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I don't think the problem is too many tournaments in and of itself, but that there are too many tournaments AT THE SAME TIME.
This weekend just past, there was WCS Asia, ROG Nordic, Iron Squid and more going on right at the same time.
This meant that it was nigh on impossible to follow it all together.
I think this is the main thing that will decrease viewer numbers. Some of us can watch 2-4 streams simultaneously, but not a lot of us can. This means that one will have to be chosen and the others, that would otherwise have been watched, will miss out.
With so many different tournament organisers, this almost becomes similar to one of the VEC debates on whether the eSports scene needs a governing body to oversee all of this.
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On October 15 2012 21:53 Dodgin wrote:Show nested quote +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. GSL has 9 different winners over 26 months, It's not bad in that case at all, especially this year there are only five seasons and one of them was a repeat champion ( could be two this Saturday )
True i should have said 15 tournaments, instead of tournament winners, since mvp alone is already good for 4 tournament wins.
Either way i think sc2 could use 1 super big tournament that only happens once or twice a year.
As in it's so big certain players would even chose to skip other tournaments in order to get the best preparation and come with strats no one seen before.
I also think that it would be good for the game, because if players are constantly in tournaments, when do they have time to make up complete new stuff? As it stands now it's better to just perfect what you already know.
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6) stop letting non professional casters cast in tournaments, I find it so annoying listening to commentators go on about irrelevant things like warcraft 3 during an sc2 game especially for longer than 5 minutes, Or blizzard employs casting games making a mockery out of it because they don't know whats really going on. It might sound like a great idea behind the scenes but it comes across as an eye roll and I have to mute the stream which means I can't talk good about the tournament experience to other potential fans.
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I don't think it's just that there are TOO many tournaments, I think its that they have very little meaning because they lack cohesion.
I mean, look at all of the WCS National Tournaments, if they went under any other name they'd probably get less than a third of the viewership they did and be worse off for it. The reason they got the viewership they did was because they were a part of something bigger. They had an inherent story-line and value beyond a prizepool.
Of course, this has come up multiple times before, but there has to be some Tournament of Tournaments made up by all of the tournaments currently in session... A tournament that would give perspective to all of the others. The problems this brings up are numerous.
Who decides what each tournament is worth?
Who gets to host the final tournament?
How does the tournament control "flashes in the pan"? (Players who qualify for the final tournament early on in the cycle, but drop off in skill by the end of the cycle.)
How can the organizer make this tournament be definitively the BEST tournament of the year? (It's the theoretical culmination of ALL of the tournaments, it should be one of the, at least, top 3 BEST tournaments of the year without question.)
Solving the problems of the "Final Tournament" would even make little tournaments able to apply for "official status" in that they could award "Tournament Points" to their winning players... Hell, it'd probably even spike the quality of games in Playhem Dailies. (Which really should be national representative status locked.)
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Yes. Often I get the feeling that there is too much SC2 going on, it's becoming difficult to keep my interest going.
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too many warcraft 3 style games.
you know what i mean
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I would say, we don't necessarily need less tournaments, but more quality in most of the tournaments. Most tournaments beside the GSL seem to have huge problems with keeping their schedule and that's a huge problem. Tournaments need to invest more into preventing delays. To have a big tournament like WCS Asia delayed for an hour without giving out any kind of information or coverage is a huge fail and it seems to happen way too often even in major tournaments.
Just learn from other sports broadcasts. If you can't start the tournament in time, provide some reports of the participating players of interest, the mappool, the history of the tournament, whatever. If it's too expensive for your tournament then have at least your host/casters/experts talk about that stuff while you solve the problems in the background. And give out information about the delay - reason and times when you will restart.
Those delays cost you a ton of viewers and deter a lot of new viewers right from the start!
And if those improvements cost so much that tournament organisers can't afford as many tournaments as they can now, then be it so! Quality > quantity in that regard. I think the western tournament scene should start to learn from GSL (which has the highest level of professionalism right now in the SC2 esport scene) and other sport broadcasts!
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Overall I think SC2 is oversaturated by tournaments with 1-4 premier or major tournaments a month, with various invite only tournaments also grabbing alot of attention.
I'll consider the topic a bit and return if I come up with something original or support for one of the proposed solutions.
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6. My solution
In my opinion there is too much to watch right now. But I don't believe reducing the amount of tournaments is the right way to go. In my opinion there is too much content in every tournament. Every tournament seems to have 2-3 days of starcraft for up to 14 hours a day. That's just too much! The people who watch these tournaments aren't pro-gamers, they don't have the time or passion to spend that much time with starcraft (there are those people but I'm talking about the average viewer right now).
My solution would be to just have smaller tournaments and keep the qualifications online. Then the tournament finals needs to be meaningful! I was really disappointed when WCS china had bo3 in the finals. That's just stupid. Make every finals bo7, start the finals at the best possible time (if the tournament is big, you should find good time for both europe/na).
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+ Show Spoiler +On October 15 2012 20:10 Grubby wrote:
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>
I'd say 1 & 3 and adding that esports need to develop into something like soccer or any other big sport. Go away from constant 1-3 day weekend event and have it span over longer time. Champion's league comes to mind or something similar. I hope you catch what I'm trying to say.
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I think that 5 will lead to 2.
It is kind of a double edged sword. If there are less tournaments, interest will increase, but it will be harder for pro gamers to make a living playing. If there are more tournaments, it becomes easier for pro gamers to make a living, but at the expense of the health of the scene overall.
Another point that I want to bring up is that the number of tournaments seems to make it very hard for players to get adequate amounts of practice and thus strategy development seems to stagnate. I remember shortly after the queen patch, there was a period of a month, where Stephano said in interviews that he hadn't had a chance to actually make any changes to his style to take advantage of the change, because he was always at events. This also has an effect on viewership numbers and interest in the game in general, because games start to all look the same.
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The over saturation thing is common in all things that get hype. Just look at MMA first it was underground. Then it started gaining acceptance. Then BOOM there were tons of organizations. It has now entered the coalescence faze. Where UFC owns pretty much everything.
Same happened in poker. A few years back there were probably around 1000 sites of which a lot had plenty of traffic. Now there is basically only pokerstars and a few others left. That have enough traffic to be worth playing on.
I am pretty sure esports is going the same way. In a few years there will be a few major players left. Also the major tournaments will start to air on regular TV ^^
For me I'm pretty content just watching GSL, just wish they went global and made a real team league ;-)
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grubby, youre just so amazing. i can tell that you actually understand esports and the sc2 scene very well by reading the OP. I like how you tried to be as neutral as possible in putting forward the question to the community, and the way you worded it.. was just great, i've been wondering this myself for a while now, but i just couldnt figure out how to word it all correctly. Your wording however is A++, sums up my exact thoughts.
As for any actual input i can offer to this thread.. its hard to decide which point id rather take. I think having just a few *BIG* tournaments every year is really cool, like one every month which is super important and has a lot of money up for stake, with an amazing invitee list. I think this sort of structure to the SC2 esports world would interest a lot of the casual viewers, and get a lot of random other people interested in sc2 which wouldnt usually be interested.
I remember the days when Barcraft use to be this thing that happened once every few months when there was a *Massive* tournament on, and everyone went, everyone made a big deal about it, showed up, had a great time, etc. But now, there can pretty much be a barcraft every weekend right? there are so many leagues out there. This brings me to what might be a controversial topic - divide players based on actual skill/performance.
The way this would work is that top teir players would be invited to and attend top teir tournaments and play in them (this would be your DRG's, Nestea's, MC's, MVP's etc.). And then you would have your other tournaments which would be like your B team tournaments which include players like Destiny, Catz... (insert any white player here pretty much). - but this level of organisation would involve the iesf im guessing. Wouldnt it be cool if there was something like that? i believe it would be something similar to what americans have for baseball and basketball, where they have the Top teir players in one league, and there are lesser leagues for teams which arnt top teir.
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Maarten
6) other. The solution is: Centralization
With sports, people subscribe to sports channels on tv. They know where to go when they want to watch their favorite sport.
With SC2, it's scattered all over the place on the web and viewers have to put in effort to watch SC2. If there was a channel, be it a website, or twitch channel (or whatever) where all the big tourneys show up (like on a tv channel), that thousands of people can follow, things would be a lot better.
Arists impression, feel free to use it and get rich:
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/hf8x3.png)
Another advantage of this would be less scheduling conflicts, because the tourneys better put in effort to show up here instead of clipping.
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I just ended up watching the GSL. Most of the worlds best players, fun format and plenty of matches. There are other good tournaments, but I just don't have the time to watch them all. I don't watch live streams, only VOD's since I live in Norway.
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On October 15 2012 22:00 Gowerly wrote:
I don't think the problem is too many tournaments in and of itself, but that there are too many tournaments AT THE SAME TIME.
This weekend just past, there was WCS Asia, ROG Nordic, Iron Squid and more going on right at the same time.
This meant that it was nigh on impossible to follow it all together.
I think this is the main thing that will decrease viewer numbers. Some of us can watch 2-4 streams simultaneously, but not a lot of us can. This means that one will have to be chosen and the others, that would otherwise have been watched, will miss out.
With so many different tournament organisers, this almost becomes similar to one of the VEC debates on whether the eSports scene needs a governing body to oversee all of this.
Well, the Iron Squid was only the qualifiers so I think that only caters to the hardcore crowd or if your favorite player was making a deep run. It would be like trying to follow basketball. Sure, you can watch a lot of the NBA games. What about Euro league, leagues for each country? Chinese league?? At some point, you will have to pick and choose.
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I think the problem is definitely #3 (and 1, and 5, and some other factors as well- basically a bit of everything). For a while there were few tournaments and they were getting big viewership. As a result, it's no wonder lots of other people decided to throw their money into the ring and start their own tournaments. It used to be that when a MLG or dreamhack happened, I would block out almost all of the weekend and watch as much of the tournament that I could. Now? I'll tune in if I happen to be at my computer and not busy (or turn it on the background if I am). I may make an effort to watch the semis or finals if I have time. But its no big deal if I miss it? Why? Because tomorrow there is probably another tournament, maybe not AS good, but still pretty good. I can get my fix when I want, whenever I want and the 'big' tournaments aren't that much different from the little ones anymore.
So, what to do about it? I think it's understandable that almost every small tournament out there has big aspirations of being the next big tourney. There isn't anything you can do to stop that without some central body controlling the market and picking the winners and losers - something an internet community would likely never support. So I have a couple of ideas on ways to help:
1. Big tournaments need to start hyping themselves selectively. They can no longer rely on their fans to spread the word for them. MLG in particular has done a rather poor job recently. It used to be that there was so much fan hype that I knew a month in advance when an MLG was happening. Now? I pay more attention than I used to, but it could be that I might not even find out about it until after it has started. I know people think that more hype isn't the answer, and in general it isn't. I think that the big tourneys need to reserve their hype for their big offline events and stop equally hyping every little thing they do. Save it for the big MLG, or IPL, or whatever. Don't try and hype the online qualifier to an online tournament the same way you do your main events. I know that they are afraid that if they don't that they will lose viewership to a smaller event. They are right, but it is coming at the cost of a major hit to their viewership in their big events.
Major tournaments need to come up with new ways to hype their tournaments. Attracting top talent is no longer enough. You need to get that top talent to write blog posts about how excited they are for the tournament. Write about what they did to prep and their hope for how they expect to do. Maybe for a week running up to a tournament have a top pro player write a short blog piece for your tournament helping to hype it. Maybe that wouldn't work, I'm just tossing ideas, but people have to start being more selective with their hype, and bigger and more creative when they do choose to hype things.
2. Fewer events in general. At almost any time during the day, more than one event is on air on the TL sidebar. Now most of these are small events and no one is forcing you to watch anything, but there is just so much content that nothing feels that special anymore. Why care about missing a major LAN when you can watch the same players play in an online event a few days later. Sure, it's not AS good, but if it is comparable and it fits my schedule a little better, then that is a sacrifice that people would be willing to make. I honestly think that if the big name players played in less events that would help. I don't think supply and demand will ever truly sort this out naturally and even if it does, it might not be a good thing. It used to be that the tournaments that got the Koreans got big viewers, but now even a small tournament can get a few Koreans. It's just to the point now where there is more content from the best of the best than I could ever watch and as a result, I just stop caring.
I can go on and on, but I think that the big players need to act like they are big. They need to stop blurring the lines between their daily broadcasts of some online qualifier to some tiny tournament I don't care about and their big LANs. The big events have lost almost all the hype. It seems like everything (except the GSL) is becoming the same. MLG tried to do something different with their MLG vs Proleague event. It was a great idea to differentiate themselves and do something new, they just made WAY too much content to the point where I could never dream of following it (so I never tried).
Anyways, this is getting a bit rambly and I need to get to work, but I think it is a problem and that something needs to be done. GSL is about the only thing left that seems to still be special, and even then it is starting to have that be diluted by the plethora of content.
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We're labeling over saturation viewer fatigue now?
Everyone only has so much time on their hands to watch the games. This has been known since day 1 and there is too many bush leagues yet the organizers keep preaching the old competition is good remark, which has solid backing to it.
Doesn't mean it's the only answer though and as we've seen with KeSPA and MLG's partnership well gee golly shit and go awry easily still.
Back to day 1 again. There's too much bush league stuff. People don't want to see bush league stuff. What do they do instead? They tend to follow certain players around in the end because they can only make so much time in their schedule or they'll watch a major/stream instead for whatever reason.
The real problem is over saturation and all of us knew about this long, long ago.
You want to fix the problem you might want to actually consider holding that summit with everyone involved like I said and come up with a policy and address the scheduling problems so everyone is on the same page.
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This is a good topic of research. Good luck and I hope you get conclusive data and thus apply it to how tournaments are scheduled and conducted.
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Canada16217 Posts
On October 15 2012 22:10 Technique wrote:Show nested quote +On October 15 2012 21:53 Dodgin wrote: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. GSL has 9 different winners over 26 months, It's not bad in that case at all, especially this year there are only five seasons and one of them was a repeat champion ( could be two this Saturday ) True i should have said 15 tournaments, instead of tournament winners, since mvp alone is already good for 4 tournament wins. Either way i think sc2 could use 1 super big tournament that only happens once or twice a year. As in it's so big certain players would even chose to skip other tournaments in order to get the best preparation and come with strats no one seen before. I also think that it would be good for the game, because if players are constantly in tournaments, when do they have time to make up complete new stuff? As it stands now it's better to just perfect what you already know.
Blizzard Cup? I'm pretty sure they are doing a blizzard cup this year.
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EPT
