutkrieg.de, before that page went offline.StarCraft II definitely meant more competition in the German speaking area. To cooperate with the competitors is more often rather difficult, due to the target audience [interests] overlapping and the question arising if one side would gain greater profits than the other.

It's easier if tasks can be clearly divided, for example that we host a tournament and another page gives us a caster – or the other way round. Such things happened more frequently since StarCraft II and it can work out just fine, if the communication is right and the personal level suits everyone. For a page with volunteers it's a little harder, as you need reliable and long term contacts. To make sure that the persons involved really do talk about concrete plans, you need to have staff members from the correct sections present; however, that's where we have a high fluctuation personell wise. If someone is a long term member it still works out well.

Where we always have a high level of solidarity and cooperation is during press tours. There were events for Wings of Liberty and Heart of the Swarm, to which representatives of gaming magazines and web pages were invited. If you attented a press conference [shared interview], it basically wasn't a problem to exchange notes or photos. That's mostly because these were held for multiple countries in one go. If I conducted an interview with a developer together with a Polish and US American colleague, we did afterwards address different target groups. Therefore there's no conflict of interest. I really did appreciate the few days of retention period, which gave you enough time to work out content in peace. If such a period isn't set, you'll always face the problem that Americans already report news, while you yourself are trapped on the flight back from California. So yes, the level cooperation did increase after StarCraft II, since there are simply more opportunities to exchange.


Broodwar.de does attract a very special kind of userbase and the community does know each other rather well. Do you think that we're about to face some sort of problem due to the usership changing age- and interestwise? Or phrased differently, how did the feedback from the users change of time?


We're already past this generation conflict. It reached its climax after the start of the Wings of Liberty Beta. Since there were no chat channels, a lot of people invaded our forums, which did not really amsue the veterans. That made times hard for our moderators for a bit. However, new users are not bad by any means, quite the opposite, they brought new energy and we could recruit new staff members. I do realize myself that I have less time for work than I used to have, therefore fan pages always do need new blood. This has decreased in the past year and we're not the only ones to notice. Permanent volunteer work is not in anymore, people mostly offer help in short lived projects, which they're interested in but don't agree to stay for more time intensive work. Sadly, that hits a page like ours especially hard.

The conflict was raging in its prime not that much between the age groups by the way. More dramatic were the skirmishes between veterans and rookies of the RTS genre, who got in each others faces a lot. After a few months this all died down, partly, since we moderated more strictly, partly because the player themselves earned some experience, and of course because many casuals dropped out, as previously mentioned. The amount of feedback hence decreased, but the few who still discuss do so on an acceptable level.


That our forum still offers themed forums aside from StarCraft, and that they're used by a bigger group of ex-players, I see as strength of the page. The users do like the community and want to stay in touch, even though they only play StarCraft seldomly or not at all. That's something special and also means we have a potentially interested audience. Of course, there are also those who never played Brood War or SCII and only stick around because of our forum culture, but that mixes things up. However, it did not make my job as webmaster any easier, since it was difficult to cater the huge diversity of interests.


Something else you might want to consider when it comes to the younger generation is the question of which communication platforms to use. In the past users did read news by default, once they typed broodwar.de into their browser's adress bar. Today there are some users, who never really navigates to a page on purpose, but clicks some links. That causes a lot of work, but it's no way around doing it, if you want to gain a significant amount of readers for your articles.

Let's stay with the community for a moment – are there some extraordinary hilarious, emberassing or remarkable stories, which make broodwar.de special?


Yes of course, but the best ones we're not allowed to tell. Well, regardless, I did get to know a ton of people via broodwar.de and not online only. The past staff meetings and the christmas party for the network are one splendid way to get a face to face with people you'd otherwise only identify as online names. These meetings alone offer some stories, yet I don't want to bother people with it. It also involves a lot of insiders, so stories are that much funnier if you actually understand them.

Personally, one of the remarkable events was the German Grand Finals of the WCG in Cologne. Despite of everything being dumped on eSports before 2010 in Germany, it's great to have had such an event around here. At the evening before the Grand Finals there was a large party hosted and some of the Koreans had a little too much to drink. I think at some point the managers intervened, but you simply couldn't help but see what the consequences meant during next day's final. There also was some heated discussions behind the scene because of that.

There were always a lot of interesting travels and experiences. Eventually, the job did earn me some invitations from Blizzard and enabled me to not only fly to California, but also once to Shanghai. That was definitely an experience. Actually, I do remember some funny story: I do not mean the ones with the casters, who got scammed by a cab driver, that story is known. At the last evening after the tournament in Shanghai every of the fan page representatives went to out to get something to eat. We had some sort of fondue, a boiling sauce, in which you could dip several pieces of... - meat, tofu, rice, salad and other ingridients – of course using chop sticks. Well, due to the hot steam above the bowl a lot of things went missing. Might not sound too spectacular, but it was some fun evening at the end of the Eurasian continent, something I would not have experienced without broodwar.de.


Now the ghastly side of organizing. There were (and still are) sadly cheating scandals and notrious hackers. How hard was it for broodwar.de to handle these and what's your personal stance as organizer?


The trouble these things caused is one of the most annoying things I had to encounter in the past decade. Especially the eternal arguements revolving Selector did cause tons of problems. Personally, I do think hacking is simply unfair. It is – especially during tournaments – cheating [fraudulent] and it should never have a place within the eSports scene. However, you do have the problem of proofing fraudulent behaviour and the question if you want to give them another chance. These were the questions which tormented our staff multiple times, most times when players were concerned who could really do well without hacks. For example, the German admins obviously wanted the strongest player to play for our team, yet you can't have such persons as the shining star of a national team. Due to the number of high class players being limited, this naturally caused a conflict of interest, since the German Team Leaders were also members of the broodwar.de staff, and the German Team was a section of broodwar.de as well.

I'm really happy this didn't matter in StarCraft II so far, yet the national teams do not matter that much anymore either. Yet, it remains a touchy topic, it's something teams might be destroyed by. It's something hackers probably don't consider at all. The seemingly small mistake, or „fun“ as many in Brood War wanted to call it if it happened outside of competitive leagues, wasn't one. Especially in cases in which hacks were used outside of leagues two worlds collided: People who just wanted to play for fun and anonymously versus people who took it seriously and did take responsibility, because they did not use smurfs. That's a fatal combination with a lot of negative potential. I do not plead for forcing private data being tied to accounts online, yet the asymmetric character should be considered, before handling hack scandals.


We're slowly approaching the end of the interview. I do recall that you were the manager of a 30-50 man team handling a multitude of tasks. We already mentioned the small internal conflicts – do you want to share some tipps to help out hobby organizers?


Keeping the overview is not easy, indeed. You have to let go of the idea that you could handle everything on your own. It's good to know what skillsa re needed to handle this or that task, but de-facto, you never have enough time to fully commit to detail work. Therefore you need fixed contact persons for large projects, who in turn have an eye on their section and can report back. You need to just rely on their expertise.

Aside from that decisions should not be done on your own, but you should also not just let go of an idea. If you have an idea, discuss it. If you don't have a solution yet, collect ideas. There's no correct way, but as „boss“ it's always important to know where you're at currently and to utilize this information to plan ahead and determine what else is missing. Once there are concrete tasks, it's important to give a good example. It's also helping to not talk about stuff you don't know. I did gather experience in a large amount of environments: moderation, tournament administration, writing news and lengthy articles. With experience it's easier to recognize upcoming problems or how to teach new staff members.

Another thing is quite important: Do never try to work on everything at once, especially not when it comes to volunteer work! This eventually ends with nothing being finished at all. Start at one point and then try to find out if you can do it. Then think if you can continue the work. If you can't, you might be highly active one day, but suffer a burn out the next. Better only do one or two things, as long as you can do them over a longer period of time. I want to stress this out, since it doesn't always work out for broodwar.de.


Well, thanks for the interview! Any last words?


Thank you for listening and a huge thank you to all, who helped us at inStarcraft.de / broodwar.de. Let's hope we will be sharing some nice experiences in the future!