SC2's shrinking talent pool: stuchiu on ESPN - Page 14

On January 22 2016 20:26 Elentos wrote:

WCS Korea is open to anyone regardless of residency and citizenship. The only requirement is to be in Korea when you have to play.

The problem is that events that weren't locked last year - IEM, Dreamhack, whatever - are locked by WCS requirements now. And that's going to be the vast majority of SC2 events this year. The biggest national SC2 scene is locked out of 66%+ events unless they leave behind everything at home and go to another country. Meanwhile, everyone else is allowed to play in 100% of SC2 events as long as they qualify.

On January 22 2016 21:12 Elentos wrote:

I didn't call anything racist. But the fact that many non-Koreans have gone to Korea and played in those leagues even when WCS was already a thing just shows that calling the Korean system "closed" is bullshit. "Koreans were allowed to participate in every tournament"? No more than any other person from any other country on the planet. Or do you think it's more convenient to be a Korean, go to America and play in the old WCS than it is to be a non-Korean, go to Korea and play in GSL?

A bullshit statement, de facto and de jure.

On January 22 2016 21:16 Phredxor wrote:


So Koreans 'only' have to get athlete visa or permanently move to play WCS and you say that's fine. But then you complain about the difficulty of having to play offline in Korea to play GSL/SSL..

Does not compute.

On January 22 2016 20:19 Pr0wler wrote:

As a football player you are forced to live in Europe in order to participate in the CL. Every region has their own equivalent. In the same way we have WCS Korea - for anyone who lives in Korea and WCS circuit for people that live outside of Korea.

So you are saying that forcing me to move to Korea in order to play in their league is different than forcing them to move to China, Honk Kong or Taiwan in order to participate in our league. And that is racism against the Koreans... Interesting.

If anything they are still privileged, because in the "World cup" at Blizzcon, they receive 8 spots (for one country) and the rest of the world gets 8. It would be much fairer if we had a region for every continent and each region gets 2 or 3 spots, but SC2 is just too small to support such system.

On January 22 2016 08:58 heishe wrote:
SC2 competitive is just not fun for most people, hardcore RTS players included. It's easy to get the feeling SC2 players somehow represent the majority of RTS enthusiasts, but if you ever go outside of Starcraft focused communities like TL or the Starcraft subreddit, people will generally say good things about the campaign gameplay variety but otherwise mostly shit on the game as being a clickfest where mindless speed outweighs strategy, which is like 90% of the reason the vast majority of people play RTS games.

Of course they don't know the game like we do, but a lot of their criticism and subjective feeling about the game are justified because SC2 does objectively have some pretty stupid things that do make it a "clickfest", like the arbitrary macro mechanics and lack of a lot of utility function in the UI and control that would make it easier to manage. Also, at the level that most players enter the game, playing speedy far outweighs playing strategically smart, by a ton actually. TBH if these things were gone I think the game would automatically become exactly 120% more awesome, because the sick Korean APM would go into many multipronged unit micro battles which are infinitely more exciting to watch (and also to play) than seeing someones APM being pumped into putting down mules and checking how many drones they have at each expansion.

As long as these things exist, the game's community will remain relatively small imo and slowly fizzle out (now that no more expansions are on the horizon anymore), even with a magic skin marketplace and stuff, I don't think it's going to have quite the pull a game like CS:GO or LoL or Dota 2 has (not even nearly), purely because of the gameplay. Although I sure do hope I'm proven wrong.

On January 22 2016 13:32 JimmyJRaynor wrote:


it is ATVI's and Blizzard's cash. they are creating excitement in parts of the world that will buy their games in the future in proportion with future projected buying patterns. not in proportion with where the best players are. South Korea is not where they generate the most revenue.

ATVI and Blizzard are in the business of SELLING VIDEO GAMES... not running leagues... the WCS is just a money loser designed to generate hype for future ATVI games and hype for stuff like that Nova campaign.

if someone wants to create this pie-in-the-sky, ideal, super-fair amazing league they can get a tourney license from Blizz and have a blast. the probability of generating a profit is zero so no one will ever do this.

On January 22 2016 16:51 papaz wrote:
SC2 e-sports growth or lack of is such a disappointment. I remembered the hype when the game got relesed and GSL announced. We had Fruitdealer, Artosis and Tasteless casting (Artosis even playing).
The feeling when waiting for GSL to come on air with the k-pop. Those were the days.
And here I thought that was only the beginning, from there it would only get bigger.
And look at the scene today.
I'm not sure what goes on in Blizz headquarters. If there are in it for the really long run so that when SC3 gets released in 15-20 years the foreign scene will be on par with Korea.

On January 22 2016 23:36 JimmyJRaynor wrote:


the RTS genre is not worth their valuable time. Morhaime, Pearce, et al are too talented to waste their time on a group of people that spends no money.

the entire genre is going down. there is nothing BLizzard can do about it. in fact, there is nothing ATVI and EA and Microsoft combined can do about it. its over.

consumer tastes changed.

Same thing happened with the dot-eating maze game genre. Games like LadyBug and MsPacman were far better than Pacman and it didn't matter. Everyone quit playing because consumer tastes changed. Nothing ever came close to making the cash Pacman did. And, really Pacman is not that great a game and it made 7 billion, but it hit consumers at just the right time.

Game Quality is not the final word on the financial success of a game.. and without financial success the entire AAA business model goes away

It is interesting watching the genre's #1 heavyweight attempt to deal with shifting consumer tastes. EA and Microsoft have already given up.

Blizzard is by far the best company at making RTS games and the abuse they take from their "fans" is hilarious. The threats to David Kim. The insults. These people should fire up a copy of Grey Goo or Act of Aggression. Or maybe play the new F2P online-only Command and Conquer game made by Victory Studios. Or play some Age of Empires Online. Then they'll see how good Blizzard really is.

The quality of SC2's game play is irrelevant. Consumers are bored with RTS games.

On January 23 2016 00:29 deacon.frost wrote:
The sad thing is, that I think Wolf said in some interview, that SC2 in Korea was on a rise. Right now we have 6.5 team in Proleague, 1 KeSPA cup and 2x2 seasons of leagues. That's pretty bad result for 2016. Yeah, not everything is Blizzard/WCS fault, but still, 2x2 seasons? Damn it, most foreigners will get more time than the best players on the planet!

On January 23 2016 00:21 Big J wrote:


Microsoft has shifted its focus on the Xbox. EA is a shit company. And they don't seem to be interested in eSports.
Grey Goo and AoA were projects that wanted to be shit. Their design-philosphy was "we want to make a game without taking any lessons from other games, in particular we want it to be as far as possible from the successful multiplayer games out there." And hey look, the games were shit. Mission accomplished I guess. (the fact that they didn't have money for good development to begin with didn't help either)

Moving on, LotV sold a million copies in 24 hours (not including presales). People out there are eager for RTS games. They just don't want to play a multiplayer that has nothing to do with the way they envision to play strategy games. When most of the players from other successful esports genre's tell you that your game is too hard to be fun - players that have the passion and endurance to become total freaks in their respective games - then everything has been said.

From 2010: http://www.pcgamer.com/5-lessons-starcraft-2-could-learn-from-supcom-2/
Imagine if you just had to set your Barracks to producing marines as fast as it could for as long as you had the money - you could take your eyes off of the Barracks and actually take care of that second expansion, finance your end-game push. Sure, some people could do that in their sleep, but some people choose StarCraft over sleep. What about the rest of us?
That last sentence tells you exactly where SC2 went wrong. The 95%, the rest of us, that would love to build armies and bases and let them fight, but don't want to micromanage every single little shit in the game so that it just does what you envision it to do.
What you need is a big company to produce such a game. Not a shitty half-year development CnC from EA with no support, not a shitty game that tries to recreate 90s-feelings and not an elite game whose expansions cater to making too hard things even harder.

On January 23 2016 00:23 Taf the Ghost wrote:


Blizzard was actually willing to pay to increase the Prize Pool for "Global" events. It's the "Circuit" events, which ended up replacing the ESL-run leagues, that would be locked off. The problem is that ESL has pretty much chosen not to take Blizzard up with the IEMs. The only thing they needed was like 25k USD & 4 more flights to qualify. (This is per the public website that Blizzard put up. We don't know the behind the scenes situation.) The reality is that most of the organizers looked at the situation and viewed locking out the Koreans as the "better" course of action.

There's a lot of parties involved in this situation.