Foreigners and their invisible handicap. - Page 15

On July 09 2013 04:56 Xercen wrote:
I don't understand what your point is in the first paragraph. Why would a korean team recruit a foreigner who isn't as good as koreans players who are teamless?

On July 09 2013 04:56 Xercen wrote:
http://wiki.teamliquid.net/starcraft2/CArn

"cArn was announced to have been dropped from eSahara on 11 January 2012 due to 'lack of motivation' in regards to his refusal to attend the GSL qualifiers, believing that his skill level was not sufficient to participate.[6]"

So basically cArn was kicked out of esahara because he refused to get real life experience at sc2 tournament qualifiers. Is that really the mindset of a determined progamer? I don't think anybody would believe for a minute this to be the case.

On July 09 2013 04:56 Xercen wrote:
If you are going to Korea then learn Korean. Eastern europeans don't go to america to play tennis and assume everybody in America has to speak polish/russian/serbian to accomodate their needs. They realise they are going to America for a while and they need to start learning english. If you are a dedicated individual then you need to learn the lingo. I've been to other countries and learnt their lingo because it helps you to communicate. If you want to go to Korea to improve as a player then learn Korean. I wanted to go to France so i studied french and learnt the language because i wanted to communicate with the french in their native tongue. Don't expect to go to Korea and speak english. I won't call it laziness but it's a lack of planning and perhap naivety. I was based in hong kong for a while and i learnt cantonese. After a while i could communicate well with the natives.

On July 09 2013 04:56 Xercen wrote:
i'll quote superstartran

"In fact, all you have to do is agree with me that there are professional athletes out there who come from poor or meager backgrounds that are successful and compete at an elite level, and your whole 'infrastructure' argument gets blown up. "

There are top sporting superstars who are from very very poor backgrounds (see brazilian footballers etc) yet they were determined and worked hard and got noticed.

On July 09 2013 04:56 Xercen wrote:
btw dunno if you noticed but in the west there are plenty of progamers for example.

Fatality/thresh and other fps progamers that were esports pioneers.

I think there are hundreds of progamers playing fps and other games like wow/lol etc in the western world.

On July 09 2013 05:39 mikkmagro wrote:


I said he was as good as the Korean B-teamers on the team, that often means that he was better than the amateur players not on a team, yet 9 times out of 10 they'd still go for Koreans.



Read the wording...it's the reason eSahara said they dropped him, there's two sides to a story. He participated in a large number of GSL qualifiers, but by that time, he had been kicked out from the GOM House because there was no space and the American FXO team was making its way to play in the GSTL so they were a priority over him and he was asked to leave...he had just been travelling to loads of tournaments in France and apparently the Philippines so for once he decided to skip the qualifiers because he felt he wasn't ready...many pro gamers do this...

Read his blog: Link



He tried hard to learn Korean, he just wasn't fluent enough to communicate, maybe he couldn't afford classes? Some people are better than others in languages. Koreans seem to find it hard to learn English, it's not unreasonable to guess that French-Moroccans find it hard to become fluent in Korean. I'm guessing you need at least a few years to get fluent in a language and speaking it is even harder than understanding it. Perhaps you're just better than most at languages, other people find it harder. I spent five years studying French, and I was really good at it in school, both written, and in orals, but I was a mumbling mess when I went to Paris on holiday, not to mention that it's hard to understand a French guy speaking French haha they talk so fast.


I'm sorry but again I think the comparison is very short-sighted. For one, Brazil has a massive football culture. Secondly, professional football teams scout poorer areas because good players from Brazil are much, much cheaper (and more common), than good players from England, or Italy, for example. Not only do they ask for less salaries, but they also tend to be more physically fit. I don't come from a rich country, at all, our best football teams are a mixture of semi-pro and pro...yet there are SO many players from Brazil, Nigeria, Eastern Europe, Africa etc in the league...for the players, they still get better opportunities than in their country of origin, and can use it as a stepping stone into other European teams, and the local teams love getting players from poorer regions because it's a lot of skill for your buck lol.

The risk is completely different from eSports to Tennis/football etc. Until eSports is more stable (and that includes the length of the lifetime of eSport titles) it's ridiculously hard. eSports culture needs to be strengthened in the West, and that is what people like TB, CatZ and the entire panel at the Valencia eSports Congress have identified as being the goal we should be working towards.


WoW doesn't have progamers, WoW just has people making videos on Youtube and making money off them (now that competitive WoW as it was a couple of years back died off at least)

LoL has pro gamers everywhere because of the structure employed by Riot. They have leagues EVERYWHERE, from Brazil to frikkin Vietnam. 'Amateur' Chinese and Koreans teams are better than most pro American teams in LoL, but Riot wanted it to be viable everywhere, and thus LoL is the most successful eSport ever.

Most FPS 'pro gamers', aren't full time, their salaries are very low if they have any, with notable exceptions like NiP or Na'Vi maybe.

Console FPS players in America are sometimes very well paid because of how big games like CoD and Halo are, but there isn't much of an eSport structure around Console FPS games, especially outside the US.

On July 09 2013 07:39 Xercen wrote:
I think we r missing the point it seems cArn was dropped by gom because they would have preferred another native player ahead of him. Unlucky for him. Life is not fair. Sure you have great natural talented players like stephano on one hand who can thrive without a team environment and without a coach and you have cArn who played better with it but unfortunately gom screwed him over.

On July 09 2013 07:39 Xercen wrote:
You can use a smartphone translator to talk to people in korea if a person wasn't fluent. Or use google translator to convert english to korean and show them on yr phone.
It shouldn't take that long to learn the words for starcraft 2 units and build orders etc. If he still isn't confident at languages then you can't blame korea and koreans. It's just unfortunately that learning a language is a barrier and he was unable to do it well.

Also, i don't know why americans/europeans think korean is a hard language to learn. yes there are differences in tone etc but it's just a language. Even if the progamer failed to learn the language at least that person tried. It's better to learn the language but not a requirement.

On July 09 2013 07:39 Xercen wrote:
I don't know what you know about football but scouts in brazil try to find good talent because there are good players there.

On July 09 2013 07:39 Xercen wrote:
you said "Secondly, professional football teams scout poorer areas because good players from Brazil are much, much cheaper (and more common), than good players from England, or Italy, for example."

If somebody found another pele from brazil he would be very expensive. Look at neymar. He was recently sold to barcalona for 49 million pounds. Football clubs don't scout in brazil to save pennies. They scout there to find top players they will pay big money for to bring to their clubs. Football is the biggest sport globally worth billions of pounds. Money is no object. The fifa world cup is watched by billions worldwide....no other sport comes close to football.

On July 09 2013 07:39 Xercen wrote:
I think your view is shortsighted. You are saying that esports has to have as much money as a real sport for people to bother taking risks and invest their lives into it. Sorry but people need to take that risk because they love the sport. For example, Catz, could have gotten a normal 9-5 job but instead he made a teamhouse and does fundraisers to raise the profile of sc2 and esports. If people like catz weren't around because they wanted more money and no risk then esports would be dead in the water.

On July 09 2013 07:39 Xercen wrote:
That's why we need people to step up their game and put in maximum effort and determination and if they really want to be a progamer then go for it. If you have the skill and the right mindset you will go far. If you always make excuses about koreans having better this and that then you better forget about being a progamer and just go to university. But even university in america is way more expensive than in europe. So even going to university is a risk since most students are in debt due to student loans.

On July 09 2013 07:39 Xercen wrote:
You keep on comparing the risk of esports to tennis and NFL etc. You can't wait for esports to have that same level of infrastructure before having american sc2 progamers because by that time esports would be dead. That's why we need pioneers like stephano and naniwa to do the dirty work and take those risks and get esports on the way to becoming a sport even if it takes years after they have retired.

On July 04 2013 06:47 Vindicare605 wrote:
The whole thing becomes even more convoluted when tournaments that ARE region locked occur like Shoutcraft America and people complain that the quality of matches is poor.

It's like what? The same people that argue that Koreans should be omitted from competing then turn around and complain that an all foreigner tournament isn't fun to watch?

What it comes down to is that people want to watch Foreigners beat Koreans but they don't like watching them lose to Koreans, so we get mixed reactions that are fickle in nature to begin with. That's my observation anyway, but I agree with your overall statement.

Having Koreans compete isn't something fundamentally unfair, the best foreigners will still compete.

On July 09 2013 21:41 asdfou420 wrote:
As an asian, I can tell you that asians are not genetically better at ANYTHING. It's 100% the culture, asians are taught to try their hardest to be the best at whatever they do. In my ENTIRE life, I have never heard an asian say 'it's just a game', that's all it comes down to; mindset.

People don't care enough about winning in the west, it's all 'bad luck' 'better luck next time' 'aww its okay'. No, it's not okay, you lost; you're a loser.

On July 09 2013 21:01 Cereb wrote:
I really want to make a point about the amount of practice. You can talk about infrastructure all you want but the number of time I have seen a top Korean vs top foreigner where the Korean was much much better at spending their resources and had much higher apm. There is nothing else behind those numbers than pure mechanics and you don't get those from having "slave practice partners" and "great infrastructure". These will give you a tactical advantage, and while this might just be the most important factors, the numbers we have prove that the Koreans simply practice harder. Until top foreigners can prove that they are practicing as hard as the top Koreans I'm not even gonna bother talking how the infrastructure influences as that is much more abstract and harder to measure.

You could say that the team house facilitate players to work harder, but if you livelihood depends on it and you have decided that this is the path you have taken, plus with the massive size of the nonkorean player base vs the Korean, it blows my mind that so few nonkoreans are willing to put in the effort. Also mentioning that we see a lot of foreigner team houses lately.

Just look at the ladders as well. The top players on the Korean ladder have many more games played than the top foreigner players and judging from interviews, it does definitely not seem that it’s because foreigners just practice all the time in custom games compared to the Koreans.

On July 09 2013 21:41 asdfou420 wrote:
As an asian, I can tell you that asians are not genetically better at ANYTHING. It's 100% the culture, asians are taught to try their hardest to be the best at whatever they do. In my ENTIRE life, I have never heard an asian say 'it's just a game', that's all it comes down to; mindset.

People don't care enough about winning in the west, it's all 'bad luck' 'better luck next time' 'aww its okay'. No, it's not okay, you lost; you're a loser.

On July 09 2013 22:51 HeeroFX wrote:
As I understand your question (poorly written by the way) you want to know if we, viewers of SC II, think a foreigner will every win something big when we have koreans in it.

I guess for myself I do. Naniwa is the guy I point too who can do it. Nearly beating leenock, and getting top 4 at mlg. Losing to a polt who naniwa claims vs Terran is his worst match up. I think as long as Naniwa is in it he gives hope. Stephano also has that affect, he gives hope. Huk and idra both use to play that role for fans. I think koreans are beatable, I think we are just waiting for someone to do it, and not fear them.

On July 09 2013 23:08 mikkmagro wrote:

Part of 'Infrastructure' includes the possibility of spending more time training instead of worrying about making rent at the end of the month.



Just to use your own silly stereotype against you, thankfully a good portion of NA pros are Asians or of Asian descent...Suppy, Hendralisk, Hellokitty ...

On July 10 2013 02:34 superstartran wrote:



That's not an excuse for alot of established pros, especially the ones on EG.

On July 09 2013 19:54 mikkmagro wrote:

GOM dropped him because FXO (the American team with qxc, slog etc) was moving in the GOM House, and since they were going to participate in GSTL, whilst he was just a Code B player, they were the priority.


Out of all the Western eSport personalities in Korea, the only two people I know who are fluent in Korean are Wolf and LastShadow. As far as I know, Khaldor, Tasteless and Artosis have been going to classes, but are not fluent. As I said, unless you're a super smart genius with a sponge for a brain (or unless you're really young), becoming fluent in a language takes a long time, at least a few years. Fluent means being able to talk and write in a language with ease, almost as good as you are with your native tongue. It is not that easy to achieve unless you start learning it from when you're young. I'm not blaming Korea or Koreans, I'm saying that the language barrier is a problem which is not easily circumvented. I applaud you if you managed to become fluent in French and Chinese in a matter of weeks, but normal people are not that lucky or smart.


Of course, as I said, Brazil has a massive football culture, obviously there will be better football players in Brazil, compared to the US, or even other European countries where kids tend to prefer watching it than playing it. As you know, Brazil has some very poor areas, where amateur football is still extremely popular. I know for a fact that Maltese football clubs buy Brazilian and Nigerian amateurs, pay very little in terms of salary like 300-500 euros a month or even less, but that tiny salary is still much better than anything they'd ever get in Brazil/Nigeria. On the other hand, breeding a local player to be as good as them would be much more expensive. So you can't really compare Americans moving to Korea to play a video-game, with players from Eastern Europe/Africa/South America moving to much richer countries simply because they always have a better opportunity to make money when they move to a richer country, even if they don't become a professional tennis player or whatever, they can cook tacos and still make more money than they'd get in their hometown.



You're talking about massively famous super-stars -.- I thought we were talking about skilled players who need to be trained/developed -.- Before they get famous, they're cheap. I'm not talking about players who get picked up by the top Brazilian clubs, and then get bought by European teams...


No, it doesn't have to have as much money, but there has to be a prospect to be able to have a livelihood. For the vast majority of people who don't have the support of a top organisation, it is not possible to move to Korea when they're young, pay for rent etc whilst practicing SC2 full time...


That's exactly what most pro gamers in the West do...they do their best, and some are definitely better than mid-tier Koreans...but no one can deny that the Korean practice environment is better. The argument here is why can't people work at making such an environment available also in other regions of the world...that's how you grow eSports, not by sending youngsters to Korea.


You brought up the comparison with sports, I was just rebutting your arguments, because I don't they're applicable in this instance. What dirty work would Stephano and NaNiwa do? Sending foreigners to Korea does not make eSport more globally recognised. You mentioned GRRRR and ElkY yourself, that was a decade ago...how did their stay in Korea improve eSports in the West? It improved the recognition of the existence of the Brood War community in the West, but it did not improve eSports at all. You need to think long term, and even if HuK won a GSL, you think that suddenly Canada will rise and become a second Korea? No, not at all. You start by having domestic leagues, and clans, then perhaps you get a semi-professional team with the best Canadian players, so on and so forth.

So you can't really compare Americans moving to Korea to play a video-game, with players from Eastern Europe/Africa/South America moving to much richer countries simply because they always have a better opportunity to make money when they move to a richer country, even if they don't become a professional tennis player or whatever, they can cook tacos and still make more money than they'd get in their hometown.

No, it doesn't have to have as much money, but there has to be a prospect to be able to have a livelihood. For the vast majority of people who don't have the support of a top organisation, it is not possible to move to Korea when they're young, pay for rent etc whilst practicing SC2 full time...

That's exactly what most pro gamers in the West do...they do their best, and some are definitely better than mid-tier Koreans...but no one can deny that the Korean practice environment is better. The argument here is why can't people work at making such an environment available also in other regions of the world...that's how you grow eSports, not by sending youngsters to Korea.

On July 10 2013 10:08 Xercen wrote:
Nobody said you have to be fluent to live in korea. But it certainly does help. But if you want to live in another country then it's best to learn the lingo to at least a conversant level.

On July 10 2013 10:08 Xercen wrote:
Korea is a first world country. Every first world country has decently paid jobs for people if you look hard enough. When i was a teenager i went to a foreign country and got a job at an airport even though i didnt speak their language. English and Chinese are the main languages in the world so if you know either one of them or both then you can find a job in ANY country. It's nonsense if you say you can't find a job. But let's go back to my original point see next section

On July 10 2013 10:08 Xercen wrote:
I already stated the steps he would need to take. I never said the wannabe progamer would go directly to korea. The wannabe progamer would have to get noticed by placing high on the ladder or doing well at mlg open tournaments or some other method. Stream and/or get a sponsorship to earn some money so you can go try out for yr dream in korea. Why not just get a job in america and save some money for your trip to korea. if you got the determination to follow a dream you can get a job in America and save up those dollars!

You need a certain level of skill at sc2 to make it work but if you save up some money in america doing a job to fund your trip/rent/expenses to korea then what is the big deal?

I mean you said so and so doesn't have money but hey i just offered you a solution. Determined people get money and follow their dreams. So do you still have that no money excuse? That americans can't get jobs in Korea and don't have money to pay rent etc? i hope not since i offered a viable solution.

On July 10 2013 10:08 Xercen wrote:
Also, i'd like to know what is the difference between US players and EU players since EU players don't live under korean teamhouse conditions yet they are doing miles better than US players. Hence this is another reason why the korean environment is not the main factor.
I think the reason is that EU and Koreans are just hungrier than americans. Americans do train but EU and koreans analyse games in detail much moreso than Americans imo.

So my point is NA players aren't creative or determined enough. Maybe the asian/european/korean culture produces people who are just far more determined but honestly i don't know. Just my 2 cents. But i do know that America isn't producing players who are even on European sc2 skill level let alone Korean skill level.