Mike Morhaime "SC2 Proleague will open this year" - Page 51

On March 18 2012 21:57 gn0m wrote:

We don’t really know the nature of SC2 PL yet, but if it is going to be anything like BW PL, this would be a pretty big problem. It’s not that teams don’t have enough players to fill up the spots, but rather that teams take PL extremely seriously. Having one of your better players travelling around the world and thus missing PL-matches would be out of the question.

When players advance in both OSL and MSL (RIP), they suddenly have a ridiculous schedule of training in front of them, since they still need to support their team in PL. This actually led to some of the players being overworked and the amount of games played each week in PL was reduced because of this (hence Flash’s nickname “Child Labour Terran”).

Moreover, it is seems very rare that players have been unable to play because of illness, which I haven’t really thought about before. In my opinion, it feels like all the players always show up for their PL-games (sometimes wearing maks because they are sick and don’t want to infect others). Some players have been absent due to more severe problems though, that involves surgery or longer hospital stays.

Anyway, bottom line is that BW progamers don’t miss their PL-games. But that doesn’t mean that it necessary will be the same for SC2 players. Perhaps there will be more flexibility in regards to foreign tournaments.

On March 19 2012 11:34 Torpedo.Vegas wrote:


Interesting. But the reason they took it so seriously is there is no real other tournament with the same prestige or money on the line. In SC2, teams have options, so I think it would depend how the teams gauge their odds of winning a foreign event versus needing to win a particular match in a series. If someone does go and they lose 1 match because they are gone but are still able win, they get the win and the prestige/money from the foreign tournament.

Perhaps they will try to push to have more "top" players and spread resources over more players then in BW.

On March 19 2012 12:05 Kanil wrote:


The problem with this is that if SC2 Proleague comes anywhere close to BW Proleague in terms of prestige, then there's still going to be no other real tournaments with the same prestige on the line. Proleague is fucking awesome, and MLG, Dreamhack, the other proleague... wouldn't really compare.

Of course, that's a very big "if". This could be fucking huge, or it could just be a replacement of GSTL (with less Winner's League!)

On March 19 2012 13:46 bokeevboke wrote:
I'm a bit sceptic person. So my comment on this would be:
You know how hollywood works these days, they make a movie, not necessarily a masterpiece, then they start a big PR campaign where they try to lure in every goddamn person to watch the movie (shit movie most of the times). Then they try to hit some calendaric events making movies about valentines day, christmas or independence day, That day everyone kinda has to go and see the movie to celebrate the event. So basically its a short period trick, where people are not aware of quality of the product before they watch it.
Starcraft 2 was the same, it was sold a lot in first days, it was fine product. People were glad they bought it, but gradually they lost interest (my reasoning is that the game wasn't really good and didn't have sustaibability). People already formed their opinion now. Some think its perfect, some think its meh and some think its total garbage. And then all of a sudden, Morhaime thinks the game is not selling well, and tries to make a move, like a good PR and to be friends with Kespa, it will prompt everyone to buy their shit. But its not gonna work. SC2 already had its time and lost it. People know everything about the game and no matter how you PR its not gonna change people's opinion. Sorry SC2, I wanted you to be great. But it ain't gonna happen.

On March 19 2012 14:23 sluggaslamoo wrote:


Too go further on this point I just hope that Blizzard take away from this lesson that it wasn't that esports was the wrong goal, its that SC2 didn't take the necessary steps to achieve the esports goal. LoL (and possibly Dota 2) is a prime example here.

Hiring Browder to create an esport game. Perhaps compared to the rest of the cast he might have been the best guy for the job, who knows. Its clear though he was too ambitious with his decision making in the first stages, and I feel that he didn't want to learn much about the old game because maybe he felt it would detract from his creativity. But it led to some blunders like "the wraith is not for esports" (if you've seen two port wraith builds, you would know what I mean), "zergling vs high templar analogy", etc. I honestly feel just having the wraith instead of viking/banshee would have made a huge difference to skill and creativity in the game.

You can tell there's been a bit of a flip come HotS, with the Swarm Host [lurker], Viper [defiler], with units that are actually implemented with a purpose and lots of utility rather than just make them cool, but I feel it is getting too late. Even though there were countless threads on TL and BNET, Blizzard had to just wait and see first hand to finally come to terms with it. I kind of wish Browder was in HotS mode of thought pre WoL. Although still why these BW-like units, and why not just bring the BW units back in?

Failnet 2.0. Beaten to death.

Entitlement. Suing Kespa. Imagine how different SC2 would be in Korea if it wasn't for this. Trust me when I say Gom was a terrible broadcaster of Starcraft, even in BW. Just looking at the OSL intros compared to GSL says a lot.