The Foreigner Dilemma - Page 8

TL;DR: If you guys want to reduce the drop rate, you should complain less and practice more. Unfortunately, that's impossible for all players, and unless foreign mentality changes, the game will keep on emptying.


In my humble opinion, the problem with the drop rate is balance.

Korean players don't really complain about balance as foreigners do. The problem with western culture is that people want the game to be won for them, without any effort on their part.

Take the GSL: we've seen a single Protoss winning 2 championships, and that was it for Protoss. The Protoss race can't seem to win anything these days and, when they do, it's because there were not enough good players around.

Foreigners, if I'm not mistaken, used to play Protoss a lot more than Terran or Zerg, whereas Koreans are mainly Terran players. There are a few reasons for that, of course, namely Lim Yo Hwan (BoxeR), Lee Yoon Yeol (NaDa), Lee Young Ho (Flash), Jung Myung Hoon (fantasy), Lee Jung Hoon (MarineKing/FakeBoxer). The guys whose name I've just written are LEGENDS and probably every single serious player in the world has already heard of them, know them or have watched them play. I, for one, as my nickname suggests, am a HUGE fan of BoxeR's, and I'm pretty sure many of you also fit in this category.

The second reason for Koreans to play Terran is that, in all honesty, the race is the strongest. You guys can ban me, can sue me, can do whatever the hell you want to me, but truth be told: Terran is by far the strongest race in Starcraft 2. Whereas Starcraft: Brood War required an actual amount of skill from players, thus making the game fairly balanced (if you're not Flash, that is), Starcraft 2 is just a macro game, where you need to gather resources, create a Ball of Death and roflstomp anyone, or be roflstomped if their Ball of Death is bigger than yours.

There is pretty much no room for micro in Starcraft 2. We've seen, time and time again, 'better' players losing because they focused too much on micro and forget to macro. In Brood War you needed BOTH micro and macro, but what REALLY made a difference (and opened the door for geniuses like BoxeR and NaDa) was the micro and mechanic skills the players had. BoxeR's macro, as everyone knows, is flawed and faaaaaaar from perfect. He is, nonetheless, the Emperor.

Foreigners don't like to macro, it seems. Playing macro is playing passively. You need a HUGE amount of APM to be able to macro and harass efficiently at the same time. Foreigners just don't have that kind of skill. Plus, what's more important, they DON'T WANT TO practice to have that kind of skill. We see people complaining all the time about how marines-marauders-roaches-mutas-colossi-chargelots are imbalanced. The more you ban the people saying that, the more you hide the main reason for the huge drop hate of foreigners: the game is flawed.

That's what you would think, right? The point is: Koreans KNOW that perfect balance is impossible to achieve, unless you're incredibly lucky. Koreans KNOW that Starcraft 2 isn't going to be balanced until 2 or 3 years AFTER the release of Legacy of the Void (or you guys think any Korean liked Stephano massing PURE ROACHES against Song Hyeon Deok [HerO] and Jang Min Chul [MC]?). MarineKing is famous for his infinite number of Marines, right? WRONG! He is famous and so loved because of his CONTROL of his infinite number of Marines.

We all know the game is flawed. The game's mechanics are essentially flawed (take warp-ins, and force fields for example), but that's not the point. The point is: Koreans don't whine about game balance. They understand the problems and advantages of each race, and they make the best they can with what they can. In fact, Koreans avoid talking about game balance, because they understand there is nothing to be done, but to play to the best of their ability, so Blizzard will understand where they did wrong and fix it.
If you don't play to the best of your ability, how can you complain about game balance?

The foreign mindset is simple: if the game isn't fun, I'm not playing it anymore. And who the fuck likes to lose, unless they're masochistic?

Foreigners look at e-sports as a way to have fun. It is, essentially, entertainment. First of all because foreigners can't make a living out of e-sports, unless they're already rich. Or you guys think that foreign pro-players were poor like Kim Won Ki (FruitDealer) or Jung Jong Hyun (Mvp)?

Plus, foreigners don't feel the need to present results as Koreans do. I am still at a loss as to why "players" like IdrA, Incontrol and DeMuslim (to name a few) are so loved by the foreign community, since they can't seem to do any good.


So, as long as foreign players look at e-sports as fun, and not as a job or a way to make a living (which is impossible, due to foreign culture, which praises football more than anything, it seems) they will keep on dropping games like Starcraft 2.

To keep people playing this game, Blizzard Entertainment would need to even things out. If you get the numbers, you'll see that Zerg is the least played race, and even so they have 4 combined GSL championships (Lim Jae Duk has 3 and Kim Won Ki has 1), whereas Protoss has 10% more players (it is a lot, when it comes to a game) and only 2 championships. Terran and Protoss have essentially the same number of players, and yet people call this game TerranCraft for a reason: Terran has 6 GSL championships and 8 GSL runner-ups (as well as 15 3rd places).

Like I said before, Koreans get mad at such "imbalanced" numbers, but they don't get "dismotivated" (if such a word exists) by that: they play the race they've chosen, and they try to find ways around the inherent flaws in each game. Foreigners, on the other hand, will simply drop e-sports regarding them as 'just a game' or even 'this shit is broken, fuck it".

I'm sorry. I didn't mean to write such a huge wall of text, but I felt the urge to =X