Flash Stream Thread - Page 12

On February 16 2016 08:19 L_Master wrote:


I'm very optimistic on BW for the next couple of years. On a timescale more like 5-10 years...not so confident.

Why the concern? It's been 4 years now since BW was forced to give way to SC2. In that time, not one player that wasn't on a KeSPA team has had any sort of success. The scene is utterly dominated by the ex pros.

Quite simply, given their many years of intense practice and training they are still vastly better than any of the guys that never had that experience. Maybe guys working their butt off 10 hours a day could claw their way up to that level, but as I will talk about we will not see this happen.

Equally important, all the star power and interest lie with the ex pros, with the exception of the rare streaming personality like a Britney. Beyond that, people want to watch the former pros play because they have more memories and emotional ties to them and quite honestly the level of play is far superior. None of the players lacking significant KeSPA experience receive many viewers. Additionally, none of them are good enough to make an impact in leagues or to earn any amount of financial incentive through them. Bottom line take away is that their is absolutely no financial incentive available for 'rising amateurs', and their isn't really even a viewer or popularity incentive.

For the KR amateurs playing, they are playing almost purely for the same reason foreigners are; because they love SC. Which is totally fine, but given the skill chasm that already exists between former KeSPA pros and those lacking that experience, the gap only has a chance of being bridged with a professional caliber dedicated practice regimen. Given what we already know from the financial incentives for amateurs, their is no way to justify or support the 10+ hour days of focused practice necessary to rise to that level.

What this all means is that we will not see any player lacking KeSPA experience produce notable results in the scene. This leads to two (well three if you consider the deeply improbable) possible outcomes:

1) When most of the ex pros start leaving some of the amateur players can start being more competitive in the tournaments. However, with the disappearance of the star power and significant drop in talent level, viewership will decline and the overall interest will wane significantly.
2) The more optimistic outlook is that people truly love BW, and even when the KeSPA pros leave fans will still keep watching, despite the lack of their favorite personalities and inevitable drop in skill level. This will then support a low level BW scene that can continue to exist and be sustained by an overall lower level talent pool that allows new players on more reasonable practice regimens to rise into the ranks. BW scene will continue to exist in a healthy state, but never at the level of competition seen currently, let alone between 09-11.
3) Some unexpected significant twist comes that restores BW pro structure and results in a complete revival of a professional BW scene.

Without radical overhaul of the current system, I'm extremely confident that in the current environment we will not see any amateur achieve any form of consistent + decent (top 16) results in any Korean leagues. An amateur may get a hot hand and have a decent run in one league, but no one is going to appear that can routinely compete with the KeSPA trained pros.

The question then is where does BW go when their is a void left to be filled after the legends of KeSPA era progaming have left?

On February 15 2016 22:34 ArtOfBlack wrote:


NaDa gets 50k ...so FlaSh make it easy

On February 16 2016 17:17 WrathSCII wrote:


But if we see more BW tournaments and more sponsors for it, wouldn't that encourage a system (KeSPA-like) to foster talents to keep the scene going?

On February 17 2016 04:19 Dazed_Spy wrote:
In what sense was kespa ever useful to bw? In what sense would a cabal/monopoly ever be good for anything? Kespa didnt attract sponsors, they kept our rival leagues and made bizarre and arcane rules.

On February 16 2016 16:15 papaz wrote:
Flash playing BW is great! Awesome that he is going to stream, glhf Flash hope you destroy some nerds on stream

However this is terrible for Starcraft as such. For some reason SC2 wasn't the success we all wanted it to be.

Some didn't like the mechanics (simplification), some the units, others the maps.

Whatever the reason is I'm disappointed that Blizzard didn't at the very least gather all the pros to one game because as a spectator (I hardly play anymore) I love watching the pros and just seeing all the names in one tournament made me look forward to the weekend, getting some beer and pizza and watch starcraft all day.

That hype is now gone

On February 16 2016 16:15 papaz wrote:
Flash playing BW is great! Awesome that he is going to stream, glhf Flash hope you destroy some nerds on stream

However this is terrible for Starcraft as such. For some reason SC2 wasn't the success we all wanted it to be.

Some didn't like the mechanics (simplification), some the units, others the maps.

Whatever the reason is I'm disappointed that Blizzard didn't at the very least gather all the pros to one game because as a spectator (I hardly play anymore) I love watching the pros and just seeing all the names in one tournament made me look forward to the weekend, getting some beer and pizza and watch starcraft all day.

That hype is now gone

On February 17 2016 06:14 ProMeTheus112 wrote:

Blizzard attacked Starcraft for money. But attention and momentum shifting to BW is good for Starcraft, because it is the better game. If people remember Starcraft as being SC2, with the lesser depth, micro, strategy and everything that SC2 lacks compared to BW and the flaws it has like huge volatility etc, that is bad for Starcraft and bad for RTS. Whether RTS must remain a niche genre from now on, or make a revival at some point in the future, the reference for it must be the best game, and that is BW. Furthermore, it is imaginable that RTS lost momentum because of SC2. First of all because BW was the #1 and it got attacked by Blizzard to make way for SC2. Secondly because SC2 doesn't bring a lot of new things on the table and was never as much fun even for casual players to play online. If SC2 had been the amazing game it should have been, RTS would likely be in a much better spot right now. Because it is not, the best thing we can hope for is that BW is recognized and looked at as the reference for RTS. In My Opinion.

On February 17 2016 06:38 Jealous wrote:

I don't think your attacks on SC2 are quite fair, to be honest. I'm the last person you'd expect to support SC2 in any way, shape, or form, but you can't put it down the way you did in this post.

I agree that BW is the best RTS. However, not everyone shares that view, and that's largely due to nostalgia. There are still people out there who think that Total Annihilation, Age of Empires 2, C&C nameyourseriesnumber, or StarCraft 2 are the best game ever, and they aren't entirely wrong. Each game brings something to the table for a person to get hooked on and follow with zeal, just like we as BW fans have for BW. Every fanbase can bring up facts, figures, and opinions explaining why their game is the best, but I think ultimately it boils down to nostalgia factor for most adamant supporters.

SC2 did a lot of things well. Casual play was one of them. Casual play in Brood War was limited to noob games and UMS, and of the latter there was variety but nowhere near the scope of SC2. SC2 has a vast variety of UMS games, and I do think the leagues (Gold, Silver, etc.) are a great way of catering to the casual player. In Brood War, even on rated servers like Fish and ICCup, you could enter a D rank game and get womped by a B rank player who made a smurf to cool off or to stomp on noobs. I played a Play/Obs Fighting Spirit on ICCup yesterday, my opponent was D 1v1 C 2v2, so probably not a total noob given the circumstances (despite the new ladder system), and I got demolished by cohesive Zerg play after doing a mildly-successful non-standard build, as if this player really knew his stuff. BWChart revealed his apm to be 341 in a 12+ minute game. This rarely happens in a tiered, account-locked game like SC2. SC2 also created more user-friendly/nerfed/dumbed-down, whatever you want to call them, controls. So, I would say that it caters to the casual way more than BW, especially given the prohibitively high level of play in 1v1 BW on any relevant server at the moment. SC2 also brought "terrible, terrible damage," English streams, foreign regional tournaments, etc., which are all a huge part of the foreign/noob experience.

Was BW attacked by Blizzard? Yes. Could it be seen as a push for SC2? Yes. Were Blizzard operating completely within legal grounds and within reason? Yes. You cannot argue that Blizzard did not have the right to be compensated for its IP rights, and to promote StarCraft 2. What killed BW more than anything was the matchfixing scandal. After that, new top-level players were few, and viewer numbers were decreasing. While the game's meta was still developing (one look at the Fantasy vs. JangBi finals and Fantasy vs. Flash on Ground Zero is sufficient to showcase this), it was still on its decline even without Blizzard's IP demands.

I have been keeping tabs on SC2 here and there. I would watch a VOD or series once every 6 months for the past few years, just to see how the game is progressing. I can honestly say that SC2 is around the same level of "demanding" as Brood War now, from my low-level point of view. I have been around Brood War for more than half of my life, and that helps me appreciate the value of SC2. However, It does have its flaws, as you said. That is to be expected of a game that was still "in development" for years, and will be for the foreseeable patch future. I don't want to go too far into it, but I think part of the problem lies in the way Blizzard has handled the patching of the game, and now the WCS system, but that's another discussion altogether.

Long story short, BW was a fortunate fluke in the world of RTS in terms of balance, longevity, and mainstream exposure through Korea. It created eSports, more or less. To say that SC2 caused RTS to lose momentum is a leap, to say the least. SC2 IS RTS for the majority of people out there. SC2 made RTS relevant when most of the non-Korean world had forgotten about it. I believe that even without SC2, BW would have experienced a steady decline either way, eclipsed by MOBA and other PC gaming genres.

TL;DR: Don't blame SC2, this is an unnecessary and divisive attitude in the community. SC2 is a great game; it's just the commonly held belief by BW fans, such as you and I, that it is still inferior the the supreme RTS which is BW. SC2 shouldn't be blamed or looked down upon. Instead, we should continue to support BW in a vacuum.