The Breakout Invitational - North America

UUUUUUUUUUUUUGH I screwed up the zerg-creep opacity. UUUUUUUUUUUUUGH.

So much work to do still, such stressful, so art. wow.

I´m thankful for every tournament there is, so pls take the following as constructive critizism, because I really appreciate this, regardless of the points I´ll make.

The NA scene needs grass roots events like this to evolve into a more or less stable state again, but doing invitationals is another side of the problem, the NA scene currently has: People in NA get big through there pesonality, not through actually playing the game better (For example, if you look at the streaming list right now, you´ll see, that a less skilled, but more whiny american version of Strelok/GoOdy is leading the stream numbers). You invite people, that you think, might have a break through sooner or later, why do you not give those guys a chance to have their first small breakthrough right now, by making it into your event instead of getting invited?

I see the problems, coming along with this: If Scarlett signs up, she willl probably get through without much trouble and destroy everyone. Same goes for HuK. But one can relativly simply avoid that by just doing, what IPL did with their amateur qualifiers and just let people with less than a certain amout of prize earnongs compete. Let´s say, you set this border at 5k: With that you eliminate VIBE, qxc, Suppy, Xenocider, Goswser, Illusion, puck, Idra, Sheth, Kane, TT1, HuK and Scarlett from the competition, so basically all the established pros, who could farm your grass root event. But on the other side, you still give every upcoming player a chance to shine and even old veterans of the early days, like iNcontroL or Nony could show, that they still have the power to compete with the next generation. I mean, how cool would it be, if Machine suddenly qualifies, shows amazing play and wins the whole thing (I mean, everyone likes Machine, right?). I know, iNc has the chance to do that in Krefeld, but lets be honest, Polt will do things to him, more horrible, that even Vincent Longborn could ever imagine. And being in a scene with less oppurtunities, than Kor or EU, would´nt it be fair for those veterans to get a chance to prove themselves as well, even though they aren´t the fresh new blood?

Anyway, I wish you the best of luck with this event.

I'm confused, you're either missing the point of what this is for, or you've been very vague about the "issue" you have with this tournament.

So in short you're saying there shouldn't be invitational events for new people to play against other new rising players? The point is to expose the community to new players, it's not to show them that these guys are "AMAZING OMG HE JUST BEAT JAEDONG" - it's to actually get their name out there so people know who they are, their playstyles and to give a face to a name, so that when someone does take a few games off Bomber, or Scarlett, or Naniwa at the next big open/LAN tournament - we don't have the same bullshit expression from the community of "well who the hell is this guy".

Of course the true test of newer "rising" players is when they go to a Dreamhack Open, an IEM qualifier, or a Challenger League qualifier and then take a spot, take a game, take a series off a known player - but to say that there shouldn't be "exposure" tournaments like this is incredibly short-sighted in my opinion.

In many traditional sports, top players get scouted by people who head out into community grass-root events (say for example, the "local football game") to see young, fresh new talent. In eSports we don't really have anything similar to that, besides the possible situations like former Root player "Succeed" who was seen on ladder by Catz and was slowly brought into that team. We occasionally have players that appear at big events and stun the crowd, such as Scarlett at IPL, Trimaster at early MLG's and whatnot who are then recruited into big teams. But rarely do we ever get to simply give some exposure to newer players who are rising up and can compete on a high level. Partly this is just the nature of how the SC scene works at the moment, partly it's because many players simply don't know how to market themselves (with exceptions of people like Grubby, PiG and WhiteRa I guess) - and because sometimes they just don't get a chance.

A long time ago when I started casting, a local player here in Australia Rossi said to me "hey it'd be cool if you could put my twitter and stream on the cast somewhere so people know where to find me" and we had a long discussion about it, which delved into the main point of "it's hard to get exposure for new players" and so I started doing it whenever I could in my casts. This is taking it another step forwards - hosting a simple tournament that showcases some new talent up against other new talent, so that people can say "Hey, that's Bones I've heard of him before, he's that Canadian Protoss who has 50 minute PvP games" or something like that. It gives identification and starts the basis of a story for players.

I don't disagree with your point about players actually showcasing true skill needing to be in real tournament situations - but in my opinion to think this isn't a good idea is folly, I believe we should have more of this kind of thing, instead of simply catering to the top level professional players. It's an issue overall with the SC2 scene, and it's an issue the community needs to deal with too - it's not just a problem that organisers can fix, we as the people appreciating this game need to be more respectful of new rising players too.

To everyone talking about the invitational vs open thing, you've got to understand this is a direct tie-in to Feardragon's show, Breaking Out. This invitational is a tournament showcase of the players that he's had on so far. There's a specific purpose to the event that pulls everything together. There are huge benefits to having an open tournament, but also extreme difficulties as well (how do you run it? how many people? what format tournament? who can join? etc).

Feardragon's got a very specific theme going here, whether he intended it or not. It's a very interesting take and something that I personally think is a great idea. He's giving each player the same amount of time and giving us an in depth look at each one.

There's really no reason to compare the tournament style that you'd rather see and what he's doing because they don't have the same goals, they're not doing the same thing. I'm sure he agrees with the majority of your points because they all make sense, but this ties things together really well in my opinion.