The SC History Project: Ten years of TL statistics

CyanEsports

Canada128 Posts

August 17 2015 18:29 GMT

Hello and thank you for taking time to check out the Starcraft History Project! I’ve spent a lot of time working on this and although the finished product is very different from what I set out to create, I still think that the information I’ve collected is relevant to the SC2 scene, and to all eSports in general. I believe that the history of Starcraft’s eSports scene offers us some very valuable lessons to learn from, including some important lessons that still are widely unknown or even not taken seriously.

Preface

You can skip to section three if you’re only interested in the scene from 2010 onwards. I included information of Broodwar (2004-2009) for context, to properly show the trends, and because it felt like the right thing to do, but the information in that section isn’t integral for the conclusion. You can also skip the individual article context sections if you are pressed for time. I’m hoping that this will be as accessible as possible for as many people as possible, while having as much depth as possible too.

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With this article, I’m targeting the hardcore Starcraft 2 eSports fans - the fans who have joined the scene in more recent years who may not know the story of SC2 eSports, and perhaps most importantly (at least in my mind), I’m targeting the eSports tournament organizers, Blizzard’s WCS team, and team owners/operators. I really believe that the information I’ve found can be useful for any game trying to create its own space in eSports and professional gaming, not only Starcraft.

I’m going to try and keep this article as fact-based as possible, but from time to time I’ll be offering up some anecdotes based on what I remember about a given point in time, and obviously I’ll be bringing my own personal bias to the table because I’m a human being and it's not possible to be TOTALLY unbiased! You can take those pieces of information however you wish and I will try to avoid presenting my own memories without a disclaimer.

So what exactly are you looking at? Well, early in 2015 the professional streamer/ex-pro/community personality Destiny made a blog-style post to /r/starcraft talking about how dead the subreddit was in terms of casual content. That post really got me thinking about what I could do for the community that I love so much. I had been wanting to produce some sort of Starcraft content for ages but I had no idea what I could do that people would be interested in. This post really inspired me to finally get on the ball. I’ve been in school for the past few years working on a history degree. I’m by no means an expert historian but I know how to write a history paper so I thought that I could research the foreign SC2 community and draw a timeline of the rise and fall of SC2 as the number 1 eSport. As I got deeper and deeper into the project I decided to focus on TeamLiquid.net specifically, and to extend my timeline as far back as I could go. So now I have a reasonable number of statistics and factoids on the Starcraft scene from 2004 all the way to 2014. Ten years.

I used the Internet Archive’s ‘Wayback Machine’ tool to accomplish this. Each month, I loaded the log that was closest to the 29th of the month (that was as close to the end of the month that I could get in the first log) and I recorded which news post on the front page had the highest number of comments, as well as how many comments there were. For a while at the beginning, I also logged the total number of votes cast in that month’s poll. I then took this data and graphed it on scatter plots, dividing it into two sets (pre-2010 and post-2010), hoping to see first a positive trend indicating growth, and then a negative trend indicating decline. I ended up dropping the poll stats from the project altogether though because over the years they showed no trend at all. There were many months that were sadly NOT logged in the Wayback Machine, and there were many missing days. I tried to collect data in a manner that was as consistent as I possibly could, but please keep this in mind.

Before starting in I want to mention that this is by no means a comprehensive history of all the important events that occurred in StarCraft eSports’ history. There were many many stories that I didn’t see at all. Huge events like Idra being dropped from EG don’t show up in TL’s news section. I assume that this is because Team Liquid eventually became a major StarCraft team itself and didn’t report on major happenings from its competition. While it would have been interesting to see the statistics for EVERYTHING interesting that has happened in StarCraft, the goal of the project is to create sets of data that indicate the growth and then the decline that we would expect to see, and then analyze that data to see what the community was most interested in.

No more lollygagging, lets dive into this.

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At the outset of this project, my goal was to attempt to identify key moments in Starcraft’s history that indicated what the community valued most, and therefore identifying exactly what it was that made the game so popular. I hypothesized that I would find that the foreign scene was a large draw for many people, and the announcement of WCS in 2013 ended up hurting the scene over the past two years because it forced many foreign players and teams out of the spotlight.

THE EARLY RESULTS

I originally wanted to start in the year 2010 and look exclusively at /r/starcraft. I thought that there was plenty of content on the internet already on the Broodwar years, and I felt that /r/starcraft was the internet’s hub for all things SC2. When I thought harder about how the project would work though, I realized that if I wanted to show decline in 2010-2014, I should first show growth pre-2010. The earliest log for /r/starcraft on The Wayback Machine is for 2009. The subreddit hadn’t existed long enough to be a viable resource of Broodwar information, so I went to TeamLiquid.net for my information. Before we jump straight into the numbers, I’d like to point out that although the comment totals on news posts is very low in the start, the number of votes cast in the polls is quite a bit higher. In 2004, the cumulative comments on the top news post from every month is 535, while the cumulative number of votes cast in the monthly polls is 12,770. This is a large part of why I wanted to measure the polls on TL. Had they shown the trends that would have made it a worthwhile set of data to study, they would have given a fantastic indication of how many lurkers there were on TL through the years. It also might have potentially shown any differences in opinion between the hardcore and the more casual audiences. Sadly, the poll scatter plot for 2004-2009 ended up looking like this :
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There was no trend to look into with this set of data, so I dropped polls from the project.

2004-2009 TEAM LIQUID NEWS STATISTICS

Thankfully, the news comments were much kinder to me. This is the scatter plot of the highest total comments on a TL news article each month from 2004-2009:

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So the strategy here is to examine the linear regression and identify which articles found themselves above the line. I’m working under the assumption that those news stories were either driving growth, or were written on topics that were controversial.

I want to mention before I start, that the point waaaaay up there
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Is the thread for a showmatch between Idra and the Chinese Zerg player F91. I’ll offer some more context on this later, but I wanted to acknowledge this particular story right away because it's such an obvious outlier. Even without that article, there is still a very clear positive trend.

Article summaries/contextualization

I’ll go year by year, identifying which articles fell above the linear regression, and I'll try to contextualize what made them interesting:

2004

- July: A website specializing in gear for Korean eSports teams opens sales for foreign fans.

- November: TL writer/staffer ‘mensrea’s ‘ farewell/resignation letter is posted.

2005

- January: Foreign pro ‘Rekrul’ posts his retirement announcement and writes a blog explaining some of the hard facts about life in Korea, the Korean eSports scene, and Korean team houses. Tl;dr – eSports in Korea isn’t as big as everyone in the foreign scene thinks it is.

- February: Announcement of a clan war series featuring the European team ‘Templars of Twilight’ who would be playing against various ‘well-known’ Korean teams/clans, the first of which happened the day after this post vs the clan HyO. To quote directly from the post ‘…these Clanwars will be a rare opportunity similar to WCG of competition between Korean and non-Korean gosu Gamers’.

- March: Matchups are revealed for the ‘Starcraft Mystery Map Invitational’. Team Europe vs Team Asia. The tournament was organized by Blizzard. Player lineup for each team as seen here:
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- April: Professional player ‘Elky’ attends a poker tournament and does quite well. This article was posted on day 2 of said tournament while Elky was in 12th place of 83 participants.

2006
- August: Biographical-style write up on Boxer before he entered military service.

2007

- January: Announcement of a showmatch/tournament for TeamLiquid users vs the Big Game Hunters community on BGHers.com

- March 1: Announcement of the 5th tournament in the ‘Superfight’ tournament series. First 3 players announced as those who were awarded at the KeSPA awards (Savior, NaDa, Bisu) and 6 players selected by fans through an online poll. Tournament series ‘Superfight #5’ update, revealing the players and map pool. The players participating are Nada, oov, Midas, Savior, July, Jaedong, Bisu, nal_ra, and Anytime.

- March 2: Tournament series ‘Superfight #5’ update, revealing the players and map pool. The players participating are Nada, oov, Midas, Savior, July, Jaedong, Bisu, nal_ra, and Anytime. (NOTE: I included two entries from March because the number of comments on them were 144 and 142 respectively, making them essentially tied.)

2008

- January: New map pool announced for the Korean league OSL

- May 1 & 2: Two separate articles in which the VODs for the Razer TSL semifinals were posted. The comments on the threads numbered 655 and 633 respectively. Players featured were Nony, BRAT_OK, lefNaij, and Draco.

- August: An order of CJentus team shirts arrive to be sold to TL.net users.

- September: ‘TeamLiquid Attack’ series with the German Zerg ‘MoonDragon’. TL Attack is a show where top foreigners played regular fans while the games are cast on stream. Moondragon is described in the thread as ‘the best Zerg in the world’ and ‘the master of BM’. Nony scheduled to commentate.

- October: TL Attack with Nony. Kennigit and Fakesteve to commentate.

- December: VODs and Replays for the ‘TeamLiquid.net Liquibition 2008’ tournament series. Canadian IefNaij played vs the Russian BRAT_OK. IefNaij wins.

2009

- March: VODs for the Liquibition Broodsport tournament series showmatch. Idra vs F91. F91 takes the series. This is by far the most popular news topic in the 2004-2009 period. Idra was viewed by many as the strongest American player. F91 was considered the best Chinese Zerg player. The Liquibition series was much like IPL’s Fight Club, with F91 winning 5 straight matches and left undefeated, building his fanbase in a similar way to Hyun circa 2012. This is perhaps the only topic that I would label as ‘controversial’ outright. F91 takes the series and much of the thread becomes fans either shitting on or defending Idra. I believe this is a large part of what made this thread so popular. I believe that it's important to note that a community figure who caused many polarizing opinions was the cause of this.

ALRIGHT. To restate, those are the articles that fell above the line of standard deviation on TeamLiquid.net from 2004 to 2009. So let’s analyze what we have. Its fine to have this but what does it MEAN!?

ANALYZING THE DATA (04-09)

I categorized each of these popular news post under either ‘Korean’, ‘Foreign’, or ‘Other’ (‘Other’ is anything that pertains specifically to TeamLiquid.net as a website). I then made this graph:

First off, to be clear, 2009 had only three (3) months logged in the WayBack Machine, as opposed to the twelve (12) I would be hoping to see. I don’t believe that this was a slow year for Starcraft necessarily, but I simply don’t know. The lack of logs are what account for the dip in statistics, not a decline of the scene.

In total, we’ve got seven (7) Korean stories, nine (9) foreign stories and two (2) stories classified as ‘other’. Is there anything that we can learn from this graph though? Well, I think so. The following is opinion and speculation coming up, so take it for what you will. It's simply my own analysis and I encourage you to draw your own conclusions on what I’m presenting!

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Starcraft 2 Wings of Liberty went into beta in February of 2010 and was released in July of the same year. Starcraft 2 was released to an enormous amount of hype, built on the backs of a hugely successful professional scene in Korea and a rise of professional gaming in Europe and North America. It was an exciting time to be an eSports fan. For a couple of years, brands like MLG, Dreamhack, ESL, TeamLiquid, Evil Geniuses, and many more grew their businesses largely on the back of the Starcraft scene. Unfortunately though, Starcraft 2 went into decline.

Here’s the scatterplot for the comments on TeamLiquid news articles from 2010-2014:

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Article summaries/contextualization

So just like I did in the 04-09 section, I’m going to list the stories that fell above the linear regression to provide you with some context.

2010

- April: Blizzard awards TL.net with 500 beta keys to give out to the community.

- May: The conclusion of the Kespa match-fixing scandal, perhaps one of the biggest eSports news stories of all time.

- September: GOMTV announces the Global Starcraft 2 Leauge (GSL). The goal of this league according to the announcement is to provide an accessible global StarCraft league for both players and viewers from all over the world.

2011

- January: TSL 3 is announced under PokerStrategy.net sponsorship. Featuring mainly NA and EU professionals.

- August: HuK parts ways with Team Liquid. As far as I can tell, this is the biggest news story that has ever been on TeamLiquid.net.

- November: New line of TeamLiquid shirts and posters is announced.

2012

- April: TSL 4 is announced.

- June: The ‘Liquid Rising’ documentary is released under a ‘pay what you can’ model.

- August: Jinro retires. The Wayback machine log for this month is unfortunately on the same day that the article was released (the seventh) so this isn’t an optimal statistic, which makes it even more impressive. The number of comments on the article in a matter of hours are staggering. It still doesn’t beat HuK though!

- December – EG and TL partner to produce English language casts of Proleague broadcasts. This is during the EG/TL Proleague partnership days.

2013

- January: TeamLiquid Legacy Starleague announced. The third edition of a Broodwar Tournament series.

- June: TL+ is announced for teamliquid.net, offering users premium features.

- October: Interview with Blizzard’s eSports director, Kim Phan. The state of WCS and the plans for the future are discussed.

2014

- February: Mana and Bunny join Team Liquid.

- September: TL power ranking for August 2014. A popular regular feature on Team Liquid, returning for the first time in a long time.

Analyzing ‘10-‘14’s numbers

Once again, I categorized each story under ‘Korean’, Foreign’, or ‘Other’ depending on what the article was addressing. Here’s the graph:

The picture that’s being painted seems fairly clear to me. Interest in Korean Starcraft outside of Korea just isn’t as high as the interest for foreign players. The involvement from the community on stories about foreign players and tournaments is just higher. In fact, it seems that interest in Korean players and the Korean scene is at an all-time low.

With this data, we can draw some conclusions about what happened to SC2 as a spectator sport and why it went into such harsh decline. This isn’t going to be anything new, but I have numbers to back it up. The dominance of Korean professionals who shut foreign players out from WCS and various other tournaments drove many viewers away.

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People like cheering for the home team. People like cheering for the team/player that they can identify the most with. Nationality is often something that’s very identifiable. When a player wins a large tournament, there’s lots of potential for their local news agencies to report on them and expose their name, their team, and the game to brand new people. When people who have never heard of Starcraft tune into a tournament and they see their national flag next to a player’s name, they have incentive to watch that player, cheer for that player, and follow that player’s story.

Past round 16 at any given StarCraft tournament, the opportunities for fans to find those players that they can identify with in this way are very few. Korea is the strongest nation of gamers in the world, and by far and away the strongest nation for StarCraft. Within the SC2 community, it's really a joke. The fact that any player outside of Korea is called a ‘foreigner’ is itself indicative of the strength of Korean StarCraft. StarCraft lives there. That’s where its most at home. When a foreign player makes mistake in a tournament, the colloquial phrase used by fans is that they ‘went full foreigner.’ It really isn’t the best attitude to be broadcasting to potential fans. It really is just a fact of life though. Koreans win tournaments. Foreign players have very very rarely come out on top of Korean players, even B-teamers.

Not only does this matter in terms of attracting and retaining a casual audience, but it is also hugely important for attracting teams to the game.

In 2013 when WCS was announced, there were more than a few rumors that major League of Legends LCS teams were scouting for SC2 players. TSM, Cloud 9, and CLG were all names being tossed around within the community. CLG’s general manager even confirmed that the team was interested in expanding to Starcraft 2 both on twitter and on /r/starcraft . So what happened? Why didn’t any of these teams invest in Starcraft?

In my opinion, they didn’t invest because Blizzard’s WCS is simply too hostile to be a safe investment for NA and EU eSports organizations. These teams who are based in North America, and Europe, who have North American and European sponsors, these teams who target the North American and European eSports fans. They want a player who will grab as many eyes as possible and who can rep their organization and their sponsors as effectively as possible. Quite frankly, Korean players aren’t as effective at doing these things outside of Korea. There is often a language barrier, many players have a problem with shyness and they often come across as bland to casual viewers. There are obviously exceptions, and I am in no way trying to diss Korean professional StarCraft players, but these things do play a role in the decisions each team makes. NA and EU teams appear to prefer NA and EU players. Local heroes and fan favourites.

Having the major LCS teams announce StarCraft divisions would have been such a boon for SC2 in 2013. It would have exposed a huge portion of the League of Legends community to the game, bringing us back to the issue of players being easily identifiable with the audience. When I watch LoL or CS:GO with my friends, I cheer for teams I recognize. I know nothing about the scene, but I recognize EG, coL, Fnatic, TL, Flipsid3 and other STARCRAFT teams. It makes it exciting. It gives me a reason to watch and a reason to be excited for what's happening.

At the time of writing, TSM has 19 players signed across five games , CLG has 26 players across six games , and Cloud9 has 41 players across eight games (these numbers are all excluding management and coaching staff). Most of the games that these teams are involved in are 5-person-squad games (LoL, CS:GO, Smite, Halo, etc). A five person squad is a lot more of an investment than one Starcraft player. It's not good that these teams see more validity in paying five salaries, five sets of plane tickets, and five beds in a hotel to send their Smite team (for example) to a tournament than one Starcraft player. Management for these teams have decided that other eSport games are more marketable than StarCraft 2.

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When it comes to eSports in general, this data suggests that the most important thing to stimulate growth is to ensure that the professional scene is locally involved. Try to base your scene as locally as possible. If you want to grow your scene in one region, focus your efforts and attention in that region. A European team winning an American tournament won’t stimulate as much growth in America as if an American team were to win. It does seem like fairly common sense.

It is possible that the trends seen in the data is representative of a decline in TL.net’s community rather than the SC2 scene at large. I think that’s highly unlikely though. TeamLiquid is still the largest fansite for all things Starcraft eSports. The upward trend from 2004-2009 and the decline shown in 2010-2014 fits everything that we know about the scene and what happened to StarCraft 2’s popularity. I believe that this data does not just represent trends for TeamLiquid.net as a self contained entity, but rather it represents the scene as a whole.

By now, if you’re still reading, you’re expecting me to say that the best way to help WCS and SC2’s pro scene is to region lock WCS completely and for tournament organizers to put a higher value on doing foreigner driven content. It isn’t as simple as that though.

Starcraft 2 has lost many of the professionals and personalities that were oh-so-popular ‘back in the day.' Remember the graph of data from 2004-2009? Remember the Idra outlier? That guy is gone now. Nony is gone. Grubby is playing Heroes. Even players who started to rise up in recent years are starting to leave us, such as Kane and for a brief and horrifying period of time, Scarlett and Naniwa. I’m not saying that there are no interesting players left in foreign Starcraft, but it will take time to make new and returning fans fall in love with these people in the way that people did in 2010 and earlier.
There’s also the issue that it may simply be too late. A very vocal set of people have always complained since the announcement of WCS that the only players worth watching are the players who are the most skilled, meaning the Koreans. It may be the case that too many of the more casual fans have moved on. To watch LCS for their region, to watch DotA where the playing field is fairly level, to watch CS:GO which is largely European dominated, or any other game that might be out there. It may simply be too late for Starcraft to grab these people back. I don’t know.

If it were my decision, I would make WCS completely region locked. I think that in the short term, the scene may suffer as Korean pros who were making their money outside of Korea may be forced into retirement, some Korean teams may fold as professionals return home and saturate the market with strong free agents, and the foreign scene may lose some of those ‘skill is the only thing that matters’ die-hards. But in the long run, I believe that such changes are the only investment worth making. I believe that such changes are the only thing that will keep professional Starcraft 2 relevant and thriving.

I truly believe that SC2 can be the biggest eSport in the world. The things that are keeping us from that size are all things that we can change. Games have changed their destiny before. Starcraft 2 is the most beautiful game in the world if you ask me. I’d love to see it on top, and that’s why I’ve written this.

If anyone has any questions please get in touch with me. I’d love to do a Q&A stream if there’s any interest. I’d also love to do a similar article on the history of /r/starcraft, though I will be unable to do it in the same way, as the Wayback Machine isn’t compatible with the way Reddit functions.

Please give me any feedback that you have. I worked really hard on this and I’m really nervous and excited for people to read it.

HUGE SPECIAL THANKS TO FEARDRAGON FOR READING THIS THING MORE THAN ONCE AND OFFERING SOME INCREDIBLE ENCOURAGEMENT!

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Sources
+ Show Spoiler +

https://www.reddit.com/r/starcraft/comments/1bk6lq/clg_starcraft2_team/c97fz7w
http://www.tsm.gg/index.php/p/teams/
http://clgaming.net/teams/?team=5
http://cloud9.gg/teams/
https://www.reddit.com/r/esports/comments/jgu6q/an_open_letter_to_the_counterstrike_fps_esports/

neptunusfisk

2286 Posts

August 17 2015 18:59 GMT

Why not put all news in categories instead of just a few? Graphs with like a total of five articles are not especially meaningful

Also why not list the articles on a time axis? Two articles from the same time will certainly affect eachother

CyanEsports

Canada128 Posts

August 17 2015 19:08 GMT

On August 18 2015 03:59 neptunusfisk wrote:
Why not put all news in categories instead of just a few? Graphs with like a total of five articles are not especially meaningful

The articles in those graphs are the stories that fell above the linear regression on the scatter plots, meaning that they were more popular than the data would suggest they were supposed to be. So in theory they were the stories that drove growth, or at least they were the stories that got the community most excited. Which is exactly what I wanted to measure. That's the whole point of the project.

I think that categorizing ALL of the news stories would have given ENORMOUSLY skewed data for the 2004-2009 statistics. The amount of content coming from Korea compared to the rest of the world makes pretty not worthwhile in my opinion.

Remember too that there are so few articles in the 2010-2014 'most popular' graph because the scene was declining, meaning most articles fell BELOW the linear regression. In a way, those news stories are even more important because there are so few.

ZigguratOfUr

Iraq16955 Posts

August 17 2015 19:29 GMT

Feels like there really isn't enough data to draw any meaningful conclusions. Also why does the first best fit line start at 0?

CyanEsports

Canada128 Posts

August 17 2015 19:37 GMT

On August 18 2015 04:29 ZigguratOfUr wrote:
Feels like there really isn't enough data to draw any meaningful conclusions. Also why does the first best fit line start at 0?

I was using a website that was making the scatterplots for me with the data I was plugging in. I honestly don't know why it started at 0.

As for not enough data to draw a meaningful conclusion, I can respect that viewpoint. I'd disagree but I can understand why anyone might feel that way. This was the best way I could think of to measure what the community valued over ten years of esports history. I personally believe its effective, but I can understand where you're coming from.

blabber

United States4448 Posts

August 17 2015 19:44 GMT

for some reason it was much easier to be extremely passionate about BW than it is for sc2. Perhaps we had our "honeymoon" phase with sc2 and we just don't really care anymore.

alukarD

Mexico396 Posts

August 17 2015 20:09 GMT

Nice read. Great effort. Thank you.

Kinda hard to get conclusions based on popular articles. As you say, there has always been lurkers. A lot. I was one of the for a long time.

Most of the times, emotions is what drives people. The Idra articles clearly says so: so many haters and lovers. And that's why Naniwa (for example) grabs people's attention, be it for hating or loving him.

As my opinion, I feel like Starcraft is in a "nerdy" situation right now. It's hard to understand Starcraft as it is, and that makes it hard to be a Starcraft fan. I use the word "nerdy" because the way it seems and feels. For example, WCS streaming games 1v1 with only the players and commentators to be seen. It feels like excluded. To make a comparison, it feels like Starcraft is the engineer area, where only a few go there, and nobody knows what they do inside there. Opposite of that, the football team, that gets all the attention and praise. Why? Because being a football players is "cool" I guess. And those "cool" games are LoL, CSGO, etc.

It might sound stupid, but Starcraft needs to get "cooler". Get it more OUT there, instead of hiding it. Or we can leave it "nerdy" the way it is, making a few of us happy, with no need of attention, just good games.

LastPoet

Canada11 Posts

August 17 2015 20:42 GMT

This looks like it was alot of work, good job putting this together. My only suggestion would be label the X and Y axis on your scatter graphs, it makes them alot clearer. I had to back track and re-read the section in order to figure out that the X axis was number of months into the 4 year stretch, and the Y axis is number of comments in the "most popular article that month" (I think?).

I think the assessment that the lack of a foreign scene has hurt sc2's popularity seems pretty accurate, but I disagree with the direction of introducing even tighter region locks as a fix. The region locks have already been tightened up a lot, and at what point do the region locks get too tight and become completely unfair for the players involved? I dont think its necessarily right to say to people "because you were born in X country, you may never compete in any events from within Y region". With the region locks in their current state, players must become a legal resident of the country that they want to participate in. Its no easy feat to move your entire life over to a new country and become a legal resident. At some point you have to draw the line on region restrictions, because this is something that affects peoples lives and careers.

I think a better long term solution would be to take an in depth look at what seperates koreans from "foreigners" in terms of what is making them successful, and attempt to emulate that same structure outside of korea. Its not necessarily a simple thing in a scene without a whole lot of money involved, but if koreans are pulling it off then I believe they must be doing something that foreigner teams are not.

TelecoM

United States10700 Posts

August 17 2015 20:45 GMT

Great post! Thanks for all of your hard work collaborating all of this data, really nice job.

On August 18 2015 05:09 alukarD wrote:
Nice read. Great effort. Thank you.

Kinda hard to get conclusions based on popular articles. As you say, there has always been lurkers. A lot. I was one of the for a long time.

Most of the times, emotions is what drives people. The Idra articles clearly says so: so many haters and lovers. And that's why Naniwa (for example) grabs people's attention, be it for hating or loving him.

As my opinion, I feel like Starcraft is in a "nerdy" situation right now. It's hard to understand Starcraft as it is, and that makes it hard to be a Starcraft fan. I use the word "nerdy" because the way it seems and feels. For example, WCS streaming games 1v1 with only the players and commentators to be seen. It feels like excluded. To make a comparison, it feels like Starcraft is the engineer area, where only a few go there, and nobody knows what they do inside there. Opposite of that, the football team, that gets all the attention and praise. Why? Because being a football players is "cool" I guess. And those "cool" games are LoL, CSGO, etc.

It might sound stupid, but Starcraft needs to get "cooler". Get it more OUT there, instead of hiding it. Or we can leave it "nerdy" the way it is, making a few of us happy, with no need of attention, just good games.

I agree with this pretty much, lets make SC2 cooler, it def. needs to be done.

CyanEsports

Canada128 Posts

August 17 2015 21:13 GMT

#10

On August 18 2015 05:42 LastPoet wrote:
This looks like it was alot of work, good job putting this together. My only suggestion would be label the X and Y axis on your scatter graphs, it makes them alot clearer. I had to back track and re-read the section in order to figure out that the X axis was number of months into the 4 year stretch, and the Y axis is number of comments in the "most popular article that month" (I think?).

I think the assessment that the lack of a foreign scene has hurt sc2's popularity seems pretty accurate, but I disagree with the direction of introducing even tighter region locks as a fix. The region locks have already been tightened up a lot, and at what point do the region locks get too tight and become completely unfair for the players involved? I dont think its necessarily right to say to people "because you were born in X country, you may never compete in any events from within Y region". With the region locks in their current state, players must become a legal resident of the country that they want to participate in. Its no easy feat to move your entire life over to a new country and become a legal resident. At some point you have to draw the line on region restrictions, because this is something that affects peoples lives and careers.

I think a better long term solution would be to take an in depth look at what seperates koreans from "foreigners" in terms of what is making them successful, and attempt to emulate that same structure outside of korea. Its not necessarily a simple thing in a scene without a whole lot of money involved, but if koreans are pulling it off then I believe they must be doing something that foreigner teams are not.

To be clear, I'm reading EVERY comment! :D

I think the only way to run it is to go on citizenship, just like the Olympics would!

I think that for the past five years everyone has been trying to find out what makes foreigners worse than Koreans and trying to emulate Korean success. It ain't working though. And we aren't in a position where continually ramming our heads against that wall is a viable play.

Yorbon

Netherlands4272 Posts

August 17 2015 21:46 GMT

#11

Just out of curiosity: how did you determine which articles were outliers in the graph with 'idra' written in it? It seems to me 'being above the line' is a very weak indicator of some article having a significant impact in the community.

TheBloodyDwarf

Finland7524 Posts

August 17 2015 22:05 GMT

#12

This was very interesting read, thanks!

2010-2012 was so good time in SC2. I feel so nostalgic..(Im listening Nerd Alert at the moment)

UberNuB

United States365 Posts

August 17 2015 22:27 GMT

#13

I'll read some more, but I don't necessarily agree with the fitted line. I mean it's completely inaccurate for 0-35 (assuming those are months from start?), and overall not indicative of the actual data. Seems like it should have started at ~75 with a minor incline (minus the outliers skewing the data).

I don't even think it's safe to say there was a steady incline until month ~50, as month ~35 had a large jump then steadily declined for a bit. Overall, growth seemed fairly stagnant until the last ~12 months, which I'm assuming was generally related to IdrA.

Deleted User 132135

702 Posts

August 17 2015 22:27 GMT

#14

It is the quality of the whole package of SC2 evaluated by each player individually which determines if one continues to invest time into the game with playing or watching or reading/writing about it in forums or not. Things that you described have surely an effect on accelerating a certain trend, but they are not able to cause or swap the trend.

I do believe that if the game was 100% great (e.g. like broodwar^^) that region unlock of WCS can't have that much of an impact on its popularity. It was not like everyone wanted SC2 but due to the missing region lock they turned their backs towards it.

Problems started with release instead. Alot of people denied to play sc2 instead of broodwar. Many who moved to SC2 were unhappy about alot of game design things such as the very narrow strategic diversity, short single fights without much micro but only positioning deciding outcomes of games and all races being able to macro up too quickly, missing community features of bnet 2.0 etc. (apart from the mbs, no limit unit grouping and other broodwar specific complaints).

I am very conviced of the fact that the region unlock of WCS was not and cannot be the source of SC2 decline but something that blizzard reacted with because it didn't go as well as it could from the beginning and to spice foreigner SC2 land up with some koreans. It surely accelerated the decline of SC2 outside of korea tho in the end for the reasons you mentioned.

Your writeup sounds like if WCS wasn't region locked then big foreign teams would have picked up SC2 and popularity of SC2 would have gone up. This is majorly wrong tho if it was meant like that. Right is that they would have probably picked up a few SC2 players for a period of time. But then SC2 decline would have proceeded and they would have dropped them again.

I think that SC2 can only become excellent and popular when game design gets excellent no matter if koreans continue to overshadow foreigners or if foreign tournaments and leagues include or exclude koreans. To achieve this it might be useful to listen to players feedback in the very beginning of WOL and fix all the fundamental issues that still exist now:
- terrible terrible damage mechanics decide 15-30 minutes of (pseudo-) strategical play (actually a macro test with both players mostly doing the same in every match) within seconds of chance (makes watching these 15-30 minutes irrelevant as watching the 2-3 seconds of terrible damage would have been enough and no matter which player was 5% ahead beforehand due to hard work of micro, tactics and strategy, the 2-3 seconds of terrible damage overshadow this anyway)
- reaching 200/200 too quickly (metagame changes when both players sit on 200/200 )
- hardly ways to come back out of a disadvantage (too much advantage scaling)
Obviously blizzard adresses these things now with the refinement of macro mechanics and low value mineral patches. It will be a good thing.

"A five person squad is a lot more of an investment than one Starcraft player. It's not good that these teams see more validity in paying five salaries, five sets of plane tickets, and five beds in a hotel to send their Smite team (for example) to a tournament than one Starcraft player. Management for these teams have decided that other eSport games are more marketable than StarCraft 2."

This had to be said. Have realized this many times myself.

endy

Switzerland8970 Posts

August 17 2015 22:38 GMT

#15

Pretty cool article. Looking at comments number is probably not the best way of analyzing activity/growth, but it was a fun angle.
And it's Mondragon, like the goalkeeper, not MoonDragon.

Azhrak

Finland1198 Posts

August 17 2015 23:36 GMT

#16

When WCS was about first national, then regional (or continental) and lastly global championships in 2012, it was awesome. It could be worth creating a similar structure in the future too. We could even combine the current WCS points system with the three-tier system we had in 2012 to more include the non-WCS events in the mix.

Three seasons in a year
- Season consists of one National Championships, one Regional Championships and multiple possible Partner Events
WCS Main Events
WCS Partner Events
- Meaning the current WCS Global Events (IEM, DH, Gfinity, etc.) which could decide to have a region lock and give out regional points, or stay open and give out global points
Region locks
- National Championships require a citizenship in the nation
- Regional Championships and regionally locked Partner Events require the player to be living in the region
  - For instance, a Korean living in the USA can't participate in the USA National Championships but can acquire American regional points to grab one of the USA's spots in the America Regional Championships

This is a system I came up on the spot. I might have overlooked many things. Also, I don't know if a points system on top of the three-tier qualification would make any more sense than to just grab all the national and regional top X players and have them advance to the next stage like in 2012. That way the WCS partner events would not be part of the system though.

Joedaddy

United States1948 Posts

August 18 2015 00:27 GMT

#17

well done sir. ty

FueledUpAndReadyToGo

Netherlands30548 Posts

August 18 2015 00:41 GMT

#18

plots with no axis labels :-s

Bernabus1

4 Posts

August 18 2015 00:51 GMT

#19

Idra, what a fucking guy

Cascade

Australia5405 Posts

August 18 2015 01:32 GMT

#20

Thanks for connecting and compiling the data. Any chance that you'll publish the raw data?

I feel that your conclusion that sc2 is declining because it is not local enough isn't supported from your analysis. Maybe I missed it, but I don't find the point where you explain why that is. You just open with the statement in the conclusion without any motivation. Sure it's not that personal bias you take about in the introduction?

Not saying it's not true, I just don't see how you get there from the data you show.

feanaro

United States123 Posts

August 18 2015 02:49 GMT

#21

Really nice article. The fit doesn't appear to be right on the graph: any chance you could post a list of how many comments there were for each month for the whole period (both broodwar and sc2)?

I'm not sure if region locking is inferred from the data: even if you had a better fitting, more sharply diving regression, you would have to be careful in picking out causation from correlation. Less may be written about foreign players not simply because of the region lock, but because there are fewer viewers to start with due to an external reason. Because we have had a partial region lock this year, it would be very interesting to see the data up through July of 2015, instead of cutting of at December 2014.

Also would be interesting if you could collaborate with Conti's streaming numbers to see if they tell a similar story in terms of region locking. (I took a cursory glance, but the evidence did not look convincing in terms of showing a foreigner inspired uptick, so I would love to see what you would make of it.)

varsovie

Canada326 Posts

August 18 2015 04:26 GMT

#22

Why linear interpolation, why?

CyanEsports

Canada128 Posts

August 18 2015 04:41 GMT

#23

Ok all wow! I'm REALLY happy with the response this is getting and I'm really happy that I've sparked some discussion. I won't be able to quote everyone who's commented but I'm going to address some stuff that people have mentioned.

Graphs - Yeah I know, they're kinda shitty. I just googled 'make scatter plot' or 'make line graph' and used online websites. All I did was plug in the data. Speaking to the first scatter plot directly, take away the first 24 pieces of data, and remove the 'Idra outlier' (official name now) and there's still an upward trend. As far as I can tell, the math in calculating the linear regression is legit.

SC2 needs 'x' to be popular - I am ONLY commenting on the professional starcraft scene. I'm not trying to make any claims about game balance, or price point, or features, or anything at all besides the professional SC2 scene, the data that I've collected, and what conclusions I feel can be drawn from it. I recognize that there are a lot of factors in play, and I was hoping that a few of them would come up when I was doing my research, but I have NO data on those other factors. So the statements I make in the article are the only things I really feel comfortable commenting on based on this data.

The data you collected is bad because... - I thought long and hard about what sort of data I wanted to collect. It wasn't possible for me to look at the forums. Poles didn't work at all. SCreddit wasn't possible as a source for this type of project. There were no other websites that have existed for as long, and have had the prominence that TL.net has had. The most unbiased set of data that I could look at, that still showed the trends I needed to see, was the news articles on TL.net. The best way to measure growth is obviously community activity. So I looked at the comments posts were getting. It seems to make sense to me that the news articles that received the most attention in the form of comments were the stories that drove interest in StarCraft one way or another. There isn't really anything that I can say beyond that. I think some people are misunderstanding how I determined which articles were 'most popular' as well.

With each scatter plot, there is a linear regression. That's a line that measures where data would be EXPECTED to fall, creating a sort of average. If you want to make a prediction about future data, you extend that line and you should have an idea of where data will fall!

So from 2004-2009, the scene and TeamLiquid.net was growing. That means that there was an upward trend. Data was increasing in size as time went on. The stories that I marked as 'most popular' are stories that fall above the linear regression. That means they were more popular than the data would suggest they'd be. In theory, logic says that those are the stories that helped drive growth.

From 2010-2014 the scene and TeamLiquid.net shrunk. There was a downward trend where data decreased over time. More posts fell below the linear regression, forcing it to form that downward slope. Still, the stories that fall above that line are stories that were particularly interesting in some way shape or form. They had more people interacting with them than one would assume by looking at the data. So those are the stories that are most 'important' for the scene in this time period.

That's how I marked articles and stories as 'most popular' for their respective time periods. That's why they are relevant.

Will you post the raw data? - Probably not unless there's some SERIOUS interest. Its just a ton of numbers and I don't really love the idea of typing it all out (I have it stored in a physical notebook atm). I will if there's enough interest though. I'd do anything for you, SC2 community <3

I disagree with your conclusion/I think your conclusion is hella biased - I did warn you more than once that personal bias would come into play!

I believe I even prephased my conclusion with such a warning as well!

All I can say is that numbers don't lie. You're more than welcome to disagree with me and I'm so happy that you read the article and looked at the data to the point where you feel you can form an opinion!

To be honest, I wasn't sure that I was going to get this result when I started! I was actually quite worried that I would find that the scene cares more about top level play and the KR region than anything else! I'm a huge foreigner fan! But that isn't what I found. I think that at this point, you have to have blinders on to say that the lack of a region lock on WCS in 2013 had no effect on the decline of SC2. That's a little harsh and I mean no disrespect, but everything I've seen says otherwise.

At the end of the day, I think Olympic style region locking is the way to go for WCS. I think that people who want to see the highest level of play aren't watching WCS anyway. I think that at no point were WCS NA or EU representative of 'the highest level of play' because they were featuring the Koreans who didn't feel totally comfortable competing with the best of the best in Korea. I think that if the scene cares most about Koreans, no one loses with pure region locking, only foreign fans will win when their favourite teams/players get to come first in WCS for their region.

There's my big shpeal for now, I hope I've appropriately responded to some of the comments I've seen! Thank you everyone who's been offering such kind words of support and everything! Thank you all for reading and for participating in the conversation! I think that it is a relevant topic!

varsovie

Canada326 Posts

August 18 2015 04:55 GMT

#24

cyan just plot your data in a spreadsheet like LibreOffice Calc, Google Spreadsheet, Microsoft Excel or a math software (even wolframe alpha), but please get in quadratic or something and with the option of not zeroing.
Also would be nice to indicate year/month on the graph, right now we have to "calculate" the start date and add the number of months (up to 60) to know when are the results in order to link 'em with the little information snippet on popular stories.

As for the data I dunno why you went back in time to get inconsistent post counts (time period missing, some data few days old, others nearly same day) instead of taking all your results from today. Yes you would get few more results because of "late" posters, but usually a subject dies out withing a month and TL is quite diligent about their necro policy. It would at least get the same "cooling" period to each news.

As for how you interpret your results and even your "solutions", well let's say you "assume" quite a bit while your only point demonstrated was about news only, and as discussed before they themselves might have been skewed by the way they were collected and analysed.

I'm sorry if this community is a little hars, but some have scientific (or autistic) backgrounds. Hell just look at how we demolish all the "math behind xxx" threads when there's one comma missing.
Thank for the effort, but like in SC2 it takes way more to reach perfection.

CyanEsports

Canada128 Posts

August 18 2015 05:09 GMT

#25

On August 18 2015 13:55 varsovie wrote:
cyan just plot your data in a spreadsheet like LibreOffice Calc, Google Spreadsheet, Microsoft Excel or a math software (even wolframe alpha), but please get in quadratic or something and with the option of not zeroing.
Also would be nice to indicate year/month on the graph, right now we have to "calculate" the start date and add the number of months (up to 60) to know when are the results in order to link 'em with the little information snippet on popular stories.

Yeah I'm not great with ....well.....any of those programs. I don't know how to use them. I'm really sorry about the por quality of the graphs. I thought this would be a-ok but it could have been better. A lot better.

[B]As for the data I dunno why you went back in time to get inconsistent post counts (time period missing, some data few days old, others nearly same day) instead of taking all your results from today. Yes you would get few more results because of "late" posters, but usually a subject dies out withing a month and TL is quite diligent about their necro policy. It would at least get the same "cooling" period to each news.

Oh man I totally forgot to talk about this! The reason why I didn't just look at the site as it stands today is twofold!

1. I wanted to get a picture of the stories and the community reaction to them as they happened. Not two months later. Not two years later. Within one month of each article being posted. There's much less room for fudged numbers that way, and its a unique chance to see a snapshot of the community frozen in time.

2. I would have NO idea of what to be looking for. I'm not a frequent TL user right now, I'm not familiar with navigating the website, and I don't even know if I would be able to get as far back as 2004. Right now if I go to the News section and click to the last page available, I get to 2008. The Wayback machine offers a deeper timeline with less hassle.

[B]As for how you interpret your results and even your "solutions", well let's say you "assume" quite a bit while your only point demonstrated was about news only, and as discussed before they themselves might have been skewed by the way they were collected and analysed.

I'm sorry if this community is a little hars, but some have scientific (or autistic) backgrounds. Hell just look at how we demolish all the "math behind xxx" threads when there's one comma missing.
Thank for the effort, but like in SC2 it takes way more to reach perfection.

No one is being harsh (yet ;_; )! I like the discussion that's being had and I feel like more people are agreeing with the information I'm presenting than are disagreeing! I know that this article is by no means perfect, and there are things I can learn from for next time! I don't have a math background so I appreciate the feedback and I hope my responses make sense. I think that the data I collected is valid but I always knew some people would disagree! And that's so ok! TL is a very intelligent community and I'm more than happy to be sparking some discussion if I can't convince everyone!

Cascade

Australia5405 Posts

August 18 2015 09:10 GMT

#26

Cyan, umm... You go "I am biased", "My analysis is crappy" and at the same time you say that you are "really comfortable" about your comments and "numbers don't lie".

This thing with what the data actually shows, and what your opinion is are two different things. Some things here are facts from the analysis, which we can disagree on because some do the analysis in a flawed way, some add in personal assumptions that others don't agree on, but ultimately there is an objective truth about what the data says, and which assumptions are needed to reach what conclusions. When it comes to statements like "the data shows this", you can't guard yourself with "this is my opinion, disagree if you want"; you can be plain, objectively wrong. Opinions don't enter in that at all. Bias together with lacking analytical skills (both of which you have happily admitted) will skew your answer, but you are still wrong.

To guard yourself from bias as much as possible, it is important that you lay out your argument clearly and slowly for how you go from the data, through the analysis to the conclusion you claim. I don't feel that you did that at all regarding the statement first in your conclusions: "When it comes to eSports in general, this data suggests that the most important thing to stimulate growth is to ensure that the professional scene is locally involved." If you want to make that statement, you need to lay out every logical step from the data leading to it, which you haven't done whatsoever. You just made some random plots on thread views, and then make this huuuuge statement about how eSports works out of nowhere, and claim that is based on the data.

Again, I am not necessarily disagreeing with the statement itself, only your claim that it is based on the data.

CyanEsports

Canada128 Posts

August 18 2015 14:30 GMT

#27

Well first off I NEVER said my analysis is crappy. I think my analysis is spot on in fact

. My graphs could have been better in terms of how pretty they look, but that wouldn't change the numbers on said graphs.

My bias comes into play when I start talking about WHY the foreign news stories are more interesting to the community. Its bias because there is no possible way that I can measure how important it was for fans in 2010 to identify with local pros, but the data leads me to that conclusion. Likewise, I have no idea what made the LCS teams decide against opening SC2 rosters, I wasn't invited to those meetings. But I can use what I know about the history of SC2, what I've learned about the fans from this project, and what I know about these organizations, and I can make very educated conclusions about what PROBABLY happened. Those spaces are where my bias comes in. I don't think I'm wrong at all, and frankly I think that looking at these statistics and drawing any conclusion other that 'yeah wow the foreign scene is actually more important to fans than KR' is incorrect. But I respect that opinion and I welcome any discussion on it. I arrived to my conclusion by gathering data on the most popular news stories on the biggest SC esports site, categorizing them based on what scene they were pertaining to, and simply counting where most of these popular stories were coming from. A majority of them come from outside of Korea. I have to disagree with the idea that I took a leap at this point when I said 'When it comes to eSports in general, this data suggests that the most important thing to stimulate growth is to ensure that the professional scene is locally involved'. I think that's exactly what the data is showing.

I don't think that my numbers are incorrect at all. I think that the data I gathered is valid, shows the trends we would all expect to see, and I think that I've gone about analyzing it in the right way.

I think this is the last post I'll make to this thread for today at least. I feel like I'm bumping it the most and I don't want to just self bump all the time! I'm really happy to respond to questions and comments! If I wasn't able to defend my methodology or results then it wouldn't be a very good piece at all right? :D

R1CH

Netherlands10342 Posts

August 18 2015 14:33 GMT

#28

On August 18 2015 03:29 CyanEsports wrote:
Before starting in I want to mention that this is by no means a comprehensive history of all the important events that occurred in StarCraft eSports’ history. There were many many stories that I didn’t see at all. Huge events like Idra being dropped from EG don’t show up in TL’s news section. I assume that this is because Team Liquid eventually became a major StarCraft team itself and didn’t report on major happenings from its competition.

I'm not sure how you found your news stories but we definitely report on happenings in the scene regardless of whether it's from "competition" or not. The thread you mentioned was pretty big and can be found at http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/starcraft-2/411840-evil-geniuses-releases-greg-idra-fields

CyanEsports

Canada128 Posts

August 18 2015 14:44 GMT

#29

On August 18 2015 23:33 R1CH wrote:

Show nested quote +

Woah shit hi there!

I never meant to imply that these stories didn't exist on TL.net, but they don't appear in the official 'news' section. Unfortunately, the way forum posts work and the way the Wayback Machine works means that I wasn't able to look at the forum section of the site at all. It moves too fast for the Wayback Machine to log it effectively and the numbers would be enormously skewed if I went back to look for these stories in the state they are now. I wanted to see the community impression while the stories were as topical as possible.

I certainly didn't mean to imply that TL is shutting out topics on other esports teams and I'm sorry if that's how it reads. I meant that some of the big stories didn't appear under the 'news' section on the site.

CyanEsports

Canada128 Posts

August 18 2015 14:49 GMT

#30

Looking at the 'Idra released from EG' thread, I'm actually really surprised to see that the last comment is only nine days after the thread was started. I expected way more necro bumps and such! Another issue with trying to go back through the forum to collect 10 years worth of data is that there's just way too much to sort through. There are 706 pages of Broodwar threads alone. With necro bumping in mind, I'd have to open each individual thread to find the original post date. Sadly, unless someone wants to pay me to do this, collecting data from the forum sections of TL.net is just not possible.7

There might be something to an idea for going back and purposefully looking for some of the larger stories that have happened in the past four years though. We'll see.

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