EPTEDIT 2: There are actually subtle differences between NA and EU (which, IMO, is why there are atleast some new european pros emerging). The difference is there are much more online cups and leagues running in europe. On top of the playhem dailies, they have go4sc2s, zotacs, competos etc. etc. etc. While this isn't reliable income, you can one day make some money off of these and get noticed (like Nerchio). NA doesn't have enough of these IMO. And the ones that do pop up are won by Koreans anyways (as the times for them are pretty good for Koreans to play).
EDIT 3: IdrA brought up the point of just dropping everything, going to Korea and trying to go pro (like DesRow is doing). Personally I think a foreigner that wants to go pro needs to do that. Korea has the infrastructure and foreigners can make use of it. But one has to admit it is significantly easier for a Korean to drop his life and stay exactly where he is to do it vs. a foreigner that has to drop his life, then move to korea and worry about where he's going to live and whether he can afford it.
EDIT 4: Many of you bring up the notion that the player numbers dropping is a result of casuals just dropping out of the game and what remains are hardcore players. Let's hope that is this case. Anyways, my entire argument doesn't hinge on just the player numbers. There are still issues with the system.
EDIT 5: Open qualifiers are what has made stars out of anyone that has risen in the SC2 scene. Stephano qualifying for IPL3 and erupting into stardom, ThorZain for TSL3, NaNiwa for TSL3/MLG Dallas. For the health of the scene we need more qualifiers and less inviting.
TL;DR at the beginning because this is huge: foreign player pool is dying. Foreigners are going to stop existing in SC2 one day.
Alright guys, this is going to be long. So get ready. This is a post about where the SC2 community is headed and why, unless we make some drastic changes, our community as we know it will shrink substantially. In the last few weeks we’ve read tons of articles about foreign teams dropping their foreign players and picking up new Korean players. EG dropped Axslav/Strifecro and grabbed JYP, fnatic has dropped the majority of the roster and recently picked up Moon and this trend will definitely continue. It’s no secret that the way to win is to hire Koreans. They are the best players in the world, no doubt about it. Even Code A Koreans are better than the majority of foreigners. So for a foreign team of course it makes sense to grab a Korean instead; it’s a no-brainer.
So what is the problem? It’s no secret that the best way to succeed with a tournament is to mix the following: top tier well known foreigners (IdrA, Huk, white-ra etc.), a few well known Koreans and a celebrity caster or two (day[9], totalbiscuit, etc.). You mix all of those elements and unless your show is a catastrophe, you will get viewer numbers. Thankfully for us, the celebrity casters aren’t going anywhere. We love day[9] and I like to think he loves us too. So he’s here as long as we are. Koreans obviously aren’t going anywhere. But the last element might.
At some point all progamers retire. Some have extremely long careers (ex. Grubby was a WC3 progamer for almost the entire existence of professional WC3) and others retire quickly (Creolophus was a WC3 progamer that made his mark in a single year and retired, similar to what Stephano intends on doing). At some point all progamers will retire. A sustainable e-sports model requires there be new progamers to replace them. This has always been an issue in e-sports. It is very common for progamers to retire with almost no one to replace them. This is simply because the barrier to entry gets steeper and steeper as a game develops (BW at the start was filled with noobs compared to the level of refinement from a Flash or Jaedong). So you can see why declining player numbers is a huge issue (especially since NA/EU are declining at a much faster rate). This is a large part of the reason why e-sports scene often die.
Of course this applies to both Korean and Foreign progamers but it is more of a concern for foreigners.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/VIkFD.png)
The graph represents player numbers for each region since the games release (taken from sc2ranks). For those really curious, it’s divided by patch. Half a year ago, EU/NA had 3-4x as many players as the Korean server did; now all 3 servers are about equal. That’s astonishing when you think about it. The drop-off for Koreans is minimal compared to Foreigners. And there’s no reason this trend won’t continue.
Let’s try to figure out why. First I’m going to paint you a picture of a Korean that is trying to go pro. He’ll start off a scrub; 4gating his way up the ladder. He’ll land in a lower league and slowly start working his way up. Along the way he has tangible goals; first to get into gold, then platinum, then diamond and finally masters. What happens then? He is ultra-motivated to quality for Code B. Code B represents ~ 1500 of the best Korean players on the ladder (which I believe is mid-high masters on the ladder). Once he finally reaches that plateau he can compete in the Code A qualifiers. He’s going to go to a huge LAN event and have a chance to play against players like Boxer and LosirA. How does that not motivate an individual? I might be playing Boxer next week. I’m going to fucking practice 24 hours a day until then. Once you’re at this level, you have a new goal. Now you want to be noticed by team coaches and players on ladder and maybe get yourself into a B-team house (like ProS). Hell, you might be good enough to skip a step and get straight into a proteam house. There are probably a hundred spots available and considering many players have multiple accounts, I’d venture to guess that anyone that is GM on the Korean ladder is skilled enough to belong in a team house. Now you’re playing in the big leagues. In the team house you’re practicing everyday and will keep going until you can finally beat MMA or DRG or whoever else is in your house.
What’s my point here? There are clear goals along the way. Motivation comes from having a goal. It’s impossible to motivate yourself without a goal. You know who succeeds when they want to lose weight? The guy that says I will lose 5 lbs in a month. Not the guy that says I’m going to lose a ton of weight brah (partially because the second guy sounds like an idiot).
Let’s look at the other end of the spectrum: the life of a foreigner. I work my way up the ladder. I’m masters now fuck yea. I’m going to post this on reddit and be 23rd on the front page of r/Starcraft for about an hour. Sweet. Now what? Might as well keep laddering and get to GM. Awesome I’m GM now. It took forever but I’ve finally done it. You know how much karma this is going to get me on reddit? A ton. I’ll be right at the top for half a day! This seems facetious but it is actual reality. A high masters/low GM player on the NA (and to a lesser extent EU) server have no way of getting noticed. They have no tangible goals. Koreans know exactly what they need to do to get into Code B. They have a very real opportunity to get into a team house once they get there. Foreigners on the other hand have nothing. They have no clear avenue to get into progaming. It’s too much of a crapshoot on the foreigner side. It’s way harder to get noticed and even if you do, it’s so hard to actually get onto a foreign team or into a major tournament.
Let’s put this into perspective. Imagine you’re a GM player on the NA server. You’re not on a pro team but you’re pretty good. How do you get noticed? Streaming doesn’t do anything. No one watches players they don’t know. You’d get 5 viewers. Even players like Vibe have trouble breaking a few hundred viewers despite the fact that his stream is of epic quality (tons of commentary, awesome player). Someone once described streaming as feast or famine (I feel like it was Huk or Tyler on SOTG a long time ago) and that is 100% true.
The other option is to try and qualify for some major events. Let’s look at the leagues. IPL3 held online qualifiers, but they were filled with Koreans. The Koreans won the majority of the spots. The same idea was true for the NASL qualifiers. This pretty much holds true for any major event that holds qualifiers. Here’s an example. Let’s take GoSu.Gatored. He is an outstanding player. At IEM NYC he beat DRG, Top and went pretty damn far. How far can he get in MLG? Nowhere. His highest placing was 33rd and I doubt he’s had many (if any) streamed matches. How’d he do in IPL3? Can’t qualify. He is exactly the type of player that should be getting a ton more recognition than he currently is. Unless a player gets noticed he doesn’t provide any value to a team. But it is nearly impossible, in the game’s current state, to get noticed. See the dilemma?
In my opinion, the state of the foreign scene is pretty bleak. Just take a long hard look at some of the tournament results. If you look at the foreign scene, it is the usual suspects in every event since release. The very first foreign SC2 tournament was IEM Cologne in 2010. Guess who the top 3 were? Morrow, IdrA and Dimaga. The entire player list is represents pretty much the top tier foreigner list to this date. But if you look at the Korean scene there are always new players popping up. There is much more turnover with new players developing, getting noticed and entering competitive. The motivation just isn’t there for foreigners because there is no clear way to get noticed. However there are ways to solve this though.
Let’s start with event organizers. I’m sorry but this invitation system needs to end. We can’t have 95% of the players being invited and 5% qualifying through qualifiers. It has to be the other way around. I get the need to invite a few big name players to attract viewers. But instead of inviting 30 players and qualifying 2, do the opposite and invite a handful and have qualifiers for the rest. Of course that doesn’t solve the problem itself. The qualifiers need to be region locked. A NA qualifier should be for NA residents only. The NA qualifiers shouldn’t be won by 4 different Koreans. That defeats the purpose. Organizers need to start doing region-locked qualifiers for all 3 regions. This is part of the reason I love ESL. They get it. They’re doing exactly this. ESL is the reason a guy like Gatored has been noticed. He is a beastly player and got to display that at IEM NYC. Also to their credit, MLG seems to be progressing in this direction for 2012. Yes qualifiers are more work. But to run an open qualifier online, it really doesn’t take that much work. You can set it up on z33k or playhem or binarybeast or whatever and let the system automate it. You only need to invest an afternoon to admin the event (maybe 2-3 people if you have hundreds of signups). Trust me, I’ve personally admined events with hundreds of people and all it takes is an afternoon (+ whatever time you want to spend advertising). Korean qualifiers are a little more difficult (language barrier, advertising in Korea). But hopefully more organizations can adopt the Asus ROG/Korean Weekly model.
Now what can the community do? Let’s stop focusing 100% of our attention on a few select players. There are tons of streamers that are as good as some of the popular guys. Let’s also start branching out and watching some other events. Yes I’m from z33k and playhem is my mortal enemy (sarcasm) but watching their dailies does give some ROI for teams with players competing. It does give you, the viewers, a chance to see some of the lesser known players that are almost, if not, as good as some of the current pros.
Anyways, that’s it for now. It’s 4 am and I’m going to get to bed. I’ll respond to as many people as I can when I wake up.
I wrote this at 4 am and I was dead tired. I'm wide awake now and want to add a few points.
First of HOTS. Yes, this will (hopefully) have a huge impact on the player pool and bring in some new blood. But this is a temporary fix to a systemic problem. For all we know it will have a very minimal impact. For all we know, players will come back, try all the new shiny toys and then say forget it I'm done with this. Basically the point is, the game itself doesn't seem to motivate, so we shouldn't rely on changes in it to fix the issues at hand.
Another thing I didn't mention, the coming of BW A-teamers. This has the potentially to seriously kill the foreigner scene. If the BW pros engrain themselves into SC2 like the current Korean progamers do (actively looking for foreign teams, participating in foreign events, trying to qualify for them) it marginalizes SC2 foreigners even more.
