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On March 09 2014 08:21 Plansix wrote:Show nested quote +On March 09 2014 07:21 Zealously wrote:On March 09 2014 07:18 TeeTS wrote:Well, this is the last big year of professional SC2, it becomes more and more clear. Tournament organizers will drop one after another. Blizzard fucked it up during 2012 and 2013, destroying the game dynamic with some really bad balance changes. This made the game frustrating to play and boring to watch and other games were already lurking, just waiting for SC2 to show some weakness. Sad story in the end: late 2011 - early 2012 was some great time of SC2. The game was pretty well balanced, fun to play, had tons of viewers and tournaments. Good old times  I think the game is still great and fun to watch - I'm sorry that you feel otherwise but it's hardly all death and destruction The "dead game" folks haven't had a lot to do for the last couple of months, they are backed up.
I loved SC2 until mid 2013. Then the game became so unfun and frustrating to play. There are still tons of design problems in the game, that are just overshadowed in top level play right now - so noone cares about them.
That´s one big problem, that´s allways been for SC2: David Kim seems to balance only after Code S results. Protoss did poorly in fall 2011? Got a couple of major buffs (cheaper upgrades and immortal range) Zerg doing bad in season 2 of 2012? Queen range and Overlord get´s buffed! No Terrans in Code S this season? We get ghost energy and widow mines buffed, while Protoss gets nerfed.
The game is balanced around a couple of shortterm results without even looking at the real problems. D. Kim tries to get some balanced results with flicking the surface.
Also there was never a balance change reverted in SC2 history - no matter how bad it turned out to be.
This all lead to the downfall of playerbase and viewer numbers we have now. You don´t have to be apocalyptic to realise, that the game is lacking immensely behind his former peak.
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On March 09 2014 07:18 TeeTS wrote:Well, this is the last big year of professional SC2, it becomes more and more clear. Tournament organizers will drop one after another. Blizzard fucked it up during 2012 and 2013, destroying the game dynamic with some really bad balance changes. This made the game frustrating to play and boring to watch and other games were already lurking, just waiting for SC2 to show some weakness. Sad story in the end: late 2011 - early 2012 was some great time of SC2. The game was pretty well balanced, fun to play, had tons of viewers and tournaments. Good old times
The thing is, every prognosis that came during 2010-2011 was absurdly exaggerated, sponsors and fans assumed a level of growth that was never going to happen. A huge amount of money was pumped into the scene to create the infrastructure necessary to support that kind of explosive growth. And then it never happened. This is the back draft of overly optimistic investments that never payed off, and are now being cancelled or focused elsewhere.
What we are seeing is not the game dying, what we are seeing is the superfluous money and infrastructure leaving the scene. It will continue until we hit an equilibrium where the SC2 scene is no longer gobbling up more resources than it can generate. The kind of investments that were made early on were insane, the Starcraft viewer base could never support them. This is the reality check that people were predicting in early 2012, only to be laughed at and scorned. Anyone with a rudimentary grasp of mathematics could see this coming from a mile away.
I would not be surprised if we see some fairly substantial cutbacks in the Korean scene and a few more smaller organizers folding or dropping Sc2 before we hit a level where the investments actually reflect the value of the game. It's bound to happen, no need for tooth gnashing and despair when it hits. Roll with the punches, esports is a rough business.
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Im not understanding why the community is still leaving players/events, in some points i think the game and then...news like this destroy all my hopes.
Where will this go?
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On March 09 2014 09:16 Aeh wrote:
Im not understanding why the community is still leaving players/events, in some points i think the game and then...news like this destroy all my hopes.
Where will this go?
No where. MGL is still happening. LotV is still coming out. ESL is going strong. Dream Hack is still doing its thing. IEM is still going strong. GSL and proleague are still doing their thing.
As long as we keep watching, they will run events and the players will come. The only place SC2 is dying is on the forums of TL. Even Reddit doesn't really talk about it any more.
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check the viewer numbers.it tells the truth.nothing else.boring to watch.
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On March 09 2014 08:51 TeeTS wrote:Show nested quote +On March 09 2014 08:21 Plansix wrote:On March 09 2014 07:21 Zealously wrote:On March 09 2014 07:18 TeeTS wrote:Well, this is the last big year of professional SC2, it becomes more and more clear. Tournament organizers will drop one after another. Blizzard fucked it up during 2012 and 2013, destroying the game dynamic with some really bad balance changes. This made the game frustrating to play and boring to watch and other games were already lurking, just waiting for SC2 to show some weakness. Sad story in the end: late 2011 - early 2012 was some great time of SC2. The game was pretty well balanced, fun to play, had tons of viewers and tournaments. Good old times I think the game is still great and fun to watch - I'm sorry that you feel otherwise but it's hardly all death and destruction The "dead game" folks haven't had a lot to do for the last couple of months, they are backed up. I loved SC2 until mid 2013. Then the game became so unfun and frustrating to play. There are still tons of design problems in the game, that are just overshadowed in top level play right now - so noone cares about them. That´s one big problem, that´s allways been for SC2: David Kim seems to balance only after Code S results. Protoss did poorly in fall 2011? Got a couple of major buffs (cheaper upgrades and immortal range) Zerg doing bad in season 2 of 2012? Queen range and Overlord get´s buffed! No Terrans in Code S this season? We get ghost energy and widow mines buffed, while Protoss gets nerfed. The game is balanced around a couple of shortterm results without even looking at the real problems. D. Kim tries to get some balanced results with flicking the surface. Also there was never a balance change reverted in SC2 history - no matter how bad it turned out to be. This all lead to the downfall of playerbase and viewer numbers we have now. You don´t have to be apocalyptic to realise, that the game is lacking immensely behind his former peak.
HOTS killed SC2 for me too. Everyone proclaimed it the best game ever when the new units it shook up the meta, and even David Kim "realized" that "aggressive play is fun to watch" but it turned out to be worse than WOL, and since I had the Beta, I never felt the game was better than WOL.
The Swarmhost, the Widow Mine, the MSC... these are terribly designed units. No amount of "balance" changes will fix them. They are downright annoying to play against and the game really isn't fun to play casually at all for me. It's sad, because back in 2011, I loved to play SC2.
I still enjoy watching SC2, and I have hope that Starbow will take over or that Blizzard will get a new design team for LOTV. But that last line really resonates with me: You don´t have to be apocalyptic to realize, that the game is lacking immensely behind it's former peak.
SC2 isn't dead. But it certainly isn't thriving.
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Yeah I just think SC2 is lacking an X factor, I used to watch it every day now I regularly miss events. I find myself so bored, I usually read a book during matches.
One thing I do miss are fun tournaments, the way that WCS is portrayed is too serious. I miss the days when some random, computer company would host a tournament in Europe and it would be non stop clowning, like 2GD telling mother jokes to Incontrol all day, priceless. They just didn't care. I also miss game orgies at MLG, I would watch fighting games and Halo 3 in between my favorite players damn whatever happened to that, MLG is coming again right?
It would be good for the NA scene to die. SC2 doesn't need it, its better IMO as the Premier League in Football of video games. SC2 would be amazing if it was just Europe and Korean region locked. NA players could go into open brackets at MLGs and win games that way.
I don't even care if the regions go against each other. I think if they catered to a Euro audience and showed SC2 as a new hardcore sport, really marketed it to youths by putting it on cereal boxes, brought some action sports attitude to it, they could get some attention but Blizzard would really need to put its heart into it. I feel like splitting the attention three ways really makes it diluted.
Remember Polish SC2 with that insane crowd, how much passion there was, and then they stopped having crowds, weirdly for months, bring it back to that insane crowd level! Every WCS event should have crowds, even if it was just a University auditorium that could fit 50 people, they could probably get some random Dutch university auditorium to host games at for cheap.
As a fan of the games I would rather see exploding, healthy Euro scene and a Godlike competitive Korean scene than try to make the scene worse overall by trying to pretend there is an American scene and trying to float a sinking ship.
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Starcraft 2 had so much money being pumped into from sponsors who thought the scene would explode, which it did, for a short time, then the popularity wore off, mobas become more popular, and the game started to fade, so investors started pulling out. It happens with almost every game, sure some last a lot longer than others (BW, counter strike, etc) but in the end people will generally move on to something else. LoL dominates the e-sports scene now and probably will for quite awhile until the next big thing. It sucks to see sc2 falling so rapidly (barely top 10 on twitch when there's no tourneys on), but thats just how it goes. We will keep seeing companies go, but we also should be happy about the ones who stick around and who still find sc2 worthwhile, perhaps even profitable (Red Bull, Dreamhack, MLG?? GSL/Kespa). I think one of the things that made early sc2 so amazing were the crazy weekend LANs, the legendary MLG brackets and such. I wish we could have these back. I like the group format usually but it gets kind of boring when every single tournament has the 4 player group thing (Match A, match B, winner match, loser match, final match).
I doubt we'll see another explosion in popularity with sc2, maybe around LotV? Maybe the game will balance itself out somehow and reach that level of perfection that Brood War was able to hit, where the game was balanced more around maps and not the races (units like the sentry make this really tough to do though). The fact is, I've been around and played this game since 2010, and while I've lost some of my passion lately, esp hearing things like NASL going away, I still find myself playing on ladder, watching Proleague vods, Day9, tournaments that come on, because I still love this scene and because I just can't leave. enjoy what we have and try not to worry so much
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Thats some really good ideas, WoodLeague. Hope someone with the power to use these does read it.
We need changes, tournament-wise, and game-wise. Not bit by bit changes, but big ones. We need people that like to experiment.
I really like IEM for doing the 100k winner-takes-it-all thing. Those are the things we need, less routine, more action and uniquness, both ingame and outgame.
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Northern Ireland25725 Posts
In no way wish to be overly critical of the NA scene, but for the last god knows how many years it's been talk about marketability when talk shows occur, people being personalities etc, I've always felt that was too much a focus. The NA scene, much more so than even EU seems very much like an old boy's club, the same faces all the time, espousing how important it is to show personality and engage the audience, while never stepping aside themselves to give others that exposure.
The ideas of big E-sports personalities doing what they do should be something to compliment and enhance the tournament and competitive scene all-round, but in NA it seems to have nigh on supplanted actually being good at the game, and getting opportunities from that.
I don't feel MLG helped it with their continuous format changes, that's just to me of course. They have an obligation as a business to pursue other options, but even before they scaled back I felt that they had lost something of their magic. Perhaps that was over-familiarity and oversaturation but I don't feel that's everything,
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On March 09 2014 07:21 Zealously wrote:Show nested quote +On March 09 2014 07:18 TeeTS wrote:Well, this is the last big year of professional SC2, it becomes more and more clear. Tournament organizers will drop one after another. Blizzard fucked it up during 2012 and 2013, destroying the game dynamic with some really bad balance changes. This made the game frustrating to play and boring to watch and other games were already lurking, just waiting for SC2 to show some weakness. Sad story in the end: late 2011 - early 2012 was some great time of SC2. The game was pretty well balanced, fun to play, had tons of viewers and tournaments. Good old times I think the game is still great and fun to watch - I'm sorry that you feel otherwise but it's hardly all death and destruction
While the game is fun to play and to watch, it's definitely lost it's appeal compared to before. I think this is due to having way too many events in too short amount of time. Players and viewers alike are having enough, if that's possible. While I still watch the tournaments and WCS, I find that I don't pay attention much anymore and rather keep it on as a background video kind of thing.
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On March 09 2014 12:33 WoodLeagueAllStar wrote:
One thing I do miss are fun tournaments, the way that WCS is portrayed is too serious.
Yeah NASL dropped all sense of fun when they switched to WCS.
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On March 08 2014 22:30 Plansix wrote:
Man it's been over a month since we had a good "dead game" discussion and hate on Blizzard circle jerk. Good to see we still have the ability to go back to our roots.
No the game itself isn't dead, per se, just in north america it is. It's not alone either. Shit just look at the korea dota 2 league, for example. It has presented opportunities to those NA players that they wouldn't have got here. League isn't much better for amateur teams wanting to go pro. look at what happened to Team MRN. It's weird also that we have the best economy, probably, on the planet yet we can't keep esports deeply rooted here for some odd reason? We don't have many big teams here to take the next great player in. Besides if we only have one or a few tournaments to keep players even remotely motivated to support themselves until maybe one of those teams decides to pick a player or team up. Why do that when those organizations like Complexity or EG could just utilize their existing rosters? I'd love to hear from teams about that in this or another thread topic with the closure of one more opportunity close by.
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On March 09 2014 09:22 Plansix wrote:
As long as we keep watching, they will run events and the players will come. The only place SC2 is dying is on the forums of TL. Even Reddit doesn't really talk about it any more.
what a laugh.
we can say the same thing for Pac-man.
as long as we keep watching people play Pac-man they'll run events and the competitive Pac-man players will come.
the RTS genre is in decline. Blizzard knows this and is adjusting to it... they can only react to their customers tehy can not tell them what to like... and the RTS genre is going the same way as the dot eating maze game.
http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/starcraft-2/445541-fallen-starleague?page=7#131
people saying its "dying" are adding an overly emotional component to the situation.
stated more objectively, in every measurable way RTS games are being played less, watched less and consumed less.
This trend began around 2010 or so... and continues.
Starcraft is Blizzard's #3 franchise in terms of profit.... and many years ago RTS games were the cornerstone of Blizz.
Hell , Team 1 is working on a MOBA.
there will be some fun events this year..
but if anyone thinks RTS games, new innovations to the RTS genre, and the RTS competitive scene were as good as they were from 2002 to 2007 ... well.. they are dreaming in technicolour.
incidentally, dot eating maze games are fun...
they just fell out of favour as consumers' tastes changed.
dot eating maze games stopped being the #1 priority of arcade game makers... the RTS genre has experienced a similar phenomenon over the past 10 years.
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Well they can just go fuck themselves then
User was warned for this post
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On March 09 2014 09:52 ssregitoss wrote:
check the viewer numbers.it tells the truth.nothing else.boring to watch.
They're consistent. We know our audience and have for a quite a while now.
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I'm remembering the NASL rumor thread (domain registration) as if it was yesterday.
Can't put my finger on it but it never felt right to me. There was always something missing dunno. Maybe thats why it never really took off?
Thanks for your commitment!
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On March 09 2014 09:52 ssregitoss wrote:
check the viewer numbers.it tells the truth.nothing else.boring to watch.
Guess we all have to watch American Idol then. Viewer numbers don't lie!
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On March 10 2014 01:00 blackone wrote:Show nested quote +On March 09 2014 09:52 ssregitoss wrote:
check the viewer numbers.it tells the truth.nothing else.boring to watch. Guess we all have to watch American Idol then. Viewer numbers don't lie!
I'm so glad I don't own a TV anymore ^^
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EPT
