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On October 18 2015 18:24 OtherWorld wrote: Yeah there's a big issue with foreignland, that is that foreignland is wide and large. But there's one solution : to hell with Foreign ProLeague, let's make a French ProLeague ! viva la revolution!
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On October 18 2015 14:50 bduddy wrote: Now, obviously, in order to be viable, this would need significant funding from Blizzard, probably a lot more than WCS. No one outside of Blizzard knows exactly how much they care about SC2 continuing on as a viable eSport, or how much money they're willing to spend to make it happen. But if they do care, and they do want it to be viable outside of Korea, I think this is probably the only way. It would provide an incentive for real teams, for training, for the "infrastructure" everyone is talking about. It would draw fans and improve players. It would ensure that top-level professional SC2 is a thing for a long time to come.
I like the idea but THIs make no sense at all. Why ask blizzard when we know they're not that stupid and wont go for it.
Suscriptions(us), partnership, fee coming from the teams are better options. For example, SK telecom T1 is sponsored by SK telecom. Visibility is the key for a sponsor. Everyone here knows that there is a korean airline company named Jin air. If there is a lot of people that are going to watch it, you can ask money for rights to broadcast, like in every sport no ?
On October 18 2015 15:11 ZAiNs wrote: 3. If this happened, foreigners would still get destroyed by top Koreans. 4. Prime could move to America and have a shot at winning! :D So no koreans allowed ?
edit: do we have to create the same Proleague right now ? with players metting each other ? Gaming houses? etc ? Why some people wants to go for the best when we dont even have the player to make a foreigner proleague interesting ?
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Easier said than done. To make this work you'd have to have a few actual good gaming houses with all expenses paid in centralised locations in America/Europe and start paying a fine salary so people actually lived there. Aka an amount of money that will never happen.
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On October 18 2015 16:44 -Kyo- wrote:Show nested quote +On October 18 2015 16:07 Incognoto wrote: "develop home-grown talent"... there was none to begin with
I have no idea why people dislike it so much that Koreans are good at this game and the rest of the world is not. :/
for sure though, one of the big flaws of the foreign scene is that people don't root for teams, they root for players Yeah, sorry, we all forgot that SC2 is a gene in the human genome. How could have been so blind to the fact that at the start of BW and WoL there were foreigners fighting for top spots in leagues? Blind to the fact that they were actually part korean that is! HAH!~! GOT EM BOYS
Yeah, those foreigners deserve praise for their mettle.
Today's foreigners just don't even compare with top Koreans, however. The past is the past.
It's not the lack of competitions for foreigners to partake in. There are more foreign events than Korean events. Why are Koreans so much better? Work ethic and a cutting-edge Korean metagame.
WCS was an attempt to cut out Koreans from the scene, and now the gap is even more pronounced than before.
Really I would say it comes down to lack of proper practice. No foreign team has the facilities that Korean counter-parts do, nor the Korean ladder. Nor do foreigners practice as much, I would say. Lack of coaching doesn't help. Lack of structured practice, etc.
There's a reason the gap is there, it has nothing to do with genomes, it's that Koreans have a better environment to become good and they also have the mettle to take full advantage of that environment. They have proper recognition for what they do as well in Korea, whereas professional gaming in Occidental countries is a niche within a niche. Pro gaming is probably a niche in Korea as well, but one with far more recognition than what we have here.
When you look at it, it kind of makes sense that foreigners just aren't as good. WCS won't really help that, at least not to the degree everyone would like it to. WCS did a good job of killing off Koreigners though, such as all of Axiom for starters.
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On October 18 2015 19:08 Incognoto wrote:Show nested quote +On October 18 2015 16:44 -Kyo- wrote:On October 18 2015 16:07 Incognoto wrote: "develop home-grown talent"... there was none to begin with
I have no idea why people dislike it so much that Koreans are good at this game and the rest of the world is not. :/
for sure though, one of the big flaws of the foreign scene is that people don't root for teams, they root for players Yeah, sorry, we all forgot that SC2 is a gene in the human genome. How could have been so blind to the fact that at the start of BW and WoL there were foreigners fighting for top spots in leagues? Blind to the fact that they were actually part korean that is! HAH!~! GOT EM BOYS Really I would say it comes down to lack of proper practice. No foreign team has the facilities that Korean counter-parts do, nor the Korean ladder. Nor do foreigners practice as much, I would say. Lack of coaching doesn't help. Lack of structured practice, etc. There's a reason the gap is there, it has nothing to do with genomes, it's that Koreans have a better environment to become good and they also have the mettle to take full advantage of that environment. They have proper recognition for what they do as well in Korea, whereas professional gaming in Occidental countries is a niche within a niche. Pro gaming is probably a niche in Korea as well, but one with far more recognition than what we have here. When you look at it, it kind of makes sense that foreigners just aren't as good. WCS won't really help that, at least not to the degree everyone would like it to. WCS did a good job of killing off Koreigners though, such as all of Axiom for starters.
I think people see that, but I think people just want more viewership/engagement from the Western scene. Western SC2 players aren't marketable, the skill the work ethic, the infrastructure, that that comes to play. But from a business/viewership standpoint, I think people want a league where the best foreigners can play versus eachother.
I think that was a huge part of the LCS and why they're exclusive, the business and viewership is easy if you only have to worry about the Koreans once or twice a year.
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as totalbiscuit would say, i'm not an industry insider and don't know what goes on behind the scenes. so i could be way off base. but for all this convoluted debate about region locks and infrastructure and ethics, isn't the problem basically that there aren't enough sponsors or enough money to create a foreign environment for SC to rival the environment in korea?
seriously, someone correct me if this is wrong. but the way entertainment works is there has to be money in it, and esports as a business is entertainment for audiences. doesn't priority #1 have to be somehow marketing this game to larger audiences and proving to sponsors that they should give a shit what kind of training infrastructure exists outside korea?
is that not 95% of the entire issue at hand?
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Of course you are completely right, but because Korea is all located in Seoul, and they have a local audience to market to, it is actually viable commercially (and even that might be questionable). To introduce this in the foreign scene is sadly completely unrealistic. At this point very few teams even field a serious lineup. Not only would Blizzard have to set up a Proleague itself it would also have to give incentive to teams to invest into salaries.
Internally our players and staff had been playing around with the thought of suggesting to Blizzard to turn Challenger into an online League. For example two groups of 16 or four groups of 8 and the higher you finish the further you get placed into the playoff bracket. This would be many times better for players to stay motivated over time. Currently whenever a player loses in WCS motivation is gone for the next few months. Just a thought.
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I still think that it's not WCS' and Blizzard's duty to develop the scene, we just need more local tournaments, and the World Championship Series it's not meant to be (or shouldn't be) a local tourney.
Though I agree on that I'd like to see a kind-of-foreign-Proleague, even if all online with only the grand finals offline.
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The only thing to ask is "is it viable?" Because if it is, there is no way it can actually harm. Proleague is one of the most interesting and improving leagues out there. For KR teams, Proleague comes before individual leagues. It seems it is not so in Foreign ones. However, NA is a really big country, and transportation systems are kinda hard to come by. EU might be more viable since there are a lot of trains? Kinda tentative on that opinion since idk much about EU. Will continue translating. Fighting!
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Simply put
1) more viewers -> 2) more money -> 3)more viable career path -> 4)more competition -> 1) more viewers -> 2) more money -> etc etc.
It's a circle and you really have to start at step 1. I guess you could start at 2 if someone would be crazy enough to really sink a shit ton of money in there but I don't see that happening. In the end it seems that the money in the gaming industry is made by those who make games, and those who can gather a crowd of loyal followers (such as youtube streamers). Companies try their best to lock down the o so fickle early teens to late twenties crowd by things such as GSL, Proleague and whatever equivalent other games have but the crowds are young, attention spans are short, and very few games succeed in being relevant for more than 5 years. Good luck building a scene around that.
Why would anyone dedicate years of their live to competing within a scene where maybe the top 1% (but probably less) can actually make enough money to even so much as break even? Until that moment has actually arrived you will see what we have now: a few very passionate people that make due with what they have (like juggle a job and a gaming career) or some kids that are willing to bunk up in some kind of dorm room until their mid twenties and spam play games 24/7 until they realize that this really isn't going anywhere (lots of them I'm sure but just do it because they love it).
TL;DR: We are expecting an incredible level of dedication and self sacrifice from the players we love to watch but we have practically nothing to give them in return.
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Interesting to see ppl saying as if there were no provinces in SK except Seoul.
I think there`re no big difference between SK pro-aspirants moving to Seoul from Busan and foreigners moving to a place where their team-house is located, in a sense of leaving home.
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On October 19 2015 00:04 B.I.G. wrote: Simply put
1) more viewers -> 2) more money -> 3)more viable career path -> 4)more competition -> 1) more viewers -> 2) more money -> etc etc.
It's a circle and you really have to start at step 1. I guess you could start at 2 if someone would be crazy enough to really sink a shit ton of money in there but I don't see that happening. In the end it seems that the money in the gaming industry is made by those who make games, and those who can gather a crowd of loyal followers (such as youtube streamers). Companies try their best to lock down the o so fickle early teens to late twenties crowd by things such as GSL, Proleague and whatever equivalent other games have but the crowds are young, attention spans are short, and very few games succeed in being relevant for more than 5 years. Good luck building a scene around that.
Why would anyone dedicate years of their live to competing within a scene where maybe the top 1% (but probably less) can actually make enough money to even so much as break even? Until that moment has actually arrived you will see what we have now: a few very passionate people that make due with what they have (like juggle a job and a gaming career) or some kids that are willing to bunk up in some kind of dorm room until their mid twenties and spam play games 24/7 until they realize that this really isn't going anywhere (lots of them I'm sure but just do it because they love it).
TL;DR: We are expecting an incredible level of dedication and self sacrifice from the players we love to watch but we have practically nothing to give them in return. this is what i was trying to say in my post, basically. i feel like a lot of fans are in mass denial about the fact that foreign starcraft just has an interest problem. that's not to say "ded gaem", it's just an unavoidable fact that starcraft isn't football or league of legends or MMA or something with a massive fanbase that makes the scene attractive as a full career commitment. the intense, angry debating about region locks and foreigner skill just seems secondary to the issue of financial viability...
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Mentioned already before in the thread, but if they couldn't pull off NASL... when the bandwagon of hype was super large, don't see how they'd pull off something now.
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On October 18 2015 21:51 Liquid`Nazgul wrote: Of course you are completely right, but because Korea is all located in Seoul, and they have a local audience to market to, it is actually viable commercially (and even that might be questionable). To introduce this in the foreign scene is sadly completely unrealistic. At this point very few teams even field a serious lineup. Not only would Blizzard have to set up a Proleague itself it would also have to give incentive to teams to invest into salaries.
Internally our players and staff had been playing around with the thought of suggesting to Blizzard to turn Challenger into an online League. For example two groups of 16 or four groups of 8 and the higher you finish the further you get placed into the playoff bracket. This would be many times better for players to stay motivated over time. Currently whenever a player loses in WCS motivation is gone for the next few months. Just a thought.
Yeah the whole "Bo5 or GTFO" is pretty harsh, particularly since seeding means people who make a breakout Challenger run are immediately shut down. I dunno how you'd do it for all regions seeing as SEA, Taiwan and China only have 8 slots between them. but changing up how Challenger works has my support.
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151 Posts
On October 19 2015 01:46 BEARDiaguz wrote:Show nested quote +On October 18 2015 21:51 Liquid`Nazgul wrote: Of course you are completely right, but because Korea is all located in Seoul, and they have a local audience to market to, it is actually viable commercially (and even that might be questionable). To introduce this in the foreign scene is sadly completely unrealistic. At this point very few teams even field a serious lineup. Not only would Blizzard have to set up a Proleague itself it would also have to give incentive to teams to invest into salaries.
Internally our players and staff had been playing around with the thought of suggesting to Blizzard to turn Challenger into an online League. For example two groups of 16 or four groups of 8 and the higher you finish the further you get placed into the playoff bracket. This would be many times better for players to stay motivated over time. Currently whenever a player loses in WCS motivation is gone for the next few months. Just a thought. Yeah the whole "Bo5 or GTFO" is pretty harsh, particularly since seeding means people who make a breakout Challenger run are immediately shut down. I dunno how you'd do it for all regions seeing as SEA, Taiwan and China only have 8 slots between them. but changing up how Challenger works has my support.
Bo5 or group phase for challenger still leads to the same issue : If you don't win in challenger you have almost no tournament to play for months.
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You have to make compromises and most teams won't be able to field a bo5 lineup. Maybe if we reduce the format to 1 person per team and make PL a big bracket with groups and stuff it would work
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Good luck getting people to show up for a teamleague.
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On October 18 2015 21:51 Liquid`Nazgul wrote: Internally our players and staff had been playing around with the thought of suggesting to Blizzard to turn Challenger into an online League. For example two groups of 16 or four groups of 8 and the higher you finish the further you get placed into the playoff bracket. This would be many times better for players to stay motivated over time. Currently whenever a player loses in WCS motivation is gone for the next few months. Just a thought. Anything is better than Bo5. Maybe I am wrong but both examples seem to have less punishment than the 4man group (Top32 and Top16), which is not nice I think. I think 4man group is the best for Challenger too.
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why not just crowd-fund a lite (read online) version of proleague
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Without having read every post. I think the OP is right. Look at WC3L in the past. It was the most prestigous, most followed WC3 league. Online with offline Finals. It was great, eventhough Twitch didnt exist and generally the coverage was mostly via shoutcast. WaaaghTV and text. Teams took it very serious and even a lot of players gave it a higher priority than individual tournaments (besides the really big ones of course). Just make it financially viable for teams and players like the LOL leagues with guaranteed salaries and stuff. I would prefer it A LOT to the current WCS system
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