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On September 04 2013 13:54 Nerski wrote:
It's pretty obvious how blizzard already plans to pseudo region lock the thing...they've said multiple times they want to move EU/NA to more and more offline play (maybe for 2014?). Pretty plain and simple if weeks of the tournament go to offline mode instead of days, you'll see Koreans not wishing to leave Korea drop like flys.
The issue isn't will WCS become more region based, it's by the time that it does will the scene in the EU/NA still be healthy. That's why you see people who are pro's in those scenes be proponents of region locks. It's not because they 'need' it to be truly locked, they just need the people playing in the scene to be invested in it.
The problem with this system is that europe/America are a tiny bit bigger then Korea resulting in quite hard to reach for some people and still do partial other stuff in their life. Korea got an advantage here since everything is bunched up together so we seen GSL champions like Life going to school. This kind of stuff will be impossible for the foreigners.
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On August 22 2013 17:59 theking1 wrote:Show nested quote +On August 22 2013 17:41 NarutO wrote:On August 22 2013 17:14 ChosenSC2 wrote:
Anything that promotes actually having a NA scene, I'm all for it. As someone who has eat, breathe, sleep SC for like 6 years, it's hard to even care anymore. I don't want to tune in to WCS "America" to watch 32 Koreans go at it.... wtf?
Or go to MLG in America to see 85 Koreans get the top 75 spots. I would actually love to watch MLG if the final 4 was like Sheth, ViBE, HuK, SeleCt way more than watching Korean mercenaries who just fly in for 2 days to win money. They have GSL, and if an American wants to play in GSL they can't just fly there for 2 days and win $25,0000....
The best example I can think of is like in Canada, they have a Canadian Football League. It is very possible for a player, coach, manager, employee, organization etc to make a sustainable and comfortable income being a part of it. If in the Canadian Football League every season they just had the Green Bay Packers, New England Patriots and Pittsburgh Steelers come SHIT on everyone and take any money associated with the league do you think it would survive as a League?
TL:DR: Until NA players have a reason to be full-time, something to play for, the NA scene will slowly die. Right now there is no reason unless you make money from streaming or other means. Lets see how long it takes until you realize that 'elitist' people that want to see the highest level of games are not actually that much in the minority compared to the people that want to see local talent. I dare to say even those people will after a given time switch over and prefer to watch highest level. Its plain boring. NA players have the same reason to be full-time as Koreans. Be good, win money, earn fame. Koreans have a higher risk and harder competition. NA scene did raise for example Scarlett who is one of the best if not best foreigner right now. EU scene did raise Stephano. Now tell me how those two are outstanding examples and no other player could achieve their level due to training. Truth is, you want mediocre players to be rewarded while lots of others don't see a scene building around mediocre players. Every player that has high NA level would not need to increase his level or at least not elevator it any further to win money and sustain themselves if you ban Koreans so whats the point? You are going to completely remove progress in skill taking out the competition. I think your logic is preety flawed.First of all the highes tlevel of play in sc2 as you call it isn tin wcs na or wcs eu it is in wcs korea aka gsl and osl.That is the highest level of play.What you see in WCS NA ans WCS EU are called B TEAMERS or OVERTHEHILL players such as MVP and Nestea who can not make it in wcs kr anymore.They aren't highest level of play.In fact they are very low by korean standards.The highest levle of play right now in the sc2 world is Maru,Innovation,Bomber,Rain.Nothing less nothing more and most likely one of them will win the word championship. Now in na and eu nobody wants to see B treamers and OVERTHETOP players hence the record low viewing numbers even in eu this year(do not give me ti3 excuse).Continental players are much better in attracting viewers and promoting the game,And it also does not hurt the competitive scene since one of the top 4 of wcs korea will win the world championship anyways.Whether it is tlo,grubby,mc,jaedong or duckdeok they will still get demolished by bomber,innovation,maru and rain. "Now tell me how those two are outstanding examples and no other player could achieve their level due to training." Scarlett does very bad with top koreans and stephano is an exception(1 player of of hundreds of foreigners is very statistically insignificative and even he didnt win anything in korea).The only players that did something at the HIGHEST LEVEL OF PLAY as you like to call it are Jinro,naniwa and Idra who went to korea and actually went to higher stages of the gsl but that was a t the beggining. Nowadays it is nearly impossible.
Why don't you stop with your BS and rewatch WCS season 2 finals? Way to cherry pick Mvp & Nestea to prove your point when they didn't even pass regional Ro32.
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On August 22 2013 16:35 FreedomSC2 wrote:
Introduction:
Hello everyone,
I have been involved in the Starcraft II scene since its early years. I have worked with some phenomenal players not only on my teams but also in events I have helped oversee. I have kept in touch with several players top within the scene who have shared their opinions on the current WCS situation.
I understand there is currently a debate going on discussing whether or not region locking is the best possible solution to resolve the issue. I personally was against region locking in the beginning because as a former manager I know what practice vs the best players in the world can do to up and coming talent.
I have changed my view a bit on the topic though as I have spoken to several excellent players who have been forced to almost retire due to the difficulty of having time to train in the NA scene. In order to play full time you need to either be a student, work very few hours, or be on a Premier team in NA.
I believe though there may be another way to look at this dilemma. What about a possible Hybrid system? A system where players can get the practice they need vs Koreans to excel well also leaving enough resources on the table for up and coming gamers to support themselves on their gaming endeavors.
I believe such a system could be possible but I think as a community it is something we need to come up with together. I know there is a lot of smart people in this community and the energy we all share well debating this topic is tremendous. Perhaps we should look for a possible solution outside the "yes or no" region lock discussions.
I have decided to start this topic because I wanted to see if anyone in the community could share ideas to possibly help blizzard out in providing an alternative option that would give the players the best of both worlds.
PRO's to Region Lock:
Players have a chance to make enough money to sustain full time training to become better players.
CON's to Regon Lock:
Player lose the chance to practice vs top level talent from around the world. Slowing growth.
Possible Hybrid:
Could we create a system where a regular season has no region lock and season finals with region lock. So we get the experience from playing top level koreans well still being able to earn enough money to train full time. Perhaps a point system? Tell us what you think.
Original WCS Post in other thread:
I posted a comment in the other WCS thread but I wanted to create a sepertage post for it so it doesn't get lost in the pages. Here is my intial comments in the other post:
I can see both sides of the debate. I know several former pro players who had to stop playing due to the financial aspect of it. If we can give NA players the chance to earn money more players can play full time but they would need to get the korean practice experience elsewhere. So its sort of a balancing effect if they were to do region locking. NA players would need to find a way to practice vs koreans which is very difficult without lag over servers. Brings up an interesting discussion for sure. Initially I was all for keeping it open as it raised the skill level but the truth is there isn't many na players besides those on top teams that can afford to train the way koreans do. There is no gaming houses where food and what not is provided. Perhaps those interested who have spare cash look at opening up a korean style team house. I know I would If i had the money.
Another Idea:
Perhaps they need to look at a new system that allows NA/EU/KR players to play against each other in the regular seasons but have region locks in effect for season finals. I don't see how to do it but im sure a system could be created. There are a lot of people smarter then me. Why don't we discuss ways this might be possible? give blizzard some ideas?
This would give us the best of both worlds. Players get the experience of playing vs Koreans and they have the chance to earn money to keep the na scene robust.
If you have anything to contribute to this conversation please do. I believe something is possible if we can turn some of that energy we are putting into the debate into some creative alternative solutions. :D Hope to hear from you guys.
Freedom.
Your OP is way too biased.
CON's to Regon Lock:
Player lose the chance to practice vs top level talent from around the world. Slowing growth.
That is not even the main problem. The biggest concern would be we end up with two regions with 2nd-3rd tier skill level
and the inevitable foreigners humiliation at the seasonal finals. There won't be any viewer, and I suspect even the most avid fan of the local talent won't be there to watch the regional championship again after seeing their local hero getting humiliated in the seasonal finals. SC2 WILL BE DEAD before the NA scence even start to grow.
Seriously, if you guys like watching Vibe, qxc, snute, ... please go the challenger league. I don't see any difference here unless you just want to see your local hero in places where they shouldn't belong.
It's Blizzard that invest money into WCS EU/NA and since Blizzard is not the government, the money is fair game to the Koreans. I don't understand this entitlement attitude at all when it's not their money to begin with.
WCS 2 finals is a huge success in terms of games quality and we witnessed the exciting competition between NA/KR. If anything, it suggests that we need more talented Koreans in EU/NA, especially in EU (Innovation please), so that we have an even more exciting three way races in each seasonal finals.
As for NA/EU players trying to improve : learn from Naniwa, Scarlett.
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On August 28 2013 11:02 Op wrote:
Just a weird question: why do we have 3 different WCS tournaments (KR, EU, NA) ?
If we all would want to see the best games, then why not have one big tournament in Korea (like GSL before) ? Or have all 3 tournaments in Korea so the best players can participate and qualify for the finals ?
BTW: love the discussions, some very interesting points, especially having 'x' spots for non-resident players, and the team-based region seem quite interesting
For one thing it's hard for people in NA to watch WCS KR. It's actually making perfect sense to have 3 code S in three different regions/time zones so anybody can enjoy code S level SC2 live.
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On August 22 2013 17:14 ChosenSC2 wrote:
Anything that promotes actually having a NA scene, I'm all for it. As someone who has eat, breathe, sleep SC for like 6 years, it's hard to even care anymore. I don't want to tune in to WCS "America" to watch 32 Koreans go at it.... wtf?
Or go to MLG in America to see 85 Koreans get the top 75 spots. I would actually love to watch MLG if the final 4 was like Sheth, ViBE, HuK, SeleCt way more than watching Korean mercenaries who just fly in for 2 days to win money. They have GSL, and if an American wants to play in GSL they can't just fly there for 2 days and win $25,0000....
The best example I can think of is like in Canada, they have a Canadian Football League. It is very possible for a player, coach, manager, employee, organization etc to make a sustainable and comfortable income being a part of it. If in the Canadian Football League every season they just had the Green Bay Packers, New England Patriots and Pittsburgh Steelers come SHIT on everyone and take any money associated with the league do you think it would survive as a League?
TL:DR: Until NA players have a reason to be full-time, something to play for, the NA scene will slowly die. Right now there is no reason unless you make money from streaming or other means.
thinking like this is why na scene is so stagnant. we need to get better in na not exlcude koreans
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On September 04 2013 13:04 Taipoka wrote:Show nested quote +On September 04 2013 09:08 Sherlock117 wrote:
...
I come at this with a pretty big background in tennis and understand all levels of the pro scene very well there. I am currently working on developing pro tennis competition in my local area. So my thoughts on this will be very biased towards what is done there. However, I think the Starcraft competitive scene most resembles the tennis competitive scene and should learn as many lesson from it as possible. People try to compare Starcraft to other sports, usually team sports, but the infrastructure is too different to come at it from this view point.
...
Point scaling is a very easy fix. Tennis has the very most important tournaments, the grand slams, worth twice as much as the still-important-but-not-quite-as-much tournaments. This feels like a good balance. Leave season finals where they are at, but make Tier I tournaments worth twice as much as they are currently (winner gets 1500 instead of 750) and payout points further down in the standings on a tournament-by-tournament basis.
I would say that i disagree at all. :D But i´ll just put a pint as you asked for a tweak. You failed to consider one thing about SC2, and that is what i allways said KeSPA did right and GOM did wrong. SC2 tounaments are focused on players, like you want (Like tennis), but you don´t have a structure like tennis. Why? Because on tennis, the players are the team. A player win money from prizes, sponsors, comercials, etc, and the player pay a salary for his coach, nutricionist, medic, etc. On SC2, a player win money from tournament, but he is part of a team with coach etc. And this team must find sponsors to pay for the house, coaches, food, and maybe a salary. Saw what is wrong? Where is the exposure to the sponsors????????????? Because you see Liquid Taeja winning championships... not <put sponsor name> Liquid Taeja, but the sponsor is paying for all the liquid team, not only Taeja. I think there are 3 alternatives to SC2: 1) Be like tennis. ie, close the teams and play like ATP circuit with the players paying for coach, house, etc. 2) Be like KeSPA and focus on teams, ie, focus on sponsors. 3) Be like the only one entity who made this SC2 scene right (I dont like em, but i must recognise they are good on this). Do like EG. Don´t focus on be the best and win champioships. Focus on be a enterntainer. This gives your sponsors the visibility needed. But. Are there space for that much entertainers? Let put 200~400 only on korea?
Yes, this is a good point, and something I overlooked. The tweak I asked for was in the structure of the WCS to make it better overall. So will WCS be better served trying to promote interest in players, the already popular and the up-and-coming? Or would it be better served promoting sponsors? Which of these would help the growth of the game and entertainment value for viewers?
Taipoka, I think you are hinting that you think your option 3 is best. I agree! Buy you are saying what you think SC2 in general needs to be, while I am asking what should WCS specifically look like. What is WCS? It is a venue for players to compete and prove themselves. People watch WCS to watch the competition and cheer for their players to succeed. The entertainment value of WCS comes from people watching a good match and cheering for their players to do well. This is why I compare SC2 (or let's just say WCS then) to tennis. WCS is an individual competition, not a platform for sponsors, not a platform for entertainers to interact with stream viewers. The WCS specifically, while it shouldn't be exactly like tennis, can solve some of its issues by learning from tennis. The prize money, points structure, and fostering of new talent will not be solved by catering to your options #2 and #3 and won't help the growth of WCS as a competition.
I would also like to mention I agree with tadL that region locking will create leechers, and the current system is already starting to promote that with only 8 players dropping out of challenger each season. The tweaks I propose in WCS would create more of an influx and outflux that would drop the players who do not deserve to be there, while giving newer players opportunities to step out on the big stage and be rewarded for their performance. Right now none of that is happening in WCS.
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On September 04 2013 16:39 psychotics wrote:Show nested quote +On August 22 2013 17:14 ChosenSC2 wrote:
Anything that promotes actually having a NA scene, I'm all for it. As someone who has eat, breathe, sleep SC for like 6 years, it's hard to even care anymore. I don't want to tune in to WCS "America" to watch 32 Koreans go at it.... wtf?
Or go to MLG in America to see 85 Koreans get the top 75 spots. I would actually love to watch MLG if the final 4 was like Sheth, ViBE, HuK, SeleCt way more than watching Korean mercenaries who just fly in for 2 days to win money. They have GSL, and if an American wants to play in GSL they can't just fly there for 2 days and win $25,0000....
The best example I can think of is like in Canada, they have a Canadian Football League. It is very possible for a player, coach, manager, employee, organization etc to make a sustainable and comfortable income being a part of it. If in the Canadian Football League every season they just had the Green Bay Packers, New England Patriots and Pittsburgh Steelers come SHIT on everyone and take any money associated with the league do you think it would survive as a League?
TL:DR: Until NA players have a reason to be full-time, something to play for, the NA scene will slowly die. Right now there is no reason unless you make money from streaming or other means. thinking like this is why na scene is so stagnant. we need to get better in na not exlcude koreans
Getting shut down in a few quick matches does not constitute getting practice against the highest level of competition. Cross server ladder play should be more appropriate for that (albeit with some additional lag).
As long as both local and global options exist (is this such a hard concept?), there is more motivation for na players to actually play. The local options would have to exist outside WCS though, at least with the current format.
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On September 04 2013 13:09 vthree wrote:Show nested quote +On September 04 2013 09:08 Sherlock117 wrote:First of all, sorry for the long post. I've been thinking long and hard about how the system works and have some thoughts that I want to explain. But to really explain things requires some words! I think the WCS is pretty good actually, but with a few tweaks a lot more can be accomplished. One problem with WCS I've heard Xenocider mention is that right now there are basically 3 opportunities in a year for up-and-comers to make a name for themselves in the WCS qualifiers. Is it worth it for an up-and-comer to devote 30+ hours a week for a very small chance to qualify and maybe win $100 once every couple months? Some of the biggest problem with the current WCS system I see are:1. Suffocation by Korean pros 2. Not enough opportunities for up-and-comers to make a name 3. Prize money not properly scaling 4. WCS points not properly scaling I come at this with a pretty big background in tennis and understand all levels of the pro scene very well there. I am currently working on developing pro tennis competition in my local area. So my thoughts on this will be very biased towards what is done there. However, I think the Starcraft competitive scene most resembles the tennis competitive scene and should learn as many lesson from it as possible. People try to compare Starcraft to other sports, usually team sports, but the infrastructure is too different to come at it from this view point. So now I would like to explain what I mean by each of these problems and propose some solutions. Maybe these aren't perfect solutions, but I hope you think about them and maybe tweak them a little bit yourself to make them even better. 1. Suffocation by Korean prosThis one is pretty obvious. WCS America is just another region for Koreans to compete, albeit mostly Koreans who are popular in the American scene. How can we get people to be interested in watching WCS America? What would make people want to tune in? Personally, I find myself making sure to tune in when it is one of my favorite players playing an important match, and my favorite players are either popular Koreans or Europeans who play my race Terran (so Polt, Taeja, Lucifron, Happy) or almost ANY American player (Scarlett, ViBe, HuK, etc.). In the WCS Season 2 Global Finals the player I cared about most was Scarlett, followed by Polt and Naniwa. I did whatever I could to make sure I would be able to watch the Scarlett vs Bomber quarterfinal. This match was an very important (and competitive) match involving a player I cared about. So to summarize, an all-korean WCS America is boring, and a region locked WCS America would be lame to watch. Let's make it something we want to watch! How do we do this? 2. Not enough opportunities for up-and-comers to make a nameAgain, as it stands right now, the motivation for an up-and-comer to devote 30 hours a week for several months of intensive training is to try his hand at the WCS qualifiers 3 times a year and maybe, maaaaaaaybe get a spot in premier league. This is the problem people have been talking about in this thread and some people aren't understanding. Yes, the American players just aren't as good as Koreans in general, but the main issue is there is little motivation for Americans to become good right now. In order to increase motivation there needs to be a good scaling of goals (different levels of prize money) which are obtainable for local up-and-comers at the lower levels. 3. Prize money not properly scalingThe way I see WCS currently, if you qualify for WCS challenger league, great! That's a step in the right direction. But you win absolutely no money unless you qualify for premier league. If you do, you either get $100, $200, or $300 depending on which slot you qualified through (bracket stage, group stage 1st place, or group stage 2nd place). But wait, if you do qualify, you get an additional $1500 next season by playing in premier league. So as a challenger league player you should actually look at it as I either make nada, nothing, zilch, or I make $1600-$1800. In my opinion, that gap is the biggest single issue with WCS not creating opportunities for the up and coming players. Then, there is no difference between 25-32 and 17-24 in premier league and only a very small difference between that and 9-16. 4. Points not properly scalingThe issue is exactly the same as the issue above. Non-qualifying players get 25 points, qualifying players get either 150 or 200. That's too big a gap and the 25 points are basically worthless. But there is another, more important issue with ranking points. At this point, the rankings are essentially only worhwhile to people trying to qualify for the year end finals. I'm fine with that for now, though it is something to improve in the future. Blizzard wanted to make sure to not completely stifle other tournaments and throw out some points for other tournaments satisfying certain requirements. But the way I see it, the only qualifyers for the year end finals (the only thing the rankings are good for right now) will be those who made it to season finals at least twice, or placed in the top 2 at one of the season finals. Essentially nothing else matters. So instead of rewarding consistent performance and determining who the best player is, the rankings reward the players who perform well over a 3 day period. A few examples: A consistent player who finishes 9th-16th in a couple WCS seasons and maybe just couldn't push through in a 3rd season and finishes 6th place, while winning several non-WCS tournaments (maybe an IEM and an MLG) should be considered a possible candidate for being in the top 16 players in the world. This person would have something like 2600 points and probably finish the year ranked 25-30. A player who does absolutely nothing in non-WCS tournaments, only qualifies for one WCS season, scrapes by in 5th place, and then somehow miraculously wins the global finals ends up with 3500 points and something like 10th-15th. The biggest issue to me is that finishing 6th in a season gets you 500 points, while finishing 5th gets you 1000 points, and finishing 4th gets you 1250 points. That's just a wonky point scale and needs to be tweaked. Or somebody like Naniwa has some really solid results in WCS and out and is in the running for the year-end-finals, but then has one bad day by dropping to challenger league in the round of 32 and now has 0 chance of making it. Why? His only hope at this point would be to win at least 1 Tier I non-WCS tournament and one or two Tier II tournaments. Solutions?I said I would come at this with a view of how tennis works, because I think Starcraft would succeed very much if they tweaked some things in the way they are done with tennis. 4. Point scalingPoint scaling is a very easy fix. Tennis has the very most important tournaments, the grand slams, worth twice as much as the still-important-but-not-quite-as-much tournaments. This feels like a good balance. Leave season finals where they are at, but make Tier I tournaments worth twice as much as they are currently (winner gets 1500 instead of 750) and payout points further down in the standings on a tournament-by-tournament basis. Possibly reduce the WCS seasons so the winner gets 1000 and so on appropriately as these tournaments are more money winners for the players and exclusive qualifiers for season finals. Right now there is too much double-dipping of points each season within WCS tournaments making non-WCS tournaments irrelevant. Tier II tournaments could be either 750 or 1000 depending on prize money, again with more spots getting points lower down. A new Tier III tournament tier could be added awarding somewhere between 200-500 points to the winner depending on prize money. These could be region locked tournaments. 3. Money scalingAnother easy fix without the answer being "More money!". Change the money for premier league to: 25-32: $750 17-24: $1250 13-16: $1750 9-12: $2500 This makes each win in Premier league worthwhile. What else does it do? It frees up an additional $9000 in the prize money that can be used elsewhere! Where? In challenger league and it's qualifiers. This actually doesn't make the 17-32 finishers lose out as much as you think because they will won some more money down in challenger league. It just spreads more money to challenger league players. Changes for the challenger league? Have the bracket stage be about winning the money, have the group stage be about qualifying for premier league or challenger league next season. Bracket winners get $500, runners-up get $300, 3rd place gets $200, and first round losers $100. That only eats up $4800 of the extra money and everyone who qualifies gets paid! What about the rest of the money? Hold off a minute and I'll give you my thought.
2. More opportunities for up-and-comersIncrease the number of qualifiers and drop outs each season of wcs to 24 instead of 8, adding an additional round to the bracket stage of challenger league with the winners getting $0 (or maybe $50?). Have qualifiers spread throughout the WCS season, once every few weeks. Some are open to anybody and offer no prize money, only challenger league qualification. Some are region locked and offer some of that $4000 leftover prize money as well as challenger league qualification. Oh, wait! That also solves some of #1, suffocation by Korean pros, while at the same time not region locking!!!!I'm a numbers guy, so I could go into more detail about how the wcs system should work and give exact numbers and all that, but that's not necessary. Try and get the big idea  So please consider this, and maybe offer some tweaks that would make it even better! Although I agree with the many of these points. I just want to point out the issue with points scaling (more points for non-WCS events). Unlike tennis where most of the top 50 pros can attend most of the tournaments. This is not the case for non-WCS events like MLG, Dreamhack, etc. Sure, some tournaments have qualifiers. But it still doesn't take away the fact that the EG, TL, players (and HyuN) just gets a lot more opportunity to attend foreign events.
Another great point. However, at the moment all outside tournaments are essentially irrelevant. Do you think the ranking system should only include WCS results because not every pro makes it to all tournaments?
Even in pro tennis the normal ATP 250 and 500 events only have something like 10 of the top 50 players playing, and that's ok. A 500 level event is still worth 1/4 of a grand slam. In WCS winning a Tier I non-WCS tournament is 750 points while winning a regional + season finals is on the order of 4000 points. Don't you think it would be a good idea to make the most important non-WCS tournaments, like IEM, worth a little bit more in the points system?
Maybe 1000 points for IEM and then 2000 points for season finals and 1500 points for regionals would be a bit better.
Also, my biggest issue with points scaling is the difference between finishing 4th/5th and finishing 6th in a season. This is a very strange gap in the points structure that needs to be addressed. It is basically awarding points twice (what I called double-dipping) for a single performance (winning the 5th/6th place game) and doesn't make sense competitively. It should be an easy fix for next year.
Another thing I would like to see down the road is the ranking system be used as part of the qualification process for tournaments, like tennis. I think it works extremely well. In order to do this, the ranking system needs to include more tournaments at the lower end of the points scale.
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On September 04 2013 23:52 dangthatsright wrote:Show nested quote +On September 04 2013 16:39 psychotics wrote:On August 22 2013 17:14 ChosenSC2 wrote:
Anything that promotes actually having a NA scene, I'm all for it. As someone who has eat, breathe, sleep SC for like 6 years, it's hard to even care anymore. I don't want to tune in to WCS "America" to watch 32 Koreans go at it.... wtf?
Or go to MLG in America to see 85 Koreans get the top 75 spots. I would actually love to watch MLG if the final 4 was like Sheth, ViBE, HuK, SeleCt way more than watching Korean mercenaries who just fly in for 2 days to win money. They have GSL, and if an American wants to play in GSL they can't just fly there for 2 days and win $25,0000....
The best example I can think of is like in Canada, they have a Canadian Football League. It is very possible for a player, coach, manager, employee, organization etc to make a sustainable and comfortable income being a part of it. If in the Canadian Football League every season they just had the Green Bay Packers, New England Patriots and Pittsburgh Steelers come SHIT on everyone and take any money associated with the league do you think it would survive as a League?
TL:DR: Until NA players have a reason to be full-time, something to play for, the NA scene will slowly die. Right now there is no reason unless you make money from streaming or other means. thinking like this is why na scene is so stagnant. we need to get better in na not exlcude koreans Getting shut down in a few quick matches does not constitute getting practice against the highest level of competition. Cross server ladder play should be more appropriate for that (albeit with some additional lag). As long as both local and global options exist (is this such a hard concept?), there is more motivation for na players to actually play. The local options would have to exist outside WCS though, at least with the current format.
With a few tweaks at the bottom of WCS, I think local options can exist within WCS.
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To address your supposed con to Region Locking the WCS. You mentioned that the problem with Region Locking is that the EU/NA players lose their quality of practise by losing their ability to have matches against the koreans.
This statement is totally invalid in my opinion. What happens right now is that the koreans play online in like 4-6 matches and then go to play live where they wreck all the foreign competition. This is no real training to make the foreigners improve. RegionLocking would address this issue much more effectively because it forces the koreans who still want to compete in the foreign scene to actually move there in their Acer-team houses for example and thus be playing on the EU/NA ladder so that the players get more practise with the koreans over time instead of just owning them and leaving.
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On September 04 2013 23:56 Sherlock117 wrote:Show nested quote +On September 04 2013 13:09 vthree wrote:On September 04 2013 09:08 Sherlock117 wrote:First of all, sorry for the long post. I've been thinking long and hard about how the system works and have some thoughts that I want to explain. But to really explain things requires some words! I think the WCS is pretty good actually, but with a few tweaks a lot more can be accomplished. One problem with WCS I've heard Xenocider mention is that right now there are basically 3 opportunities in a year for up-and-comers to make a name for themselves in the WCS qualifiers. Is it worth it for an up-and-comer to devote 30+ hours a week for a very small chance to qualify and maybe win $100 once every couple months? Some of the biggest problem with the current WCS system I see are:1. Suffocation by Korean pros 2. Not enough opportunities for up-and-comers to make a name 3. Prize money not properly scaling 4. WCS points not properly scaling I come at this with a pretty big background in tennis and understand all levels of the pro scene very well there. I am currently working on developing pro tennis competition in my local area. So my thoughts on this will be very biased towards what is done there. However, I think the Starcraft competitive scene most resembles the tennis competitive scene and should learn as many lesson from it as possible. People try to compare Starcraft to other sports, usually team sports, but the infrastructure is too different to come at it from this view point. So now I would like to explain what I mean by each of these problems and propose some solutions. Maybe these aren't perfect solutions, but I hope you think about them and maybe tweak them a little bit yourself to make them even better. 1. Suffocation by Korean prosThis one is pretty obvious. WCS America is just another region for Koreans to compete, albeit mostly Koreans who are popular in the American scene. How can we get people to be interested in watching WCS America? What would make people want to tune in? Personally, I find myself making sure to tune in when it is one of my favorite players playing an important match, and my favorite players are either popular Koreans or Europeans who play my race Terran (so Polt, Taeja, Lucifron, Happy) or almost ANY American player (Scarlett, ViBe, HuK, etc.). In the WCS Season 2 Global Finals the player I cared about most was Scarlett, followed by Polt and Naniwa. I did whatever I could to make sure I would be able to watch the Scarlett vs Bomber quarterfinal. This match was an very important (and competitive) match involving a player I cared about. So to summarize, an all-korean WCS America is boring, and a region locked WCS America would be lame to watch. Let's make it something we want to watch! How do we do this? 2. Not enough opportunities for up-and-comers to make a nameAgain, as it stands right now, the motivation for an up-and-comer to devote 30 hours a week for several months of intensive training is to try his hand at the WCS qualifiers 3 times a year and maybe, maaaaaaaybe get a spot in premier league. This is the problem people have been talking about in this thread and some people aren't understanding. Yes, the American players just aren't as good as Koreans in general, but the main issue is there is little motivation for Americans to become good right now. In order to increase motivation there needs to be a good scaling of goals (different levels of prize money) which are obtainable for local up-and-comers at the lower levels. 3. Prize money not properly scalingThe way I see WCS currently, if you qualify for WCS challenger league, great! That's a step in the right direction. But you win absolutely no money unless you qualify for premier league. If you do, you either get $100, $200, or $300 depending on which slot you qualified through (bracket stage, group stage 1st place, or group stage 2nd place). But wait, if you do qualify, you get an additional $1500 next season by playing in premier league. So as a challenger league player you should actually look at it as I either make nada, nothing, zilch, or I make $1600-$1800. In my opinion, that gap is the biggest single issue with WCS not creating opportunities for the up and coming players. Then, there is no difference between 25-32 and 17-24 in premier league and only a very small difference between that and 9-16. 4. Points not properly scalingThe issue is exactly the same as the issue above. Non-qualifying players get 25 points, qualifying players get either 150 or 200. That's too big a gap and the 25 points are basically worthless. But there is another, more important issue with ranking points. At this point, the rankings are essentially only worhwhile to people trying to qualify for the year end finals. I'm fine with that for now, though it is something to improve in the future. Blizzard wanted to make sure to not completely stifle other tournaments and throw out some points for other tournaments satisfying certain requirements. But the way I see it, the only qualifyers for the year end finals (the only thing the rankings are good for right now) will be those who made it to season finals at least twice, or placed in the top 2 at one of the season finals. Essentially nothing else matters. So instead of rewarding consistent performance and determining who the best player is, the rankings reward the players who perform well over a 3 day period. A few examples: A consistent player who finishes 9th-16th in a couple WCS seasons and maybe just couldn't push through in a 3rd season and finishes 6th place, while winning several non-WCS tournaments (maybe an IEM and an MLG) should be considered a possible candidate for being in the top 16 players in the world. This person would have something like 2600 points and probably finish the year ranked 25-30. A player who does absolutely nothing in non-WCS tournaments, only qualifies for one WCS season, scrapes by in 5th place, and then somehow miraculously wins the global finals ends up with 3500 points and something like 10th-15th. The biggest issue to me is that finishing 6th in a season gets you 500 points, while finishing 5th gets you 1000 points, and finishing 4th gets you 1250 points. That's just a wonky point scale and needs to be tweaked. Or somebody like Naniwa has some really solid results in WCS and out and is in the running for the year-end-finals, but then has one bad day by dropping to challenger league in the round of 32 and now has 0 chance of making it. Why? His only hope at this point would be to win at least 1 Tier I non-WCS tournament and one or two Tier II tournaments. Solutions?I said I would come at this with a view of how tennis works, because I think Starcraft would succeed very much if they tweaked some things in the way they are done with tennis. 4. Point scalingPoint scaling is a very easy fix. Tennis has the very most important tournaments, the grand slams, worth twice as much as the still-important-but-not-quite-as-much tournaments. This feels like a good balance. Leave season finals where they are at, but make Tier I tournaments worth twice as much as they are currently (winner gets 1500 instead of 750) and payout points further down in the standings on a tournament-by-tournament basis. Possibly reduce the WCS seasons so the winner gets 1000 and so on appropriately as these tournaments are more money winners for the players and exclusive qualifiers for season finals. Right now there is too much double-dipping of points each season within WCS tournaments making non-WCS tournaments irrelevant. Tier II tournaments could be either 750 or 1000 depending on prize money, again with more spots getting points lower down. A new Tier III tournament tier could be added awarding somewhere between 200-500 points to the winner depending on prize money. These could be region locked tournaments. 3. Money scalingAnother easy fix without the answer being "More money!". Change the money for premier league to: 25-32: $750 17-24: $1250 13-16: $1750 9-12: $2500 This makes each win in Premier league worthwhile. What else does it do? It frees up an additional $9000 in the prize money that can be used elsewhere! Where? In challenger league and it's qualifiers. This actually doesn't make the 17-32 finishers lose out as much as you think because they will won some more money down in challenger league. It just spreads more money to challenger league players. Changes for the challenger league? Have the bracket stage be about winning the money, have the group stage be about qualifying for premier league or challenger league next season. Bracket winners get $500, runners-up get $300, 3rd place gets $200, and first round losers $100. That only eats up $4800 of the extra money and everyone who qualifies gets paid! What about the rest of the money? Hold off a minute and I'll give you my thought.
2. More opportunities for up-and-comersIncrease the number of qualifiers and drop outs each season of wcs to 24 instead of 8, adding an additional round to the bracket stage of challenger league with the winners getting $0 (or maybe $50?). Have qualifiers spread throughout the WCS season, once every few weeks. Some are open to anybody and offer no prize money, only challenger league qualification. Some are region locked and offer some of that $4000 leftover prize money as well as challenger league qualification. Oh, wait! That also solves some of #1, suffocation by Korean pros, while at the same time not region locking!!!!I'm a numbers guy, so I could go into more detail about how the wcs system should work and give exact numbers and all that, but that's not necessary. Try and get the big idea So please consider this, and maybe offer some tweaks that would make it even better! Although I agree with the many of these points. I just want to point out the issue with points scaling (more points for non-WCS events). Unlike tennis where most of the top 50 pros can attend most of the tournaments. This is not the case for non-WCS events like MLG, Dreamhack, etc. Sure, some tournaments have qualifiers. But it still doesn't take away the fact that the EG, TL, players (and HyuN) just gets a lot more opportunity to attend foreign events. Another great point. However, at the moment all outside tournaments are essentially irrelevant. Do you think the ranking system should only include WCS results because not every pro makes it to all tournaments? Even in pro tennis the normal ATP 250 and 500 events only have something like 10 of the top 50 players playing, and that's ok. A 500 level event is still worth 1/4 of a grand slam. In WCS winning a Tier I non-WCS tournament is 750 points while winning a regional + season finals is on the order of 4000 points. Don't you think it would be a good idea to make the most important non-WCS tournaments, like IEM, worth a little bit more in the points system? Maybe 1000 points for IEM and then 2000 points for season finals and 1500 points for regionals would be a bit better. Also, my biggest issue with points scaling is the difference between finishing 4th/5th and finishing 6th in a season. This is a very strange gap in the points structure that needs to be addressed. It is basically awarding points twice (what I called double-dipping) for a single performance (winning the 5th/6th place game) and doesn't make sense competitively. It should be an easy fix for next year. Another thing I would like to see down the road is the ranking system be used as part of the qualification process for tournaments, like tennis. I think it works extremely well. In order to do this, the ranking system needs to include more tournaments at the lower end of the points scale.
1000 for IEM and 1500 for Regional would pretty much take up all the hype from regionals. Why fight for 1500 points through 2-3 months when you can pick up 1000 via a weekend event?
And those events aren't irrelevant at all, Naniwa/MC wouldn't be in Top 16 without non WCS events. Revival would be right on the edge. HerO and JD would not be 'safe' like they are now. That is 5/16 players being affected a lot by non-WCS events.
And you mentioned that regionals+season finals is 4000 points. But that is basically 2 tournaments, It is like winning a Masters event AND a Grand Slam. And your comparison for ATP 500 events remains similar in scale.
Global = 2x Regional = 4x Tier 1
Grand Slam = 2x Masters 1000 = 4x ATP 500
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On September 05 2013 01:07 vthree wrote:Show nested quote +On September 04 2013 23:56 Sherlock117 wrote:On September 04 2013 13:09 vthree wrote:On September 04 2013 09:08 Sherlock117 wrote:First of all, sorry for the long post. I've been thinking long and hard about how the system works and have some thoughts that I want to explain. But to really explain things requires some words! I think the WCS is pretty good actually, but with a few tweaks a lot more can be accomplished. One problem with WCS I've heard Xenocider mention is that right now there are basically 3 opportunities in a year for up-and-comers to make a name for themselves in the WCS qualifiers. Is it worth it for an up-and-comer to devote 30+ hours a week for a very small chance to qualify and maybe win $100 once every couple months? Some of the biggest problem with the current WCS system I see are:1. Suffocation by Korean pros 2. Not enough opportunities for up-and-comers to make a name 3. Prize money not properly scaling 4. WCS points not properly scaling I come at this with a pretty big background in tennis and understand all levels of the pro scene very well there. I am currently working on developing pro tennis competition in my local area. So my thoughts on this will be very biased towards what is done there. However, I think the Starcraft competitive scene most resembles the tennis competitive scene and should learn as many lesson from it as possible. People try to compare Starcraft to other sports, usually team sports, but the infrastructure is too different to come at it from this view point. So now I would like to explain what I mean by each of these problems and propose some solutions. Maybe these aren't perfect solutions, but I hope you think about them and maybe tweak them a little bit yourself to make them even better. 1. Suffocation by Korean prosThis one is pretty obvious. WCS America is just another region for Koreans to compete, albeit mostly Koreans who are popular in the American scene. How can we get people to be interested in watching WCS America? What would make people want to tune in? Personally, I find myself making sure to tune in when it is one of my favorite players playing an important match, and my favorite players are either popular Koreans or Europeans who play my race Terran (so Polt, Taeja, Lucifron, Happy) or almost ANY American player (Scarlett, ViBe, HuK, etc.). In the WCS Season 2 Global Finals the player I cared about most was Scarlett, followed by Polt and Naniwa. I did whatever I could to make sure I would be able to watch the Scarlett vs Bomber quarterfinal. This match was an very important (and competitive) match involving a player I cared about. So to summarize, an all-korean WCS America is boring, and a region locked WCS America would be lame to watch. Let's make it something we want to watch! How do we do this? 2. Not enough opportunities for up-and-comers to make a nameAgain, as it stands right now, the motivation for an up-and-comer to devote 30 hours a week for several months of intensive training is to try his hand at the WCS qualifiers 3 times a year and maybe, maaaaaaaybe get a spot in premier league. This is the problem people have been talking about in this thread and some people aren't understanding. Yes, the American players just aren't as good as Koreans in general, but the main issue is there is little motivation for Americans to become good right now. In order to increase motivation there needs to be a good scaling of goals (different levels of prize money) which are obtainable for local up-and-comers at the lower levels. 3. Prize money not properly scalingThe way I see WCS currently, if you qualify for WCS challenger league, great! That's a step in the right direction. But you win absolutely no money unless you qualify for premier league. If you do, you either get $100, $200, or $300 depending on which slot you qualified through (bracket stage, group stage 1st place, or group stage 2nd place). But wait, if you do qualify, you get an additional $1500 next season by playing in premier league. So as a challenger league player you should actually look at it as I either make nada, nothing, zilch, or I make $1600-$1800. In my opinion, that gap is the biggest single issue with WCS not creating opportunities for the up and coming players. Then, there is no difference between 25-32 and 17-24 in premier league and only a very small difference between that and 9-16. 4. Points not properly scalingThe issue is exactly the same as the issue above. Non-qualifying players get 25 points, qualifying players get either 150 or 200. That's too big a gap and the 25 points are basically worthless. But there is another, more important issue with ranking points. At this point, the rankings are essentially only worhwhile to people trying to qualify for the year end finals. I'm fine with that for now, though it is something to improve in the future. Blizzard wanted to make sure to not completely stifle other tournaments and throw out some points for other tournaments satisfying certain requirements. But the way I see it, the only qualifyers for the year end finals (the only thing the rankings are good for right now) will be those who made it to season finals at least twice, or placed in the top 2 at one of the season finals. Essentially nothing else matters. So instead of rewarding consistent performance and determining who the best player is, the rankings reward the players who perform well over a 3 day period. A few examples: A consistent player who finishes 9th-16th in a couple WCS seasons and maybe just couldn't push through in a 3rd season and finishes 6th place, while winning several non-WCS tournaments (maybe an IEM and an MLG) should be considered a possible candidate for being in the top 16 players in the world. This person would have something like 2600 points and probably finish the year ranked 25-30. A player who does absolutely nothing in non-WCS tournaments, only qualifies for one WCS season, scrapes by in 5th place, and then somehow miraculously wins the global finals ends up with 3500 points and something like 10th-15th. The biggest issue to me is that finishing 6th in a season gets you 500 points, while finishing 5th gets you 1000 points, and finishing 4th gets you 1250 points. That's just a wonky point scale and needs to be tweaked. Or somebody like Naniwa has some really solid results in WCS and out and is in the running for the year-end-finals, but then has one bad day by dropping to challenger league in the round of 32 and now has 0 chance of making it. Why? His only hope at this point would be to win at least 1 Tier I non-WCS tournament and one or two Tier II tournaments. Solutions?I said I would come at this with a view of how tennis works, because I think Starcraft would succeed very much if they tweaked some things in the way they are done with tennis. 4. Point scalingPoint scaling is a very easy fix. Tennis has the very most important tournaments, the grand slams, worth twice as much as the still-important-but-not-quite-as-much tournaments. This feels like a good balance. Leave season finals where they are at, but make Tier I tournaments worth twice as much as they are currently (winner gets 1500 instead of 750) and payout points further down in the standings on a tournament-by-tournament basis. Possibly reduce the WCS seasons so the winner gets 1000 and so on appropriately as these tournaments are more money winners for the players and exclusive qualifiers for season finals. Right now there is too much double-dipping of points each season within WCS tournaments making non-WCS tournaments irrelevant. Tier II tournaments could be either 750 or 1000 depending on prize money, again with more spots getting points lower down. A new Tier III tournament tier could be added awarding somewhere between 200-500 points to the winner depending on prize money. These could be region locked tournaments. 3. Money scalingAnother easy fix without the answer being "More money!". Change the money for premier league to: 25-32: $750 17-24: $1250 13-16: $1750 9-12: $2500 This makes each win in Premier league worthwhile. What else does it do? It frees up an additional $9000 in the prize money that can be used elsewhere! Where? In challenger league and it's qualifiers. This actually doesn't make the 17-32 finishers lose out as much as you think because they will won some more money down in challenger league. It just spreads more money to challenger league players. Changes for the challenger league? Have the bracket stage be about winning the money, have the group stage be about qualifying for premier league or challenger league next season. Bracket winners get $500, runners-up get $300, 3rd place gets $200, and first round losers $100. That only eats up $4800 of the extra money and everyone who qualifies gets paid! What about the rest of the money? Hold off a minute and I'll give you my thought.
2. More opportunities for up-and-comersIncrease the number of qualifiers and drop outs each season of wcs to 24 instead of 8, adding an additional round to the bracket stage of challenger league with the winners getting $0 (or maybe $50?). Have qualifiers spread throughout the WCS season, once every few weeks. Some are open to anybody and offer no prize money, only challenger league qualification. Some are region locked and offer some of that $4000 leftover prize money as well as challenger league qualification. Oh, wait! That also solves some of #1, suffocation by Korean pros, while at the same time not region locking!!!!I'm a numbers guy, so I could go into more detail about how the wcs system should work and give exact numbers and all that, but that's not necessary. Try and get the big idea So please consider this, and maybe offer some tweaks that would make it even better! Although I agree with the many of these points. I just want to point out the issue with points scaling (more points for non-WCS events). Unlike tennis where most of the top 50 pros can attend most of the tournaments. This is not the case for non-WCS events like MLG, Dreamhack, etc. Sure, some tournaments have qualifiers. But it still doesn't take away the fact that the EG, TL, players (and HyuN) just gets a lot more opportunity to attend foreign events. Another great point. However, at the moment all outside tournaments are essentially irrelevant. Do you think the ranking system should only include WCS results because not every pro makes it to all tournaments? Even in pro tennis the normal ATP 250 and 500 events only have something like 10 of the top 50 players playing, and that's ok. A 500 level event is still worth 1/4 of a grand slam. In WCS winning a Tier I non-WCS tournament is 750 points while winning a regional + season finals is on the order of 4000 points. Don't you think it would be a good idea to make the most important non-WCS tournaments, like IEM, worth a little bit more in the points system? Maybe 1000 points for IEM and then 2000 points for season finals and 1500 points for regionals would be a bit better. Also, my biggest issue with points scaling is the difference between finishing 4th/5th and finishing 6th in a season. This is a very strange gap in the points structure that needs to be addressed. It is basically awarding points twice (what I called double-dipping) for a single performance (winning the 5th/6th place game) and doesn't make sense competitively. It should be an easy fix for next year. Another thing I would like to see down the road is the ranking system be used as part of the qualification process for tournaments, like tennis. I think it works extremely well. In order to do this, the ranking system needs to include more tournaments at the lower end of the points scale. 1000 for IEM and 1500 for Regional would pretty much take up all the hype from regionals. Why fight for 1500 points through 2-3 months when you can pick up 1000 via a weekend event? And those events aren't irrelevant at all, Naniwa/MC wouldn't be in Top 16 without non WCS events. Revival would be right on the edge. HerO and JD would not be 'safe' like they are now. That is 5/16 players being affected a lot by non-WCS events. And you mentioned that regionals+season finals is 4000 points. But that is basically 2 tournaments, It is like winning a Masters event AND a Grand Slam. And your comparison for ATP 500 events remains similar in scale. Global = 2x Regional = 4x Tier 1 Grand Slam = 2x Masters 1000 = 4x ATP 500
Except that the regionals are essentially qualifiers for the season finals, so it's like having to finish in the top 4 at a masters in order to make the grand slam. I just feel like there could be some non-WCS tournaments, not all, that could be on the same level of a tennis Masters 1000 tournament.
Maybe you're right though, and that isn't reasonable with the qualification and invitation process right now for non-WCS tournaments. I just don't like it that there are only 3 of the regionals/Master 1000's a year and 3 of the global finals/grand slams a year which can only be got into by already doing well in the Masters. Qualifying for global finals (already giving you at least 500 points, the equivalent of 2nd place in a Tier I) gives you a free bonus of 500 points no matter how well you do at the global finals. THAT is what needs to be tweaked! That is the biggest point scaling issue I see right now.
I still think the most important change right now is to foster meaningful, entertaining, competitive games with up-and-coming local talent. I really think proper money scaling and region locked qualifiers could accomplish that. Fixing things at the bottom. The 2012 WCS did that and was more exciting to me, so implementing that in just a little bit could add a lot.
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EPT
