EPTChoya says team will continue, criticizes WCS system (TIG)…
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Account252508
3454 Posts
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skatbone
United States1005 Posts
On October 03 2013 02:34 Cracklefire wrote: I personally feel people have to be patient with WCS. It's relatively new. WCS is going to be a very good thing for SC because we have always needed a single primary league, like the NBA, or the NFL, but transitions take time. There are always corrections that have to be made, and other companies/models that resist the unification will have to fail. That's natural. If we're patient, WCS will allow a complete restructuring of teams and business models. I also have a feeling that crowd-funding will become a bigger and bigger part of eSports soon. Instead of trying to compete with WCS, people need to consider supplementing it. Like college sports and high school sports. There need to be major leagues for lower level players so they can step their way up to the big leagues just like mainstream sports. Imagine if there was no high school or college basketball, who would go straight from playing for fun with their friends to training for the NBA? Not many people. You have to have motivation and opportunity in stages. If the WCS makes SC more stable at the top end, then there will be a lot of money on the lower end for people who want to compete in leagues that help them become drafted by teams who will support their WCS travels and competition, etc. It's important to keep in mind that just because some of these guys say WCS is hurting StarCraft doesn't make it true. Maybe WCS is hurting their business model, but that just means their business model has to adapt. It's like saying cell phones hurt land lines, or the internet hurt newspapers. Tough. Get over it. Adapt and evolve, if you really want to continue being relevant. I wish these guys the best of luck, and I hope everyone will continue working hard to make StarCraft more stable. Really thoughtful first post. I appreciate your appeal for patience but that is because I am not an apocalyptic thinker. SC2 is definitely in a state of flux. Whether it is the death of the game, a scaling-down, or something we have yet to predict, I don't really know. My gut appeal for patience is related to my feeling that WCS is still to young to judge. Hell, I even feel that three years of a "sport" is not enough to really assess the future successes/failures of a sport, especially when the genre (e-sports) is still so young. On October 03 2013 03:13 Nebuchad wrote: Ultimately BW was better because everyone who watched BW were actual fans. When you're a fan, you tune down what you don't like, you give the whole thing positive light => hence the nostalgia now. Could we see the skill of the people who advance when their race has the advantage in SC2? Yes, we could. As a community, we just chose not to. Could we see the difference between the games despite the compositions being the same? Insofar as we could do it in BW, then we can also do it in SC2. We just don't. This is insightful. I was into BW but not a diehard. Because BW fandom was cultivated in a different time and space (I'm thinking about the bedroom VODS which are a part of SC2 history, but much less important), the feeling for the game is not directly comparable to the feeling people have for SC2. Couple that with the general entitlement that today's video game fans have with speaking their mind to the game developer and we find ourselves in a place that is quite different than the late 90s when SC1 and BW players and fans started developing their appreciation for the game. Given the discussion on the most recent Meta about access to pro-gamer replays (a rarity in BW and an entitlement in HOTS given that WCS makes all their replays available), I'd argue that the "staleness" of the game is related as much to a vastly accelerated metagame. I definitely can't explain why the HOTS metagame has seemed, in some MUs, to stagnate quickly, but again, the game hasn't even been out for a year. tl;dr Sorry to FXO-Korea, but in my opinion, we are vastly reductionist to the extent that we blame WCS for what amounts to a lot of uncertainty in the contemporary SC2 scene. | ||
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AceOfCakez
United States72 Posts
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Popkiller
3415 Posts
On October 03 2013 07:01 monkybone wrote: agree fully with this, well written. The grand slams HAS to go, they are boring and ruins GSL & OSL anyone want to calculate what the Top 16 would be if there had been no grand slams? Just curious. | ||
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jinorazi
Korea (South)4948 Posts
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. | ||
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Ohforfsake
Norway204 Posts
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. 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. .. | ||
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Kvz
United States463 Posts
They need to rethink: Battle.net / Chat interfaces / Community interface. Team games UMS games Those were what made BW fun for a lot of casuals. The solo ladder queueing isn't that fun and you can only do it for so long before going crazy. | ||
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jinorazi
Korea (South)4948 Posts
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. .. 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. | ||
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GolemMadness
Canada11044 Posts
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kaos00
United States125 Posts
It will fall into a healthy place eventually and wont even come close to dying. Just trimming off some extra weight. | ||
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Ohforfsake
Norway204 Posts
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. Not sure I understand all you're saying, so if I get any of this wrong, sorry. In my opinion there is currently no need to put a limit on number of koreans in any league. Just require local residency like any other sport. If we see a trend that western teams only import korean players and doesn't help local talant at all, then put limits in. We are not there yet. If you by world finals mean season finals then I agree with you. If you by world finals mean blizzcon, then I do not agree. Once a year there should be a clash with someone naming him/herself world champion after the event. Currently the defending champion is Parting in my view, he should be invited especially to this years final to defend his title against 15 contenders. If you have 3 regions that makes picking the contenders easy. Pick the top 5 in each region either by using the wcs points system or by hosting a special event (regional championship). I prefer the later since again that reminds me of other sports I watch. As for the league it has to be seperated from the championship. Again picking football as the example each nation has a league and a championship. The winning team of those two are rarely the same. The league promotes consistency while the championship promotes a flawless run. The same can be done in the WCS system. The player with the highest points at the end of a WCS year can be the league winner. He won't win that title by winning any specific match or tournament but by consistently preforming in tournaments and series throughout the year. On the other end of the spectre you have the world champion. He might not win any other tournament of the year since he put all his effort into prepering special tactics for this one torunament. And to ensure his opponents couldn't prepare for him he refused to play or use his tactics in other tournaments throughout the year, perfecting it for that one championship run. Both these fictive guys are equally impressive and rewarded in other sports. Handled this way it doesn't conflict and people will easily understand the system since many other sports are the same. Again, all this have already been solved in other sports. Just use their systems. And don't copy american sports, they arn't world sports. Noone cares about them outside of USA (except a fanbase aproximately the same size as broodwar elitists). Try copying sports where there's 50 or more nations actually participating in the world championships. | ||
BigFan
TLADT24920 Posts
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. this! I feel that while the WCS idea in theory wasn't bad, killing off GSL to make WCS with all regions having the same prize money etc... just made the scene a lot worse. You have players hopping from one region to another, playing it in then going back. It's not helping the scene grow and infact, it's doing a lot more harm than good. At one point, I considered GSL to be the best tourney in SCII and any winner in it was an amazing player in my book but once WCS got implemented and players started leaving GSL(WCS KR) to other regions, the prestigious league that was GSL fell to the side as yet another (high level) tourney but missing some key players etc... | ||
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Baarn
United States2702 Posts
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. Nope of it were a LAN event then nobody would have a problem. Still confused why Korea needs more representation for a world final? Just because you have a stronger pool of players to pick from doesn't mean you just get to invite more. If anything proving you are the best of the best within a group of strong players should be more meaningful in itself. It's like when a foreigner won everything outside of GSL and then giving that league a go. The way things are setup now it's Blizzard wanting to maximize viewership and looking at the short term benefits rather than promoting sc2 on a regional scale so they all grow over time. I guess blizzard isn't thinking about what they could have when they get around to making starcraft 3? | ||
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mrjpark
United States276 Posts
On October 02 2013 19:32 Hider wrote: He is clearly confusing causation with correlation. WCS didn't ruin Sc2. I think it likely wouldn't have been even worse without WCS, but eventually if there are not enough viewers watching Sc2, then the size of this scene couldn't be sustained. Thus, it has to be scaled down. But for there to be more tournaments, they have to be proven profitable. Blizzard came in and shat all over Gom's pay wall business model and ruined their viewership. Look at the view numbers from 2011/2012 and the view numbers from 2013. The contrast is appalling. More people watched brood lord infestor GSL than what we're seeing right now, even with all the crying and moaning about how boring the game was. SC2 in Korea was unsustainable with the introduction of KeSPA, but Blizzard took a contracting scene and made it implode. On October 03 2013 09:59 Baarn wrote: Nope of it were a LAN event then nobody would have a problem. Still confused why Korea needs more representation for a world final? Just because you have a stronger pool of players to pick from doesn't mean you just get to invite more. If anything proving you are the best of the best within a group of strong players should be more meaningful in itself. It's like when a foreigner won everything outside of GSL and then giving that league a go. The way things are setup now it's Blizzard wanting to maximize viewership and looking at the short term benefits rather than promoting sc2 on a regional scale so they all grow over time. I guess blizzard isn't thinking about what they could have when they get around to making starcraft 3? Because money. The fact that beating Americans and Europeans can get you the same number of points (which is correlated with money) as beating a tournament with people like Innovation, Parting, Soulkey, etc., is ridiculous. This is most likely why Blizzard didn't region lock and why WCS NA is all Koreans now. Without the Koreans to push the development of the metagame forward, the game becomes boring -- we already have the perspective of what could have been. Had we never seen Koreans play the game before, it would be a different story, but now that we know what you can do once you're a mechanical machine...it hurts to watch 2nd tier players win more points than the top 64 players in Korea by playing in an easier region. I love finale (a.k.a. duckdeok), but do you think he would have ever reached the Ro8 in Korea? And the people he beat to get there wouldn't have even made it to Code A aside from MC. 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. | ||
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ssxsilver
United States4409 Posts
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. 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. | ||
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Shinta)
United States1716 Posts
Sucks that the team is losing their title sponsor though. Tehe, I agree that having 1 tournament is hurting Korea. They should have put WCS on GOM and let the OSL operate separately (in my opinion). Having GSTL, ProLeague, WCS, and StarLeague would have been better than making GOM and OSL share WCS. But yeah, like some people are saying, Korean SC2 is in the shitter because KeSPA transferred over and didn't contribute enough to take care of the completely massive amount of players their induction brought upon. Foundation would have crumbled even without a WCS system. But seriously, contrary to what some of these replies have been saying, WCS gives me so much content that I WANT to watch... I don't understand how anyone could "stop watching sc2" because of WCS. That's just really terrible thinking. What the hell is wrong with you? lol. Because it's not region blocked? Or what? Oh well. | ||
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Dodgin
Canada39254 Posts
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. We know that Blizzard sponsored the majority if not all of the prize pool for the GSL open seasons but we don't know what % of the prize pool they provided for the following seasons, it might not be very impactful. After all GOM had a sponsor for every season(I believe). | ||
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docvoc
United States5491 Posts
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mishimaBeef
Canada2259 Posts
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ssxsilver
United States4409 Posts
On October 03 2013 11:39 Dodgin wrote: We know that Blizzard sponsored the majority if not all of the prize pool for the GSL open seasons but we don't know what % of the prize pool they provided for the following seasons, it might not be very impactful. After all GOM had a sponsor for every season(I believe). I guess I'm being presumptuous, but I just don't see how Gom could have operated the GSL w/o significant backing (they're only running WoT with Wargaming backing and Dota 2 with the Nexon partnership). Multiple people have said they funded heavily for open seasons and this WCS has 1.6 mil at stakes (albeit split across 3 regions/finals), so I can't imagine a scenario where Blizzard severely cutting funds without it making news. | ||
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