On April 21 2015 22:46 SetGuitarsToKill wrote: Boy, reddit is really laying into her of this. They're more upset with Scarlett than I was
I mean, sure $75/hours is a lot, and way more than a lot of people can afford, but other players have and do charge even more than that so it's still not the worse deal out there. It's more about playing with Scarlett than actually getting better obviously.
Meh, reddit. A wretched hive of scum and villainy. An immature one to boot.
reddit is just a place like any other where anyone can post anything about the game, there's good and bad just like on TL... also it's been supportive of Scarlett most of the time and even on the coaching thing it's far from being all negative. Besides this community is always a bit sensitive when anyone is trying to make a little bit of money so no surprise there.
I think it's simply this. If you want to take multiple lessons to get better over time, then you should probably go with Pig or Enderr or whoever. If you want to play with your favorite player for a while and get some good advise while doing it, go with Scarlett. Scarlett's experience as a player and skill as a coach isn't really relevant, especially if you're a below masters level player there's probably nothing she can give you that others can't.
As for the price, $75/hr is probably too much for most people, even as a big fan I couldn't really justify paying that much, but it's up to other's how they wanna spend their money. I have no doubt she'll get those 10 people willing to pay. As I said before, you could still do a lot worse with your money.
Scarlett never played in Proleague, she played in GSTL
That is correct.
The position that 'Life in Korea' adds to this uniqueness seems like an odd position here.
My position is that her time spent in Korea makes her more interesting than someone who hasn't lived there.
Specialist Doctors can take up to 14 years to become fully qualified in their fields. This is usually while earning shit-all wages and living on package noodles, this is similar to Psychiatrists and any other type of specialist. Even Philosophers (10 years here so far). They also have to undergo regular training to keep up with the medical profession. I think comparison between these people and coaches for SC2 or any other game is disingenuous.
And Scarlett played for peanuts for years before she hit it big, with the odds stacked against her, and beat them. It's easier to live on packaged noodles when you know you will be set for the rest of your life making $250k+ per year once it's all over; it's much harder to put off college to chase a very risky dream. Scarlett took a lot more risks to get where she is, is what I'm saying. She continues to take that risk every day she wakes up and sticks with SC2 instead of studying CS. Also, Scarlett of course has to undergo regular training to keep up with SC2. Also, to be perfectly honest, if becoming a specialist doctor were incredibly difficult, there would not be 468,942+ of them in the United States alone; with a population of 320 million, roughly 1:682 people become a specialist doctor. There are how many foreigners who have ever played at Scarlett's level in SC2? 5? 6? This is out of how many GM players?
This is interesting, because we start to get into the debate about Price Theory. Namely, how much can one charge for their services. I'm not sure of the numbers of coaches vs. students in Starcraft so this will be fairly theoretical, with a little bit of assumption. Your understanding of "how the world works", especially in economic terms is seriously flawed. Pricing always has to be in a relation to something. You set your price according to a number of things. 1) What coaches are charging 2) What students are willling to pay 3) What you believe your value is. As you mention, Scarlett's time is limited, only accepting 10 people per week, and while you are correct in saying that she wants to make as much money as possible in accordance with the limited time she wishes to spend coaching per week, she also has to factor into the equation the "market price" of coaching. She also has to make it perfectly clear why someone should willingly folk out $75/hr for her coaching over PiG ($30/hr), EnDerr ($8/hr), Lokto ($53/1hr 30mins) (as example)
So then we get on to the question of Value. Namely, what makes Scarlett value her time and coaching ability at a higher price then other coaches. So "Value" is the price someone will pay for the exchange of goods and services. But we can broaden this discussion to two forms of value. 1) Economic Value and 2) Expertise Value. The first has to do with the actual $75/hr that Scarlett values her time and coaching at. The 2nd form of value is the value that her as a player/coach feels her coaching has. We can speak of Economic value in a number of ways, The Labour Theory of Value holds that Value should be calculated according to the socially necessary labour required to do the coaching. This theory I do not think has any application here. The best application for our purposes is probably the Subjective theory of value in which the value of Scarlett's coaching is not determined by an intrinsic "Value" of Scarlett's coaching, but rather the importance that Scarlett places on the value of her coaching in accordance with her desired ends (Whatever that may be). If Scarlett thinks that $75/hr for 10 people is the level of value her coaching deserves in accordance with her desired ends then the value of her coaching can be judged at $75/hr. But this brings in the second problem, namely Expertise Value. If we judge Scarlett's coaching based on her previous experience in Starcraft 2, by what degree does she measure this expertise.
Honestly, these two paragraphs don't seem very germane to my position on Scarlett's $75 fee. My position is that if she wants to coach, and has decided she can do 10 hours for the week, then she should charge as much as she can while still filling all 10 slots.
Regarding your belief that Scarlett: "has to make it perfectly clear why someone should willingly folk out $75/hr for her coaching over PiG ($30/hr), EnDerr ($8/hr), Lokto ($53/1hr 30mins) (as example)" I disagree. Scarlett doesn't have to sell herself to anyone; her credentials are right out in the open for all to see. I do not feel that she has to explain herself, or her rate, to anyone. Also, according to your logic, should Lokto not have to explain his rather strange $53/1.5 hour rate? First of all, who is Lokto? Second of all, why $53, and not $52 or $54? Why 1.5 hours? Has he planned out a series of 10 minute exercises for me? Why is PiG $30/hr? Has he factored in his overhead (electricity, rental costs, experience, etc...) I mean, I could go on with this, it's just that I feel that players don't have to explain to me why they are charging what they are.
I read your writing on this whole issue, and you raise interesting points, but they are all moot in the sense that the person who chooses to schedule coaching with Scarlett has not automatically thought of each of them. For example, your position that PiG is a well-respected coach and costs less than Scarlett likely does not matter to a Scarlett fan who wants to get coaching from her and chat with her. What I'm saying is that the concerns you have listed are not automatically shared by others.
According to esportsearnings.net Scarlett has won $113,856.17 in prize money. This I think we can agree is more then most 21 years old will have earnt by this time in their lives. If invested wisely, she could be earning some pretty mean interest on that. There are also to many assumptions in this paragraph to make sense of. At least according to Australian data, the average first home buyer is well into their 30s before they can afford to buy a house (of course we in Australia have extremely expensive houses) but hte point still stands. If Scarlett say begins college in 2016 at the age of 22, and does a 4 year degree in some Computer Science. Let us assume programming. So she finishes her degree at 26. Let us then assume she gets a graduate level computer programming position in some place. On averag, according to payscale.com, she would earn $45,000/per year ($865/week, Canadian). I'm not sure of pricing in Canada, but with the assumption she invested her winnings from SC2 well, added that with a stipend that Acer might have paid her, added to that the median wage of a graduate level computer programming position.
Scarlett has certainly won a lot of prize money, and she has almost certainly been on salary with Acer during that time period. I don't know if those figures are pre or post-tax, but if they are pre-tax, remember that most of the payments to Scarlett came in large lump sums and I think they get hit pretty hard by the tax code, especially in Canada. Anyway, it's probably true that she is doing well in life up to this point, compared to her peers. That being said, I don't think she is wealthy, and I don't think that the early 20's are the time to start easing up on the amount of money you're taking in. I don't consider Scarlett greedy or disrespectful, not even one little bit, for charging $75 an hour for her lessons. Remember; even if Scarlett gets her degree at 26 like you've calculated, she will have missed out on 4 years at $45,000; in other words, $180,000 in lost earnings on that CS degree. Now, let's factor in the $113,856.17 in prize money, reduce it by 25% due to taxes, add in 3 years at $40,000 per year with Acer, and we get $205,392.13. That is approximately what she has made since she started as a Pro SC2 player; the remaining year's (this year's) earnings are yet to be seen. As you can see, it seems she has not yet lost out on earnings by playing SC2 over getting the CS degree; however, what are her tournament prospects for this year? Is she making an average of $865 per week? ($45,000 / 52 weeks) If she isn't then she's losing the extra ground she's gained, see? Anyway, this is all boatloads of speculation on speculation, actually; the bottom line is she's young and has a special skill-set that took tons of time and dedication to learn, and this is possibly a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for her, and she can charge whatever she wants for her coaching.
We could also assume that Scarlett, giving her intelligence which is documented in the NYT article on her, that she may be awarded with a scholarship for her degree. That would negate the cost of her University degree, and significantly reduce her cost at college, allowing her to save, or spend on whatever she wanted.
These are even more assumptions, and regardless of if they come true or not, Scarlett shouldn't have to slow her financial pace because something good might come her way in the future. Also, remember that if she doesn't demonstrate a financial need, a lot of scholarship opportunities go right out the window; her financial success prior to school may be eaten into by that.
I'm not arguing that she has to apologize for her decision to charge $75/hr for her coaching. She can do whatever she likes, and the market (according to Macro-economics) will decide if she makes the correct decision. I'm just pointing out that your analysis on this issue doesn't seem to take into account a lot of information that doesn't support the position you are making.
I took them into account and dismissed them; that's different from having never considered them.
This is useless, and not even analysis. But your diagnosis brings up a lot of interesting philosophical, and ethical issues. Which if I had time I would explore in more detail. I partly agree that she doesn't have an obligation. The only obligation she has is an economic obligation to her customers.
I disagree that those statements are useless. I actually think that if my entire post had to be summed up in one statement, it would be this one: "I believe that none of us have an obligation in life to answer to those who tell us we aren't allowed to be happy and successful and financially comfortable." I will supplement that with an old saying, "Be all that you can be." Scarlett has a right to be all that she can be, regardless of whether or not she has taken the time to sit down and write a graduate-level ethical defense of her actions.
You like to go on about this "way of the world" but you have not really offered any concrete exegesis of current economic trends to support your analysis.
The "way of the world" is to get while the gettin's good because the world is a cruel place that might kill you, paralyze you, blind you, kill your loved ones, strike your mother down with cancer, or see you sneeze while driving and accidentally kill someone and be saddled with some pretty hefty bills to pay, or inflict other tragedies upon you or your loved ones at any time. You, me, Scarlett, any one of us could become a quadriplegic before our next trip to the store is over. And do you think Canada will say to Scarlett, "Well, you had lots of potential and were making 70k a year before this happened to you, so here's 70k a year for the rest of your life?" No. Canada will say "Here's a shitty pension that's just enough to keep you from starving; tough break, kid." Get what you can when you can get it; the future is never certain. That's "the way of the world" that I was referring to.
Also, I will take this opportunity to gleefully point out the hypocrisy espoused by most people who are irked by Scarlett's fee; to those people I ask this: do you seek to maximize the amount of money you are paid for the work you do? If you answered yes, yet are criticizing Scarlett for setting her price point at $75, then you are criticizing someone for taking the exact action you would have taken in their position, and are being hypocritical; that person who criticizes Scarlett for maximizing her own income, yet gladly maximizes their own, is probably blinded to their own hypocrisy by the envy they feel toward Scarlett's success; they don't even realize how foolish they sound.
Frankly, a lot of this criticism amounts to no more than "Who does she think she is?" People who think that way should set aside their envy at Scarlett's success and simply congratulate her for doing well in life. Let me ask you this, why can't you just congratulate her? Why can't you, in addition to the people in the Reddit thread just say "Wow, good for her" and move on?
I partially agree with the main thrust of your argument, namely that Scarlett does not need to justify charging $75/hr.
You would agree completely if you weren't envious of her.
On the one hand she does need to justify why a persons money is better spent on her coaching rather then someone else's coaching at a cheaper rate, I think this is just economically sensel.
Scarlett doesn't owe you or anyone else some kind of explanation as to why her coaching is worth $75 an hour. Her resume speaks for itself. It is for each person to decide if they want to pay it, and that's that. My hypothesis is the reason you want so badly to know why she is asking for $75 per session is because you see PiG as the better player at this point in time, and are upset to see that Scarlett will probably make money than him. I believe that your entire post is an attempt to show that PiG should be making more per hour than Scarlett when it comes to coaching.
Let's test this proposition with a thought experiment; imagine PiG is booking lessons at $150/hr and Scarlett is booking lessons at $75/hr. Does that give you some sort of relief? Then you're probably upset for no other reason than you think Scarlett doesn't deserve to be making more than PiG.
Honestly, what a lot of this boils down to what I'm going to go ahead and call "The Scarlett Factor." Scarlett has the Scarlett factor; whether it's her attractiveness, or mysterious nature, or history as a foreigner hope, or the fact that she's pretty famous and well-known, she has "it." No other foreigner today has "it" like Scarlett does, in my opinion. Snute is close, but no cigar (again, my opinion; other's may differ). PiG may have superior play right now, but he doesn't have "it" like Scarlett does.
Honestly here... all this drama. It's freaking $75 an hour, it's not even that much. Don't go to the bar or order food for 3 weeks -- done, there's your $75; now enjoy your lesson with Scarlett. Record it and show it to your kids later on, and tell them all about e-sports way back in 2015, when you could actually get coaching from someone so famous in e-sports for only $75.
I'll be honest yall, this is so ridiculous haha.. sorry to disrespect everyone's thesis they slaved over but this is extremely ridiculous. Get lessons if you want ... or don't . The fact that you all have to question and nag every aspect of her offering coaching (it being worth it or not) its soo silly, stop putting her under a microscope.
NEW TOPIC Share your favorite Scarlett match/series,moment, or memory!
When, Where, Why, How, or whatever reasoning; please describe in less than 500 words
Winner gets a beautiful Filco Majestouch 2 Limited Edition Pink Keyboard W/ Black Switches (This keyboard is rare and not made anymore) + Show Spoiler +
On April 23 2015 00:48 TheLastTemplar wrote: I'll be honest yall, this is so ridiculous haha.. sorry to disrespect everyone's thesis they slaved over but this is extremely ridiculous. Get lessons if you want ... or don't . The fact that you all have to question and nag every aspect of her offering coaching (it being worth it or not) its soo silly, stop putting her under a microscope.
NEW TOPIC Share your favorite Scarlett match/series,moment, or memory!
When, Where, Why, How, or whatever reasoning; please describe in less than 500 words
Winner gets a beautiful Filco Majestouch 2 Limited Edition Pink Keyboard W/ Black Switches (This keyboard is rare and not made anymore) + Show Spoiler +
as someone who suffers with social anxiety myself, this interview hearing her talk about past problems and being happy in life now made me smile(and put alittle lump in my throat) http://www.rig8.com/project/scarlett-redbull-battlegrounds-dc-story-segment/ also scarlett could u tell us wtf u said to polt at 1:10 to make him pull that face
on a less deep note favorite game i think most will say THE bomber game but i would say Parting at redbull BG DC parting play style is a particular thorn in her side so for me the proxy hatch into borrowed roach was fun and smart, but the 2nd game with swarmhost nydus play was just class imo
As a person who has only recently gotten into starcraft (I like BroodWar also) in general I never had the chance to watch many of Scarlett's games. I've been rewatching many old matches, to see the history of starcraft. A favorite moment of mine was Scarlett vs Jaedong in this WCS match:
Scarlett ended up losing the series 2-3 and when I was browsing through sc2 vods a while ago I didn't really like foriegn players. Now it's not the same to me anymore, I read Scarlett's interview on The New Yorker and it made me begin to appreciate both Korean progamers and the rest of world. So then I decided to watch some more Scarlett games and came upon the one linked above and it was really nerve wracking to watch the series play out, game 4 almost making me turn into a nervous wreck haha.
My favourite memory is definitely Red Bull New York 2013. It was the first Starcraft II tournament I have ever watched. After that famous series versus Bomber I was blown away how entertaining esports can be. Naturally Scarlett right away became my favourite player. Next day I watched all her interviews on youtube, vods, discovered huskystarcraft channel, team liquid and so on. Few weeks later I bought Wings of Liberty and Heart of the Swarm. Now when I think about it I was lucky my first contact with Starcraft content was that great event. Otherwise it is quite possible I would find this thing boring and not worth my attention. So mainly due to Scarlett's amazing performance in New York I am Starcraft fan today.
On April 23 2015 00:48 TheLastTemplar wrote: I'll be honest yall, this is so ridiculous haha.. sorry to disrespect everyone's thesis they slaved over but this is extremely ridiculous. Get lessons if you want ... or don't . The fact that you all have to question and nag every aspect of her offering coaching (it being worth it or not) its soo silly, stop putting her under a microscope.
NEW TOPIC Share your favorite Scarlett match/series,moment, or memory!
When, Where, Why, How, or whatever reasoning; please describe in less than 500 words
Winner gets a beautiful Filco Majestouch 2 Limited Edition Pink Keyboard W/ Black Switches (This keyboard is rare and not made anymore) + Show Spoiler +
I admit that the academic in me takes over. my object was not Scarlett coaching,but just to point out flaws in the previous. essay. I will stick to making sarcastic comments and comments on good or bad play in Scarletts games.
On April 23 2015 00:48 TheLastTemplar wrote: I'll be honest yall, this is so ridiculous haha.. sorry to disrespect everyone's thesis they slaved over but this is extremely ridiculous. Get lessons if you want ... or don't . The fact that you all have to question and nag every aspect of her offering coaching (it being worth it or not) its soo silly, stop putting her under a microscope.
NEW TOPIC Share your favorite Scarlett match/series,moment, or memory!
When, Where, Why, How, or whatever reasoning; please describe in less than 500 words
Winner gets a beautiful Filco Majestouch 2 Limited Edition Pink Keyboard W/ Black Switches (This keyboard is rare and not made anymore) + Show Spoiler +
Well, obviously I'm gonna go with the time Scarlett played with a bunch of us TL noobs in LRSL Blizzcon tournament and 4v4's afterwords. She Protoss troll-builded her way to the finals of that tournament before finally dropping a map (to a 4gate lol) and then after she'd won a bunch of the LR regulars and strat guys played 4v4 monobattles for a while. Then after the monobattles, me, the_templar and kingofdahiphop still wanted to play so we invited Scarlett to join us. She was like "fine, I'll play one with you guys" and then we played like 6 games. Games mostly consisted of us distracting and being her meatshields as she went proxy oracle and into double proxy nexus, or cannon rushes, with me dying to rushes half the time. This formula proved to be effective enough to get us a 5-1 record, which somehow gets us gold league. Since Scarlett was playing on her normal account, we got a lot of "omg real?!" or "actually scarlett?: to which the standard replies were "Yes it's the real Templar" or "who?". Overall super fun time, even if, as me and Templar have pointed out in the past, Scarlett isn't much of a team player.
Share your favorite Scarlett match/series,moment, or memory!
When, Where, Why, How, or whatever reasoning; please describe in less than 500 words
got many amazing Scarlett moments.
When she replied to a TL pm saying thank you for her portrait vid; i cant put in words how rewarding it felt, especially that i had to learn a ton of After Effects for it and did a lot of research to learn how to to get closer to my idea. I kept bugging the artist (he's Glider on this forum) "you done yet?" haha, i was so eager to put the portrait together with my effects and such.
When I worked on the Scarlett tribute video, it was so awesome doing something and knowing she will enjoy it when its complete; i remember being so enthused, that i worked on it through the night, even if two hours later i had to go to work; but hey, 4 double espressos and i made it through the day.
But nothing beats the amazing time i had in Korea, with Suppy and Kane. Every day when Scarlett was with us was nothing less than fantastic. Over the entire trip i was highly sleep deprived (especially last nights) due to trying to go everywhere in Seoul and meet with various progamers (also visited SKT teamhouse once), but even so it was one of the most amazing trips i ever had.
One morning we went to the hospital to fix Kane's leg, after that we went at Lastshadow's place to meet with Scarlett and spent a few hours chatting, streaming and singing was amazingly fun (she still has the title on her twitch stream from that day). Suppy has the entire trip documented on his youtube channel.
One evening we met with Cella, a friend of his, Sacsri and ex-SKT Paralyze and went out, had lots of fun then got back at our place and just spent the night chatting, drinking soju and having sick fun. Had a chat late into the night about Starcraft in general, why Life is so good, foreigner scene and such. Sasha is really knowledgeable; she also wrote all our names in Hangul That morning we took her to a taxi and then I stayed out for a morning walk, but forgot the access card to the apartment inside, and Kane and Suppy were sleeping, didnt want to wake them up to get in, so i just went to a PC Bang and had my first wins on the KR ladder there. Theres something about friggin Korea that makes you just win there; cant explain it.
She is absolutely charming, and addictive to be around. She isnt trying it, she just is, naturally. Some people simply have it. Shes also very down to earth.
EPT
