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Open letter to the community about viewership tournament fatigue in sc2 eSports
This is an attempt to see if there is a possibility for a concerted effort to help improve upon an aspect of eSports, in this case StarCraft II eSports. There are so many theories that come to mind, but each has its merits and disadvantages. Recently and regularly I read descriptions of problems in our world of SC 2 eSports. That is happening because of our community's PASSION, which is great. One problem I've read about (whether the majority sees it as one or not, I find that hard to accurately judge) is "viewer tournament fatigue". Just to explain, the concept here would be that the scene is suffering (yes, suffering, not blossoming) under the stress of too many tournaments; of oversaturation, and thus in extension suffering of a reduced significance of any one tournament. Is this a problem, or not? And if it is, and should be done about it, if anything? If you care about the eSports scene, or care to add your voice, I'd love to read your opinion (point 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 or 6: other).
Public discussions have been had many a time over this topic and other topics similar to it, but because of the complexity of the problem, I'd like to absorb your input and maybe come up with a comprehensive plan, or just keep it in mind so that I may see what I can do to improve the scene by, at any point in the future, like nudging it into the correct direction. I could try to accomplish solutions behind the scenes, or thru airing opinions on vblogs, I don't know yet. For now, see this as a survey or even a school sociology finals exam question (it's starting to look like one). Heh, hey, maybe I'll grade your answer!
For this item, public discussion is allowed, even encouraged - hell, you're a free (wo)man - <<NO MORE EMAILS, THX!  >> Looking forward to your reply!
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Your name and nickname:
Q: Let's for a moment say that tournament fatigue of the viewer is a realistic problem. What will improve SC2 eSports the most according to you, and help fix this problem?
(1) more quality and quantity tournament coverage is needed on TeamLiquid/ESFI World/other sites so that the tournament and player stories get developed more. I can still choose to watch tournament A, B, or C or all three; when I do, I can easily find previews, power ranks and results as well as interviews and pictures.
(2) We need to have less tournaments around. Delayed gratification will make the next tournament that much better. With too many tournaments around, I don't know what to follow anymore.
(3) tournaments need to become more well rounded; the time that *just* providing a proving grounds for top players for 1-4 days was enough, is over. The responsibility lies not with independent coverage, but in the production value, post-production value and pre-hype and side shows that tournaments themselves deliver. I will watch a lot more tournaments and streams if only every tournament had the production, self-generated hype or 'feel' of (for instance WCS EU).
(4) The same points as in point 3, but adding the following:
Every party has a responsibility to improve the viewership experience for the audience. This means a fan needs to tell his friends about SC2/tourneys/eSports; a tournament organization needs to raise her own production value; a player needs to go above and beyond "just playing" by becoming actually involved; would-be writers, people from the community with passion need to start covering tourneys; etc; basically anyone who can do anything needs to start doing it.
The theme of point 4 is: "We dont have time to let the hype and growth of (SC2) eSports die off or decline before *maybe* it gets super big in the year 2030 after our own active followership."
(5) There is no problem of oversaturation. The market of supply & demand will sort itself out eventually. Tournaments that don't provide enough quality or have enough improvements will concludingly have low viewership, therefore die off and make room for the new. The same with players who don't perform; they, too, will be replaced by the new. The circle of life will naturally work itself out, as will the circle of eSports life. No amount of theorizing is going to change anything about the direction that eSports is going to be taking, whatever that may be.
6) other. The solution is: <your solution>
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Greets,
Grubby
edit 1: cleaned up a bit
edit 2: cleaned up a bit more
edit 3: posted this, but will write here too:
Hi guys and gals! Thanks everyone for the amazing and massive response! I'd just like to ask people not to email anymore! :D I'm afraid I can't read any more new emails. I had about 200 email responses, a massive response and I have been sifting through them for days, trying to give everyone the attention they deserve. I still have about 90 new emails. I hope no one will be too upset if no personal response will be forthcoming, I have some important matches to play the coming weeks which I need to focus on. Still, this is an important issue and I'm compiling all the date I have into a huge sheet of information. Hopefully I can make good things come out of it, as I said before, behind the scenes or with a second public manifesto. Thanks again everyone.
edit 4: removed my email address
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Edit: I can't read. Just noticed it was a mostly e-mail thing. I'll leave my original post below in spoiler brackets.
+ Show Spoiler +I feel a combination of 3 and 5.
There currently are too many tournaments and some are doing a lot better then others. I think the tournaments that make themselves easier to follow while producing good content and having in general good quality games will be the ones to survive. (Although the latest factor of those is one out of your control)
I'll use this post to particularly single out the NASL. After having ran a very good season 3 I feel that season 4 is next to impossible to follow actively. The insane amount of reschedules means that any logic behind the 'Division Nights' is completely out of the window and it feels like you currently need to watch every single day even just to keep up if you would normally follow only 1 division. As I normally only followed Division 3 (the Friday's are convenient for me) I've stopped this season because of the complete randomness of how many matches get shown, whether those are from "my" division or even whether they actually even have a single game to show.
I wonder why they stepped off the approach they took in S3, it's not like that season was filled with WO/s.
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I'll make connections with LoL which has the most viewers at the same time out of all esports.
LoL only has about 1 huge tournament per month, if they have 2 or 3 tournaments same month, the months before or after doesn't have it, that's one of the problems with the SC2 scene as its flooded with big tournaments every weekend for months to end. for LoL, next big tournament is IEM (I think), if there were less big tournaments in SC2, then it would have more viewers for each, also the spectator overlay by blizzard isn't as good as the spectator overlay in LoL, that could be a huge factor too.
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I'm glad someone with influence is opening up this line of discussion. It's something I think a lot of us have experienced in one way or another but it's really though to formalize and I'm sure there's many approaches to dealing with it.
Will mail when I'm off work (don't look at me like that, this is my lunchbreak).
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I think have a central organizing body, with a "grand slam" of tournaments will at least center everyone around what they should watch. For example, I think WCS is great as a yearly or bi-yearly tournament. I think there's so much choice right now, people aren't even sure what to watch and it diultes the numbers. The only exceptions are the big MLGs/IEMs/GSL etc... they're not suffering as much imo. I know that if there is a MLG coming up that I don't really care what else is on, I will watch it.
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I don't think too many tournements is a problem. What evidence is there that it is?
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I only like to follow a few of my favorite players, so I only watch matches in tournaments that they are playing in.
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I have been saying for a significant period of time that SC2 suffers from tournament oversaturation so I fully support this initiative.
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A bit of 1 and 5, liquipedia is seriously awesome and should be more highlighted. The problem is that each tournament wants to please it's sponsors and bring more hits to their webpages so they won't put effort into liquipedia. I feel sc2 needs to be more "centralized" in a way because it does seems to be a bit chaotic right now.
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I just comment on the points itself, my english is not good enough to express what i actually wanna say to make it comprehensible.
1) There were some rare cases of lan events were there was close to zero coverage which turned out to be great events, but this was like 9 months ago (if i remember correctly) and especially the tl coverage (only coverage that i care about) has in my opinion greatly improved for sc2
2) I actually think that that would be good but as a lot of tournament organizers are eager to get a piece of the pie i doubt that this will happen anytime soon. But that is only me as a viewer. For example playerwise (even thou there are downsides too) the more tournaments the better, broodwar only had wcg for foreigners (well some other rare stuff too) but that was not good
3) i agree, but there r just not enough people to actually do it in a good way, for example what 2gd with his studio does and the people around them is pretty good, Dreamhack does a good job and i always feel like i am closer to those tournaments as for example iem or mlg.
4) Dont know what u want the players to actually "do more" cuz in the end i as a viewer wanna see the best possible performance of the players to generate good games and as u know its no cakewalk to be in a tournament with a lot at stake, the mental pressure can be pretty excausting plus the jet lag which is always an issue (or can be). I dont think it would be good to drag the players around more than is necessary.
5) I dont think it will actually sort itself out anytime soon, bad tournaments always excisted in every game i played since 98 but i dont know the actual viewership of tournaments which i think are horrible, maybe they are doing fine
6) There is no simple "do this and it will all be sunshine" Blizzard could try to copy Riot (League of Legends) cuz when it comes to promoting the game and esport content they are probably the best company out there. Sponsors needs to be more carefull
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Tourneys need more personalities and storylines and need to find ways to generate this and convey it to the viewer.
Fact is, more people will watch a lower quality tourney with people like Idra in than a super professional tourney with a bunch of faceless koreans or faceless foreigners.
You can have all the flashy graphics and content you want but if the players are boring and they're no storylines then people won't be interested.
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Option 2 for sure. So many tournaments.
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Hey Grubby!
I think #4 is the ideal: "(4) same as point 3, but also: Every party has a responsibility to improve the viewership experience for the audience."
But I think the most important factor is simply #3. In other words, quality must be emphasized in making each tournament/event very polished on a production level, storyline/hype level, etc.
NASL is starting to really capture my attention and they have a large QUANTITY of events (5 out of 7 days), but I'm not getting that fatigued because they craft their content with interesting personalities while maintaining some decent "hot" matchups almost every night AND their production values are solid.
I think the biggest example of how NOT to do this was this weekend with WCS Asia Finals. They had the very TOP Koreans there, but they started off on the wrong foot because there wasn't that much hype leading up to it. They had you and Artosis casting, which is already top-tier casting (plus Rob Simpson and the Jaris---something person) BUT what they really failed on was their production values.
WCS Asia Finals' had a decent intro/hype video that they would play periodically, but there was a LOT of downtime between matches where they just had the WCS spinning logo. What was even worse was that the video and for a little bit, even the audio, went down several times (i.e. black screen) even during matches. And the sound wasn't the greatest, there was booming bass leaking from somewhere else in the venue, and the lighting setup for the casters wasn't the most professional.
In other words, it takes a LOT of work and effort to put together a production that not only has good "specs" (or names/players attached to it) but that manages its downtime well and has a lot of polish. I think that's what #3 brings to mind and I think that is the biggest weapon to use against tournament/viewer fatigue, and perhaps the easiest thing to focus on first is how to get the most value out of the downtime.
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On October 15 2012 20:29 dsousa wrote:
I don't think too many tournements is a problem. What evidence is there that it is?
We have too many tournaments. If we have lesser tournaments, all those tournaments will have more importance.
I really miss the wc3 times, every month 1 international tournament with all the best players of the world! Always!
Everyone wanted to come!
In sc2 i hear to many cancellation from many players from tournament to tournament. In wc3, a cancellation from one player was like a rarity.
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I couldn't get this out of my head and ended up emailing anyway. My view is not far from EmperorKiras. A tournament held at most 4x a year to crown the world champion for that period would help a lot. WCS is a nice start, but the national qualifiers lead to a skewed division when it comes to skill, nor has it so far been The One Tournament To Rule Them All. I'd much rather see MLG/GSL/DH/IEM award seeding points scaled on the frequency of the events and the skill level which will be hard to balance. On the other hand I think the bigger issue will be convincing MLG/GSL/DH/IEM that it's in their best interest to crown only 1 world champion rather than a new champion every 2 weeks at their own events.
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England2669 Posts
My main problem with over-saturation is twofold.
Firstly, it seems that most of the time it's the same players at every event which leaves little variety to an occasional viewer such as myself.
Secondly, I feel that, for me, the bigger cause of "fatigue" is the sheer number of games that happen at each event. While it's cool to see a 64 player tournament will lots of clashes every once in a while, they just seem to be way too common and when they are it's all Bo3 and then Bo5 early on and Bo7 finals. It's just an overload of matches to me. I can't keep up with 100+ games over two days. Unless you're heavily invested in the scene, you're going to get bored of that much Starcraft, especially if there are a lot of people who could be playing. With tournaments with big view counts, coverage is a very important thing. The only televised event I can think of that covers more than 32 players in a short time is Poker events and they do that with stints of 1-2 hour shows edited together and Poker does lend itself well to this format. If the mass games tournaments are to stay, perhaps a 1-2 hour recap show would be a very good way to present it, then leave the main viewers to watch the live 10 hour stream. If it weren't for TL or Liquipedia I would have no idea what was happening any time I drop into watch a game or two of a major tournament. The choice a viewer needs to make when tackling most events is to either swallow the entire mass of games and results in one go or have no idea what is going on.
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As it is right now, there are some big (GSL/MLG/OSL/IPL/WCS), medium (DH/IEM/RoG) and a lot of smaller tournaments. It seems, that the organizers of the big/medium tournaments are in contact, as the scheduling works out quite well (most of the times).
For viewership concerns:
- One has to subscribe to every tournament individually (5$ there, 10$ here, another 20$ over there....) [maybe cooperate? and offer one scheme for everything??? (might prove to be impossible, because of greedyness)]
- Battle.net for the first time ever (WCS Asia Finals) offered a link inside their game. Blizzard should more actively encourage tournament watching by providing easy access for even the non-TL-aware gamers.
- Implement a spectator mode into SC2 directly. Explicitely add some sponsor bars into the game, while watching in the "spectator" mode. This would probably save the internet a lot of bandwidth and would allow users with slower internet connection to observe the games.
Tournament hype? There is no tournament hype for me. The only tournament i always will be looking forward to watch are the GSL, GSTL, IPL, IPTL. Other than that, i will just look at the stream list whatever is live, and the best one for me, will be picked.
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6. The game needs to be more diverse, more fun and more exciting.
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On October 15 2012 20:17 opterown wrote:Excellent initiative I shall muse on the topic and see what I feel about the matter.
I second that! Grubbster = Mr. Awsome 
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EPT
