Choya says team will continue, criticizes WCS system (TIG)…

On October 02 2013 19:46 Fionn wrote:
The worst thing, to me, about the current WCS system -- outside the whole players being able to touch down in their "region" for four days every three months and then fly back to their actual home region -- is the grand slam seasonal finals. If you're going to do regions and build those storylines, then how backwards is it that those two plus months of games are completely wiped out a weak later at the grand slam finals?

Maru, a prodigy, and a huge underdog against Rain in the WCS finals, went on to beat the favored reigning champion in a memorable series. You had the iconic moment with his mom hugging him, Maru celebrating with his sister and a decent sized crowd cheering him. This was all negated when Maru had to travel to Europe the weekend after, lost -- if I remember correctly -- in the group stages, and Bomber went on to win the championship. Polt, duckdeok and Maru all had interesting tales to their championships, but none of it mattered because Bomber and Jaedong ended up in the finals and were featured on a larger scale with more money going there way.

1. Make the players have to actually reside in their home region. While it's funny to talk about Mvp being a European native, it's less humorous when he plays with awful lag in the Ro32, and then if he makes it farther, comes down for a few days and then leaves right away when the games are over. I thought the whole point of not region locking was so that Koreans could go to other regions, play on those servers, and up the competition around them by living in European/North American team houses. Currently, that is exactly the opposite of what is going on.

2. Kill the seasonal grand slams. They're awful for narrative purposes. Fucking awful. By themselves, disregarding the entire WCS story from Season 1 opening to Blizzcon Finals, the grand slams were produced awesomely -- with great crowds, good casting and hosting, and Blizzard got higher viewership than the respective regions were able to deliver with their finals. But if you actually want to tell a story and build heroes, villains, and interesting characters, YOU CANNOT continue the grand slam finals. It's incredibly damaging to crown three champions from three regions and two weeks later have all three perform poorly against people who didn't even make their respective region's finals.

Even when you had Sniper, the craziest, least likely champion of all-time in a rushed GSL season, you still had time to build him up. Was he a gigantic fluke? Is he actually good? What's going to happen next season? Will someone rise up to challenge him? If the current WCS system was implemented during the time Sniper won his GSL, then he most likely would have flown to Europe or America a week later, got his ass kicked in the group stages, and everyone shrugging their shoulders going "Well, that last season of GSL was a complete waste of time."

The prestige of a GSL and OSL title right now is like a soda that has been left out overnight. It's flat. It might taste good going down, but the aftertaste is nasty. I want Starcraft to succeed. It's the game that got me into writing and loving e-sports, so while I think it's not in a healthy position currently, it can get better with a few changes going into 2014.

Just my long ranting thoughts.

On October 03 2013 07:25 jinorazi wrote:
to me it seems blizzard wanted the best players from their regional leagues to duke it out at the end of the year. however they've also replaced those regional leagues with their own. in the end, blizzard wanted a "world finals" and being it called mlg/iem/osl/gsl/wcs/dh makes no difference since any of these leagues allowed koreans to play in it.

so i guess other than removing world finals, it makes no difference, suggesting region lock will be obsolete, unless you just dont want koreans playing in your local league...but that'll be stupid, no more stupid than kicking out messi from la liga because spanish league's best player should be spanish, not argentinian.

On October 03 2013 08:01 Ohforfsake wrote:


Messi is physically on site and thus contributing to barcelona and Spains future success in soccer. You have to be a localresident to be a part of the lineup of the club in soccer. This is exactly what those who complain on the current WCS want implemented in that system as well.

Also most major leagues in soccer has rules for how many foreigners (outside of the region) can play for a team at any given time (spanish league has no such rule to my knowledge for some reason). And all players must be approved for VISA and be accepted by the local soccer federation before they can join the team. All the other sports have a federation who governs the rules about this to maintain fairness. You just don't see them as much since there arn't any headlines about this in media.

There's a lot of people comparing to other sports without realizing how things actually work within said sport. ..

On October 03 2013 08:01 Ohforfsake wrote:


Messi is physically on site and thus contributing to barcelona and Spains future success in soccer. You have to be a localresident to be a part of the lineup of the club in soccer. This is exactly what those who complain on the current WCS want implemented in that system as well.

Also most major leagues in soccer has rules for how many foreigners (outside of the region) can play for a team at any given time (spanish league has no such rule to my knowledge for some reason). And all players must be approved for VISA and be accepted by the local soccer federation before they can join the team. All the other sports have a federation who governs the rules about this to maintain fairness. You just don't see them as much since there arn't any headlines about this in media.

There's a lot of people comparing to other sports without realizing how things actually work within said sport. ..

Because of WCS, all the foundations have crumbled. If things go like this again next year, then StarCraft 2 teams will be hurt even more."

On October 03 2013 08:19 jinorazi wrote:


there is a confusion, i was considering everything as a LAN event. i keep failing to realize non korean wcs is an offline event. (so i assume players are there to play)

i also understand the limitation is there to allow the local talent to shine (imo). for example KBL (korean basketball) did not allow foreigners, then changed it to 2, then tried to impose a foreigner height limit which was denied.

the scenes/leagues/regions where they already are the standard have no need for such limitation.

i'm all for region locking if 1) world finals is removed or 2) more world finals seed available to WCS KR. (EUFA gets more world cup seeds than AFC for same principle; player base/size and skill)

region locking and world finals conflict each other.

On October 03 2013 11:19 mrjpark wrote:
This was all a very long-winded way of saying that Koreans got screwed by the WCS format and the only way to actually keep that running is to give them incentives to play the freaking game. More seeds to BlizzCon means more money. But what should have happened is Blizzard should have run WCS separately from OSL/GSL and let those two tournaments do whatever they want. Who cares if you're overshadowed, look at how good the WCG games are and nobody gives a shit about that. It's money, so all the Koreans play. If you're worried about image Blizzard, just make it a better tournament. None of this competition-killing, monopolistic shit.

On October 03 2013 11:36 ssxsilver wrote:

But Blizzard is/was the main source of funding for Gom's prize pool to begin with. How much sense would be to fund two different tournament structures, only to have them compete with one another? Unless of course you think GomTV's going to be able to pay out big prize money off (primarily) foreigner subscriptions.