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opterown
Australia54784 Posts
On March 27 2013 10:24 egernya wrote:Show nested quote +On March 27 2013 09:43 Branman wrote:On March 27 2013 05:58 StarStruck wrote:On March 27 2013 05:45 Branman wrote:
I already addressed the differences between those sports and becoming a professional gamer though. They want them nice and young because the development process is different when it comes to RTS professional gaming. It's unfortunate but required compared to other athletics where players mature a lot later. It's well proven. :/
I just wanted to address this point and cut off the rest of the quote tree because it was really complex. Just because you can mature as a younger RTS professional player doesn't mean that that is the right thing to do. There are many things that should be sacrificed in the quest to have the greatest skill, and there are things that shouldn't be sacrificed. Going back to my steroid example from a few posts ago. Juicing up will make you bigger, faster, and stronger (increase your skill level), but as a society, we've decided that it isn't worth the costs of allowing steroids. We've decided that the sacrifices required in order to take steroids while training and maintaining a career as a professional athlete are unacceptable. It very well can be the case that starting a very stringent training regime at 14 will make you a better RTS player than if you started a similar regime at 18, but we as a community should probably look down on starting so early because it does not give an aspiring pro player a bridge to a post-esports career. We should agree that going pro before the age of 18 is a sacrifice that we shouldn't accept. Let me put it this way. In their development process it is necessary for them to start young in order to reach their full potential or else they put themselves at risk of not achieving their goals. Sacrifices always have to be made and it's no different when we're talking about Starcraft. It's a pretty tough pill to swallow. There will always be certain exceptions like your Nestea's and dare I even say White-Ras. I didn't really specify the age but I know some guilds who look for kids even younger than 14 when it came to BW. Scary don't you think? Yes, it certainly doesn't address their education let alone letting them live out their youth where they can learn all kinds of shit, but these are the sacrifices they choose in hopes of making it and unfortunately very few will. You heard me talking about the limited player pool in places like NA. There are a lot of Koreans who dream about becoming Pro Gamers too, but very few of them will find success as well. Not saying I personally encourage it. If those kids want to give it a try it's their choice and their sacrifice. In many cases I don't think they truly understand what they're doing with their lives which is sad. If the kid is ridiculously good and has that raw talent that so few have and seems to understand the sacrifice. I would have no problem taking them on my team and making them a stone cold killer. You seem to agree with what I'm saying, but you're making an appeal to "this is just the way it's done." In your last sentence, you said that if a kid truly understood what they were giving up, you wouldn't have a problem with that. However, the point of this would be to protect them from people who don't actually care about them. For every person that would actually only recruit them if they truly understood the sacrifice, there are many more who are willing to just exploit their dreams for commercial gain. If you ever want to have a widespread audience in the West, then any semblance of dropping out of high school to play games professionally will have to be eliminated from the worldwide scene. Sports have always thrived on the idea that kids could dream of one day being good enough to grace the stage of the pro game. However, if the message becomes "if you want to eventually make it as a pro, you have to drop out of high school and just start playing games otherwise you'll be behind your peers" then the idea that Westerners should even think of becoming a pro will just fade away. Just from the right hand sidebar on TL, both Life and Creator were born in 1997 and were playing professionally at the age of 14 having logged GSL/GSTL games in the TLPD from 2011. How can we expect a Western player who starts going pro at the age of 18 to even hope of catching someone who has already been a pro for 4 years? That's the thing about competition, if you want to compete at the highest level, then you have to do the exact same things everyone else on the highest level does. This was steroids in baseball in the late 90s, and it's dropping out of high school in Starcraft today. I think your opinion is basically correct. However, just to point out a little flaw, not all young Korean progamers have dropped out school. Ofcourese there could be some players have dropped out, but as long as I know, most of young players including Life, Parting, Creator, and TY still go school.
all the younger FXO players go to school as well
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United States97276 Posts
On March 27 2013 10:29 opterown wrote:Show nested quote +On March 27 2013 10:24 egernya wrote:On March 27 2013 09:43 Branman wrote:On March 27 2013 05:58 StarStruck wrote:On March 27 2013 05:45 Branman wrote:
I already addressed the differences between those sports and becoming a professional gamer though. They want them nice and young because the development process is different when it comes to RTS professional gaming. It's unfortunate but required compared to other athletics where players mature a lot later. It's well proven. :/
I just wanted to address this point and cut off the rest of the quote tree because it was really complex. Just because you can mature as a younger RTS professional player doesn't mean that that is the right thing to do. There are many things that should be sacrificed in the quest to have the greatest skill, and there are things that shouldn't be sacrificed. Going back to my steroid example from a few posts ago. Juicing up will make you bigger, faster, and stronger (increase your skill level), but as a society, we've decided that it isn't worth the costs of allowing steroids. We've decided that the sacrifices required in order to take steroids while training and maintaining a career as a professional athlete are unacceptable. It very well can be the case that starting a very stringent training regime at 14 will make you a better RTS player than if you started a similar regime at 18, but we as a community should probably look down on starting so early because it does not give an aspiring pro player a bridge to a post-esports career. We should agree that going pro before the age of 18 is a sacrifice that we shouldn't accept. Let me put it this way. In their development process it is necessary for them to start young in order to reach their full potential or else they put themselves at risk of not achieving their goals. Sacrifices always have to be made and it's no different when we're talking about Starcraft. It's a pretty tough pill to swallow. There will always be certain exceptions like your Nestea's and dare I even say White-Ras. I didn't really specify the age but I know some guilds who look for kids even younger than 14 when it came to BW. Scary don't you think? Yes, it certainly doesn't address their education let alone letting them live out their youth where they can learn all kinds of shit, but these are the sacrifices they choose in hopes of making it and unfortunately very few will. You heard me talking about the limited player pool in places like NA. There are a lot of Koreans who dream about becoming Pro Gamers too, but very few of them will find success as well. Not saying I personally encourage it. If those kids want to give it a try it's their choice and their sacrifice. In many cases I don't think they truly understand what they're doing with their lives which is sad. If the kid is ridiculously good and has that raw talent that so few have and seems to understand the sacrifice. I would have no problem taking them on my team and making them a stone cold killer. You seem to agree with what I'm saying, but you're making an appeal to "this is just the way it's done." In your last sentence, you said that if a kid truly understood what they were giving up, you wouldn't have a problem with that. However, the point of this would be to protect them from people who don't actually care about them. For every person that would actually only recruit them if they truly understood the sacrifice, there are many more who are willing to just exploit their dreams for commercial gain. If you ever want to have a widespread audience in the West, then any semblance of dropping out of high school to play games professionally will have to be eliminated from the worldwide scene. Sports have always thrived on the idea that kids could dream of one day being good enough to grace the stage of the pro game. However, if the message becomes "if you want to eventually make it as a pro, you have to drop out of high school and just start playing games otherwise you'll be behind your peers" then the idea that Westerners should even think of becoming a pro will just fade away. Just from the right hand sidebar on TL, both Life and Creator were born in 1997 and were playing professionally at the age of 14 having logged GSL/GSTL games in the TLPD from 2011. How can we expect a Western player who starts going pro at the age of 18 to even hope of catching someone who has already been a pro for 4 years? That's the thing about competition, if you want to compete at the highest level, then you have to do the exact same things everyone else on the highest level does. This was steroids in baseball in the late 90s, and it's dropping out of high school in Starcraft today. I think your opinion is basically correct. However, just to point out a little flaw, not all young Korean progamers have dropped out school. Ofcourese there could be some players have dropped out, but as long as I know, most of young players including Life, Parting, Creator, and TY still go school. all the younger FXO players go to school as well
Booster the Kart Rider emperor goes to school with Life too
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1001 YEARS KESPAJAIL22272 Posts
On March 27 2013 10:30 Shellshock1122 wrote:Show nested quote +On March 27 2013 10:29 opterown wrote:On March 27 2013 10:24 egernya wrote:On March 27 2013 09:43 Branman wrote:On March 27 2013 05:58 StarStruck wrote:On March 27 2013 05:45 Branman wrote:
I already addressed the differences between those sports and becoming a professional gamer though. They want them nice and young because the development process is different when it comes to RTS professional gaming. It's unfortunate but required compared to other athletics where players mature a lot later. It's well proven. :/
I just wanted to address this point and cut off the rest of the quote tree because it was really complex. Just because you can mature as a younger RTS professional player doesn't mean that that is the right thing to do. There are many things that should be sacrificed in the quest to have the greatest skill, and there are things that shouldn't be sacrificed. Going back to my steroid example from a few posts ago. Juicing up will make you bigger, faster, and stronger (increase your skill level), but as a society, we've decided that it isn't worth the costs of allowing steroids. We've decided that the sacrifices required in order to take steroids while training and maintaining a career as a professional athlete are unacceptable. It very well can be the case that starting a very stringent training regime at 14 will make you a better RTS player than if you started a similar regime at 18, but we as a community should probably look down on starting so early because it does not give an aspiring pro player a bridge to a post-esports career. We should agree that going pro before the age of 18 is a sacrifice that we shouldn't accept. Let me put it this way. In their development process it is necessary for them to start young in order to reach their full potential or else they put themselves at risk of not achieving their goals. Sacrifices always have to be made and it's no different when we're talking about Starcraft. It's a pretty tough pill to swallow. There will always be certain exceptions like your Nestea's and dare I even say White-Ras. I didn't really specify the age but I know some guilds who look for kids even younger than 14 when it came to BW. Scary don't you think? Yes, it certainly doesn't address their education let alone letting them live out their youth where they can learn all kinds of shit, but these are the sacrifices they choose in hopes of making it and unfortunately very few will. You heard me talking about the limited player pool in places like NA. There are a lot of Koreans who dream about becoming Pro Gamers too, but very few of them will find success as well. Not saying I personally encourage it. If those kids want to give it a try it's their choice and their sacrifice. In many cases I don't think they truly understand what they're doing with their lives which is sad. If the kid is ridiculously good and has that raw talent that so few have and seems to understand the sacrifice. I would have no problem taking them on my team and making them a stone cold killer. You seem to agree with what I'm saying, but you're making an appeal to "this is just the way it's done." In your last sentence, you said that if a kid truly understood what they were giving up, you wouldn't have a problem with that. However, the point of this would be to protect them from people who don't actually care about them. For every person that would actually only recruit them if they truly understood the sacrifice, there are many more who are willing to just exploit their dreams for commercial gain. If you ever want to have a widespread audience in the West, then any semblance of dropping out of high school to play games professionally will have to be eliminated from the worldwide scene. Sports have always thrived on the idea that kids could dream of one day being good enough to grace the stage of the pro game. However, if the message becomes "if you want to eventually make it as a pro, you have to drop out of high school and just start playing games otherwise you'll be behind your peers" then the idea that Westerners should even think of becoming a pro will just fade away. Just from the right hand sidebar on TL, both Life and Creator were born in 1997 and were playing professionally at the age of 14 having logged GSL/GSTL games in the TLPD from 2011. How can we expect a Western player who starts going pro at the age of 18 to even hope of catching someone who has already been a pro for 4 years? That's the thing about competition, if you want to compete at the highest level, then you have to do the exact same things everyone else on the highest level does. This was steroids in baseball in the late 90s, and it's dropping out of high school in Starcraft today. I think your opinion is basically correct. However, just to point out a little flaw, not all young Korean progamers have dropped out school. Ofcourese there could be some players have dropped out, but as long as I know, most of young players including Life, Parting, Creator, and TY still go school. all the younger FXO players go to school as well Booster the Kart Rider emperor goes to school with Life too
"Booster the Kart Rider" is a totally awesome name
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Thanks for the additional information, everyone. Do they have special schedules or what. I'm having a hard time imagining how these guys are able to go to school for 7 hours a day, study, and maintain a world-class skill level at Starcraft.
I'm really interested in this because I think this is a key to the differences between the Korean and foreign scene which hasn't been explored as of yet.
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1001 YEARS KESPAJAIL22272 Posts
On March 27 2013 10:45 Branman wrote:
Thanks for the additional information, everyone. Do they have special schedules or what. I'm having a hard time imagining how these guys are able to go to school for 7 hours a day, study, and maintain a world-class skill level at Starcraft.
I'm really interested in this because I think this is a key to the differences between the Korean and foreign scene which hasn't been explored as of yet.
A lot of younger players mention that they don't get to practice that much. Younger players aren't excused from class when they have events such as Group Selection Ceremonies (Life always skips them). As far as I know GOM always tries to schedule to avoid conflict between players and their classes.
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For people curious about pro atheltes that go broke, they should search for 30 for 30: Broke, an ESPN documentary. It's estimated that 78 percent of NFL players are bankrupt or facing serious financial stress within two years of ending their playing careers and that 60 percent of NBA players are broke within five years of retiring from the game. It's pretty staggering. People that have made well over 100 million in their careers are going broke as soon as they retire.
If you have it, there's a tendency to find a way to spend it. Even if a lot could find a way to still make a decent amount after their careers, it's just such a drastic shift in life style that has to be made. A lot of pro athletes go from nothing and making nothing to making millions, back to making nothing. At least few seem to be getting short changed when it comes to living it up during their careers.
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On March 27 2013 09:43 Branman wrote:Show nested quote +On March 27 2013 05:58 StarStruck wrote:On March 27 2013 05:45 Branman wrote:
I already addressed the differences between those sports and becoming a professional gamer though. They want them nice and young because the development process is different when it comes to RTS professional gaming. It's unfortunate but required compared to other athletics where players mature a lot later. It's well proven. :/
I just wanted to address this point and cut off the rest of the quote tree because it was really complex. Just because you can mature as a younger RTS professional player doesn't mean that that is the right thing to do. There are many things that should be sacrificed in the quest to have the greatest skill, and there are things that shouldn't be sacrificed. Going back to my steroid example from a few posts ago. Juicing up will make you bigger, faster, and stronger (increase your skill level), but as a society, we've decided that it isn't worth the costs of allowing steroids. We've decided that the sacrifices required in order to take steroids while training and maintaining a career as a professional athlete are unacceptable. It very well can be the case that starting a very stringent training regime at 14 will make you a better RTS player than if you started a similar regime at 18, but we as a community should probably look down on starting so early because it does not give an aspiring pro player a bridge to a post-esports career. We should agree that going pro before the age of 18 is a sacrifice that we shouldn't accept. Let me put it this way. In their development process it is necessary for them to start young in order to reach their full potential or else they put themselves at risk of not achieving their goals. Sacrifices always have to be made and it's no different when we're talking about Starcraft. It's a pretty tough pill to swallow. There will always be certain exceptions like your Nestea's and dare I even say White-Ras. I didn't really specify the age but I know some guilds who look for kids even younger than 14 when it came to BW. Scary don't you think? Yes, it certainly doesn't address their education let alone letting them live out their youth where they can learn all kinds of shit, but these are the sacrifices they choose in hopes of making it and unfortunately very few will. You heard me talking about the limited player pool in places like NA. There are a lot of Koreans who dream about becoming Pro Gamers too, but very few of them will find success as well. Not saying I personally encourage it. If those kids want to give it a try it's their choice and their sacrifice. In many cases I don't think they truly understand what they're doing with their lives which is sad. If the kid is ridiculously good and has that raw talent that so few have and seems to understand the sacrifice. I would have no problem taking them on my team and making them a stone cold killer. You seem to agree with what I'm saying, but you're making an appeal to "this is just the way it's done." In your last sentence, you said that if a kid truly understood what they were giving up, you wouldn't have a problem with that. However, the point of this would be to protect them from people who don't actually care about them. For every person that would actually only recruit them if they truly understood the sacrifice, there are many more who are willing to just exploit their dreams for commercial gain. If you ever want to have a widespread audience in the West, then any semblance of dropping out of high school to play games professionally will have to be eliminated from the worldwide scene. Sports have always thrived on the idea that kids could dream of one day being good enough to grace the stage of the pro game. However, if the message becomes "if you want to eventually make it as a pro, you have to drop out of high school and just start playing games otherwise you'll be behind your peers" then the idea that Westerners should even think of becoming a pro will just fade away. Just from the right hand sidebar on TL, both Life and Creator were born in 1997 and were playing professionally at the age of 14 having logged GSL/GSTL games in the TLPD from 2011. How can we expect a Western player who starts going pro at the age of 18 to even hope of catching someone who has already been a pro for 4 years? That's the thing about competition, if you want to compete at the highest level, then you have to do the exact same things everyone else on the highest level does. This was steroids in baseball in the late 90s, and it's dropping out of high school in Starcraft today.
The thing is most kids don't really have any perspective of the world around them when we're talking about anywhere from 9 -14. Kids who are even 16-22 barely have perspective as well. I'm just grateful that a lot of the kids early on who did well decided to put their parents in charge of their winnings. As for the people recruiting these kids. Yeah, it's hard to come by the right house let alone the right team and coaches. Like I said we're severely limited on great coaches that give the proper attention they deserve. It's practically impossible to protect them. I wrote a long manifesto a long time ago which includes certifying Clubs/Teams that follow a certain criteria I wrote myself, so players know what to look for when they're being wooed.
You view it as catching up. I view it as stunting their development because those years you speak of are critical when it comes to player developing their skills. There is no real catching up. They will be superior. Looking at the old BW pros 16 equals prime time. Yes, you do have to do what they do. Some players will tell you they like to have their own practice regime because it works for them. Look at their results and notice how the vast majority aren't getting the payoff. Show them what they were doing before compared to what they are doing now. Yup. That and you really need good sparring partners like I said before so yeah. You know what I think about that already. Dropping out of high school to play Starcraft isn't new. The kiddies were doing it in BW as well. You think their parents liked it? Heck no. Ask a lot of the players this question.. when you have kids would you want them to follow in your foot steps? I've seen several interviews where they ask this question and they all say the same thing. No.
On March 27 2013 11:10 playa wrote:
For people curious about pro atheltes that go broke, they should search for 30 for 30: Broke, an ESPN documentary. It's estimated that 78 percent of NFL players are bankrupt or facing serious financial stress within two years of ending their playing careers and that 60 percent of NBA players are broke within five years of retiring from the game. It's pretty staggering. People that have made well over 100 million in their careers are going broke as soon as they retire.
If you have it, there's a tendency to find a way to spend it. Even if a lot could find a way to still make a decent amount after their careers, it's just such a drastic shift in life style that has to be made. A lot of pro athletes go from nothing and making nothing to making millions, back to making nothing. At least few seem to be getting short changed when it comes to living it up during their careers.
Entertainers too man. People don't know how to save and invest money, which is very unfortunate. Don't blow it.
On March 27 2013 10:54 lichter wrote:Show nested quote +On March 27 2013 10:45 Branman wrote:
Thanks for the additional information, everyone. Do they have special schedules or what. I'm having a hard time imagining how these guys are able to go to school for 7 hours a day, study, and maintain a world-class skill level at Starcraft.
I'm really interested in this because I think this is a key to the differences between the Korean and foreign scene which hasn't been explored as of yet. A lot of younger players mention that they don't get to practice that much. Younger players aren't excused from class when they have events such as Group Selection Ceremonies (Life always skips them). As far as I know GOM always tries to schedule to avoid conflict between players and their classes.
I'm glad a lot of players today are more wary of going all-in with professional gaming and starting to take more classes. Life's a great talent and he's able to do both. Good on him. I heard he was going to sign a deal for 200k. Not sure if it's annual or if its a few year term. I would hope he would be making a little more if it is a few years considering he's in his prime.
On March 27 2013 10:28 eviltomahawk wrote:Show nested quote +On March 27 2013 10:24 egernya wrote:On March 27 2013 09:43 Branman wrote:On March 27 2013 05:58 StarStruck wrote:On March 27 2013 05:45 Branman wrote:
I already addressed the differences between those sports and becoming a professional gamer though. They want them nice and young because the development process is different when it comes to RTS professional gaming. It's unfortunate but required compared to other athletics where players mature a lot later. It's well proven. :/
I just wanted to address this point and cut off the rest of the quote tree because it was really complex. Just because you can mature as a younger RTS professional player doesn't mean that that is the right thing to do. There are many things that should be sacrificed in the quest to have the greatest skill, and there are things that shouldn't be sacrificed. Going back to my steroid example from a few posts ago. Juicing up will make you bigger, faster, and stronger (increase your skill level), but as a society, we've decided that it isn't worth the costs of allowing steroids. We've decided that the sacrifices required in order to take steroids while training and maintaining a career as a professional athlete are unacceptable. It very well can be the case that starting a very stringent training regime at 14 will make you a better RTS player than if you started a similar regime at 18, but we as a community should probably look down on starting so early because it does not give an aspiring pro player a bridge to a post-esports career. We should agree that going pro before the age of 18 is a sacrifice that we shouldn't accept. Let me put it this way. In their development process it is necessary for them to start young in order to reach their full potential or else they put themselves at risk of not achieving their goals. Sacrifices always have to be made and it's no different when we're talking about Starcraft. It's a pretty tough pill to swallow. There will always be certain exceptions like your Nestea's and dare I even say White-Ras. I didn't really specify the age but I know some guilds who look for kids even younger than 14 when it came to BW. Scary don't you think? Yes, it certainly doesn't address their education let alone letting them live out their youth where they can learn all kinds of shit, but these are the sacrifices they choose in hopes of making it and unfortunately very few will. You heard me talking about the limited player pool in places like NA. There are a lot of Koreans who dream about becoming Pro Gamers too, but very few of them will find success as well. Not saying I personally encourage it. If those kids want to give it a try it's their choice and their sacrifice. In many cases I don't think they truly understand what they're doing with their lives which is sad. If the kid is ridiculously good and has that raw talent that so few have and seems to understand the sacrifice. I would have no problem taking them on my team and making them a stone cold killer. You seem to agree with what I'm saying, but you're making an appeal to "this is just the way it's done." In your last sentence, you said that if a kid truly understood what they were giving up, you wouldn't have a problem with that. However, the point of this would be to protect them from people who don't actually care about them. For every person that would actually only recruit them if they truly understood the sacrifice, there are many more who are willing to just exploit their dreams for commercial gain. If you ever want to have a widespread audience in the West, then any semblance of dropping out of high school to play games professionally will have to be eliminated from the worldwide scene. Sports have always thrived on the idea that kids could dream of one day being good enough to grace the stage of the pro game. However, if the message becomes "if you want to eventually make it as a pro, you have to drop out of high school and just start playing games otherwise you'll be behind your peers" then the idea that Westerners should even think of becoming a pro will just fade away. Just from the right hand sidebar on TL, both Life and Creator were born in 1997 and were playing professionally at the age of 14 having logged GSL/GSTL games in the TLPD from 2011. How can we expect a Western player who starts going pro at the age of 18 to even hope of catching someone who has already been a pro for 4 years? That's the thing about competition, if you want to compete at the highest level, then you have to do the exact same things everyone else on the highest level does. This was steroids in baseball in the late 90s, and it's dropping out of high school in Starcraft today. I think your opinion is basically correct. However, just to point out a little flaw, not all young Korean progamers have dropped out school. Ofcourese there could be some players have dropped out, but as long as I know, most of young players including Life, Parting, Creator, and TY still go school. Also, Flash and Stats ended up graduating from high school* just a couple of years ago. iirc, it's the same high school that MKP went to coincidentally. *Google says the link has malware, but it's probably because of the picture links to fomos.
Once professional gamers are done with their careers I would sincerely hope they would all go back to finish school. I remember Flash finally graduating. Kind of forgot the Dragoon Rider did as well.
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On March 27 2013 11:10 playa wrote:
For people curious about pro atheltes that go broke, they should search for 30 for 30: Broke, an ESPN documentary. It's estimated that 78 percent of NFL players are bankrupt or facing serious financial stress within two years of ending their playing careers and that 60 percent of NBA players are broke within five years of retiring from the game. It's pretty staggering. People that have made well over 100 million in their careers are going broke as soon as they retire.
If you have it, there's a tendency to find a way to spend it. Even if a lot could find a way to still make a decent amount after their careers, it's just such a drastic shift in life style that has to be made. A lot of pro athletes go from nothing and making nothing to making millions, back to making nothing. At least few seem to be getting short changed when it comes to living it up during their careers.
True but look how much they spend and the size of their entourage. You can also look at child actors that have spent all their money. Some athletes do go pro early female gymnast's come to mind. Also a high percent of lottery winners are back to where they started 5 or so years down the road. Just because some waste all their money does not mean you should prevent or regulate others to make a livining.
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On March 27 2013 11:22 norjoncal wrote:Show nested quote +On March 27 2013 11:10 playa wrote:
For people curious about pro atheltes that go broke, they should search for 30 for 30: Broke, an ESPN documentary. It's estimated that 78 percent of NFL players are bankrupt or facing serious financial stress within two years of ending their playing careers and that 60 percent of NBA players are broke within five years of retiring from the game. It's pretty staggering. People that have made well over 100 million in their careers are going broke as soon as they retire.
If you have it, there's a tendency to find a way to spend it. Even if a lot could find a way to still make a decent amount after their careers, it's just such a drastic shift in life style that has to be made. A lot of pro athletes go from nothing and making nothing to making millions, back to making nothing. At least few seem to be getting short changed when it comes to living it up during their careers.
True but look how much they spend and the size of their entourage. You can also look at child actors that have spent all their money. Some athletes do go pro early female gymnast's come to mind. Also a high percent of lottery winners are back to where they started 5 or so years down the road. Just because some waste all their money does not mean you should prevent or regulate others to make a livining.
It's funny you mention that because the paper had a write up on a lottery winner a few days ago in the Star about how a woman who won I believe was it 10 million a while ago decided to save that money and teach her kid's about being responsible. Went right back to their way of life. Great story.
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On March 27 2013 11:22 norjoncal wrote:Show nested quote +On March 27 2013 11:10 playa wrote:
For people curious about pro atheltes that go broke, they should search for 30 for 30: Broke, an ESPN documentary. It's estimated that 78 percent of NFL players are bankrupt or facing serious financial stress within two years of ending their playing careers and that 60 percent of NBA players are broke within five years of retiring from the game. It's pretty staggering. People that have made well over 100 million in their careers are going broke as soon as they retire.
If you have it, there's a tendency to find a way to spend it. Even if a lot could find a way to still make a decent amount after their careers, it's just such a drastic shift in life style that has to be made. A lot of pro athletes go from nothing and making nothing to making millions, back to making nothing. At least few seem to be getting short changed when it comes to living it up during their careers.
True but look how much they spend and the size of their entourage. You can also look at child actors that have spent all their money. Some athletes do go pro early female gymnast's come to mind. Also a high percent of lottery winners are back to where they started 5 or so years down the road. Just because some waste all their money does not mean you should prevent or regulate others to make a livining.
I'm not advocating anything. I was just trying to help point out that whether an athlete is the guy making the 400k minimum or star player making millions a year, a lot of them are still ending up in financial peril, college educated or not. The ability to make millions is always better than the lack of ability to make them. I'm not trying to solve the problem, and I'm certainly not advocating removing the opportunity to make more. Investing classes, maybe... A lot of athletes are going broke because of things like 20K plus a month child support payments. I think esports is safe there.
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On March 27 2013 10:45 Branman wrote:
Thanks for the additional information, everyone. Do they have special schedules or what. I'm having a hard time imagining how these guys are able to go to school for 7 hours a day, study, and maintain a world-class skill level at Starcraft.
i think its not that hard. when i was finishing school (year 11/12) i found myself having around 11-12 hours of spare time each day (more on weekends of course)
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opterown
Australia54784 Posts
On March 27 2013 11:58 teddyoojo wrote:Show nested quote +On March 27 2013 10:45 Branman wrote:
Thanks for the additional information, everyone. Do they have special schedules or what. I'm having a hard time imagining how these guys are able to go to school for 7 hours a day, study, and maintain a world-class skill level at Starcraft.
i think its not that hard. when i was finishing school (year 11/12) i found myself having around 11-12 hours of spare time each day (more on weekends of course)
wow that's a lot of spare time. i had like... 2-3hrs a day at most during my final years of high school
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On March 27 2013 12:05 opterown wrote:Show nested quote +On March 27 2013 11:58 teddyoojo wrote:On March 27 2013 10:45 Branman wrote:
Thanks for the additional information, everyone. Do they have special schedules or what. I'm having a hard time imagining how these guys are able to go to school for 7 hours a day, study, and maintain a world-class skill level at Starcraft.
i think its not that hard. when i was finishing school (year 11/12) i found myself having around 11-12 hours of spare time each day (more on weekends of course) wow that's a lot of spare time. i had like... 2-3hrs a day at most during my final years of high school
I had maybe an hour or 2 but then again I was running (Cross country, track, indoor track) each season so thats part of it but still even without that 4-5 tops
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On March 27 2013 12:05 opterown wrote:Show nested quote +On March 27 2013 11:58 teddyoojo wrote:On March 27 2013 10:45 Branman wrote:
Thanks for the additional information, everyone. Do they have special schedules or what. I'm having a hard time imagining how these guys are able to go to school for 7 hours a day, study, and maintain a world-class skill level at Starcraft.
i think its not that hard. when i was finishing school (year 11/12) i found myself having around 11-12 hours of spare time each day (more on weekends of course) wow that's a lot of spare time. i had like... 2-3hrs a day at most during my final years of high school
probably different from country to country and from person to person so it obviously doesnt apply for everyone, just wanted to point out that it can been possible to play sc2 for 10 hours a day and still get educated.
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1001 YEARS KESPAJAIL22272 Posts
On March 27 2013 12:05 opterown wrote:Show nested quote +On March 27 2013 11:58 teddyoojo wrote:On March 27 2013 10:45 Branman wrote:
Thanks for the additional information, everyone. Do they have special schedules or what. I'm having a hard time imagining how these guys are able to go to school for 7 hours a day, study, and maintain a world-class skill level at Starcraft.
i think its not that hard. when i was finishing school (year 11/12) i found myself having around 11-12 hours of spare time each day (more on weekends of course) wow that's a lot of spare time. i had like... 2-3hrs a day at most during my final years of high school
11-12 hrs sounds crazy. My high school classes were 7:30am - 4:00pm so I still had the whole afternoon and evening to play BW. I suppose pros in high school can crank out 4 hours of practice after homework, more if they sleep later than midnight.
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On March 27 2013 12:05 opterown wrote:Show nested quote +On March 27 2013 11:58 teddyoojo wrote:On March 27 2013 10:45 Branman wrote:
Thanks for the additional information, everyone. Do they have special schedules or what. I'm having a hard time imagining how these guys are able to go to school for 7 hours a day, study, and maintain a world-class skill level at Starcraft.
i think its not that hard. when i was finishing school (year 11/12) i found myself having around 11-12 hours of spare time each day (more on weekends of course) wow that's a lot of spare time. i had like... 2-3hrs a day at most during my final years of high school
That sucks I found high school really easy and always had a ton of free time. Was pretty awesome getting home from school and either hanging out with friends or gaming from 3:30 to 11:30 :p
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1001 YEARS KESPAJAIL22272 Posts
On March 27 2013 13:29 Emzeeshady wrote:Show nested quote +On March 27 2013 12:16 lichter wrote:On March 27 2013 12:05 opterown wrote:On March 27 2013 11:58 teddyoojo wrote:On March 27 2013 10:45 Branman wrote:
Thanks for the additional information, everyone. Do they have special schedules or what. I'm having a hard time imagining how these guys are able to go to school for 7 hours a day, study, and maintain a world-class skill level at Starcraft.
i think its not that hard. when i was finishing school (year 11/12) i found myself having around 11-12 hours of spare time each day (more on weekends of course) wow that's a lot of spare time. i had like... 2-3hrs a day at most during my final years of high school 11-12 hrs sounds crazy. My high school classes were 7:30am - 4:00pm so I still had the whole afternoon and evening to play BW. I suppose pros in high school can crank out 4 hours of practice after homework, more if they sleep later than midnight. Thats a long school day man! Mine is 8:30 to 2:30 (Grade 11 Canada)
I went to an exclusive school that produces a lot of successful people. Also, same culture as that Asian tiger mom thing.
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On March 27 2013 11:13 StarStruck wrote:Show nested quote +On March 27 2013 09:43 Branman wrote:On March 27 2013 05:58 StarStruck wrote:On March 27 2013 05:45 Branman wrote:
I already addressed the differences between those sports and becoming a professional gamer though. They want them nice and young because the development process is different when it comes to RTS professional gaming. It's unfortunate but required compared to other athletics where players mature a lot later. It's well proven. :/
I just wanted to address this point and cut off the rest of the quote tree because it was really complex. Just because you can mature as a younger RTS professional player doesn't mean that that is the right thing to do. There are many things that should be sacrificed in the quest to have the greatest skill, and there are things that shouldn't be sacrificed. Going back to my steroid example from a few posts ago. Juicing up will make you bigger, faster, and stronger (increase your skill level), but as a society, we've decided that it isn't worth the costs of allowing steroids. We've decided that the sacrifices required in order to take steroids while training and maintaining a career as a professional athlete are unacceptable. It very well can be the case that starting a very stringent training regime at 14 will make you a better RTS player than if you started a similar regime at 18, but we as a community should probably look down on starting so early because it does not give an aspiring pro player a bridge to a post-esports career. We should agree that going pro before the age of 18 is a sacrifice that we shouldn't accept. Let me put it this way. In their development process it is necessary for them to start young in order to reach their full potential or else they put themselves at risk of not achieving their goals. Sacrifices always have to be made and it's no different when we're talking about Starcraft. It's a pretty tough pill to swallow. There will always be certain exceptions like your Nestea's and dare I even say White-Ras. I didn't really specify the age but I know some guilds who look for kids even younger than 14 when it came to BW. Scary don't you think? Yes, it certainly doesn't address their education let alone letting them live out their youth where they can learn all kinds of shit, but these are the sacrifices they choose in hopes of making it and unfortunately very few will. You heard me talking about the limited player pool in places like NA. There are a lot of Koreans who dream about becoming Pro Gamers too, but very few of them will find success as well. Not saying I personally encourage it. If those kids want to give it a try it's their choice and their sacrifice. In many cases I don't think they truly understand what they're doing with their lives which is sad. If the kid is ridiculously good and has that raw talent that so few have and seems to understand the sacrifice. I would have no problem taking them on my team and making them a stone cold killer. You seem to agree with what I'm saying, but you're making an appeal to "this is just the way it's done." In your last sentence, you said that if a kid truly understood what they were giving up, you wouldn't have a problem with that. However, the point of this would be to protect them from people who don't actually care about them. For every person that would actually only recruit them if they truly understood the sacrifice, there are many more who are willing to just exploit their dreams for commercial gain. If you ever want to have a widespread audience in the West, then any semblance of dropping out of high school to play games professionally will have to be eliminated from the worldwide scene. Sports have always thrived on the idea that kids could dream of one day being good enough to grace the stage of the pro game. However, if the message becomes "if you want to eventually make it as a pro, you have to drop out of high school and just start playing games otherwise you'll be behind your peers" then the idea that Westerners should even think of becoming a pro will just fade away. Just from the right hand sidebar on TL, both Life and Creator were born in 1997 and were playing professionally at the age of 14 having logged GSL/GSTL games in the TLPD from 2011. How can we expect a Western player who starts going pro at the age of 18 to even hope of catching someone who has already been a pro for 4 years? That's the thing about competition, if you want to compete at the highest level, then you have to do the exact same things everyone else on the highest level does. This was steroids in baseball in the late 90s, and it's dropping out of high school in Starcraft today. The thing is most kids don't really have any perspective of the world around them when we're talking about anywhere from 9 -14. Kids who are even 16-22 barely have perspective as well. I'm just grateful that a lot of the kids early on who did well decided to put their parents in charge of their winnings. As for the people recruiting these kids. Yeah, it's hard to come by the right house let alone the right team and coaches. Like I said we're severely limited on great coaches that give the proper attention they deserve. It's practically impossible to protect them. I wrote a long manifesto a long time ago which includes certifying Clubs/Teams that follow a certain criteria I wrote myself, so players know what to look for when they're being wooed. You view it as catching up. I view it as stunting their development because those years you speak of are critical when it comes to player developing their skills. There is no real catching up. They will be superior. Looking at the old BW pros 16 equals prime time. Yes, you do have to do what they do. Some players will tell you they like to have their own practice regime because it works for them. Look at their results and notice how the vast majority aren't getting the payoff. Show them what they were doing before compared to what they are doing now. Yup. That and you really need good sparring partners like I said before so yeah. You know what I think about that already. Dropping out of high school to play Starcraft isn't new. The kiddies were doing it in BW as well. You think their parents liked it? Heck no. Ask a lot of the players this question.. when you have kids would you want them to follow in your foot steps? I've seen several interviews where they ask this question and they all say the same thing. No.
Thanks for your input to this conversation. It's clear you've been around this for awhile and have seen many of these things first hand.
The fact that pros have said that they wouldn't want a similar life for their kids is very telling. Esports will have a much harder time maturing to a viable industry if retired pros say things like "don't do it, it's not worth it" to their own children or other up and coming kids.
I think that in order for there to be a sustainable global scene, and a scene which actually cares about young players, we need two rules. (I would expect these to come from Western sources whose culture has less tolerance for underaged labor.)
1. Any player under the local age of majority which enters a tournament must do so as an "amateur" (i.e. not on the roster of a pro team).
2. Any player which is a member of a pro team which employs underaged players will not be allowed to participate.*
These rules work to protect players from being pressured into joining a pro team before they reach the age of majority. You won't have the 15 year old Kespa "practice slaves" under a system like this, or you would have those players but Kespa A-teamers wouldn't be allowed to enter tournaments and their sponsors would get less exposure. The pressure to enter a strict training regimen at an early age will likewise be reduced because everyone is summarily penalized. This should result in an esports career being less "all-in" as players will have an opportunity to finish school on time.
Things you can still do under this rule:
You can still have underaged players enter tournaments and practice a LOT. If esports is truly a passion, then they can continue to put as much time as they can into it. This will make becoming a progamer more analogous to becoming a musician or dancer. In no way should we discourage players from working hard and practicing, but the point is doing so as a 'pro' where someone is making money off of your labor is VERY different from pursuing it as an amateur.
You will still see these players in tournaments if the tournaments which operate under these rules have qualifiers specifically for amateur players. For example, IPL had open tournaments for a paid plane ticket and hotel room for their definition of amateur. That's also how Scarlett got her start. The goal is to still see players like Life make it to the big stage and upset the established pros. This will make for great story lines, protect the underaged players, and probably really boost the best ones as they will have a bidding war for their services once they turn 18.
Now, you'll still have tournament organizations which would ignore these rules. I just hope that the community would recognize the difference between types of tournaments. Going back to my sports analogy from a few posts ago, this would be like having one sports league where steroids are allowed, and another sports league where steroids are banned. Sure you will see higher level play in the league with steroids, but history has shown that higher-level play isn't the end-all-be-all goal of sports.
*Caveat to rule#2: you wouldn't need to ban all pro teams if there was an actual oversight organization which would ensure that underage players weren't being exploited. The optimal final solution would be for some international governing body to actually monitor pro teams which employ players under the age of majority to make sure that their needs are being taken care of. Unfortunately, this doesn't exist, so the idea is to just say no to such behavior.
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Mentioned this in the ITG thread, but just want to reiterate my biggest issue with the more fervent defenders of region-locking. I would just encourage those people to look at it from the spectator perspective. Whether it would legitimately boost their enjoyment as a viewer or not. It seems like the pro-region locking folks tend to view it from the perspective of increased hopefulness that they can improve their personal success as a player before looking at it any other way.
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EPT
