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
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm 100% happy with GOM/OGN. (well, assuming OGN gets its game in order at some point.)
Rarely watch other tournaments. To me they're superfluous as they don't have the best players so they are like minor leagues. WCS is an exception ofc. Great tournament.
I wish the scene was more explicitly divided between minor-pro and major-pro and not divided by region. Like what Code A used to be but more global and age/salary restricted.
This is a very quick reply because im VERY tired, but I feel the reason why there are so many tournaments is because sponsors all want a piece of the cake. It would be awesome if the sc2 community could come together in some sort of SC2League (kind of what NHL USED to be in icehockey, pre KHL of course)
At the same time, I think of all the tiny tournaments such as playhem daily zotac etc etc as leagues where unknown players can practice and show themselves, Team leagues and lesser individual leagues such as IPL is basically AHL / Swedish elite league/ the finnish SM-liiga.
But, there are too many "NHL"s in the business at least with the speed they produce content, I find it impossible to follow everything I want to follow and still have time for other activities. to come back to Icehockey, in hockey its okay if I dont watch all the matches, but I still want to watch my fav teams matches (FORZA LULEÅ/DETROIT lol), in Sc2 theres too much inconsistency in elimination-tournaments for the audience to be able to plan their time so they can watch their fav players / teams without having to basically hog the computer the whole tournament.'
nowadays theres too much downtime in tournaments, I feel like im spending more time waiting for matches than actually watching the game, and all of a sudden its as if someone pulled a plug and there are matches everywhere (dual-quad-streams etc)
One way to approach this "fanbase-community" is to expand liquipedia and promote it!
Im just gna stop rambling now because Im too tired to come with a real sum up of what im trying to say, I hope someone can get something out of my ramble, goodnight
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 21:05 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.
Not what you mean, if you mean a "long-run" tournament like NASL, GSL and co, then no. I dont dislike such tournament, I just dislike this format.
Viewer fatigue is, and will continue to be prominent issue and I also share concerns surrounding that although it's not immediately directed towards the 'quantity of tournaments' as a lot of consolidation has occurred over the past year or so.
In my opinion the issue which needs to be addressed isn't relatted to the tournament, but how the tournament is consumed via the content it creates - and I don't think necessarily the problem is content which originates from the matches StarCraft 2 produces, but rather the way tournaments engage their streams to consistently show matches without providing a break to the viewer.
There is only a limited amount of energy and attention a viewer can give 'high-octane gaming' and I think tournaments are sometimes misguided in their attempts to cram as many matches in as possible. The ROG 2GD tournament is the first time I've been able to watch the entire production from start to end (after years of watching many many esport tournaments) and I feel a big contributing factor to that was how engaging the content outside of the game was.
There are way too many tournaments. I only follow GSL nowadays anyway. Now is the time where tournament organizers need to stop trying to be the next big thing and start thinking about what's best for the scene. (this won't be happening soon because greed)
Having too many tournaments cause some serious issues. First, it does exactly what you said, where tournaments become trivial. Just in the NA scene alone there is MLG, NASL, IPL. Does it matter anyone won anything in any of these tournaments? Secondly, it puts on tremendous pressure on sponsors. The longevity of teams is not helped by the fact that sponsors have to pay tickets to fly players everywhere. And sponsors can't not send players to these tournaments, even if it costs them a lot, because in order to remain relevant, players have to show up to tournaments. Finally, it makes play worse, simply because players have to split their attention when there are many tournaments.
In a perfect world, I think there would be 3 tiers of tournament. There should be 1 big individual tournament. (GSL). Possibly monthly or seasonally. There would be 1 big team tournament that has a much bigger prize than any other tournament. And there needs to be one tournament that's open to the public for a non-established player to break out.
Having one big individual tournament is obvious. This is where all the focus is, and viewers are split between watching multiple tournaments. One tournament does amazingly well, instead of multiple tournaments all doing crappy. The reason why a team tournament should have the larger prize pool is because it spreads out the money more evenly. It is much healthier for the scene for each member of a team to get $10,000, then a single person getting $50,000. Finally, the reason why you need an open tournament, is so that non established players can make a name for themselves.
KESPA has maintained a stable tournament ecosystem off this exact model. The OSL, (and MSL when OSL isn't going on), as the large individual tournament. The proleague as the large team tournament. And the courage tournament, so non-established players can make names for themselves(and get their license).
Since Starcraft 2 is much more international, this exact model wouldn't work as you would need each region to have their own tournament as well. But only one tournament would be needed per region.
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.
Big fan of your stuff man, especially your recent casting at WCS; your enthusiasm is exceptionally contagious!
That aside, I've been considering this issue for quite some time and been doing my own slight investigations in the matter.
I believe that a large part of the problem lies in the other category:
6) Americans need a dog in the fight
To the purist like myself (KR server player ONLY), I don't really mind the constancy of having Koreans in the top 8 positions at tournaments; it is often the source of the highest quality of play. However, it is public knowledge that viewership numbers go way down when foreigners are no longer represented in a tournament. Unless the Korean happens to be MC or Nestea, I'm sure Sundance crosses his fingers during an MLG each time Stephano plays his matches.
Americans are the largest consumers of SC2 content (I vaguely remember hearing incontrol saying this), so this 'suffering' of viewership seems to be somewhat intertwined with that in mind. If we look back to the time when SC2 was growing and flourishing (years 0-1.4) we had seminal figures like IdrA, Huk, Jinro, all with their respective and attractive (in the media sense) personalities.
These days, there are 0 foreigners remaining in the GSL. But not even Nestea is in GSL anymore; that's how fucking tough it is.
But these days, money is tight in the world of eSports, particularly in the Starcraft scene. Financially, we aren't as well off as our LoL cousins (which I hope would be reason enough to want to improve the state of SC2). And while two years has passed since the beginning of SC2, I don't think it's too late to double-down, and invest in the right places this time around. Teamhouses should not be built based upon how easy it is to produce content; Rather, they should be located anywhere one can access the KR server with a playable latency. Period.
Otherwise, we are training at a disadvantage. In almost the purist sense of the word 'race', we are very much dead last when it comes to the quality of our training, and sequentially the quality of our players and server.
I love this game, and it pains me to see the scene struggle in this uncertain period of growth. But it's not all doom and gloom. Major props to team Quantic and team liquid for investing the insane amount of money it must cost to accomodate players in Korea. While we may not see immediate results, it is important to not get discouraged and keep our eye on the ball--We must get better.
P.S. website is unfinished... very much so in the incipient stages of such an endeavor...
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.
this would be hard; not everyone wants to go to Korea, and at current skill levels, not many of these "feeder" tourneys would provide GSL contenders (most foreigners are, sadly, walkovers for top korean pros).
MLG's used to excite me allot, I loved rivalry’s between Idra and MC for example. But recently I’m feeling like the SCII pro scene has lost allot of it's initial charm. WCS EU had me hyped like crazy, why? because it came really close to the Euro Cup(soccer) I was rooting for Ret and You(grubby :D) to make our lil country(HOLLAND!!!) proud.
So for me as a spectator i need to get some sort of a bond with players in tournaments. Recently I feel like the pro-scene is flooding with new players either pro's coming from Broodwar or just new "talents". I cant bond with all those people or keep up with all the streams. Although I read allot of the tournament previews here on TL I still find it hard to "bond" with players. I'll give an example of people I like and why I like/"hate" them:
Grubby(yups): Great personality, Dutch and a prime example of a E-Sports pro.
White-Ra: Man his streams are the best ^srry Grubby I love the music he has on there (DJ Amoureux FTW) and overall he is just the most friendly person in E-Sports. -do I even need to explain xD?-
Idra: Because the rage that flows trough Idra is strong in this one (me) and I can understand the frustration of a loss trough him. He dares to show e-motion where others just don’t and just shake the hand of the person that just crushed them.
Dragon: The biggest clown in the community... Really would like to see him in more tournaments have good hopes for HOTS!
LiquidHerO: My heart breaks when he looses
BLACKLIST: Stephano >:| my most disliked player (to keep it proper) even before it was cool (youknowwhatimtalkingabout)
I could continue this list but the point is all the people named above have a strong personality and are interesting to watch or hear about. They create hype because you want to see them do good in tournaments(or not), but since there are so many tournaments and so many players in tournaments where I cant care about because I just don’t feel a connection, this problem is increasing quickly.
The solution would be complicated (if there even is one) but maybe less frequent tournaments would help. I’m the sort of person that would prefer watching games between pro’s I know and have a connection with (White-Ra vs Grubby) over watching two gods play SC2 (Rain vs Parting). So invitational only tournaments might be a good thing, only invite people that have a big fan following. Basically anything to build up story between/about players, spectators need to care in order to keep the SC2 pro-scene alive.
Pretty much what I mailed to Grubby :D it's rather disorganised and very 'train-of-thought' though, but my views are as follows :D
(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.
(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.
By title I thought this was about player fatigue of doing too many tournaments (this topic is brought up by casters during each tournament when some favorite is not playing its top game) but I see this is about too many tournaments (which is also connected with player fatigue).
I see no way to permanently fix this except for Europe and US to have big local tournaments like GSL is in Korea. The one where players need to come to physically each week and play live.
If it is not done this way, then what we have now which is like Tennis, is going to stay.
On October 15 2012 20:53 Velr wrote: 6. The game needs to be more diverse, more fun and more exciting.
Found the solution: Just clone TLO x9128073098123 and shit's gonna be so insane :3
No but seriously 90% of the game in the current meta are greedy due to metagame -> turtle to 200 -> push Mostly Koreans produce the interesting games with very well planned strategies but you just do not see them that often apart from the GSL
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.
yep, I zone out of a tourney pretty quickly when there is downtime or the players I want to see aren't playing until a few hours, or the schedule is totally fucked to begin with and they could be playing any time.
some tourneys have like 2 games every 3 hours, not acceptable.
amazing topic Grubby. i've been thinking about this for a long time and you put it in words way better than i ever could.
i think the big tournaments that we currently have just need to make their season longer (GSL, OSL), and the weekend tournaments should become longer, e.g. a week or something (MLG, IPL, DH). now i know that would cost them a lot more, but you can also charge more money from people at the venue and get a lot more ad revenue. and just have less of these tournaments. i think it's really strange that big tournaments are literally happening all the time, have you ever heard of any sport where that is the case?
players would also have more time to dedicate towards developing and practicing new strategies if they didn't feel the need of constantly going to tournaments. imagine if GSL had 3 seasons which take 3 months each, and 1 month between each season. now the GSL players have a lot more time to experiment and practice, but can also dedicate some of that 1 month break towards going to 1 big foreign event, such as an MLG that takes about a week. i keep rambling on about the weekend tournaments becoming week tournaments because i think it is also often way too much starcraft to watch on one day. i can't imagine sitting in front of my PC watching sc2 for literally 12-14 hours. maybe that's just me, but i think you could get way more concurrent viewers if each day was about 2-3 hours long, like a soccer match.
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 )
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.
Should probably mention the number of people playing LoL around the world vastly outnumbers sc2 players. The most I've seen peaked was about 40k (could be much larger somewhere else, but this is what i've seen) or so on a sc2 stream when LoL wasn't considered a good game to spectate yet. Also the number of sc2 players are dwindling in a sense, probably in preparation for heart of the swarm.
I trawl more then I write. Maybe that is good. But I will write up my opinion. I personally do not think the fatigue is due to too much tournaments as my instinct first told me. I actually think its the people. The personalities. I.E the lack of it. Take football for instance its on non-stop in the UK and people still watch, obviously there are many reasons why but for me there are so many stories with the players etc the banter the hostility grudges that you want to watch.
SC2 is stale for me any how in the personality area. Is this the reason? probably not but it might be one of the contributing factors?
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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!
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.
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).
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.
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.
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 ;-)
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.
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:
Another advantage of this would be less scheduling conflicts, because the tourneys better put in effort to show up here instead of clipping.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
did not read the whole thread, but i hope i can contribute something
1.+3.
Why not compare viewer attraction of esports to normal sports. What SC is missing is a definite Championship. I dare to suggest that LoL has as many viewers as it does (partly) because following LoL is so clear-cut. There is a championship. There is the championship. Teams fight for participation, there is progress, teams falling out, and then a winner. In other sports you always(!!) have a sort of championship. The one Tournament everyone (everyone) tries to attend. Be it Olympics, World Championships, or other things. Starcrafts ultimate measure of skill is the GSL. But the GSL has a completely different structure than commonplace Championships. As the name suggests, it is a League. Thats not a bad thing, you need a league for people whose capacity isn't filled with just watching a championship, but the broad mass doesnt have time and or motivation to follow a league. Starcraft is missing A CHAMPIONSHIP. The one and only tournament, that is THE measurement for greatness. That is GSL at the moment, but as i said, GSL doesn't appeal to the mass as a championship would. Blizzard is trying to establish the WCS, but their first try, as far as i can tell, is not getting enough attention from the really skilled players as it would have to to be what SC2 needs. Too many faces who are clearly some of "the best" are already missing (mainly MVP), due to schedueling or other unfortunate mishaps. This year WCS won't be able to fill the gap.
edit: Okay, i read back a bit, and i guess alot of people share the view i tried to express with my post. I'd like to pick up a Term "Youtakenocandle" has used on the previous page. 6. Centralization
On October 15 2012 22:12 aka_star wrote: 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.
while i kind of get your point, you can't expect casters to only talk about the current game, all the time. especially when there isn't a game going on, but even when there is there is plenty of time in your average sc2 game where nothing needs to, or even can be, said about the current game beyond what we can see on screen ourselves.
On October 15 2012 22:31 winthrop wrote: too many warcraft 3 style games. you know what i mean
no, i don't know what you mean. could you elaborate maybe?
On October 15 2012 23:27 Yomi-no-Kuni wrote: did not read the whole thread, but i hope i can contribute something
1.+3.
Why not compare viewer attraction of esports to normal sports. What SC is missing is a definite Championship. I dare to suggest that LoL has as many viewers as it does (partly) because following LoL is so clear-cut. There is a championship. There is the championship. Teams fight for participation, there is progress, teams falling out, and then a winner. In other sports you always(!!) have a sort of championship. The one Tournament everyone (everyone) tries to attend. Be it Olympics, World Championships, or other things. Starcrafts ultimate measure of skill is the GSL. But the GSL has a completely different structure than commonplace Championships. As the name suggests, it is a League. Thats not a bad thing, you need a league for people whose capacity isn't filled with just watching a championship, but the broad mass doesnt have time and or motivation to follow a league. Starcraft is missing A CHAMPIONSHIP. The one and only tournament, that is THE measurement for greatness. That is GSL at the moment, but as i said, GSL doesn't appeal to the mass as a championship would. Blizzard is trying to establish the WCS, but their first try, as far as i can tell, is not getting enough attention from the really skilled players as it would have to to be what SC2 needs. Too many faces who are clearly some of "the best" are already missing (mainly MVP), due to schedueling or other unfortunate mishaps. This year WCS won't be able to fill the gap.
It's not Blizzard fault that Mvp chose to go to IEM, and I'm pretty sure him and nestea went to iem since LG was their hosting sponsor booths or whatever and mvp/nestea had to be there. WCS definitely is the tournament to win if they do it every year or so, that and maybe Blizzard cup if they are still doing that.
Oversaturation is a serious 'first world problem'. Esports is growing and you can't watch every single tournament like in the early days of SC2/BW? Deal with it!
I would appreciate a reliable news source, maybe a daily/weekly newsshow for people to keep up with the recent results.
On October 15 2012 22:12 aka_star wrote: 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.
Professional casters? Use that term loosely. I think the word you are looking for is experienced casters.
As for the casters. I think some of you guys are probably getting way too comfortable with the casters we have now which is very hit and miss but guess what? It's like that for every sport. You get so attached to one voice that as soon as you hear another you start crying like a baby because it's not your mother.
It's not just over saturation but the amount of games as well. BW was big in Korea because it followed the same model of regular professional sports, having games spaced out as opposed to having them played over a single weekend. Single weekend tournaments just have too many games to follow, and it doesn't help if these tournaments occur more than once a month. Even every month might be too much.
The other issue is that many fans insist on Bo3 for round robin leagues and Bo7 for elimination series. Having the better player win should not be the only consideration when designing a tournament. A study of professional leagues show that many people don't bother watching until the latter games of the series and only watch if the series is close at that point.
Cool post, I definitely think that "viewership fatigue" is detrimental to eSports and is a byproduct of a very passionate community that just got so damn excited for eSports to become something legitimate with the rising success of games like SC2, LoL, Dota 2, etc. The problem is that I feel like we created something that is only for the hardcore fans and hard to maintain interest in as a casual fan. In order to stay up to date and interested in any one eSport (never mind more than one game), you need to be seriously invested in it. I mean you need to watch tournaments regularly, watch all the shows that air nearly every day, play the game actively, watch player streams, read the forums, and doing all that and maintaining a busy and active life outside of your eSports interests is HARD.
Personally, I have almost entirely stopped watching StarCraft over the past few months simply because I don't have the time anymore... I still love the game but I don't have time to play enough to maintain a high skill level, I can't watch most tournaments because its very time consuming, I don't watch the Day9 Daily hardly ever anymore because it would consume the little bit of free time I have each night. The only thing I still do actively really is read the forums and that's because I can pick out the interesting topics and read them at my convenience.
I think having tournaments in general is part of the problem. An SC2 tournament is a marathon for everyone involved -- the players, the casters, and yes, the viewers too. I can't dedicate Friday night, all day Saturday, and all day Sunday to watching MLG 99% of the time. I would love to, but I just can't. And that is just one tournament! If I were to keep up with the scene entirely I'd have to watch SC2 almost every day for multiple hours a day. No compare that to competitive sports, like baseball, football, basketball -- they don't have tournaments, they have leagues. One centralized league where the best of the best play for large amounts of money in a long, sustained season. Look at GSL, Proleague, OSL -- the most successful StarCraft (1 or 2) tournaments out there in the most popular eSports country. They are all centralized leagues, not really "tournaments" per se. A league is much easier to follow than a bunch of sporadic tournaments that are scattered all over the world and all over the internet. Having one reliable place to go and watch SC2 games and not needing to watch every day to keep up is important to keep more casual viewers interested and invested. Once eSports can do that, that is when it will truly thrive and become legitimate.
for me it is like this: in real sports, i don't get much analytics, because the game does not require that much anyway. It requires one passionate guy, often times fed by some stats and general knowledge about the players/teams. Even though the games are way longer than one game of SC2, they keep it up, and have way less downtime (there is no building up for the first 4 minutes, where literally nothing happens. There are boring games, but the guy makes it still entertaining to listen to). In SC2, i cannot see the entire map. Often times, stuff gets missed by the observer, or i can't see stuff i want to (as in how many workers per base, for example). This complexity makes me often times wish i could observe myself, at least "offline" tournaments where players can't stream cheat.
Furthermore, most actual casters call themselves analytical casters. They bore me, as i seem to come to a different conclusion than them in every most analysis they do, and they are still just plain wrong way too often. Thus i do not listen to them anymore anyway.
Therefore, it is not the amount of content available, but rather the quality of casters. A good caster can still often times make a plat duel feel like a professional game, and worth my while to watch it. Also, usually i would go to TL to check on upcoming events or current casts etc. But since they added Dota 2, i am often times confused and have to check into the stream to see what's going on. Plus, a database of tournaments and links to where i can watch VODs would help.
For this to be totally effective, you need an international group that sanctions SC2. Otherwise, what's to stop organizations from hosting events without considering the general ESports calendar.
I don't think TOO many tournament is the underlying cause. If a tournament out shines another one, it's probably as you said, post production, hype, casters/players personality. Therefore instead of saying there are too many tournaments, I think the better phrasing are there are too many (small) tournaments with very little production.
I think there are definitely too many tournaments to watch and get excited about all of them, but they're not all equal. I watch GSL pretty consistently, and I watch MLG/IPL/Dreamhack if I'm free that weekend. That's about it. While it's true that there are tons of tournaments, that doesn't take away from GSL finals for me, because it's clear to me that that's the most prestigious thing out there right now.
What I think would make a lot of the smaller tournaments more interesting was if they differentiated themselves somehow. If some of the smaller tournaments made themselves into NA- or EU-only tournaments, that would in some ways make them more interesting. Or if NASL said you can't play in both NASL and GSL. I wouldn't mind watching a "minor league" game sometimes (though obviously it won't come close to GSL), but I'd rather watch a "minor league" game that really sought to decide something meaningful (best American player, best player who doesn't play full time, best new player, etc.) than just watching a tournament that is 99% bad players but also has MC. Those tournaments are just boring forgone conclusions. Who wins is more about who is more willing to deal with jet lag (or server lag) than actual skill.
Of course, all the other things mentioned (production quality, hype, etc.) would help too, but I think they're independent from the tournament saturation question.
On October 15 2012 23:27 Yomi-no-Kuni wrote: did not read the whole thread, but i hope i can contribute something
1.+3.
Why not compare viewer attraction of esports to normal sports. What SC is missing is a definite Championship. I dare to suggest that LoL has as many viewers as it does (partly) because following LoL is so clear-cut. There is a championship. There is the championship. Teams fight for participation, there is progress, teams falling out, and then a winner. In other sports you always(!!) have a sort of championship. The one Tournament everyone (everyone) tries to attend. Be it Olympics, World Championships, or other things. Starcrafts ultimate measure of skill is the GSL. But the GSL has a completely different structure than commonplace Championships. As the name suggests, it is a League. Thats not a bad thing, you need a league for people whose capacity isn't filled with just watching a championship, but the broad mass doesnt have time and or motivation to follow a league. Starcraft is missing A CHAMPIONSHIP. The one and only tournament, that is THE measurement for greatness. That is GSL at the moment, but as i said, GSL doesn't appeal to the mass as a championship would. Blizzard is trying to establish the WCS, but their first try, as far as i can tell, is not getting enough attention from the really skilled players as it would have to to be what SC2 needs. Too many faces who are clearly some of "the best" are already missing (mainly MVP), due to schedueling or other unfortunate mishaps. This year WCS won't be able to fill the gap.
It's not Blizzard fault that Mvp chose to go to IEM, and I'm pretty sure him and nestea went to iem since LG was their hosting sponsor booths or whatever and mvp/nestea had to be there. WCS definitely is the tournament to win if they do it every year or so, that and maybe Blizzard cup if they are still doing that.
I didn't even imply that it was Blizzards fault. Its just how it is (yeah, i believe it was due to sponsoring too)
And I think oversaturation is a problem, but for me not the biggest. I lost my passion for SC2 mainly due to some lowlives in the community calling sponsors whenever they see something they don't like and sponsors actually reacting to them. Often I don't really feel like being part of such a community anymore. Still watch GSL though and anything GD related because they don't care about sponsor callers.
Quality is a key aspect for me. I'll get up at 5am to watch the GSL, in part because of the quality. The big tourneys should always be trying to outdo each other, or at least themselves. This doesn't have to be fireworks, simple things like: filing in downtime with Husky videos, or interviews is better than a cut scene and elevator music. Having timers show up so the viewer knows how long till the next match, or multiple streams to lessen down time.
Quantity will be sorted out by the market. It's great that we have a lot of events having little King of the Hills, or a daily fight club for weekday viewing. A lot of event do need to do better job showing their broadcast times and dates.
More money, it's fine to have a $50 prize for a weekday event and somewhat larger prizes for a semi pro event. But some tournaments that cover the whole weekend and draw worldwide players/audience need something significant to fight for. For me $5,000 is not a first place prize worthy of some one flying around the world and fighting through a hundred other players. The $20,000 prizes really drive home that this is a significant win that will affect the players entire year.
Getting more money is possible, it just takes effort by all of us. Blizzard can advertise, link and allow viewing straight from the game. Even better would have all their games linked so a WoW player who has SC2 checked could get a notice in game that Idra's MLG match started.
Tournaments can implement TB's idea of having team sponsors icon show in the overlay. Tournament sponsors can have images in the map, and even cooler in the map's little signs Metropolis had little stores with moving signs and billboards that can be used. Especially if they adjust it to fit the scene, on a Terran map this may mean dirtying up the billboard.
Viewers can help by only being positive to sponsors. If the sponsor spent money on something you liked maybe send them a nice thank you, click a link, like them on Facebook. If the event wasn't to your liking you may still thank the sponsor for doing their part or not, but do not use a negative. If the EG Master's Cup sucked or a player/caster was a jerk don't send a angry email to Monster, send the complaints to Incontrol and tell him he wasn't.
Edit- Please use sponsors as a tie breaker for purchases and tell them when you do. When watching MLG and a add for Dr.Pepper comes up you will feel bad for wasting money on RC.
It´s funny how I feel that way since like 2011. I mean back than I wachted everything since it got to the point of oh another dreamhack/mlg/gls... Same players same production. With diverse production and such it got alot better, but nowadays I just watch 1/5 of all tournaments.
I think it's mostly 2+3. When the GSL was the only premier tourny, it was easy to keep up with. Now there are so many premier tournaments. There's no way to watch them all, so I have to choose, which leads to point 3. Dreamhack and Assembly set the bar high, with free 1080p 60fps streams and little delays between games. I also make time for the GSL when there's matches I want to see, which will usually be less than 10 matches a season.
To improve the SC2 scene, IMO what's needed is to make it more attractive for casual players to play the game. This can be done by providing people with incentives/rewards to play the game. Like LoL and Dota, Blizz should look into cosmetic items, micro-transactions and other kinds of rewards.
It seems to me that 'top down' plans to change the tournament scene won't do much. It needs to be 'bottom up'. Think of it as a pyramid structure, with GSL/MLG/IEM/Dreamhack at the top, minor daily or weekly tournaments with small prizes in the middle, and at the bottom casual players who just play for the lulz or in-game rewards. Right now, the base is simply not there.
I am going to email this to Grubby as well, but these are my thoughts.
3) Is the major issue with SC2. There are way to many events going on and most of them take up an entire weekend. As a professional, with a full life and tons to do on the weekend. I can rarely devote an entire weekend to anything one thing, let alone sitting and watching one tournament. Right now I watch GSL by VODs and NASL, because they are nightly events and I can enjoy them at any time. They also provide entertainment beyond just the event, though casting and production. Personally, I have found it challenging to even be aware of all the tournaments that are out there.
But another, unaddressed problem is this:
Starcraft 2 tournaments take to fucking long. Period. They take up to much of people’s time between games or to many games in one night. I have found it impossible to get any of my very nerdy friends into SC2 because every event takes forever to get to the games and valuable enjoyable material. Spinning logos, shots of crowds and other boring side shows make it impossible to recommend any event to anyone that is not already a super fan. Even NASL takes five hours to get through all of its games A NIGHT. No person with a full time job has enough free time to watch and enjoy all the stuff that is out there. Hell, even Artosis can’t keep up. As the audience for SC2 grows, the events need to be focused more on people having limited free time. Most sports fans only watch 1-3 major games a week. Those games do not take up 4-6 hours of their time.
I really feel SC2 events need to be refined down, cut out the chaff and focus more on having a tight, well made series of games. If that means fewer games, I think the community will be OK with that. But right now, there is to much out there and a lot of it does not matter.
sc2 has quite the saturation of big tournies, but until the big tournies start to become less profitable and get less viewers, etc, they will stick around. You can't just walk up to some big leagues and say "Hey there's too many of you so go away please" because who wants to do that? I remember when everyone thought NASL was gone for sure and they came back stronger than ever and have reached their 4th season. I enjoy the over saturation for the most part bc it gives more players more exposure (we have soooo many good starcraft players), but I understand it's really difficult for some.
4. I would love to see more community involvement in the participation of helping tournaments facilitate smoothly. Once someone has made an LR thread on TL what else is there to do to help out with the tournament. I would love for there to be a "help a tournament" thread where tournament organizers can look for members on TL to help them make the tournament a better experience whether that be have people as observers in the game that are taking screen shots and posting battle reports live in the LR. Or just little stuff like helping hype the next match. I'm confident there is more help needed for each tournament and stuff tournament organizers could use more help on.
TLDR: If there was a "help a tournament" thread then I would be able to participate in helping tournament organizer like many others would love too. I for one like feeling important
A) I want a 'Starcraft World Cup', like in footballl (soccer). A massive, rare, tournament that is 'THE' tournament. That would be exciting. My issue right now is that there is no "the" tournament, so it means they ALL feel like minor tournaments.
B) In many big tournaments / leagues of other sports, the events take place over weeks. In starcraft 2, for some reason, we try to cram exactly the same amount of games played but in, typically, a weekend. Why?
Too many tournaments, too many organisations. Also i agree that 3 days tournaments are way too long...maybe if you want to hype a bigger tournament you run it on 2 week-ends a bit like LoL did for S2 World finals. I think Offer and Rarety will solve the problem at least for smaller orgs...but still i for myself i am quite bored with SC2 nowadays and only follow GSL and WCS. I dont really care even for MLG and other big tournaments like Dreamhack. The production value is great but man it's just too much time and not enough added value between one. There must be a "bigger league" out there to step it up quite a bit...SC2 prize pools are still way too low imo (except maybe for WCS).
Another point is that there's way too many players to follow. Most sports are team sports but indivual sports as Tennis...do you really give a shit about #11 seed unless he's your brother...of course you don't. I guess it's the same with SC2...i don't really care about Vortix or JRecco or Bling because they aren't top tier players but maybe 11-20 seeds players...same could be said for Koreans too.
I think Blizzard has to go further if they want SC2 to remain a top esports title. If not, more and more viewers will get tired of it.
This is an absolutely terrible idea. If this were to a happen, a handful of organizers would have a monopoly over tournaments. This is extremely greedy. The problem is not the amount of tournaments.
Part of the problem is people are becoming less interested in sc2. Another reason why the scene is not growing is because there aren't enough NEW FANS. Bring more people into the scene. That is what you need to do. More people=more money.
Perhaps you should worry about introducing more people to sc2 than limiting the amount of tournaments/content. sc2 is competing with the whole gaming industry. There are plenty of games to play, let alone watch.
Shrinking the amount of tournaments is not going to solve the problem of "x" organizers not making the money they hoped/visioned. It's not going to make SC2 "exclusive" either.
You need to expand the general audience that enjoys sc2. Introduce more people to the game. Get people interested.
Now on the other hand, I have been watching/playing sc2 since the beta. I used to watch tons of content every week. I used to play 10 hours a day. Now I barely play anymore. The game for me has become stagnate and boring. Throughout all the patches in sc2, MOST but not all of the fun aggressive micro oriented playstyles have become eliminated. It has become mainly a sit/camp macro fest. There is not much action to that. I only watch a couple players I like. I watch very few events nowadays. Why? SC2 just isn't extremely exciting/entertaining for me anymore. I've found other things that I enjoy doing. I'm sure this has happened to quite a few players/viewers.
SC2 is a very unique game in ALMOST its own genre. There aren't many popular RTS games at all. SC2 is the most popular RTS but RTS isn't the most popular genre. The viewer base is limited right there.
Another thing. I can't find the post right now. But there has been a couple threads on TL about the amount of players on sc2 b.net from season to season. The numbers have been trending down. Going lower and lower. Fewer people are playing and I'm sure that has a HUGE impact on viewership.
You need to get more people interested in sc2 in general. But thats extremely hard IMO. The game costs money and has a high skill cap.
Now on a side note, watching 2 people behind a caster desk cast replays is not exciting for me. Sure I get to see some of my favorites play but it just doesn't compare to say watching a basketball game live on tv. Some events are just doing it wrong. Look at Dreamhack. Look at the MLG championship. Its a live event that people can attend. This is great. Now on the other hand we have MLG Arena/MVP invitational, 99% of the other content out there is behind a desk or some stupid overlay with replays. Its boring. Its shit. And its not very fun to watch. Sure I MIGHT tune in to see one player but how can you expect a non-hardcore fan to even get into that? It just seems like a couple nerds talking. Man so exciting.... ZZZZZZZZ... It puts me to sleep.
But I think most people are just doing it wrong as well as the general amount of people interested in sc2 has been declining.
Change the approach at how events are ran and introduce more people to sc2 and numbers will increase.
Nothing will stop people from running tournaments or events except if they don't see that it is worth their time. Trying to put a cap on it will only benefit those already established and thus monopolize the tournament industry. It is extremely greedy. Worst idea ever IMO. Your idea of making a rule to eliminate competition from organizers is well to put it frank, greedy and retarded.
O one more thing, stop suggesting that its a fan's responsibility to tell people about event's/sc2. It's not our responsibility. If you want your damn numbers higher than you go tell someone. Don't ever, EVER, try to tell someone what their responsibility is when you are not their parent/boss/employer. Who do you think you are? You are crossing the line. WE DON"T HAVE TO DO SHIT. We aren't responsible for selling someone's business or esports or sc2 for that matter.
weekend tournaments are a pain to follow on those I usually try to catch semifinals and on or most of the times only finals.
The Format of TSL or GSL is just the greatest at the moment to follow as a viewer , and even then i can complain about missing stuff , we have jobs and families you know!
so yeah , weekend tournaments are crap spectator wise and also the hype between matches is much lower as there is no anticipation , interviews and storylines during it as it all happens inmmediately.
We sort of have the same problem in New Zealand with rugby. Tournaments are going all the time (except for a 2 month break summer). This year the ITM cup was compressed into a short time period, so we have games on what feels like every night. With rugby on nearly every day, while we love the game to death, we're also sick of it (viewership is dropping, coaches are complaining that they can't coach anything beyond 'rest and recovery')
for SC2, there is just a lot of tournament content, and outside korea they are normally weekend marathons (asus's tournament, mlg, IEM).
In early 2011 it was a nice balance.. you'd have some GSL going for a couple of nights at the end of the week, then once every 3 months an MLG/IEM/Dreamhack weekend tournament. Now it seems like there is a weekend tournament every other week, with GSL almost running nightly and other tournaments like OSL, WCS etc all going..
I'm 30, I can't throw every weekend into this, I just can't.. I can't maintain excitement week after week after week, its tiring. I need it to build up.. So now I cherry pick, and wipe my mind of most other events so I have something to build up excitement over.
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Weekend tournaments need to drop down to something like once every 2-3 months. League based tournaments I'm not sure about, only GSL matches my time-zone (9pm start) so I simply ignore the others.
6) we need different styles of tournaments. i really, really cannot be bothered in watching yet another group stage into knockout borefest. give me a proper league system. give me a large swiss tournament. give me a ufc-style high profile showmatch night.
I think that that we need clearly defined tournaments as of now all tournaments can feature more or less the same players. I think that Dreamhack and IEM which span over many tournaments over many months is going in the right direction with big season ending finals. IPL and MLG are tournaments where there are no overarching story lines between the different stops or tournaments.
When it comes to mass games during the foreign tournaments I think that tournaments should setup a main stream with a lower pace between games and will act as a hub for all of the streams. Asus ROG with incontrol and 2GD were the first ones to venture into that kind of territory successfully. "The hub" can do highlights from other games, have discussions and prerecorded videos (featuring different players, strategy and fluff). While other streams can have more of traditional mass games approach with games after games after games.
O one more thing, stop suggesting that its a fan's responsibility to tell people about event's/sc2. It's not our responsibility. If you want your damn numbers higher than you go tell someone. Don't ever, EVER, try to tell someone what their responsibility is when you are not their parent/boss/employer. Who do you think you are? You are crossing the line. WE DON"T HAVE TO DO SHIT. We aren't responsible for selling someone's business or esports or sc2 for that matter.
On October 16 2012 02:08 ReachTheSky wrote: O one more thing, stop suggesting that its a fan's responsibility to tell people about event's/sc2. It's not our responsibility. If you want your damn numbers higher than you go tell someone. Don't ever, EVER, try to tell someone what their responsibility is when you are not their parent/boss/employer. Who do you think you are? You are crossing the line. WE DON"T HAVE TO DO SHIT. We aren't responsible for selling someone's business or esports or sc2 for that matter.
There needs to be some sort of advertising/ hype I missed the last NASL finals and 2 of the last 3 MLG's because I had no idea when they were. The sheer number of players involved in SC2 is a little overwhelming it gets dam near impossible to keep up with.
Perhaps having some sort of pro circuit would be beneficial as then all the tournaments would be inter connected and they could advertise for each other and be able to have some sort of player standings.
Personally I used to just use SOTG to keep up with everything ,but when that stopped suddenly I had no idea what was going on in the scene anymore so my whole opinion on everything might change once it comes back.
On October 16 2012 02:08 ReachTheSky wrote: O one more thing, stop suggesting that its a fan's responsibility to tell people about event's/sc2. It's not our responsibility. If you want your damn numbers higher than you go tell someone. Don't ever, EVER, try to tell someone what their responsibility is when you are not their parent/boss/employer. Who do you think you are? You are crossing the line. WE DON"T HAVE TO DO SHIT. We aren't responsible for selling someone's business or esports or sc2 for that matter.
Wait, what? did i miss something? :O
This was in regards to:
(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."
That is not to say I wouldn't try to share what I enjoy spending my time on with friends/family as I have tried to because i'd like more real life people i know to enjoy the game with. But to say that this is someone's responsibility do to this is outside of anyone's jurisdiction but their own. To even suggest this is absurd. What a brilliant way to control someone's actions by trying to influence/suggest what someone's beliefs/responsibilties and get them to work for free....NOT. Sorry I'm not a sucker. Seen that shit a mile away and I'll call it out every time.
It used to be exciting to wait and watch MLG's. This was because it was the one time when the biggest dawgs (so to speak) would clash. Now the best players are always playing in so man trivial tournaments.
I would suggest that potentially there is also an element that the teams/players could hold off the tournaments they enter to make them more desirable. A balance between "lots of time on air" vs "scarcity which boosts their demand".
Summary: I used to loose my shit waiting for MLG & GSL. Now GSL is the only event that I'm impressed by because it has prestige. Sure the best players are in WCS, NASL, MLG Arenas but I just don't care they need to mean something and be building to a crescendo.
On October 15 2012 21:18 pooMonger wrote: Americans are the largest consumers of SC2 content (I vaguely remember hearing incontrol saying this), so this 'suffering' of viewership seems to be somewhat intertwined with that in mind. If we look back to the time when SC2 was growing and flourishing (years 0-1.4) we had seminal figures like IdrA, Huk, Jinro, all with their respective and attractive (in the media sense) personalities.
Not certain you were technically implying it, but in case other people read it and get confused; Jinro is Swedish.
On October 15 2012 22:12 aka_star wrote: 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.
If that's a cheapshot at Joro&Rob combo this weekend I call foul good sir.
There are certainly a lot more tournaments than last year, but that is a good thing. Each tournament is an earning opportunity for some pro-gamers and tournament organisers, and is also a chance for SC2 fans to get some entertainment. The scene is bigger than I can keep up with. I simply cannot watch all the tournaments, there are simply too many games being played. I am fine with that. I just pick and choose the tournaments I watch, I can locate the VODs later if I cannot watch live.
These days I mainly just watch my favourite pro-gamers Stephano, Nerchio, Grubby, Mana, Thorzain and Bling. I like other players too such as Ret, Socke,Violet, MC and Vortix/Lucifron and Scarlett. I will watch tournaments they play are in or tournaments where my favourite casters are featuring like Apollo, InControl, Bitterdam, TB, Husky or Day9. The time zone factor is a big determinant as to whether I watch an SC2 tournament live. Euro tournaments are thus more convenient for me. Everyone will have their own most convenient times in their personal schedule to fit in watching some SC2. I cannot afford to watch SC2 24/7 so I don't. I just cherry-pick and watch what I want to watch, when I want to.
There are a plethora of SC2 tournaments, however in the long term those that are not viable from a business perspective will cease to operate. The market will determine which tournaments survive and which thrive. You can see that MLG, NASL, IPL and DreamHack are competing for brand exposure and viewer and player attention. That is fine with me. The competition means they have to put on a good show relative to their competitors or become second rate and overshadowed.
Korea will become a competitve market for tournaments in the same way MLG compete with IPL, DreamHack and NASL. GSL will soon come under heavy pressure within Korea when Kespa concentrates on promoting it's own SC2 tournaments as the premier Korean SC2 tournaments. I expect the importance of GSL to be greatly diminished as Kespa tournaments take over the attention within Korea. GSL is only significant because it is deemed to have the best players in the world. If Kespa players take over as the percieved best players then Kespa tournaments will take the crown from GSL.
SC2 is an individual esport. It is not like Football where someone supports the same club/team all their lives regardless of the individual players within the team. I have established an emotional attachment to my favourite players and so will follow them regardless of the tournaments they play in or the teams they play for. So from that perspective it is similar to Tennis. I like Federer regardless of who his Coach is or what sponsors he has. The personality/profile of a player is extremely important in terms of establishing an attachment to a player. There are literally hundreds of SC2 pro-gamers. I cannot root for them all or follow them all equally. I don't have the time. So if you are 'faceless' then I am not interested. I don't disrespect any pro-gamer but similarly I cannot follow everyone equally. You have to catch my attention in some way, because I have to prioritize my time. Like everyone, I have other commitments in my time like work, chasing girls, football, family, TV, Films etc. If I am going to invest my time in watching SC2, I am not going to be spending it watching a player I have no attachment to, playing in a tournament I don't really care about.
Personally I don't see it as a problem for me that there are so many tournaments, because I have accepted that I will miss a lot of them. As a football fan, I don't watch every single football game played. That's just normal.
O one more thing, stop suggesting that its a fan's responsibility to tell people about event's/sc2. It's not our responsibility. If you want your damn numbers higher than you go tell someone. Don't ever, EVER, try to tell someone what their responsibility is when you are not their parent/boss/employer. Who do you think you are? You are crossing the line. WE DON"T HAVE TO DO SHIT. We aren't responsible for selling someone's business or esports or sc2 for that matter.
Reachforthesky,
I think you have failed to see the point of Grubby’s open letter. He is asking the community to voluntarily input into what he perceives to be an upcoming problem that could cause instability in the scene. He is open to all ideas and provides some suggestions, including change nothing. He is not mandating that any of us do anything beyond what we are willing to do.
In short, I agree with the poster above, please do not tell us what to do or attempt instigate an argument about mandates, jurisdiction or whatever you are talking about above. You have made your point clear that you do not think that fans should not be asked to do anything. There are some of us who do not agree with you, but that is not what this thread is about.
O one more thing, stop suggesting that its a fan's responsibility to tell people about event's/sc2. It's not our responsibility. If you want your damn numbers higher than you go tell someone. Don't ever, EVER, try to tell someone what their responsibility is when you are not their parent/boss/employer. Who do you think you are? You are crossing the line. WE DON"T HAVE TO DO SHIT. We aren't responsible for selling someone's business or esports or sc2 for that matter.
Reachforthesky,
I think you have failed to see the point of Grubby’s open letter. He is asking the community to voluntarily input into what he perceives to be an upcoming problem that could cause instability in the scene. He is open to all ideas and provides some suggestions, including change nothing. He is not mandating that any of us do anything beyond what we are willing to do.
In short, I agree with the poster above, please do not tell us what to do or attempt instigate an argument about mandates, jurisdiction or whatever you are talking about above. You have made your point clear that you do not think that fans should not be asked to do anything. There are some of us who do not agree with you, but that is not what this thread is about.
Its one thing to ask, its another to command what someone else's responsibility is. There is a huge difference.
O one more thing, stop suggesting that its a fan's responsibility to tell people about event's/sc2. It's not our responsibility. If you want your damn numbers higher than you go tell someone. Don't ever, EVER, try to tell someone what their responsibility is when you are not their parent/boss/employer. Who do you think you are? You are crossing the line. WE DON"T HAVE TO DO SHIT. We aren't responsible for selling someone's business or esports or sc2 for that matter.
Reachforthesky,
I think you have failed to see the point of Grubby’s open letter. He is asking the community to voluntarily input into what he perceives to be an upcoming problem that could cause instability in the scene. He is open to all ideas and provides some suggestions, including change nothing. He is not mandating that any of us do anything beyond what we are willing to do.
In short, I agree with the poster above, please do not tell us what to do or attempt instigate an argument about mandates, jurisdiction or whatever you are talking about above. You have made your point clear that you do not think that fans should not be asked to do anything. There are some of us who do not agree with you, but that is not what this thread is about.
Its one thing to ask, its another to command what someone else's responsibility is. There is a huge difference.
On October 15 2012 20:10 Grubby wrote:
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).
…
For this item, public discussion is allowed, even encouraged - hell, you're a free (wo)man - but for the purposes of this I'd like to request an answer to my email address contact@followgrubby.com so I can keep the discussion pure and without input or fear of judgment from 3rd parties. So if you want me to reply - though a reply is not guaranteed; I can't predict the response size from the community - I will only do so by email. Looking forward to your reply!
These are the two parts of the OP where Grubby requests a response. Requests. There is no demand in the OP. The word “responsibility” is only used in two possible responses to his request that could be submitted by the person responding and is only used in reference to the community in one of those. It is one of six possible options.
At no point does Grubby state that he feels the community is responsible for anything. He demands nothing of anyone and does not command you do to anything. In fact, your response to his request is far more demanding and commanding that his ever was.
After watching WCS Asia this weekend, I'd have to peg point 3 as a major (but not the only) problem. Namely, production value. WCS Asia had great casters and amazing games, all let down by absolutely horrific production, and really opened my eyes to how poor production can sour even the best tournament for a viewer - Enough so for many to tune out, as I eventually did. Little wonder it had only 5k viewers for most of the time compared to the 100k for WCS Europe.
For tournaments to capture and hold large viewer numbers, they NEED the kind of production seen at DreamHack/WCS Europe. They need interesting filler content between games, they need to have a schedule and keep to it, they most definitely need to have good sound quality (big problem with many tournaments lately. And it's a big problem, too. I'd rather watch 360p with great sound quality than 720p with poor sound quality), and they need a professional-looking venue (obviously-cardboard stage backgrounds are a no-no).
If all major tournaments could manage the standards of DreamHack, I could watch them every weekend and never get tired of it. A major tournament should be a party, a spectacle, and a quality one. Just dumping casters and players into a mediocre setting and pressing 'record' is not enough.
I say if all of these tournaments want to keep dumping money into the scene then let them. The pros don't have to attend all of them if they feel fatigued, and the viewers don't have to watch them all. In terms of diluting the quality of the participant pools/viewer pools if attendance to these tournies becomes sporadic, well then the scene will just take care of this issue itself. The productions with the highest quality will ultimately win out.
You can't really tell these companies to hold less tournaments though. If they deem them to be profitable then frankly it just is what it is. Could this peak eventually lead to a valley in terms of money/viewership/popularity? Perhaps, but again if these companies are profiting right now it's hard to just tell them to stop.
currently, SC2 competitive events vaguely resemble a Golf PGA Tour weekend event.
i'd prefer to see a format switch to a "Championship Title Holder" style competition like UFC and Boxing.
so MVP might be the reigning world champion and he'll have to play against the #1 contender in some kind of BO7 or BO9. you can also have national champions put their "National Title" on the line.
So Scarlett, the reigning Canadian Champion might face HuK in a Bo7 on the "under card" for the "Canadian SC2 Championship Belt".
O one more thing, stop suggesting that its a fan's responsibility to tell people about event's/sc2. It's not our responsibility. If you want your damn numbers higher than you go tell someone. Don't ever, EVER, try to tell someone what their responsibility is when you are not their parent/boss/employer. Who do you think you are? You are crossing the line. WE DON"T HAVE TO DO SHIT. We aren't responsible for selling someone's business or esports or sc2 for that matter.
Reachforthesky,
I think you have failed to see the point of Grubby’s open letter. He is asking the community to voluntarily input into what he perceives to be an upcoming problem that could cause instability in the scene. He is open to all ideas and provides some suggestions, including change nothing. He is not mandating that any of us do anything beyond what we are willing to do.
In short, I agree with the poster above, please do not tell us what to do or attempt instigate an argument about mandates, jurisdiction or whatever you are talking about above. You have made your point clear that you do not think that fans should not be asked to do anything. There are some of us who do not agree with you, but that is not what this thread is about.
Its one thing to ask, its another to command what someone else's responsibility is. There is a huge difference.
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).
…
For this item, public discussion is allowed, even encouraged - hell, you're a free (wo)man - but for the purposes of this I'd like to request an answer to my email address contact@followgrubby.com so I can keep the discussion pure and without input or fear of judgment from 3rd parties. So if you want me to reply - though a reply is not guaranteed; I can't predict the response size from the community - I will only do so by email. Looking forward to your reply!
These are the two parts of the OP where Grubby requests a response. Requests. There is no demand in the OP. The word “responsibility” is only used in two possible responses to his request that could be submitted by the person responding and is only used in reference to the community in one of those. It is one of six possible options.
At no point does Grubby state that he feels the community is responsible for anything. He demands nothing of anyone and does not command you do to anything. In fact, your response to his request is far more demanding and commanding that his ever was.
First off I never used to the word demand. Secondly, I'll bold the very specifics because apparently bolding did not make it clear enough for you.
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."
There you go, plain and simple. Filled with commands.
If grubby didn't feel like the community should be responsible for anything it would have never been brought up.
Just because it is "listed like an option" does not negate the fact that he is stating/commanding that we need to be doing such n such.
Yes grubby asked/requested for a response to his questions. What I highlighted/originally posted is not about him asking for a response of opinions on what the issue might be, but of the ACTUAL BOLDED PARTS.
The problem you are describing is lack of hype and brand building. If every tournament looks the same and feels the same, they are doing a bad job of building their brand. A good tournament should involve more than just good games and some interviews after matches. That is where I think the SC2 tournaments are most lacking. If they implemented more "fun" stuff in between like TL attack things it would be much more fun to watch a whole "session". I end up turning off after a while or selecting just a few good matches here and there after because it's too much of the same. The only thing that excites me is a select few players or a foreigner competing. (because that's rare)
In that matter, the worst thing you can do then is follow every tournament "just to support E-Sports". Pick the good ones, and let the bad ones suffer so they have to improve to stay alive. This is how business works, and we can't keep tournaments on life support forever "just to support E-Sports".
On October 16 2012 04:43 Myrtroll wrote: The problem you are describing is lack of hype and brand building. If every tournament looks the same and feels the same, they are doing a bad job of building their brand. A good tournament should involve more than just good games and some interviews after matches. That is where I think the SC2 tournaments are most lacking. If they implemented more "fun" stuff in between like TL attack things it would be much more fun to watch a whole "session". I end up turning off after a while or selecting just a few good matches here and there after because it's too much of the same. The only thing that excites me is a select few players or a foreigner competing. (because that's rare)
In that matter, the worst thing you can do then is follow every tournament "just to support E-Sports". Pick the good ones, and let the bad ones suffer so they have to improve to stay alive. This is how business works, and we can't keep tournaments on life support forever "just to support E-Sports".
O one more thing, stop suggesting that its a fan's responsibility to tell people about event's/sc2. It's not our responsibility. If you want your damn numbers higher than you go tell someone. Don't ever, EVER, try to tell someone what their responsibility is when you are not their parent/boss/employer. Who do you think you are? You are crossing the line. WE DON"T HAVE TO DO SHIT. We aren't responsible for selling someone's business or esports or sc2 for that matter.
Reachforthesky,
I think you have failed to see the point of Grubby’s open letter. He is asking the community to voluntarily input into what he perceives to be an upcoming problem that could cause instability in the scene. He is open to all ideas and provides some suggestions, including change nothing. He is not mandating that any of us do anything beyond what we are willing to do.
In short, I agree with the poster above, please do not tell us what to do or attempt instigate an argument about mandates, jurisdiction or whatever you are talking about above. You have made your point clear that you do not think that fans should not be asked to do anything. There are some of us who do not agree with you, but that is not what this thread is about.
Its one thing to ask, its another to command what someone else's responsibility is. There is a huge difference.
On October 15 2012 20:10 Grubby wrote:
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).
…
For this item, public discussion is allowed, even encouraged - hell, you're a free (wo)man - but for the purposes of this I'd like to request an answer to my email address contact@followgrubby.com so I can keep the discussion pure and without input or fear of judgment from 3rd parties. So if you want me to reply - though a reply is not guaranteed; I can't predict the response size from the community - I will only do so by email. Looking forward to your reply!
These are the two parts of the OP where Grubby requests a response. Requests. There is no demand in the OP. The word “responsibility” is only used in two possible responses to his request that could be submitted by the person responding and is only used in reference to the community in one of those. It is one of six possible options.
At no point does Grubby state that he feels the community is responsible for anything. He demands nothing of anyone and does not command you do to anything. In fact, your response to his request is far more demanding and commanding that his ever was.
First off I never used to the word demand. Secondly, I'll bold the very specifics because apparently bolding did not make it clear enough for you.
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."
There you go, plain and simple. Filled with commands.
If grubby didn't feel like the community should be responsible for anything it would have never been brought up.
Just because it is "listed like an option" does not negate the fact that he is stating/commanding that we need to be doing such n such.
Yes grubby asked/requested for a response to his questions. What I highlighted/originally posted is not about him asking for a response of opinions on what the issue might be, but of the ACTUAL BOLDED PARTS.
You are clearly misunderstanding what I wrote.
Maybe I'm wrong here, but the OP appears to be multiple choice of common points of view. I don't think Grubby is telling you what you should believe, just saying it appears to be a common viewpoint.
I agree with you, in a sense, that we have no duty to help in brand building.
Still, if you have friends that are into Starcraft, or video games in general, it makes sense to spread the word about events that you enjoy spectating, because the event benefits from another viewer and potential fan and you benefit from having someone to share the experience with. Some of the most fun that I've had related to Starcraft is either watching an event with friends and/or discussing the games from an event with friends.
I think its important to have a lot of tournaments, for the players, to make it a real esport, the fewer tournaments there are the less pro players the game will have. This will sort itself out, im sure of it, tournament organizers will either cut their losses or find it to taxing to run/organize tournaments! As far as viewer fatigue, i really think that is up the viewer, accessibility could be considered a problem, but its like a first world esports problem, compare to other games which are not even thought of or glanced at twice! The big tournaments do stick out more then the smaller ones and i dont doubt they will receive proportional viewership numbers to the event they are organizing! Hots should also be a big boost, as refreshing and creative new game play, re-energizes the complexity of the game~
O one more thing, stop suggesting that its a fan's responsibility to tell people about event's/sc2. It's not our responsibility. If you want your damn numbers higher than you go tell someone. Don't ever, EVER, try to tell someone what their responsibility is when you are not their parent/boss/employer. Who do you think you are? You are crossing the line. WE DON"T HAVE TO DO SHIT. We aren't responsible for selling someone's business or esports or sc2 for that matter.
Reachforthesky,
I think you have failed to see the point of Grubby’s open letter. He is asking the community to voluntarily input into what he perceives to be an upcoming problem that could cause instability in the scene. He is open to all ideas and provides some suggestions, including change nothing. He is not mandating that any of us do anything beyond what we are willing to do.
In short, I agree with the poster above, please do not tell us what to do or attempt instigate an argument about mandates, jurisdiction or whatever you are talking about above. You have made your point clear that you do not think that fans should not be asked to do anything. There are some of us who do not agree with you, but that is not what this thread is about.
Its one thing to ask, its another to command what someone else's responsibility is. There is a huge difference.
On October 15 2012 20:10 Grubby wrote:
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).
…
For this item, public discussion is allowed, even encouraged - hell, you're a free (wo)man - but for the purposes of this I'd like to request an answer to my email address contact@followgrubby.com so I can keep the discussion pure and without input or fear of judgment from 3rd parties. So if you want me to reply - though a reply is not guaranteed; I can't predict the response size from the community - I will only do so by email. Looking forward to your reply!
These are the two parts of the OP where Grubby requests a response. Requests. There is no demand in the OP. The word “responsibility” is only used in two possible responses to his request that could be submitted by the person responding and is only used in reference to the community in one of those. It is one of six possible options.
At no point does Grubby state that he feels the community is responsible for anything. He demands nothing of anyone and does not command you do to anything. In fact, your response to his request is far more demanding and commanding that his ever was.
First off I never used to the word demand. Secondly, I'll bold the very specifics because apparently bolding did not make it clear enough for you.
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."
There you go, plain and simple. Filled with commands.
If grubby didn't feel like the community should be responsible for anything it would have never been brought up.
Just because it is "listed like an option" does not negate the fact that he is stating/commanding that we need to be doing such n such.
Yes grubby asked/requested for a response to his questions. What I highlighted/originally posted is not about him asking for a response of opinions on what the issue might be, but of the ACTUAL BOLDED PARTS.
You are clearly misunderstanding what I wrote.
I think you're misunderstanding what Grubby meant. If I'm not mistaken, he was writing that as possible answer #4 (or whatever that number was) and he wanted people to either say, "Yes, I agree" or "No, I disagree." I don't think he meant those were his actual views, although they could be, who knows. But I took what he said to be intended as hypothetical problem/solution #4 and he wanted people to say, "Yes, this is the problem" or "No, it isn't the real problem".
5 is the right answer. It will sort itself out. People won't watch the bad tournaments and eventually only the major leagues will survive. If the small tournaments can survive even with low viewer counts then that's good too. I always like having more to watch.
I believe the real reason the sc2 community is shrinking is because we don't get to see or play a lot of really great games. The potential is there, maru vs effort and gumiho vs mma are both examples of how exciting and intense games can get, but these are far and away the exception and not the rule. BW and war3 both developed over the years to the point where almost every high level pro match had something interesting to offer, that is not the case yet with sc2. I guess my point is, I don't think there are too many tournaments being played, I think there just needs to be higher quality games in those tournaments.
The solution? Perhaps david kim can work some magic with HoTS, or perhaps the pros just need to keep honing their skills so we can see some truly epic games.
Too many tournament circuits, each claiming to crown the best player in the world. We need some organization (probably Blizzard) to step in and force them to culminate in some sort of Super Bowl/World Series type event. As it stands, there is a new 'reigning champion' every week and it dilutes the meaning of the achievement.
I think Riot had the right idea with the World Championships. Don't remove the independent tournaments, but have them feed into something that carries greater meaning/reward.
On October 16 2012 08:38 HorsemasterK wrote: Too many tournament circuits, each claiming to crown the best player in the world. We need some organization (probably Blizzard) to step in and force them to culminate in some sort of Super Bowl/World Series type event. As it stands, there is a new 'reigning champion' every week and it dilutes the meaning of the achievement.
I think Riot had the right idea with the World Championships. Don't remove the independent tournaments, but have them feed into something that carries greater meaning/reward.
That's more or less what the GSL code S is. If you win that you truly can be considered the best player in the world.
Here's the response I emailed to Grubby, in case anyone is interested in reading it.
Hey Grubby,
I believe that option number five that you supplied rings true. Over saturation isn't really a problem for me, at least on a personal level. I agree with your option one to a degree as well though, let me try to explain why. While I think that the scene isn't over saturated, and that the best tournaments will gain more viewers naturally, and the others that aren't as worthy will die, I would also appreciate better live reporting. There are times when I can't watch a tournament because of classes, or studies, or work, and during these times I would love to be able to see a detailed account of what happened in the games and results. Currently, these things aren't really compiled into a single place very well, although Liquipedia is getting pretty close to that. I sometimes do wish Liquipedia was updated more frequently however.
Sometimes I feel like its the opposite, that we are under saturated with material. I oftentimes find that we have enough material to be picky of which tournaments we want, but when we find our niche, there is an under saturation in that niche. For example, I have found that I enjoy to watch tournaments such as proleague, OSL, GSL, MvP, WCS, MLG, DH, NASL finals, etc, and just completely disregard lesser tournaments that don't have a comprehensive list of big players involved. Oftentimes, I simply can't watch these live however, and the VOD systems are in-comprehensive, posted very late, or cost money to watch. While I don't mind spending money to watch them sometimes, the VOD payoff for my money doesn't supply me with enough VODs to satisfy me. I tend to watch Starcraft 2 during all of my time not spent on studies or out with friends and family, so many times I will find myself searching for content to watch which is high enough quality for me to enjoy, but there simply isn't always enough of it, so I will just murk around on TL or go play games myself.
(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.
I believe there is currently too many tournaments for the viewer base to support all of them. Though, even if each tournament doesn't get as much views, it doesn't mean that it is a bad thing for the players. The competitiors still get recognition and cash prizes for their accomplishments. If the only goal is to increase viewer count for "X" tournaments, well the logic reasoning would be to reduce the amount of tournaments other than those "X" ones. The few remaining tournaments could then be considered like occasional "big" events which would attract more viewers than having a ton of tournaments every few weeks.
Though, I believe that the "fatigue" doesn't only come from the amount of tournaments. The way I see it, Starcraft is currently losing players and audience to other games for severals reasons. First of all, I would like to say that Blizzard's customers service is not what should be expected from such a well-established company and which surely doesn't help keeping their "new" customers (people who have bought every Blizzard's game will be harder to lose as customer due to the customers "fidelity"). Trying to fix your problem while having to deal with a poor customers service can be frustrating and defenetly a bad experience.
Another problem which can demotivate a lot of players would be the amount of hackers (sorry that I've got to plug this here but it is my main combat for the community afterall). For the casual players which mainly play ladders, encountering severals hackers and losing to them can also be frustrating. Knowing that Blizzard isn't really efficient at dealing with those, it can discourage a lot of people to play the game. This can result in completly losing those players - some will find a new game and become active in that community to the detriment of the Starcraft community.
The players and viewers base has decreased for a reason, Starcraft is not attractive as it used to be . Something has to be done to retain/gain players and viewers.
option 2. part of what made the korean bw scene so amazing to watch was that there was really only like 4 to 6 individual tournaments every YEAR (msl/osl combined). and the fact that each tournament was spread out over a period of several months made everything much more important and you kinda just HAD to watch it.
this will never happen, but if imagine if MLG were the ONLY starcraft 2 tournaments in the entire foreigner scene. there would be like three times the amount of hype and viewers
O one more thing, stop suggesting that its a fan's responsibility to tell people about event's/sc2. It's not our responsibility. If you want your damn numbers higher than you go tell someone. Don't ever, EVER, try to tell someone what their responsibility is when you are not their parent/boss/employer. Who do you think you are? You are crossing the line. WE DON"T HAVE TO DO SHIT. We aren't responsible for selling someone's business or esports or sc2 for that matter.
Reachforthesky,
I think you have failed to see the point of Grubby’s open letter. He is asking the community to voluntarily input into what he perceives to be an upcoming problem that could cause instability in the scene. He is open to all ideas and provides some suggestions, including change nothing. He is not mandating that any of us do anything beyond what we are willing to do.
In short, I agree with the poster above, please do not tell us what to do or attempt instigate an argument about mandates, jurisdiction or whatever you are talking about above. You have made your point clear that you do not think that fans should not be asked to do anything. There are some of us who do not agree with you, but that is not what this thread is about.
Its one thing to ask, its another to command what someone else's responsibility is. There is a huge difference.
On October 15 2012 20:10 Grubby wrote:
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).
…
For this item, public discussion is allowed, even encouraged - hell, you're a free (wo)man - but for the purposes of this I'd like to request an answer to my email address contact@followgrubby.com so I can keep the discussion pure and without input or fear of judgment from 3rd parties. So if you want me to reply - though a reply is not guaranteed; I can't predict the response size from the community - I will only do so by email. Looking forward to your reply!
These are the two parts of the OP where Grubby requests a response. Requests. There is no demand in the OP. The word “responsibility” is only used in two possible responses to his request that could be submitted by the person responding and is only used in reference to the community in one of those. It is one of six possible options.
At no point does Grubby state that he feels the community is responsible for anything. He demands nothing of anyone and does not command you do to anything. In fact, your response to his request is far more demanding and commanding that his ever was.
First off I never used to the word demand. Secondly, I'll bold the very specifics because apparently bolding did not make it clear enough for you.
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."
There you go, plain and simple. Filled with commands.
If grubby didn't feel like the community should be responsible for anything it would have never been brought up.
Just because it is "listed like an option" does not negate the fact that he is stating/commanding that we need to be doing such n such.
Yes grubby asked/requested for a response to his questions. What I highlighted/originally posted is not about him asking for a response of opinions on what the issue might be, but of the ACTUAL BOLDED PARTS.
You are clearly misunderstanding what I wrote.
It's hard to understand what you actually mean under all this passive-aggressiveness. Also, way to cherry pick quotes that don't mean what you imply them to mean. Commands? Everything you bolded was part of a potentially common answer to his questions. He's listing a couple of the most likely responses for us to think about and/or pick. This way we have a nice idea of what logical responses we might have. If we disagree with all of them we input our own thoughts, or simply expand on one of his, or we just don't reply.
I don't agree, viewer fatigue on SC2 is because it isn't easy enough to tell pro players from amature players. I can watch day9, idra, anyone's stream, and go 'lol, nub' because it is no more creative than the people I find on the ladder. Sure, I know that they'll have better macro, perfect forcefields, more perfect timing: and if I played them, they'd beat me every time. But its the same strategies, because being more skilled does not open new avenues of play in sc2 if they want to win - it reduces it and makes it more coinflippy.
Too many tournaments isn't a problem, it is a blessing, because it allows more people to play in tournaments. Why do so many tournaments cater to the absolute top of the list? Is what I wonder. Yes, you have korean and 'foreigner' tournaments, but people always seem to try and mix koreans into their tournaments to give them unneeded legitimacy. There is a completely unwatchable number of football, baseball, whatever games in America, soccer the world over, and the reason why this works is because they all play in separate leagues and they're not allowed to be on multiple teams. But Starcraft 2 tries to have everyone be in one league, which doesn't work. GSL can have their B/A/S ranked players, but it shouldn't attempt to apply that ranking to everyone. And this makes every tournament worse when they try and have the best foreigners and best koreans in every tournament, instead of just having an annual world cup or something. But instead have convoluted systems to try and make things interesting.
Finally the design of SC2 is just bad, and doesn't allow for enough variety in maps, meaning not enough variety in valid strategies. In SC1 island maps were uncompetitive, but in SC2, even in bronze they are clearly broken. I'm not saying we need islands, but the imbalance of different parts of the units means you can't have maps on which those units are favored, because there isn't a way to challenge them with another race. This needs to be fixed if SC2 is to have any lasting appeal.
(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).
I feel like that a lot of tournaments aren't worth watching, mostly due to lack of quality and player representation. The number of tournaments is staggering, really, to the point where both players and viewers are stretched. Less tournaments, better quality.
On October 16 2012 10:03 OblivionMage wrote: 6. a game that people actually play. clans and a custom game system that isn't totally crap would be a good starting point.
sc2 esports isn't going to work if people don't play sc2 (or at least play customs on sc2).
agreed. i would actually like to see sc2 go with the free to play model like dota 2/LoL. this would definitely get more people playing and interested
Its come to the point where im only interested in the big offline events: DH/WCS/MLG/IGN/GSL/OGN/NASL...
I may forgot someone, but those are the events I will watch if they have something going on.
Close to everything that is done online, from replaysor whatever, im not going to watch. Its just too much shit I dont have the time to get excited about.
What I enjoy the most is games between the top foreigners and koreans. Seems to allways get me excited, where I dont really give a shit about random korean vs random korean, even if they are better then 90% of foreigners
Big tournaments are very long. As they should be, but if they are going to take up a whole weekend they can't be every weekend. Because of the way the tournaments work, it's hard to come and go and only watch part of a tournament. When they try to rigidly schedule it (to enable coming and going) it inevitably makes it longer and draggier.
On the flip side of the coin, short tournaments (or matches or events) generally don't have the same kind of high quality that we expect from the big tournaments.
I think that more events need to be more impactful.
I feel like WCS is a great example of this. While this year the early quals didn't get the best treatment (piggybacking off other events) I feel like WCS is where the future lies. If events provided points to qualify for WCS or something along those lines, all the other tournaments start to have weight to them. Smaller Region specific tournaments will push each scene forward individually to improve.
Why should NA players who are so behind the koreans put hours into this game? Why not play casually and do some streaming at prime hours. They can make some money, they can enjoy the game. But they have no real drive to improve as much as possible to do well in major tournaments.
I love the NASL and its format of practice and specific matches and groups. I follow a couple players, so I watch those groups when I am not at work. I don't have time to watch all the vods or all the games but I follow the players I like and support a tournament that supports a LOT of players at once.
I don't have time or energy to live my life and watch SC2 all day every day. But I can watch the GSL finals live, I can watch vods of matches I want to see, and I can follow particular players.
I think if the regions had fewer tournaments but more impactful ones and one International Major a month we could get the following:
-- One HYPED UP tournament everyone watches -- regionals that people follow and watch for certain players -- improvement amongst the not as strong countries because the players can improve together.
I'm still pretty new to the community but I would personally like to see less tournaments. However, with that being said, I would like to see maybe like one large tourney (among the usual ones of course) to make up for these 'lost' tournaments and set them up either quarterly through the year or even half way through the year with all the big names WITH an open registration for said tournament so people in masters or grandmasters could make a name for themselves in these large tournaments. (#6) One solution I'd love to see is that instead of eSports and SC2 being an internet phenomena in the U.S. is rather to put this on TV somehow in the Americas and make it so that a large range of the public can view these tournaments and get into the awesomeness that is SC2 and maybe turn this into a household type of deal in the U.S., like maybe baseball or football are. I've never played DotA 2 or LoL so I'm not sure what their models look like but I think it's possible for a large tournament like the one I mentioned could possibly be a great idea for eSports, with SC2 being the first one to test these new waters.
On October 16 2012 09:11 ZweiGaming wrote: Another problem which can demotivate a lot of players would be the amount of hackers (sorry that I've got to plug this here but it is my main combat for the community afterall). For the casual players which mainly play ladders, encountering severals hackers and losing to them can also be frustrating. Knowing that Blizzard isn't really efficient at dealing with those, it can discourage a lot of people to play the game. This can result in completly losing those players - some will find a new game and become active in that community to the detriment of the Starcraft community.
This isn't fixable. Most people who quit because of "too many hackers" have never actually played a hacker. I've made multiple people tell me that I cheated. I never have.
On October 16 2012 09:11 ZweiGaming wrote: Another problem which can demotivate a lot of players would be the amount of hackers (sorry that I've got to plug this here but it is my main combat for the community afterall). For the casual players which mainly play ladders, encountering severals hackers and losing to them can also be frustrating. Knowing that Blizzard isn't really efficient at dealing with those, it can discourage a lot of people to play the game. This can result in completly losing those players - some will find a new game and become active in that community to the detriment of the Starcraft community.
This isn't fixable. Most people who quit because of "too many hackers" have never actually played a hacker. I've made multiple people tell me that I cheated. I never have.
I agree. the mindset that everyone is a hacker is a pretty ridiculous one and is just another excuse for people to bitch at you on the ladder.
a combination of 1, 3, 5 if thats possible. 1)I believe that an events success in part is linked to how much hype and coverage it gets on TL/Reddit/Esfi/onegamenet ect so increasing coverage to lesser events creates niches in the market for people's specific likes. For exmaple, 2v2, King of the Hill, Arcade games should be covered if you want to broaden the base from 1v1 competetive starcraft. 3. Too much down time in SC. Production in-game is at a nice level, but the amount of wasted air time is ridiculous. NASL is pretty good, and GSL too, but for all these 5 minute breaks, i really hope for something more than a still-shot with a soundtrack. Maybe player interviews, previews, recaps. Something please! 5. This kinda goes with the 1, 3 in that competition will weed out any inferior products. but that is only within the SC community itself. For best rates of growth, you have to be getting new people interested in the game. With the except of F2p, better production and coverage should expand SC to not only other gamers, but to non gamers as well. SC should be the springboard for people to delve into the competitive esports
1. Create Superleague where only best of the best can qualify. Let say 16, 24 or 32 players qualifies. 2. Spots are given through winning premier events only (perhaps top3 gets spot), plus highest ranked players gets spot from premier events too. No other way to enter. 3. 4 Premier events yearly 4. Qualified players gets monthly salary for playing this Superleague 5. Qualified players can't play other 1v1 events other than premier events while attending Superleague (salary+premier cashes helps). If they do then sanctions/penalties. 6. 6-8 broadcast a month (if premier event coming up then only 6)
etc.. so many things to make it more amazing
This is only for 1v1 and not team league though. So for team league games there should be some ruling
Offtopic but reply to some posts, Browder did hint at giving free to play a shot, in a race by week format (somewhat similar to lol, different heros every week)! Blizzard is all about selling copies of their game, but I truly think they are now well aware of esports, before sc2 they never believed in it, they were in a bubble and now they are sending browder everywhere to gain knowledge on how to further expose their product~ SC2 is now 10$ lol, less then most subscriptions to leagues online, plus the fact they are listening to the community; give blizzard SC2 some credit, they have to report to higher departments, keep that in mind~
I think the problem is (6) other. The issue in hand is not the quantity of tournaments, but the quality and coherence between them. Every tournament is the same. There's too much redundancy in the scene. Local scenes/tournaments get no love. Most tournaments follows the same format/philosophy.
In other words, the people who build the SC2 scene should do it having the Occam razor in mind. If we are to have multiple tournaments, they should be different enough to justify their existence. There should be a feeling of coherence and continuity between tournaments. It's the lack of continuity, the redundancy and the fragmentation of the scene that creates this feeling of oversaturation, "too-much-tournaments-to-watch".
The only tournaments I watch or follow are IEM, MLG and Dreamhack, mainly because they're broadcast during weekends. I don't have time to watch the rest, and even if I did, I probably wouldn't bother. There's just no hype anymore. You can basically watch the best of the best duke it out every few days.
I'll go with (5). Yeah, there is plenty of tournaments to follow and right now the spectators have to choose. They may be a bit tough to rank but we need to do it anyway. This is how it goes for me:
offline live > online live > online replay-casted eu-friendly scheduling > trying to stay awake at 03:00 AM (and failing) good hosting and reasonable downtime > bad hosting and tons of downtime
This leaves me with GSL (im fine with finals on weekend morning), European events run by DH/IEM and IronSquid. I will watch a couple of games from some other events too but I will not follow them on regular basis. Just like a football fan wouldn't watch all the league games from 20 different countries.
For a while i thought "ugh, there are too many tournaments to follow". Now that i'm not trying to follow everything and only watch the big things, i think different. It's up to each own what to watch. Not every tournament has to be significant. I think it's good that there are plenty tournaments. Because of this, new players potentially can gain fame and get well known. This is very possible in SC2 because in Zotac cups or Go4SC2 (just to name a few) there are still very good players participating, if only some.
Of course, it's pretty much impossible to follow everything, it's hard enough to follow every 1000€+ prizepool tournament... feels like there are multiple of them every weekend. But you don't have to follow all of them. Still, i feel like there needs to be a World Championship which grants the title of the official World Champion and i think WCS could be that, if they do it yearly.
On October 16 2012 12:20 Too_MuchZerg wrote: How to fix tourney fatigue simple system:
1. Create Superleague where only best of the best can qualify. Let say 16, 24 or 32 players qualifies. 2. Spots are given through winning premier events only (perhaps top3 gets spot), plus highest ranked players gets spot from premier events too. No other way to enter. 3. 4 Premier events yearly 4. Qualified players gets monthly salary for playing this Superleague 5. Qualified players can't play other 1v1 events other than premier events while attending Superleague (salary+premier cashes helps). If they do then sanctions/penalties. 6. 6-8 broadcast a month (if premier event coming up then only 6)
etc.. so many things to make it more amazing
This is only for 1v1 and not team league though. So for team league games there should be some ruling
gomtv.net
seriously though, i dont think thats too many tournaments, but would be good to have a 'super one' like WCS but without anyone giving up it, like mvp and mc did, it should have maybe a bigger prizepool for the world finals? like enough to dont think 2 times about going for it instead of gsl
On October 16 2012 09:20 blabber wrote: option 2. part of what made the korean bw scene so amazing to watch was that there was really only like 4 to 6 individual tournaments every YEAR (msl/osl combined). and the fact that each tournament was spread out over a period of several months made everything much more important and you kinda just HAD to watch it.
this will never happen, but if imagine if MLG were the ONLY starcraft 2 tournaments in the entire foreigner scene. there would be like three times the amount of hype and viewers
You have a case study. 10/11 or whatever time prior to their invite only events. Those threads were huge because the MLG days were massive events.
I have to agree with your 2nd point, in my opinion there are just waaaaaaay too many tournaments going on and im not talking only about the big ones, but the small ones too. Im sure alot of people would agree with me when i say i like to watch sc2, but i dont want to spend 6+ hours everyday doing that.
To be honest, I don't think the problem is that there are too many tournaments, but that it's impossible to tell which ones I should care about. I'm not sure the best way to remedy this, since most tournaments operate more or less independently and no one wants to be relegated to being a 'secondary' tournament. However, as a fan, it's really hard to get excited for a tournament when there's a 'major' tournament almost every other weekend.
Let's compare starcraft to sports that operate in a roughly similar format: golf and tennis. Both have tournaments going on pretty much every weekend. However, they each have their majors which are considered far more important than the rest. I don't really care too much about who's winning the stockholm open or whatever is going on this weekend, but I'll tune in to watch Federer vs. Murray at Wimbledon, because I know that it's more important. You can't have a Wimbledon every weekend organized by a different group or it loses its meaning.
Another factor that would help is to have some sort of unified ranking system. You'd probably have to leave Korea to its own devices, since its format is drastically different than the weekend tourneys that are common in EU and NA. However, it would be a big help as far as spectators being able to tell which tourneys and matches are important. Maybe a particular tourney isn't labeled as super important, but it has 8 of the top 15 players playing.
It would also be helpful for keeping track of individual players. I don't follow tennis that much, but as a Canadian I try to keep up with Milos Raonic's progress. I assume it would be the same if a similar system were implemented in SC2. It would've added meaning to, for example, HuK's Dreamhack win if it officially made him the #1 ranked foreigner. Or it would be cool to see someone like Scarlett's progress from not even on the charts to inside the top 15 (hypothetical example).
Even if you compare starcraft to other sports like hockey or soccer that function on a more traditional format, they still have ways of making certain matches more important. During the regular season, for example, the games tend to blur together for the first half or so, with small peaks for games against divisional rivals, and then the importance of the games gradually increases as teams race to make the playoffs, and continue to ramp up in importance right up to game 7 of the Stanley Cup finals. But it's important to note that not every game is treated equal in importance. A mid-november game between San Jose and Buffalo is just another game, but by slowly building up anticipation for the important games, the excitement is massively increased. When every game is game 7 of the Stanley Cup finals, game 7 of the Stanley cup finals doesn't mean anything.
To summarize, the two major problems in my opinion are a lack of organization and cohesion between tournaments, and the lack of meaning attached to tournaments and games. It seems almost every other weekend there's a 'super important' tournament, but when you try to overstate the importance of every tournament, the end result is that none of them feel important. We need to slowly build towards the real important tournaments so that those end up being actually exciting.
As for a solution, it's tough to say the best way to go about it. No one wants to just go ahead and declare their tournament to be 'second-class' or whatever, so what I propose is the following:
Create a NA/EU starcraft tour (could separate NA and EU if the travel is too much and the playerbase is big enough) that encompasses all of the MLG/IPL/NASL/Dreamhack/IEM, etc. Get representatives from every tourney in the region to get together and agree on a universal points system and scheduling for tournaments. Create a tournament structure where the real 'major' tournaments are rare and spread out throughout the year. You could give each tournament one major, or create 'neutral' major tournaments that are co-hosted by multiple groups. That way, throughout the months leading up to the major events, it becomes massively more clear how much each tournament means, and hopefully it would also lead to more even player participation across all events. I'm not sure how to distribute prize money, but I guess that would be another factor to consider as far as how important an individual tournament is.
Players on the fringe would be battling in the open bracket of MLGs and IPLs to earn points to qualify for the majors, while top player duke it out for high seeds. Think about how much it meant for Roger Federer to regain the #1 ranking after winning Wimbledon. Now imagine White-Ra winning everything for a month and finally facing off against Stephano for the top spot in the rankings in the finals of a major event. So much intensity and excitement for fans of both players.
I, for one, am tired of the "it'll work itself out eventually" line that people continuously shoot around. The tournament scene has been saturated for almost two years now, how much longer should I wait for it to work itself out? When 3 "major" events are planned every weekend of every month, I can't keep up with the matches, nor have I come to care that much about the outcomes.
I just want to point out that I had some trouble trying to wrap my mind around the idea of tournament "fatigue" as a problem.
From the description Grubby gave, tournament "oversaturation" is the problem, and the "fatigue" is the effect caused by it.
I guess a lot of people would have gotten what he was trying to say anyway, but I feel that distinguishing between the two will be helpful in trying to pinpoint a real solution if the problem is found true.
For example, I myself feel that viewer "fatigue" probably comes from a stale metagame (especially PvZ) and old map pools. more so than oversaturation of tournaments. Perhaps, in this sense tournaments might be able to help with changing their map pools in an attempt to shake up the metagame.
I also feel that the issue of whether we are suffering of a reduced significance of any one tournament needs to be explored more thorougly (for both players and viewers). It might very well just be that there are many up-and-coming tournaments that fail to capture the crowd (failing to create any significance) and that established tournaments are still doing fine.
the theory that there might be tournament viewership fatigue is total bs.
I host tournaments on a regular basis. a lot of other organizers host tournaments on a regular basis.
one of the most asked questions in tournament chat channels is: "is this going to be streamed?" in fact i'd say its the number one asked question in any tournament "what is the stream link?"
in my experience, it doesn't matter what else is on, what else is going on. if players are in a tournament, they want to know what the stream is to watch. even if they have 5 other streams up.
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so in my opinion, the market of tournaments and streams will work itself out. the players and the community will sort throught the bad ones and the good ones will always replace the ones that die.
I'd say to mix two and three. Fewer tournaments with better production value. Look at American football; yeah there's lots of smaller games to see your favorite team, but by putting all the production value and hype towards the Super Bowl, they've made it the equivalent of a national Holiday. Not that Starcraft should just have the GSL, but it's a clear contrast to the oversaturated scene we have today
For me personally it's definitly 2. Although I would probably add that we need less big LANs specifically and not necesarily less content in general.
Right now the only tournaments I really keep updated on are GSL and to a lesser extent OSL. I remember when I was excited for weeks up to an MLG or dreamhack, it didn't even matter that both the production and the matches were a lot worse than now.
Now, I don't follow any big western tournaments actively since I feel like there are one every damn weekend. I'll tune in if I see the stream on TL and aren't doing anything but that's about it. However I feel like that kind of watching is better covered by IPTL/NASL/EGMC etc. There isn't really any downtime between matches, and you don't have to go look up brackets or follow LRs to knows what's going on. Just sit down in front of the TV and watch some Starcraft. When people randomly watch some TV because they aren't doing anything else they might as well be watching Starcraft.
I think IPL has done it better than anyone else in this regard. Lots of daily content you can tune into if you have time and then big tournaments that are far enough in between to get you excited for them.
I don't want to be harsh but NASL to me just seems to be one of those tournaments that doesn't seem necessary in it's current form when we already have GSL and IPL. I mean I'll watch from the quarter-finals onward, but the rest of the season just seems to go on way too long and constantly has games delayed and canceled. I don't want any tournament to fail but I can't imagine they're making much money as it stands.
Also MCSL and IPTL seem to be covering too much of the same ground. In an ideal world maybe there would be room for both but I don't think at the moment that the audience is there when they're broadcasting games at the same time.
option 6, my own thoughts. I current watch a truck load of SCII, like allot. But i have never payed a cent to do so. I think that it is important for people to pay, but only a very small amount. like not $20, like $2. But currently there are not many good tournies that can do that. why would I pay to watch MLG when say, i dont know who is in the finals yet, because it only last one weekend. I really proffer longer tournies like GSL and OSL. And am (like i think many others) more likely to paid for content from them because i get attached to a longer story arc, and the hype is so much better, i find myself NEEDeding to watch thoses games, and live, it is just so much more eciting than watching anything else. And not because they are supposed to be the best players because they are all koreans or what ever, because i have followed the season for a while. I know its hard to have tournies like that outside of korea because the players come from all over the world. But there are a couple of others such was WCS that also provide long story arcs that get me really interested.
2. But not really delayed gratification. That's not the problem.
It's just that the talent pools are way too watered down and there are so few events that bring together a majority of the best players,
Then even if someone wins a tournament it means nothing because 4 other guys will win "major" tournaments in that week. It's especially tough in SC2 cuz the players are so nearly identical so its hard to know who the best players are by looking at them in a vaccuum; so I have no idea what's even the best tournament on a given weekend. And because of that I've pretty much (unintentionally) stopped following any of them
If any of you are DC comic book fans you know of character over saturation. For a number of years the same comic book character, for example Superman, was active in 4-8 comic book story lines, all at the same time, released every month. The stories hardly ever intertwined or mattered to each other. This type of multiple story threads have existed for many different characters in many different comics: DC & Marvel. Imagine if you watched a television show that had 4 story lines, with a new episode for each story line once a week, so in reality you got only one episode farther into one of the stories per month. DC comics did a complete reboot for their premiere characters in the new 52. One character. One story.
1 pro player. 15 different tournaments. 15 different storylines.
I interviewed Daryl Morey, the General Manager of the Houston Rockets basketball team, and asked him about the state of eSports and how it can grow. He said two things. 1. Time. 2. Don't splinter.
Each of those points have merit Grubby. Consolidation? Maybe. Better communication with scheduling? Definitely!
I think 3 and 5 go hand in hand. I enjoy the tournaments with good production value. Those with low value and no hype just seem... meh. And those, I believe, will be first to close shop as viewers get tired of the lack of value.
All I'm gonna say is, a big part of the unimaginable success BW has had in south Korea is the fact that important tournaments were being held very scarcely.
You get fed up with what you abuse of. Snickers bars end up tasting bad and bitter when you have them several times a day. Not to mention you become fat and ugly.
SC2 is, in so many ways, heading in the wrong direction. Glad to see Grubby understanding that.
Atm i tend to watcho only really big tournaments and even these don't really make me "Wow". But thats because the game is stale and pretty boring atm. Hots isn't gonna change a thing as it seems... Well, "meh" games tend to die, just that SC2 is in a situation were it could and can survie pretty long onhis name and hype alone.
I do honestly think the number of tournaments are a problem.
Money The sponsors money gets spread out. There is a lot of smaller tournaments that if merged, could have been a big one, or the bigger ones could have been even bigger.
Fatigue and placement. It is very exhausting to sit and watch the actual big tournaments for a whole weekend. Look at the biggest tournaments in soccer (or European football) which is one of the biggest sports in my country. They don't show matches for a whole weekend. People got other stuff to do. Champions league or national team games are spread out. I think it is cool to have some of those endurance tournaments, but there are just too many. By splitting Dreamhack up over 2 weekends it would become better. We would have time to do stuff during the day, without loosing games of our favorite players. And the tournaments may even end earlier the same day. Though I do not mind them ending late on a saturday. I do mind that the finals end late on a sunday. Which is the most sensible time to place a barcraft. I have never attended to one because of that. Stupid sunday finals.
Being active getting more people to watch. Now this is a different one. This is the community that needs to become better, though I know from my own experience that it is hard because of the time and placement of tournaments that would be worth dragging people into watching. If you have a big screen hook your computer up to it and watch with your friends hanging out instead of sitting for yourself watching. Don't set up the whole day for it but do it in the evening. If people are new to watching it a whole weekend is insane and becomes boring.
Sort the Tournaments Give us some way of sorting the tournament. I only want to follow the big tournaments, and i do not want to pay to watch them. Why? because I can see equally awesome tournaments for free. But if I can sort out in all the small tournaments, and have my own calender of the big ones, I would have a lot easier time to know when they happen. I am always surprised the same week when there is a big tournament because the calender is flooded.
On October 17 2012 16:50 QRhere wrote: All I'm gonna say is, a big part of the unimaginable success BW has had in south Korea is the fact that important tournaments were being held very scarcely.
You get fed up with what you abuse of. Snickers bars end up tasting bad and bitter when you have them several times a day. Not to mention you become fat and ugly.
SC2 is, in so many ways, heading in the wrong direction. Glad to see Grubby understanding that.
BW was succesfull in Korea, but only in Korea. SC2 take a better direction than BW in the rest of the world.
On October 17 2012 16:50 QRhere wrote: All I'm gonna say is, a big part of the unimaginable success BW has had in south Korea is the fact that important tournaments were being held very scarcely.
You get fed up with what you abuse of. Snickers bars end up tasting bad and bitter when you have them several times a day. Not to mention you become fat and ugly.
SC2 is, in so many ways, heading in the wrong direction. Glad to see Grubby understanding that.
BW was succesfull in Korea, but only in Korea. SC2 take a better direction than BW in the rest of the world.
BW was successful only in Korea because they were the only ones to work their asses off to exploit it. Had SC1 had the same mediatization as SC2, everything would be ENDLESSLY different. For one we wouldn't have to cope with how shaky the SC2 scene is from a spectator POV, because Blizzard would actually know how to make an enjoyable game.
Way too many tournaments to follow. I don't even follow GSL completely. 4 hrs a day is too much to watch. So that leaves out all the other tournaments NASL, IPL, GSTL, Dreamhack, MLG, Blizzcon, Homestory. Some are free, some are pay, obviously I won't pay to watch someone i can watch for free somewhere. I think the SC2 scene needs to follow the korean model with BIG TIME SPONSORS. It's also hard to balance watching with playing (those who watch are assumed to play as well).
5. I don't feel that there's oversaturation since lot of the tournaments or leagues work around PPV so those who don't pay for the content (me) get really hyped about other tournaments and don't have their thirst for SC2 quenched. While those who pay for content have made this decision to have more and they should be pleased with the amount of content there is available
To be honest, I'm kind of hoping for the e-sports scene to decline a bit. I think that the focus of the game has gone from great strategy to great 'hype'. It's great that people can make money from the game, but when the focus shifts from strategy and execution to shouting when things are shooting, too me, that's a bad shift. I think my experienced decline in caster quality has alot to do with trying to get people who are not interested in strategy to enjoy the game anyways. That's a bad mindset. A casters job is to make the viewer understand what's happening on a deeper level. Today alot of casters conciously lie to the viewer to build 'hype'. Instead of saying "This attack will fail misserably because of X, Y and Z" they say "WILL THIS ATTACK SUCCEED!?? IF IT DOES HE WILL WIN!!!" which in my opinion feels kind of lame.
I know the basics of the game, but lack the deeper understanding of strategy. It's not really enjoyable for me to watch streams, since I really don't understand what's going on. All I can understand is which army is beating which. Instead of focusing on what the averege player DOESN'T understand, the focus is on what the average player DOES understand(units hitting each other), which makes casting kind of pointless.
And of course this is an exaggeration. Casting is still better than no casting. But the focus has to shift back to helping people who are really interested in the game to understand it, rather than to make people who are not interested in the game interested in the game by shouting when things explode.
On October 15 2012 20:10 Grubby wrote: (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.
Mostly this. You can work towards increasing the market (= getting more people to watch esports). But the feel is gonna be the same. If we have 1000ppl watching a weekly cup nowadays, maybe 10k watch a mid-sized tournament and 50k a major one. Sure if we double the market we get 2k, 20k and 100k respectively. But is that gonna change the way we feel about oversaturation? Probably not. So no, oversaturation is not a problem (actually its good because it creates competition, moves the scene forward, etc). If the problem is somewhere its because the market isnt big enough.
Compare to golf or tennis btw. Who cares about a random ATP-tournament in, say, Belgium? Or the golf tour stop at some random city in California? Probably A) The really fucking hardcore fans B) People following their favourit players C) Locals, thinking its awesome that this huge tour is coming to town for a week. But is there an oversaturation of golf and tennis? Hardly. We peobably already have something like this going on in esports. Some people follow it all (A). Some only watch because its Stephano/Idra/Taeja/MC playing but turn off when the final is two random faceless Koreans (B). And NA generally prefers MLG while not as interested in ESL/DH, opposite for EU, Canadians come together when NASL comes to town, etc (C).
I dont see the problem. Work to increase the market size, rest will fix itself.
I do believe this is a problem, but probably one we don't hear much about because the people effected by it aren't around much anymore. I have felt this firsthand, I remember back in the beta days how exciting literally every showmatch was. I know that was partially because it was still a new game, but I also think it has something to do with the fact that there were really only two tournaments that mattered in the whole beta phase, and I watched every single match on the edge of my seat. It was riveting and it felt important, and that feeling lasted for over a year after release, but I eventually couldn't convince myself to care anymore. There are simply so many tournaments now that they've lost the relevance and impact they used to have when there were only a handful per week. I now only peripherally follow the pro scene, I play for pleasure now, but as a full time student I don't believe it's even possible to watch every tournament with what free time I have.
I think (3). There are definitely too many tournaments.
Back in BW, there was only MSL/OSL to look forward to. Winning these two tournaments was a big deal, and these tournaments only happened 4 times a year. In addition, all of the best players participated. Because of this, excitement and hype was maintained, and players had the time to prepare and come up with innovative strategies.
Now, the exact opposite is true. There are so many tournaments now. For example, GSL/OSL/MLG/IPL/Dreamhack/NASL/IEM/WCS, just to name the majors ones. As a result the excitement and hype generated by each one of these tournaments individually has decreased for me. Winning one of these events isn't as big of a deal since they happen so frequently, and in addition, the player pool in each tournament is different, so each one emerges with a different winner. When someone wins, I don't get the excitement that we are crowning the world's best player, because I think, well MC or MVP didn't even participate in this one, etc.
An additional problem I've seen that players themselves are participating in too many tournaments. Evidence that there are too many tournament matches include, for example, Thorzain dropping out of a tournament earlier to prepare for WCS. While I have no problem with this, this clearly demonstrates that the players are being fatigued and is an additional negative to viewers. If I happened to be following the tournament Thorzain was dropping out of, and really wanted to see Thorzain play in that, I would have been extremely disappointed.
Finally, I think not only are there too many tournaments, there are too many games, or at least too many games being broadcasted. An example of this is the GSL. After players drop from the main tournament, they then have to play more televised matches in the form of Code A and Up/Down. These matches clearly aren't as exciting compared to the matches that decide the Code S champion and dilute the excitement for the GSL tournament in general. In addition, weekend-long tournaments such as IPL also presents a unique issue. While its awesome to see a winner crowned at the end of the weekend. It's impossible to follow all the action, and we don't see the same quality of games as when someone has had a week to specifically prepare for the matchup.
TLDR: Too many matches and tournaments reduces the individual value of teach tournament.
On October 17 2012 17:16 Velr wrote: Oversaturation is just not a problem.
If you don't want to watch. Don't watch.
Uh... that's the point. If the consumer is turned off, it is the problem. It doesn't have to be rational in your own little model of why starcraft is worth watching or not.
[edit] Good summation right above me. Conceivably you could have a bunch of tournaments and games to watch if the appetite was there, but appetite is not increased by diluting the value of matches.
On October 15 2012 20:45 mememolly wrote: 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.
I don't understand your post. Isn't Idra one of the most boring guys around in SC2?
Fatigue and placement. It is very exhausting to sit and watch the actual big tournaments for a whole weekend. Look at the biggest tournaments in soccer (or European football) which is one of the biggest sports in my country. They don't show matches for a whole weekend. People got other stuff to do. Champions league or national team games are spread out. I think it is cool to have some of those endurance tournaments, but there are just too many. By splitting Dreamhack up over 2 weekends it would become better. We would have time to do stuff during the day, without loosing games of our favorite players. And the tournaments may even end earlier the same day. Though I do not mind them ending late on a saturday. I do mind that the finals end late on a sunday. Which is the most sensible time to place a barcraft. I have never attended to one because of that. Stupid sunday finals.
Problem with this is the cost. Do you know how much it would cost to house the 32+ players for 2 weeks? Not to mention casters, non local production staff, venue?
Sport like tennis do have their tournament span over 2 weeks for Grand Slams but the budget/revenue is just totally on a different scale. The only reason GSL works is because most of the players are based in Korea. The closest thing we can get is probably The International for DoTA2 and Season 2 Championship for LoL. But those were both Flagship events that were for advertising (not revenue generation).
There is no problem with oversaturation, this will get sorted out automatically by the market. BUT! That doesnt mean, that we cant do nothing. I believe, to grow the scene, there must be much bigger focus on local tournaments, barcrafts etc.. This is what makes new gamers that will last decades, those emotions and friends that are made through the love of the game. New blizzard games feel lonely and that is big problem! (also Lan missing is a problem ) edit: Also we need people in esports like you Grubby - that have personality and can create those emotions to the game!
On October 18 2012 01:18 Kompicek wrote: There is no problem with oversaturation, this will get sorted out automatically by the market. BUT! That doesnt mean, that we cant do nothing. I believe, to grow the scene, there must be much bigger focus on local tournaments, barcrafts etc.. This is what makes new gamers that will last decades, those emotions and friends that are made through the love of the game. New blizzard games feel lonely and that is big problem! (also Lan missing is a problem ) edit: Also we need people in esports like you Grubby - that have personality and can create those emotions to the game!
How does the market fix the problem. If games are not entertaining because there are too many of them, viewership goes down, and the scene fades. Is the scene going to magically revive once tournaments die out and say OSL is the only one left? Of course not, it will just be a small scene at that point.
thanks Grubby for posting this. I get the opportunity to help out with sc2quotes from time to time, and i do agree that events are getting harder to keep up with.
I agree mostly with points 2 and 3, and a dash of 4, but too much of 4 can be bad too.
Because of daily time constraints with real life stuff, and with the over abundance on events (especially events that are starting to overlap) i have to be picky about which events i watch. Last year, i'd have been like "whatever i got 2 monitors i can watch both," but that results in me not really being able to fully enjoy either stream. In the past (early 2012, and most of 2011,) when there were overlapping events, most of the time they were staggered via timezones, which made it a bit more manageable when it came to event overlaps. but as it is now, more and more events, even on their regular season broadcasts, are competing in the same broadcast time (OSL vs GSL; NASL vs EGMCSL vs IPL sometimes).
all the factors you listed in point 3 are pretty much most of my criteria for picking out events to watch over the other ones.
On October 18 2012 01:18 Kompicek wrote: There is no problem with oversaturation, this will get sorted out automatically by the market. BUT! That doesnt mean, that we cant do nothing. I believe, to grow the scene, there must be much bigger focus on local tournaments, barcrafts etc.. This is what makes new gamers that will last decades, those emotions and friends that are made through the love of the game. New blizzard games feel lonely and that is big problem! (also Lan missing is a problem ) edit: Also we need people in esports like you Grubby - that have personality and can create those emotions to the game!
How does the market fix the problem. If games are not entertaining because there are too many of them, viewership goes down, and the scene fades. Is the scene going to magically revive once tournaments die out and say OSL is the only one left? Of course not, it will just be a small scene at that point.
You have it the wrong way, oversaturation is actually good for the market. The weak ones will die, the strong ones will survive stronger. The scene stays the same, but with more stability. What you are saying is a paradox. I dont want to go over the details with this anymore. This is a typical problem that economists, financial analysts etc. go over on a daily basis. This has already been solved by Adam Smith in his famous book - The wealth of nations in 1776.
On October 18 2012 01:18 Kompicek wrote: There is no problem with oversaturation, this will get sorted out automatically by the market. BUT! That doesnt mean, that we cant do nothing. I believe, to grow the scene, there must be much bigger focus on local tournaments, barcrafts etc.. This is what makes new gamers that will last decades, those emotions and friends that are made through the love of the game. New blizzard games feel lonely and that is big problem! (also Lan missing is a problem ) edit: Also we need people in esports like you Grubby - that have personality and can create those emotions to the game!
How does the market fix the problem. If games are not entertaining because there are too many of them, viewership goes down, and the scene fades. Is the scene going to magically revive once tournaments die out and say OSL is the only one left? Of course not, it will just be a small scene at that point.
You have it the wrong way, oversaturation is actually good for the market. The weak ones will die, the strong ones will survive stronger. The scene stays the same, but with more stability. What you are saying is a paradox. I dont want to go over the details with this anymore. This is a typical problem that economists, financial analysts etc. go over on a daily basis. This has already been solved by Adam Smith in his famous book - The wealth of nations in 1776.
That's a bit of a one-sided argument. If the classic economics problems had been solved, we wouldn't still be having these arguments over such basic economic theories (that's why Keynesian vs Austrian/Supply-side/Chicago school/etc arguments still take place). You can't just declare these problems solved.
From my perspective it seems that demand is not constant (even if price is). By letting the market sort it out does not mean that the weak will die and the strong will thrive. It can very well be the case that in this market that such massive oversaturation will kill the weak and strong alike. The demand for goods will then move over to something else (perhaps another e-sport). The SC2 tournament market isn't a closed system with constant demand. Oversupply can drive the demand down, possibly even permanently. This isn't the same as talking about supply and demand for a necessary good like food, clothes, housing, and gasoline where supply and demand are only really related through price. Not all markets and goods are alike.
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.
On October 18 2012 01:18 Kompicek wrote: There is no problem with oversaturation, this will get sorted out automatically by the market. BUT! That doesnt mean, that we cant do nothing. I believe, to grow the scene, there must be much bigger focus on local tournaments, barcrafts etc.. This is what makes new gamers that will last decades, those emotions and friends that are made through the love of the game. New blizzard games feel lonely and that is big problem! (also Lan missing is a problem ) edit: Also we need people in esports like you Grubby - that have personality and can create those emotions to the game!
How does the market fix the problem. If games are not entertaining because there are too many of them, viewership goes down, and the scene fades. Is the scene going to magically revive once tournaments die out and say OSL is the only one left? Of course not, it will just be a small scene at that point.
You have it the wrong way, oversaturation is actually good for the market. The weak ones will die, the strong ones will survive stronger. The scene stays the same, but with more stability. What you are saying is a paradox. I dont want to go over the details with this anymore. This is a typical problem that economists, financial analysts etc. go over on a daily basis. This has already been solved by Adam Smith in his famous book - The wealth of nations in 1776.
That's a bit of a one-sided argument. If the classic economics problems had been solved, we wouldn't still be having these arguments over such basic economic theories (that's why Keynesian vs Austrian/Supply-side/Chicago school/etc arguments still take place). You can't just declare these problems solved.
From my perspective it seems that demand is not constant (even if price is). By letting the market sort it out does not mean that the weak will die and the strong will thrive. It can very well be the case that in this market that such massive oversaturation will kill the weak and strong alike. The demand for goods will then move over to something else (perhaps another e-sport). The SC2 tournament market isn't a closed system with constant demand. Oversupply can drive the demand down, possibly even permanently. This isn't the same as talking about supply and demand for a necessary good like food, clothes, housing, and gasoline where supply and demand are only really related through price. Not all markets and goods are alike.
I sort of disagree. I do believe that "over-saturation" of tournaments can lead to players passing on some, meaning you may only have a couple REALLY good players in one tournament and a couple REALLY good players in another. Obviously, for the best matches, you'd need to have all of the REALLY good players in the same tournament. I think that's what the purpose of premier leagues and tournaments are. GSL/OSL/even NASL. NASL has a pretty dang good player lineup for it currently, and it has enough game frequency that you are able to see a lot of good matches, though I do believe it has a sort of "lesser" atmosphere to it than the other two premiers. I think the number of walkovers reflects this.
The advantages of many tournaments is that you will be able to see many more matches with pro players. I don't care if a game is played live or online, it's not like the latency changes. So long as a game is really good and has a lot of intelligent plays in it, I will want to watch it.
OTHER weekend tournaments need to evolve into leagues and seasons, like the GSL, NASL, and IPL. And these leagues need to have variety in format, spacing between games, and such. As much as I enjoy the MLG open tournament format, having weekend heroes does not compare to following a specific player or team through a league.
Keep live events for Finals, possibly even ro16 but not anything more. As a human being, its unrealistic for me to watch a giant tournament spanning 2-3 days. There is just no way i will see all the games, and that sucks because i get to the finals and i dont know the story of how those players made their way through the tournament.
ctrl+Fing through the thread I see that many others have mentioned tennis. I would like a system like that, with clear tiers.
Have a few top tier (grand slam) tournaments that are must watch for any serious follower, and then clearly defined tiers under that. I think that would help:
1) The viewers get a better overview. They don't have to know the name of each tourney, and if they need to care about it or not. You will just go "oh, it's a tier 2 tournament going on, have to watch!" or "meh, tier 4 tourney, no big deal that ret lost." That is, you don't need to know the name and details of every tournament to understand if it's a big one or not. Also easier scheduling. Rather than having a calendar with several entries every day, and you have no clue which are worth watching, you can press "filter tier 2 and higher" and you will get the biggest ones.
2) Tournaments can more easily define themselves, get a good idea of what are reasonable price money, what are expected of them for production quality, etc. A top tier tourney is probably expected to be offline for example, while a lower tier will be entirely online I'd guess. Maybe even have a set of requirement on the tourney hit qualify for a tier, in terms of price money and other measurable production qualities. Also well defined way to grow a tournament, to move it up from tier 4 to tier 3 if you feel confident with how you run it. The fact that you can easily make a ranking for seeds and hype is just a nice by-product.
3) Players? I guess it is easier for them to choose were to participate, and they will have clearly defined goals like "I want to place top 4 in a tier 2 tournament" or so. I'm not sure if much will change in practice for players though, as I would assume they already have a pretty good idea of what tourneys are around for them. (or do they??) They would getg a much clearer CV though. "2 tier 2 wins, 1 top 4 grand slam, 13 tier 3 wins." easy.
But what about the players? If players arent getting reasonable salaries then they have to win prizemoney to make some income. If there are too many tournaments then its better for the players cos they have more opportunities to make money. Having one multimilliondollar tournament a year is terrible for the players.
I disagree with the "less tournaments". We need to have more curcuit and/or drawn out tournaments. There needs to be constant coverage and watchable content both from shows and tournaments, so that people can start picking and choosing what to watch as if TV shows. Every so often, you miss a random TV show in order to go out for a movie (major tournament). Having things like NASL, IPTL, and I would prefer a much more spread out MLG would be awesome. Having huge MLG's is much less beneficial imo. Having MLG's everywhere will make tournaments much more to players and teams, and really take the importance off of every MLG, but at the same time put a lot more emphasis on BIG MLG's. Having big differences in the prize pools of the regular season and the final tournament makes things more exciting, and having people rank up more often and having a lot more people playing, more people earning, and less spending will really benefit the scene. It'll also put more emphasis on the NA scene and help build it (it needs help!!). Give NA players more competition and more opportunity to play at a higher level.
Having things like that for European tournaments will be beneficial too. Things like TeSL and GSL, where events are constant is very beneficial. Focus on the community and massive content. You'll take some viewers from some programs, but you'll add to the overall viewership of eSports.
Could ramble on more about how it's important, but I'll stop here for now ;D
Less tournaments, but have these be BIGGER and BETTER tournaments.
No, more small tournaments, less bigger tournaments. You want to lower the amount of opporunity? That doesn't help eSports grow, all it does is help less people make more money. Less people become motivated to play at a higher level, because the same people are going to take all them money. Build careers.... We are through with the huge prize pool tournaments. GSL 1 had over $80k to first place and what, $23k for 2nd place? They did that because they needed people to gain an immediate interest in the game. That phase is over. Prize pools need to be lessened and spread to a much broader public in order for the game to become sustainable. We need more sponsors being represented more often, more money going into eSports and more people earning that money. More events, more coverage, more shows, more sc2, less glamore, less BS, less monopolizing. eSports ftw
A bit of the 3) for sure (NASL sound, lags on the OSL ...) but 6) too.
For me, we need a real major offline globalized championship. The problem is simple, we have way too many major actors in the world of sc2 esprt tournaments and they don't work on the same direction. I'm very shocked by the lack of coordination of Dreamhack Opens, MLG, NASL, Iron Squid. We just have more and more events by we don't have a true World Championship with a coordination of Players vs Players and Teams vs Teams organised by a big structure. WCS are great but it's just an annual group of events, not a real championship. The next big thing of esport is, i hope, the creation of a Great Super league with the majority of the professional teams and players.
Perhaps it's the bw and team sports influence, but I incredibly dislike the weekend tournament where you have like a hundred games crammed into a weekend. I love the whole pro league/osl matches where there is preparation for matches from players and anticipation from fans. I understand the logistics problems involved, but it's still crappy as a fan.
Secondly, in today's world where team sports is king, I dislike the lack of team emphasis. Following a team is much more fun. Again, I realize the issues involved, but still.
Basically I've stopped watching almost all tournaments other than gsl and osl, snd I will still follow the proleague. But foreign scene like DH or MLG I eoud never watch live, and maybe watch some voids if I have time
On October 16 2012 09:40 Requiem- wrote: I think you should add to the hype, the hype videos, like this one http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=og-gULrg1Jo&feature=player_detailpage + they should do bigger online tournaments, like Zotac + Alienware instead of one for each. that would be cool
oh man those intros are soo insanely good at hyping people up i looked a bunch of them on youtube sooo goood :D:D:D
On October 18 2012 04:42 Blargh wrote: I sort of disagree. I do believe that "over-saturation" of tournaments can lead to players passing on some, meaning you may only have a couple REALLY good players in one tournament and a couple REALLY good players in another. Obviously, for the best matches, you'd need to have all of the REALLY good players in the same tournament. I think that's what the purpose of premier leagues and tournaments are. GSL/OSL/even NASL. NASL has a pretty dang good player lineup for it currently, and it has enough game frequency that you are able to see a lot of good matches, though I do believe it has a sort of "lesser" atmosphere to it than the other two premiers. I think the number of walkovers reflects this.
The advantages of many tournaments is that you will be able to see many more matches with pro players. I don't care if a game is played live or online, it's not like the latency changes. So long as a game is really good and has a lot of intelligent plays in it, I will want to watch it.
Good point. This is where player treatment comes in though. Some tournaments treat players "decently". A rare few treat them horribly. Some tournaments treat players fabulously. If a player is forced to pick between two clashing events, sponsor interests aside - he would pick the better event. So treating players better is a way for one tournament to win out over another, in terms of getting the most of the REALLY good players at their event.
As a beneficial side-effect, players would get treated better. I can't say I don't care about that.
I sort of see the over saturation like NFL football.
You used to have all 15 NFL games for the week played on Sunday all day and Monday Night. If you wanted to watch it was all there in 2 days. 3 Games Sunday (noon, 3pm, Sunday night at 730pm) then 1 game on Monday night. Then they decided to add Thursday night football. So now there's an extra evening thrown in, IMO it's sort of assuming a lot to think I want to now dedicate 3 nights to watching football. I love football and I do want to watch the games, but I also need and want to do other stuff.
With SC2 tourneys there's stuff going on 24/7. There's just too much going on and TBH many of those tournaments I don't really care about at all. I'm just being asked to try and consume too much crap so something's got to give. I want to play other games, watch streams, watch DotA 2 tourneys, watch SC2 tourneys, eat, sleep, poop, live life.
Having a ton of tournaments is nice for up and comer players I guess and you always need new faces to come onto the scene. But having SOOOOOO many tournaments tends to cheapen the feel of them all. If something is a dime a dozen who cares, you know? I'll try and watch MLG because I'll see a lot of big time players and you'll get some of the little guy melting face in the open brackets. But I can't be asked to watch the NASL for instance, I just can't justify spending time watching it or tracking the results, I've got other stuff I'd like to do.
I don't know, that's just my take on it. I'm sure there will be a shake down eventually where some tournaments go away and only a few remain. While that does suck for the little guy, it's sort of nice for narrowing the field of what to watch.
Hi Grubby, I do not have this problem because I pick what I watch. When I'm free and bored I'll watch whatever tournament that is on, otherwise I only follow the GSL and other prestigious tournaments like WCS. I also follow OSL to some extent, but haven't gotten into it as much as I have with GSL.
To me quality is important, but I also appreciate having a tournament on that I can tune into anytime and appreciate some of the lesser known and less skilled players.
"Viewership tournament fatigue" is precisely the term which describes one of the predicaments of SC2. You can only improve the QUALITY of your life, but never the QUANTITY of it (you will always have 24 hours each day and 7 days a week). Thus MORE =/= BETTER! Organizers are trying to push SC2 into becoming an eSport big time, but thats not how it works.
Two major issues that caused me to just stop watching tournaments:
1) Too much waiting around for the next match, too much downtime. I am sure everyone has experienced watching a tournament and then the stream puts on some add while some generic k pop music is playing and it says "be back in a hour"
WHAT THE FUCK are you doing in that whole hour? MLG usually does this, but to be honest most tournaments except the GSL do it, it saps any energy out of the viewer and you just dont give a shit anymore. Why hire 4-6 casters and then have absolute droughts of no games for hours? I understand they need a break but why no shuffle them around?
Be on time, do not advertize your games/tournament and then be late 50 minutes and not even mention why you were so much late. MLG Dallas was legendary for all the wrong reasons
I am sure there is a good reason for this downtime, but here is the catch: I dont give a shit. You cannot ask people to wait a whole hour before the next match
2) Games are usually not all that entertaining. I dont blame the players for this, nor the casters, nor Sundance, nor MLG. But you usually wait a hour to start a match, BO3, 2 of the game usually end very fast with some kind of 2 base push that you have seen a million times.
It is very common to spend half a day (5-6) hours watching a tournament, and spending 2 of those hours just waiting around, for maybe 1 or 2 good games at best. Thus the time investment to entertainment ratio is very low.
In a UFC PPV that lasts around 90-100 minutes with maybe 6-8 fights i know i will get at least 2-4 great fights, while the others are a borefest. That is much value than watching SC2.
Those are the big issues with watching, you invest a ton of time and maybe even money (MLG Arena) on very little entertainment, tons of waiting around, matches that you feel like you have seen about a hundred times before (oh look the Terran player is going MM, he is going to push as soon as his Stim is done or Zerg player is going for 200/200 before pushing out, right now he is droning he is at 90 drones) etc etc etc.
After a tournament you feel like you wasted your time staying up late, you saw maybe a few decent matches, and the guy who won it all...yay? He won some money and the whole thing is forgotten the next day, there is no real triumph except that the winner won some cash, there is no prestige, there is no major big league "OMG IDRA WON MLG NOW HE MOVES UP SOME RANKS TO NR. 8 IN THE WORLD!", instead he just wins money so he can buy some Levis jeans maybe and that is about.
In a UFC ppv you know that there is fallout from the show, who will get title shots, who will get fired, who challenged who. In SC2 there is no fallout, its like last nights big hyped up tournament never even happened.
(2) is pretty key not for just viewers but players. If we shuttle players back and forth overall practice and performance suffers. Jetlag, travel time, and overall mental pressure is taxing and takes away from the quality of the games. Stability is a huge factor in gameplay. Viewers also have limited time, but this is not as large of an issue. A good portion of viewers can watch a game and get chores or menial work done, so (2) is not a large factor for us.
(5) is half-true. There are too many events that are too spread out. Korean E-Sports took off because it was so centralized that you could viably have 8-12 teams duking it out many days a week. While this increased the overall quantity of games, this gave players time to rest and research in between, raising the overall quality. Viewers could be more selective of the games they watched and not feel obligated to watch everything. A great example would be OSL/MSL. They had a good mix of individual events and team events, so you could watch a decent number of games to be satisfied without watching all the games. By packing a single tournament into such a tight timeframe (1-4 days), viewers feel like they have ONLY that amount of time to watch, and the emotional cost of missing out on a game is far greater. This was illustrated best at the League of Legends Season Two World Championships. Personally, I felt like I wasted a whole Saturday watching a series that didn't complete. My schedule clashed for the day they rescheduled and I lost out on a game and a half, costing me time I could have used for other duties AND the chance to watch live.
(6) Players need to pick their events and battles. Rather than travel everywhere for everything, they're going to have to say "no" to more events. This makes that "Star Player" on a team shine more; while he doesn't play as often as everyone else, when he does play he's cashing in his value for viewers and his brand/label/himself. I remember some time ago, Creolophus retired but played later one because he was the returning championship from the year before. Because he played a limited amount, watching him play was valuable.
I pretty much fully agree with this statement, bar the end of point 5, the cycle of life of starcraft i don't feel is self perpetuating.
I think it is more like point 4 where you state that it needs to be addressed and rigorously tried to be improved and implementation of better community morals and values. SO that as a community we shift the mental stance from just a game, to a way of life, other esports do this, such as poker and other online gaming platforms.
It doesn't have to be big changes but if more people just try and contribute towards starcraft by getting it out there, then it would be looked as less by the general public as a casual sport, but an actual career sport.
So thanks for putting this out there so that people who can and want to help improve the community and Esports economy can have somewhere to go and speak there mind.
the more tourneys the better (for me as a viewer), at least i don't have to view them, right ?. It's only a problem for professional players and tourney organisators trying to earn money, they cannibalize viewership and income.
This has been the case for me ever since the second year of sc2's release. There was so much to watch that I didn't have time to keep up with any of it. I'm starting to reignite my interest in sc2 now that things are dying down, but there are still way too many smaller tournaments and not enough really really big ones.
There are a few specific units that really makes this game a bit dull to watch, because they have a very specific role and not an all round role, which creates creative use of this unit. Sentries, infestor and ghost's comes to mind. Especially PvZ atm seems to be so focused around forcefield, vortex vs. infestor + broodlord it has become a ridiculous.
On a sidenote, you Grubby are quite entertaining to watch =)
I barley watch sc2 anymore - I used to spend several hours a week watching and far more playing for well over a year. I now watch a lot of dota2.
I am not really sure why. I suspect i has to do with what blizz did to the game.
One thing i found was that watching a tournament with some kid casting from his bedroom saying things that were just nonsense or so ambiguous put me off watching entire tournaments.
PPV on MLG really put me off that. I bought a years subscription to GOM and was enjoying it untill they brought out all kinds of other tourneys i didnt have subscription to and so felt ripped off.
I overwatched day 9 ... i would love to kow how many of his viewers have been watching non stop from day1 ... I actually feel bad about not watching day9, i am not sure when i stopped. I suspect it all coincides with stopping playing which was when blizz made huge UI changes that meant my carefully crafted config for quality:performance that I had tweeked was ruined.
I think 2 + 4 tbh.
However it is unreasonable to expect a tournament organiser to say ... hmm i think there are too many so i wont bother. If that attitude held then noone would ever do anything. However why everyone wants to do the next big tourney is beyond me. Thi sis where you get into the idea of a division. There are pros and semi pros and there is everyone else. Personally I dont give a fuck about everyone else and don't want to have tournements that pros cant really play at due to scheduling diluting my attention.
An idea of seasons might work. IE 2 months on, 2 months off. Just look at how WPT totally oversaturated poker broadcasting.
I suspect from your posts that you are trying to create a governing body ... as long as it has viewer and player interests at heart that would be awesome. Sponsors need maximum viewer numbers.
One big problem i have is with over hype. So many tournaments are hyped as THE next big thing. Crap games are covnerted into masterpieces by casters.
IMO my view there is nothing wrong with a game being casted in calm way. Player A did this: player b scouted and reacted correctly. From here on player A should loose ... and he did. Great execution from both, just got out read and lost as he should. However what i would hear is a caster pretending that its close and that A can come back just to make it exciting.
This is what i liked about artosis (and tasteless) especially, hed call it as he saw it. But when someone who you do not have a gigantic amount of respect for does this it can come accross as trying to pretend they could do better or know better. Huge put off (c.f. kid in bedroom).
So i think everything got way too OTT and I just cba being force fed bs. Eg can day9 cast a game now without over enunciating?
For example, you've got a few leagues, all with say, 16 players in it. Premier league, first division, second, etc.
Each season, the top 3 of any league get promoted (except in the highest of course), the bottom 3 get demoted.
Every week, 2 matches are played (tue/wed or wed/thu, to not interfere with regular tournaments too much) by each player as a bo3 or bo5, untill every player has played every other player in a given league.
If my math is correct, this would mean that after 8 weeks and 15 playdays all players have played their matches. The one with the most points wins the season, simple. The 16th day could be used for playoffs or something similar if necessary.
Although....
Instead of a bo3/bo5 format, maybe a time limit could be imposed. Imagine a time limit of 1 hour of real time, where the timer only runs during the games (not between maps). Players play as many games as needed to fill the hour. When the timer runs out, the players finish their current game, after which the scores are tallied normally.
In this format, draws are possible, which can add excitement for both players and audience as to who might win the season overall. It also makes variable scores possible. A player could win 1-0 or even 10-0 (if he's a supercheeser), or playes could draw 1-1 or 2-2 (though the time limit should probably be more like 75 minutes rather than 60 for this).
A win would award 2 or 3 points to the winner, a draw awards 1 point to both players. At the end of the season, points are tallied - The player with the most points wins. If there is a tie, the player with the most match wins wins. If there is still a tie, the player with the most map wins wins. If there is still a tie, the 16th day could be used to resolve it between the parties involved.
I think this kind of format could really work, though these kind of tournaments should not run concurrently as it would lessen the significance aswell as the availability of the players involved. I can imagine GomTV's stuff working similarly to this, where you have the leagues in place (S, A and B) aswell as the time frame.
Can you imagine watching several streams on and off to check their progress? Where on the last day, multiple matches can have a great impact on the championship? This would add a lot of 'spice' to the competition imho, especially if the timed format is used.
I think we need a sports center type show for SC2. I want to see highlights and results with competent casters.
Lets look at a typical show of sports center (these times are 100% made up)
10 minutes talking about big game highlights and analysis 10 minutes talking about a few other games highlights maybe and inteview 10 minutes talking to expert about a past game or a future game 10 minutes talking about drama crap 5 minutes talking about 15 minutes of commercials
So if we have a weekly show that can talk about a few of the bigger tournaments/matches that happened over the last week and some stuff that is coming up (like a GSL finals or MLG or whatever) while focusing on clips of matches, I think it will help me and other casual viewers in a number of ways
1) keep up with player trends 2) keep up with where the good players are playing and when 3) High production values (scripted, edited, rational thoughts, guest experts, etc)(doesn't need a studio, or fancy graphics) 4) Easy gateway into watching more SC2
How I think a typical show would go 10-15 minutes talking about the week's big match (whether it was well played, a GSL finals, big time players) Showing clips, player's comments about match, analysis and expert opinions, and what those players have been up to and are going to be doing soon
15-20 minutes talking about other matches form the week Showing clips, showing scores, showing players recent records, stats, showing big plays, impressive micro, smart builds, or lucky moments
5 minutes tips and strategies to improve (especially if these can be obtained from well known players) 5 minutes Showing how players have been doing this week. (for example lets say no Squirtle games were shown, This would show that Squirtle went 5-3 this week he was able to beat Hack in the GSL code A round of 24 [ not Squirtle's real record]
10 minutes of commercials this leaves 5-15 minutes in an hour long show.
Problems to overcome 1) This would require an extraordinary amount of effort and collaboration to pull off well ( games watched, show cripted, edited, possible charts and graphs made. 2) Getting permission to use games from the top tournaments may be hard or impossible 3) I think record it on Sunday and re run it several times through the week would be the best way to let many people watch it, or through VODs 4) getting actual expert opinions
I think this could be a very natural guiding arrow for those who wish to stay up to date on the SC2 scene, watch clips of beautiful SC2 plays, and learn about the metagame. I am very excited by this Idea and hope that somebody more talented than me can pull it off.
Personally, it is a "yes" -- which I combat with only watching GSL and the occasional MLG.
I think for SC2 to grow into a bigger spectator eSports, you have to take care of the 30-year-olds like me. We are the people who were around playing SC1 when it first came out in '98. We understand gaming and get nostalgic about "the good old days" and willing to spend money to relive our youth by watching SC2.
But we are also people with full-time jobs, loans, rents or mortgages, and family.
We can't stay up to start watching GSL live at 2am, because we have to wake up at 6am for the commute. We can't go to barcraft all day Saturday to watch MLG until we get sick of it, because junior has soccer practice and piano lessons on Saturdays.
In other words, we haven money but we don't have TIME.
When time is of a premium, we are picky. We only have time for the equivalent of ESPN SportCenter daily; watching any actual games will be as sparing as following our own NFL team. And most likely on-demand.
Hey I don't think we need less tournaments. We need less repetitive games at these tournaments. Lets face it-- every map is three base along the backside either in a triangle or line, with the natural being unharrassable. Most zerg wins are now in the form of a bl/ infestor army. Most terran opening now involve a gasless expand. And most pvz wins are all-in or vortex. With more interesting games comes more viewers, more viewers = more money, more hype etc. If the games are more interesting to watch, ie not the same thing every time, all the rest (production, post production, increase prize-pool) will follow. Very simple... its not over-saturation.... its oversaturation of the same thing every time.
The problem with tournaments is that everyone wants to have "the best of the best" players and that is rather stifling the game, because you only get to see "the Korean style" and dont give other styles a chance to develop itself on other continents. Thus there will always be the same types of games to be watched as a viewer and this makes it rather boring in the end.
I have said it a few times already: Perfection is boring, because you can figure out the likely outcome from the numbers of units and resources and such. Players who are not that perfect will make/allow for greater mistakes and/or greater awesome comebacks for example.
My thoughts are mixed with several posts already done. I'm also close to 30 and have a lot of other activities, i still watch some but i don't see as much as i would like sometimes.
Also think the competition should evolve, someday, to an organized scheme similar to soccer like ChromeBallz said. There's a lot of scattered tournaments with no relation between them, that also as mentioned try to get they best they can to play (understandable considering that's what most want to see). The only existent relations i'm aware of are more agreements, due to business, than anything else. The eSF seemed to be more towards making rules between teams, trades, etc... There's no regional (not saying country because don't think we have the player base to support that yet) entity, governed by a global one (that should just be like a group of each of those entities), to whom all tournaments should be registered to, and supervised. So there's a scaling of levels, possibilities of going up and down and global tournaments that would pick the best teams/players from each every X amount of time, like a world cup or a blizz like world championship series. But on a much bigger and organized scale.
Towards something like that is what i hope esports will head to someday. Think it would create stories, roots, etc.. much better but don't know if it would be embraced by an esports community or not. Am allowed to dream however :D
edit: Ah, also since there's so many and so frequent tournaments it feels the champion achievement doesn't feel as important.
Most successful spectator sports have one dominate league that is considered the best. Having several leagues that are on par with each other waters down the talent. In Korea(until recently not sure how KESPA and the BW players will affect this) the "big leagues" is code S. Code S has all of they best players in the same league. There is rarely an event outside of Korea that can even say it has all of the best non-Koreans.
I agree with everyone saying 2, that there are just so many tournaments that they all kind of lose their hype.
There is another issue as well though, and that's that so many games are the same now. PvT games now are very similar to PvT games from about 6 months ago, almost every PvT I see I feel like I've seen it before. The other matchups suffer from this too.
The reason I mention this is that the two together are a killer combo. When the games feel the same AND there are so many tournaments it drains the excitement.
I also disagree that there is over saturation. I want to be able to view games when I like, with games involving the race(s) I play or players I like.
Currently, quite often there is no interesting content available when I want to watch.
I don't understand people saying they are busy and the large number of tournaments streamed is a problem. Less tournaments being streamed will just make it harder to find a game to watch during that limited amount of time when you are free.
I'm a Starcraft fan but it's not so important that I'm going to schedule a particular day/time of the week to watch, that's outdated television era thinking. When I'm free I'll watch, and then if I like a show try to make time to catch the finals.
For me it's #2. With so many tournaments it's so hard to really know which, if any, should count more than the others. They are all different formats too. Some tournies you know who you will play beforehand and others you don't. Some you have better maps than others or longer series to prepare for.
GSL is definitely the most prestigious tournament but I'm still not too interested in it because I can't relate to most of the players. MLG is probably the best non GSL tournament in terms of bragging rights. But even so, there are several MLGs each year.
I would like to see pro players playing in less tournaments so they could spend all their time preparing for a few major ones with huge prize pools and lots of bragging rights if they do well there.
With so many tournaments around I just care less because it makes all of them seem less important. In my perfect world there would be a super bowl of SC2 tournaments every 6 months. All pro players would train their asses off with this one tournament as their ultimate goal. There would be a few other tournaments (maybe once a month) between the super bowl one that they could use as preparation and to see how they currently stack up with other players and the current metagame. The super bowl tourny would be longer and more involved that any tournament besides GSL. It would take several days or maybe a week and you might know some of your opponents beforehand, at least for the earlier stages. It would be a real grind to win and the results would give a more accurate power ranking for players.
Im not really sure why everyone says #2? Sure there is alot of tournaments but you dont need to see all of them. Its better to have them more often so when the time suits you, then you can watch it. Look at any other sport, there are tournament matches everyday all around the globe. Cant watch them all of course, so focus on the once you would like to follow... For god sake there is a channel that only shows golf 24/7, golf!? And you complain that there is too many SC2 tournaments, geez!
On November 08 2012 06:16 eSportBar wrote: Im not really sure why everyone says #2? Sure there is alot of tournaments but you dont need to see all of them. Its better to have them more often so when the time suits you, then you can watch it. Look at any other sport, there are tournament matches everyday all around the globe. Cant watch them all of course, so focus on the once you would like to follow... For god sake there is a channel that only shows golf 24/7, golf!? And you complain that there is too many SC2 tournaments, geez!
Yea, it's convenient if all you want is to be able to see someone playing SC2 somewhere out there. However, if you're mostly interested in top flight awesomeness, or some specific subset of awesomeness, it would be nice if there was a worldwide standard similar to the few BW star leagues with set time frames. MLG, Dreamhack and GSL are all viewed as major tournaments but they all have varying formats and styles. Then you have other popular tourneys, such as NASL, Homestory Cup, IEM, a few LANs, etc, that may also be included in that group depending on your viewpoint not to mention the myriad of other crap that's online on any given day. For me personally, I really love the GSL, and I wish I could watch it live regularly. I'm not really into much else because the formats for many of the other tournaments bother me greatly, but they generally have a lot of non-Korean players I like to follow. So I go through periods when I just bail on non-GSL content because it's not enjoyable trying to follow my players through so many tournaments of random stature.
Also, just because there's golf on 24/7 doesn't mean that there's ever any golf on that channel you particularly want to watch.
- Long-lasting season makes the tension grow-up until the Finals, and makes every event a BIG THING - 30 years old, not enough time to watch anything at odd hours and no opportunity to dedicate an entire week-end to it - "Pretendigly-faceless" koreans >>> talentless foreigners. Who wants to watch the underdogs fighting against each other? - For a reason I cant figure out, Artosis and Tasteless are the only decent casters in the community. The others just seem they are overdoing it or look like they dont know SHIT about the game (even if they do).
It is just my opinion, but other people might relate to some points I guess.
As for the "fatigue", yes I just dont want to spend any time to watch all these weekly "3-random-letter-named" irrelevant tourneys and I could not care less about who wins them as it means nothing unless the same guy is winning every other stuff everywhere.
I can only talk for myself, but tournament oversaturation has been a problem for me.
This has been my own fault. I have watched much sc2, to the point where it all imploded and nothing looked interesting anymore. Seeying all the strats over and over again, for evenings at a time. It gets boring.
I would like to make a comparison with football. I watch one game in the weekend and during the championsleague season, I watch maybe two games during the week (every other week). And next to this, one big tournament every two years. Compared to sc2 this is very little content. But watching any more football would make it very boring, very fast. The positive here is that watching these few games keeps me up with the story development very well.
if there was just one big league that I could follow weekly it would greatly improve my personal interest, and I could see many more people interested in following this. I actually know some people that know about the sc2 pro scene, but they just dont follow it because its to overwelming. I cant talk for them, but I can see a serious possibility that more people would be interested if the overall scene is easier to follow with less time investment. Even the GSL can be a great time sink to follow well.
Another proposition was that community members needed to find more people to watch. From my experience there are many people that play custom games/team games, that hardly know about TL or the pro scene. If anybody wants to get more people watching, these people would be a great start. Just play some team games on low (diamond team) level and keep informing them about the sc2 pro scene.
On October 15 2012 20:10 Grubby 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.
(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).
(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.
2. A definite YES from me, although this isnt meant for the weekly small 100$/€ tournaments. It is not really easy to feel the hype for a daily GSL tournament for me anymore and MLG has become so big that it is hard to follow it. A complete coverage of MLG is impossible and the big waiting periods during the last one are not really adding up to "a good tournament". So its not really the numbers of tournaments but rather the size and organization of some. So it would be a nice thing to have a break between the seasons of the GSL.
3. Apart from the GSTL there have been no "live LAN team competitions" and it might be a nice thing to have smaller tournaments (meaning "not a lot of teams") over the course of a week or maybe 4 days. LoL tournaments dont have that many teams usually either and go on for longer.
There has been no "2v2" or "3v3" tournament anywhere and this will offer a different form of excitement for the viewers due to the different tactics involved.
5. The market wont sort itself out, because oversaturation will make the viewers become bored with it eventually and ALL tournaments will die off at the same time. Oversaturation will also reduce the quality of the events, because "cost" is usually the first thing that is cut when a company is fighting against other companies for market shares. "Live and let live" should be the motto instead of the capitalist propaganda and the cooperation between the tournament organizations shows that they understand this. They need to ALL survive, because one of them going bankrupt is a bad sign for the whole "SC2 as eSport" business and its sponsors.
I wonder if players feel that there are too many tournaments going on too with Rain ditching the GSL to go to MLG, for example. It's not the first time that it has happened, and I doubt it will be the last. Or when Blizzard and MLG tried to run simultaneous tourneys on the same weekend at the same place, which I'm sure everyone felt was a bit of a disaster from what I read. Then you had really hot players like Huk back in the day, Life now and many others, who have to travel ridiculous amounts to keep the cash flowing in and their personal rep up.
I truly believe that the free market will fix the problem. We, as consumers, will choose the events that separate themselves from the crowd and the weaker events will be forced to step up, die off, or downsize/consolidate.
My only concern is for the players at this point. A lot are living solely off of stream revenue and prize money. Less events means less prize money, unless tournaments settle into a tiered system.
It's possible that, as unfortunate as this may be, there are too many players that are considered "pro" that both split the salary pool and require more events to exist to sustain them.
On November 13 2012 01:57 TrippSC2 wrote: It's possible that, as unfortunate as this may be, there are too many players that are considered "pro" that both split the salary pool and require more events to exist to sustain them.
On November 13 2012 01:57 TrippSC2 wrote: I truly believe that the free market will fix the problem. We, as consumers, will choose the events that separate themselves from the crowd and the weaker events will be forced to step up, die off, or downsize/consolidate.
My only concern is for the players at this point. A lot are living solely off of stream revenue and prize money. Less events means less prize money, unless tournaments settle into a tiered system.
It's possible that, as unfortunate as this may be, there are too many players that are considered "pro" that both split the salary pool and require more events to exist to sustain them.
Free market fails reality but it's a nice ideology i guess.
The nature of the competitive scene in SC2, where there isn't one major league that dominates all the others like we have in every other sport in the world: What's happening is leagues are cannibalizing each other unwittingly, and it makes e-sports seem like a smaller thing than it is.
No one really has time to follow all the starcraft content out there right now. Most of us pick a thing, every now and then, whatever is the big thing at the moment when we have free time. And that results in views being split between a lot of different places.
What this means is that no tournament can afford to be "that" tournament. The one where a player is set for the next year if he wins the prize. The fans attention is split all over the place, and therefore the money is split all over the place, and therefore players have to go everywhere and play all kinds of things.
It's a pretty good situation for the fans, they get the pick of the litter when it comes to content, and we get to see players run ragged dancing for us. I mean, I'll snark a little bit if I don't get to see the match I wanted because I watched one tournament over another... but it's far from a serious complaint.
The Leagues are also pretty happy about this. The market is only so big, and right now no one really has to lose big. Everyone is making a fair ammount of money. Sure, any given league would really like to be the dominant league and have the other guys shrink away, but they're also all worried that if a "main" league is chosen, that it isn't them that takes the top spot, and then they start losing money. In business people are pretty used to not screwing with the status quot, and staying safe in that regard. None of the leagues are immediately interested in throwing the gauntlet down to roll the dice here.
The ones really getting screwed over is the players. They are getting pulled all over the place, they are competing for tonnes of small payouts rather than ever one big one. They have to play a lot more to keep the money flowing in the current system. The number of fans is reasonably fixed, the potential earnings for all the leagues combined is about a certain size, and players playing 50 tournaments a year doesn't MASSIVELY increase that market compared to players playing 15 tournaments a year. There is a little more viewership hours created by increasing the total amount of content out there, but not a huge amount. As a fan, if dreamhack and GSL isn't available, I just watch MLG instead. Making me choose between 3 competing streams of content at any given time won't increase the total amount I watch very much. It will just make me pick one at that time.
This actually is a real problem, and the real solution isn't very pleasant, but unfortunately what needs to happen here, is that the players need to group up and "fight back". It's REALLY shitty to say it that way, because it's REALLY not like the fans are trying to hurt the players by not watching more, and it's not like the tournaments are trying to hurt the players by offering them more opportunity to compete, It's really not like MLG and DreamHack, and NASL, and GOM and OGN are trying to hurt anyone by taking a slice of the pie. And we all love every one of those tournaments for many different reasons, they all offer something unique to players and fans alike. But the pie is only so big, and someone IS getting hurt here. Ultimately, what would fix the problem is if the players were to unionize, and basically just start screwing some leagues over in favor of others.
We don't need all these leagues to go out of business, that's not what I'm saying here, but it would be much nicer for the players if there could be 1 major league, and the rest of the leagues are minor leagues. It would be best for the players if they could compete at their best inside their actual skill level, and payouts would match their ranking. It would be really nice for players if, I'm not a top level pro, but at least I can compete at my own level for a modest payout without having to fear that I go to a local tournament and some top Korean shows up and of course dominates because he has WAY more money and time put into his training and preparation. We need a UFC of star craft. We need a league, where if you play for that league you're making the most money in all of SC2, but you're also not allowed to play for the small leagues any more. (contracts will vary actually, but the big stars will be exclusive, the top skill will be widely known to be at this one specific place).
The UFC wants every Anderson Silva to show his best ability every time they bring him into the ring. They also want the exclusive rights to show off Anderson Silva's skill. They pay Anderson a bunch of extra money to put him in the situation where he does not perform for anyone else, his performance is property of the UFC. This is good for the UFC, it's arguably bad for the fans, and it's certainly bad for the other leagues that would like to compete for the UFC, but the important thing we're discussing here is whether or not it's good for Anderson Silva. I think pretty clearly it's very good for him. He only has to worry about 1 employer, he doesn't have to worry very much about being overworked. He has time to take care of his health and put his best into his training, and he gets to look better in the eyes of the fans because when we see him, he's never having a horrible day because he was up all night the day before fighting for some minor league. His life situation is always serving to allow him to be the best he can be at any given time.
The situation is, either a League just makes the decision to make the jump, do a major power play, and do exactly this (which would suck because it takes a lot of control away from the players), or the players unionize and choose to do this exact thing their own way (this is closer to the model SC2 is following right now, but the player unions are too nice and too weak)
At the end of the day, if the players want to play less without taking a real financial hit themselves, someone in the leagues has to get hurt. It doesn't really have to hurt the fans too much, but someone needs to be screwed. The questions is do the leagues start making some really aggressive competitive moves against each other, or do the players start taking more control over their own destiny first? One way or another, it's gonna be a dramatic ride.
EPT
>> Looking forward to your reply!
have good hopes for HOTS!![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/hf8x3.png)
