Tourney fatigue investigated as potential problem - Page 2

On October 15 2012 21:05 Shodaa wrote:
One thing that we had in broodwar (and in most sport too) that we should have in SC2 is some sort of official off season. I think this would helps everybody a lot. Like a full month, no official tournament.

On October 15 2012 21:13 GhostFall wrote:
Completely Hypothetical Example: GSL and GSTL tournament run monthly with GSTL having the much larger bigger prize pool and open to all teams.. Korea has Code A qualifiers as the public tournament to feed into GSL. NA has an periodic open tournament that feeds into the GSL(say the major mlg events). Europe also has a periodic open tournament that feeds into GSL. You could still have fun little side tournaments, but they would be infrequent, perhaps once a year.

(1) More quality and quantity coverage is not an easy task to do; currently there are 2 main content creators on TeamLiquid (Fionn and Waxangel) and both are incredibly overworked; it's only recently that we've gotten a few more (e.g. Porcelina, stuchiu, monk). Cranking out near-daily detailed articles previewing tournaments is a hard task - writing one is not difficult, but it becomes quite a chore over time, as many have found out. BW coverage was more indepth and well-written, but BW tournaments were much further in between than SC2 tournaments.
Sites like ESFI and GosuGamers also have some coverage, but it's much less detailed than TL and is more in the line of a quick recap, or reporting the games as they occur. What ESFI and Cadred, etc do offer though is a variety of excellent interviews, photos and live coverage, which TL sometimes will falter in. TL cannot feasibly do interviews and photos etc for every tournament since flying out people is difficult.
With 'more coverage' too - sometimes, TL has the problem that there are several things running at once, but they can't feature many articles. An example is the TSL4 interviews and recaps - they were always written, but not often the main featured article, so they obtained very low views.
In my opinion, more coverage is good, but it won't help all that much.

(2) Less tournaments isn't something we really want to see, in my opinion. There is a lot of tournaments, true - at any given point there's likely to be ESV, NASL, IPL, MCSL, GSL or some other similar tournament on, and every fortnight or so there's a major weekend tournament.
Decreasing the number of tournaments might be an option - but I think a better one would be for tournaments to distinguish between themselves better. Right now, they all sort of become mashed together into some mush that's hard to differentiate. I have trouble following all the leagues (and I'm a pretty avid viewer; although perhaps it's also due to the fact that my timezone is not very good for EU or NA tournaments).

(3) Excellent way forward, in my opinion. WCS EU was excellently done (better so than WCS Asia, for example). It was well-hyped and had the great storylines coming in, and also introduced a bit of nationalistic pride (e.g. Dutch people would watch to root for you and Ret, for example, and would cheer for you vs. your opponents). This can sort of tie in with point 2 - perhaps it's not a bad idea to have multiple tournaments running all the time (a background buzz, if you will) but still ensure that huge massive hyped events still take place.

(4) Good point too, but I think it's a tad demanding on the players. While someone with a storyline is much liked, being a foreigner who does well is generally enough of a storyline/hype machine haha. For Koreans, having a storyline is a more difficult problem (communication barrier) - but it's not too difficult to hype them up as a tournament caster or organiser, or as a writer for a news site. To be honest - if Koreans learn a bit of English and BM each other in English, then foreigner viewers will go gaga over them as well too.

(5) There is a problem, and I fear that smaller leagues like ESV may go bust. For example, EWM is no longer broadcasted due to low viewership, and LR threads get less posts in them as times go by (e.g. Code A last year would get 150+ pages easily, while Code A these days struggle to get 70 pages on TL). I don't want to see tournaments go bust - sponsors will see that, and they will withdraw due to fear of their tournament going bust as well.

(6) My best solution? I think (3) is the best.

Develop the local scene - perhaps even at the expense of the international scene. Produce local heroes who can do well, so that the nation can have someone to cheer for and follow. If there are players that fans like who are doing well, they will get more into StarCraft.
A common theme I've noticed is that people will post much less if their favourites are slumping (e.g. SlayerS fanboys post much less now that they can't post to cheer for MMA or Boxer - also I find myself slightly more disinterested once my favourites drop out of MLG, etc). If we can promote the players well so that there are multiple people that the fans are invested in, they will follow the scene more. For example, I manage the Creator fanclub, and I follow every Creator match (every replay and VOD is also linked in that fanclub, if you so wanted to study Creator's play haha). The more players fans are invested in, the more likely a tournament will contain them and thus draw that fan's interest.
Get the Koreans to learn English, and market themselves a bit better.

Someone on reddit posted an excellent comparison with SC2 to the Tennis world tour each year - most viewers tune in for Grand Slam finals (GSL finals), some for Masters 1000s (e.g. MLG, DH, WCS continentals) and fewer for the local tournaments. That model seems quite similar to what we have now, to be honest, except that monetary support in that scene is much greater, and therefore it's a bit more sustainable. Blizzard also needs to step it up by making SC2 a bit more appealing to watch (e.g. lategame PvZ can be difficult, and PvP sometimes can get stale with Colossi wars). Get a better Observer client, and better in-game integration of Tournaments and news. Possibly provide monetary compensation to recruit more TL writers.

On October 15 2012 20:53 Velr wrote:
6. The game needs to be more diverse, more fun and more exciting.

On October 15 2012 20:51 Flicky wrote:
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.

On October 15 2012 21:43 Technique wrote:
(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.

The production of most tournaments are really good at this point, so that's not a problem.
I just feel like tournament wins are not special anymore, it's just ''one of the many'' feeling.

Doesn't mean you can't have a lot of smaller tournaments, but there should be one premiere tournament that every one wants to win.
I suppose that would be GSL, but even they have already like 15 tournament winners? It is simply too much.

On October 15 2012 20:25 deilwynna wrote:
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.