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Hey gang.
So, like many of you, I enjoy both Brood War and Starcraft 2 equally. Both totally have their merits, but that's not what this is about.
I'm finding it strange that, with Serral winning WCS, there's an article up the next day about him winning, and a nice, succint writeup.
However, for FlaSh winning his FOURTH ASL, there's barely any content on the site about it.
Is there any reason for this? I mean, if a writer is writing one of those big amazing articles about FlaSh, then that'd be totally plausable, but I find it strange that SC2 gets a LOT more play on here than Brood War. I'm not complaining, I just wondered if anyone could shed a little light
Thanks!
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Well BigFan recently stepped down as the BW Editor-in-Chief, and that has affected the level of content on the BW side.
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I hope Ty2 writes occasional content. I like that he is a decent Zerg. That is pretty rare.
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Smaller community as far as I know. TL turned into a 90% SC2 site for a few years and we lost a lot of cool posters (either moved on to sc2, some other game, or just gave up on the forum). I think there's not as much interest among BW players for reports like that anyway, although when the site was larger there were lots of articles and people replied to them. I don't know the stats of how many people post in BW now vs 15 years ago, but it's probably pretty depressing.
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To be fair, Flash winning a BW tournament and Serral winning a foreigner WCS tournament are about equally unsurprising.
To answer OP's original question, yeah, the BW community is just quite a bit smaller and more self-driven. I think most would agree that nobody's expecting to bring a bunch of new viewership back into BW, and all the consistent viewers will be hyped/ready to watch regardless of whether there are celebratory articles, so there's much less incentive. At least we still get previews and short recaps within the previews, I honestly enjoy those a ton and appreciate every bit we get 
Mod Edit: Removed Nuked Quote
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There's a lot more money flowing into SC2 via tournaments at the moment compared to BW. I think that's the reason that there's more focus on SC2 from TL's side.
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This does seem a bit unfair, they have to rely on this one weekend's worth of traffic for the circuit event, and it's mostly just a summary/spoiler article. ASL arguably gets better preview posts than GSL let alone circuit events on a regular basis, so they probably do have something bigger planned than just a summary post of Flash's 4th and final title. But other than not briefly summarizing a 4-0 final on the front page, ASL was up there pretty much the rest of the time otherwise.
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United Kingdom12025 Posts
The BW team needs more writers and staff and I believe if you're interested in contributing they'll be happy to talk to you about it!
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United States10342 Posts
I'll make a comment just to have transparency with how writing works a bit. We all contribute out time accordingly based upon what we have to do in real life. Some people are too busy, some people end up leaving or taking a hiatus, it just happens. Not everyone can always been putting in their max time writing articles, it doesn't put food on the table sadly and there are just other things that are important to do with our lives.
A few years ago, I want to say like 2016-2017, we had a lot of articles flying out and content that was pretty solid. Led by Bigfan, I would say the main core of writers was Bisudagger, myself, Blind-Rawr, cerberus, and amazingxkcd. Graphics of course was/is still v1. I'd say for the most part we did a decent job of letting the writers write, and Bigfan would edit where he saw fit. Good system.
As time takes it's toll on all of us, things change. BD started a family and had lildagger, cerb I believe focused on school/employment (haven't heard from him in a while tbh), xkcd... thing's didn't work out between TL and him anymore, I went to law school, and BR is taking a step back from writing for the most part. Bigfan also stepped down from EiC because he's a dodger.
Our current writing staff is EsportsJohn as EiC, and writer team being Ziggy, Taardad, and Ty2. Ryan aka Frudgey doing an excellent job with video recaps, and then BR/BD very infrequently stepping in sometimes if the team needs help. As you can see, we went from 5 main writers who actually would usually fight over what articles to write, especially during group stages, to now 3 writers with 2 part timers. We also went from mainly only covering ASL up to ASL5, to covering the ASL, KSL, and BSL. When we only did the ASL, we had time to really sit down and cover a tournament in depth with map analysis, exclusive tournament power ranking, etc. Now our resources are spread thin, it's harder to get everyone to constantly put in work to the staff especially once writing starts becoming more of a job/duty rather than a hobby/fun. I know that writer burnout is really hit me hard.
This is why, as much shit as I get, I stress people should contribute more to the community via article writing. It's why when people start shitting on our writers that I get overly defensive because we don't have many to start, and losing any writer is always difficult. This is a community site, we're always looking for more helpers and writers, and we'll take anyone who has a passion or interest in creating content to keep this section of TLnet moving.
TL:DR, people are busier now, the team is smaller, and there's more content out there so we can't do as much for one specific tournament you're interested in. So if you want, consider joining the team to help with content!
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Bisutopia19316 Posts
Great words Flashftw. Staff also does a ton of wiki and tlpd stuff too. Have you seen the SC2 tlpd? It has been useless for half a decade, but BW TLPD has survived. So there are hidden things BW staff has been awesome at. Also a huge shootout to V1 for the most consistent of us since the Sonic era.
Regarding article delays, we have a policy to NOT spoiler results of any tournament. Because of our smaller community, we decided a slower pace style of news press wasn't unwarranted. It would allow for our older crowd to surf TL and not have to worry about changing our ways.
Also, SC2 staff does not recap games in their prediction news articles. BW staff recaps and predicts all in one. This is due to time issue and also the quality of content put into recaps which now include awesome videos and graphics.
That being said, I almost consistently watch every game within 24 hrs now. I would be happy to post result oriented community news posts if that's something everyone would like. But we definitely need to poll this and see what the community would like.
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On September 10 2019 00:54 Chef wrote:
Smaller community as far as I know. TL turned into a 90% SC2 site for a few years and we lost a lot of cool posters (either moved on to sc2, some other game, or just gave up on the forum). I think there's not as much interest among BW players for reports like that anyway, although when the site was larger there were lots of articles and people replied to them. I don't know the stats of how many people post in BW now vs 15 years ago, but it's probably pretty depressing.
Another factor IMO is that a large portion of the hardcore non-korean BW fans are from either Russia or Peru, where it used to be more diversified for whatever reason.
People from those countries don't come here a lot, and the content is not geared towards them anyway (pretty much zero latin tournament coverage, very little russian stuff). If you go to some russian or peruvian facebook page or twitch there will be dozens of people commenting/chatting at any time. The BW section just isn't going to grow without aknowledging those communities at this point.
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United States10342 Posts
On September 10 2019 09:10 LG)Sabbath wrote:Show nested quote +On September 10 2019 00:54 Chef wrote:
Smaller community as far as I know. TL turned into a 90% SC2 site for a few years and we lost a lot of cool posters (either moved on to sc2, some other game, or just gave up on the forum). I think there's not as much interest among BW players for reports like that anyway, although when the site was larger there were lots of articles and people replied to them. I don't know the stats of how many people post in BW now vs 15 years ago, but it's probably pretty depressing. Another factor IMO is that a large portion of the hardcore non-korean BW fans are from either Russia or Peru, where it used to be more diversified for whatever reason. People from those countries don't come here a lot, and the content is not geared towards them anyway (pretty much zero latin tournament coverage, very little russian stuff). If you go to some russian or peruvian facebook page or twitch there will be dozens of people commenting/chatting at any time. The BW section just isn't going to grow without aknowledging those communities at this point.
Besides just covering those tournaments, which I think the main core of the staff is unfamiliar with, what else would you like to see from us? We'd be more than happy to have someone link us tournament links and see how big/important those are, we just need the information and the relative size/importance of the tournament.
The problem we have right now is, can we even allocate time and resources to smaller tournaments? People are already complaining about lack of content here, but our staff is short, and everyone is busy with their own lives. I understand the passion and need for content, but at some point people need to acknowledge that we have lives outside of Starcraft and cannot always slam articles out like it's our summer break and we're still in high school/college. We need more bodies, but no one is willing to step forth and actually do the work.
It's a bad cycle. People complain there's not enough content, we open staff acceptances (which btw we're open basically any time someone wants to join, just let us know and submit an article or 2 to demonstrate your writing skills), no one applies, we don't have enough people, people complain, etc.
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United States4883 Posts
On September 10 2019 00:31 Sombre wrote:
Hey gang.
So, like many of you, I enjoy both Brood War and Starcraft 2 equally. Both totally have their merits, but that's not what this is about.
I'm finding it strange that, with Serral winning WCS, there's an article up the next day about him winning, and a nice, succint writeup.
However, for FlaSh winning his FOURTH ASL, there's barely any content on the site about it.
Is there any reason for this? I mean, if a writer is writing one of those big amazing articles about FlaSh, then that'd be totally plausable, but I find it strange that SC2 gets a LOT more play on here than Brood War. I'm not complaining, I just wondered if anyone could shed a little light
Thanks!
On September 10 2019 00:39 Chris_Havoc wrote:
Well BigFan recently stepped down as the BW Editor-in-Chief, and that has affected the level of content on the BW side.
Heard. Will step things up for the community. Thank you for the feedback <3.
On September 10 2019 09:10 LG)Sabbath wrote:Show nested quote +On September 10 2019 00:54 Chef wrote:
Smaller community as far as I know. TL turned into a 90% SC2 site for a few years and we lost a lot of cool posters (either moved on to sc2, some other game, or just gave up on the forum). I think there's not as much interest among BW players for reports like that anyway, although when the site was larger there were lots of articles and people replied to them. I don't know the stats of how many people post in BW now vs 15 years ago, but it's probably pretty depressing. Another factor IMO is that a large portion of the hardcore non-korean BW fans are from either Russia or Peru, where it used to be more diversified for whatever reason. People from those countries don't come here a lot, and the content is not geared towards them anyway (pretty much zero latin tournament coverage, very little russian stuff). If you go to some russian or peruvian facebook page or twitch there will be dozens of people commenting/chatting at any time. The BW section just isn't going to grow without aknowledging those communities at this point.
I'll look into it.
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For such an old game the coverage is great.
Thanks for your continued contributions, we appreciate your time may be more limited than it was 15 years ago due to increased real-life commitments.
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On September 10 2019 11:35 FlaShFTW wrote:
It's a bad cycle. People complain there's not enough content, we open staff acceptances (which btw we're open basically any time someone wants to join, just let us know and submit an article or 2 to demonstrate your writing skills), no one applies, we don't have enough people, people complain, etc.
Don't take it as a complaint, I don't personally need you to cover it because I can go on a spanish facebook page and read all about it (I would be interested in the russian stuff though), I was just throwing an idea out there about where the community has been going and my belief that TL has not been keeping up with the changes
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On September 10 2019 07:31 BisuDagger wrote:
Regarding article delays, we have a policy to NOT spoiler results of any tournament. Because of our smaller community, we decided a slower pace style of news press wasn't unwarranted. It would allow for our older crowd to surf TL and not have to worry about changing our ways.
I really like that. Sometimes I didn't have the time or didn't feel like it, to finish a certain tournament. And having to dodge coming on here would be a bummer.
But then again, just don't put the winner into the title either way and it's good 
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On September 10 2019 06:43 FlaShFTW wrote:
I'll make a comment just to have transparency with how writing works a bit. We all contribute out time accordingly based upon what we have to do in real life. Some people are too busy, some people end up leaving or taking a hiatus, it just happens. Not everyone can always been putting in their max time writing articles, it doesn't put food on the table sadly and there are just other things that are important to do with our lives.
A few years ago, I want to say like 2016-2017, we had a lot of articles flying out and content that was pretty solid. Led by Bigfan, I would say the main core of writers was Bisudagger, myself, Blind-Rawr, cerberus, and amazingxkcd. Graphics of course was/is still v1. I'd say for the most part we did a decent job of letting the writers write, and Bigfan would edit where he saw fit. Good system.
As time takes it's toll on all of us, things change. BD started a family and had lildagger, cerb I believe focused on school/employment (haven't heard from him in a while tbh), xkcd... thing's didn't work out between TL and him anymore, I went to law school, and BR is taking a step back from writing for the most part. Bigfan also stepped down from EiC because he's a dodger.
Our current writing staff is EsportsJohn as EiC, and writer team being Ziggy, Taardad, and Ty2. Ryan aka Frudgey doing an excellent job with video recaps, and then BR/BD very infrequently stepping in sometimes if the team needs help. As you can see, we went from 5 main writers who actually would usually fight over what articles to write, especially during group stages, to now 3 writers with 2 part timers. We also went from mainly only covering ASL up to ASL5, to covering the ASL, KSL, and BSL. When we only did the ASL, we had time to really sit down and cover a tournament in depth with map analysis, exclusive tournament power ranking, etc. Now our resources are spread thin, it's harder to get everyone to constantly put in work to the staff especially once writing starts becoming more of a job/duty rather than a hobby/fun. I know that writer burnout is really hit me hard.
This is why, as much shit as I get, I stress people should contribute more to the community via article writing. It's why when people start shitting on our writers that I get overly defensive because we don't have many to start, and losing any writer is always difficult. This is a community site, we're always looking for more helpers and writers, and we'll take anyone who has a passion or interest in creating content to keep this section of TLnet moving.
TL:DR, people are busier now, the team is smaller, and there's more content out there so we can't do as much for one specific tournament you're interested in. So if you want, consider joining the team to help with content!
I appreciate all your work guys, thank you!
Bigfan also stepped down from EiC because he's a dodger.
hahahahahahahahahahaha
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South Korea2106 Posts
youse wont be able to keep up with all the content once proleague comes back
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EPT
