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On January 21 2016 20:01 stevethemacguy wrote:Maybe Blizzard's weird WCS decisions will help BroodWar heat up again...and I'm ok with that :D. I had a blast watching Tastosis cast Effort vs Zero. Now if only some other BW legends could come back to bring some decent competition again. Maybe MC or Flash will join the BW scene..one can dream  .
MC was never a legend...
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On January 21 2016 09:06 iamkaokao wrote:
Even if the teams were well supported , or sponsored .. the game is really really demanding in terms of skill, practice, stress ... its almost inhuman to keep up at the highest lvl.. and with LOTV this is even more complicated ., which in a casual lvl is awesome.. but profesionally must be painful.. to be in the espectative if the new maps or nerfs will favor or punish your race.. you never know and your career relly on that.. which is completly out of your hands
This game is much more stressing than other profesional esports .. there is just soo much you have to learn.. and you cant never stop because the meta changes every week.. along with the maps and hopes , none can really keep up with this for a long time.. , thats the only reason i think older players retire..
If they want to make the game even more elitest or selective in the pro lvls.. then they have to raise salarys.. , ex TSM csgo just got a new team , and their salary is 9k month , im not sure how much is sc2.. but they probably make 1k - 2k aprox? , which is ridiculous for the amount of work , csgo players barely even practice.. compared to kespa players ,even the best teams in the world like envy and fnatic basically play yolo style and still success...... the dedication needed to keep up in sc2 is abysmally harder i feel.. you have to practice 3 matchups.. and maps change all the time , and the patches change the game too much all the time .
I feel sc2 is just like chess or something.. only a small amount of people , like to struggle.. , lets be honest.. rts will never be casual... therefore it will always be small compared to fps and moba , that even kids can understand , also the fact that blizzard doesnt seem to care at all about sc2.. its by far the least important game for blizzard the only positive thing i can say about blizzard atm.. is that they at least keep patching XD
Lol, saying cs:go needs much less dedication xD. Also saying that envy and fnatic win with yolostyle is laughable : DDD
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On January 21 2016 06:44 Djzapz wrote:Show nested quote +On January 21 2016 06:39 LastManProductions wrote:
If people keep saying SC2 will die, it will die. I think people are saying SC2 is dying because it is. I don't know that you can successfully argue that it goes the other way around. If you're actually under the impression that the "SC2 is dying" concern is coming from no where and it has no foundation in reality, and that the concern by itself is undermining the game, you've got some serious work to do to prove that. Let me say it this way: games that are actually doing good don't have that systemic issue of passionate players raising the concerns about the game "dying".
I dunno Kev.
I find it hard to take the 'dying' thing seriously. There have been people saying Sc2 was dying/ 'ded' from when Sc2 was rising to its peak, to its troughs. The phrase did/does seem popular with LoL fans so I find it hard to take it seriously. I'd agree with Sc2 is not as big as it was, or the Korean Sc2 scene is looking less healthy currently, but I guess that is not as catchy as the ded game meme or the slightly more nuances Sc2 is dying.
EDIT
The argument that people not getting warned/banned despite saying it is a dead game is amazing. It doesn't for how someone puts their argument across nor whether the poster's views were generally in line with opinion.
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Why is football (soccer) still so popular? It's not because of Messi or Ronaldo, it's not because the premier league is crazy rich, it's because wherever you go in the world you give 2 kids a ball and they start to kick and play and they love it.
Our concern should not be about sc2 living as an esport but sc2 being fun and enjoyable to play as a game. BW became an esport and was so succesful because korean kids were playing SC in PC bangs, not the other way around.
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On January 21 2016 20:00 FuzzyJAM wrote:Show nested quote +On January 21 2016 19:47 Big J wrote:On January 21 2016 19:21 Sapphire.lux wrote:
There were things like the 3 base eco and units like Colosus and others that were meant to make it easier for new players but the result was that BW fans got alienated in time, and the game wasn't casual enough to attract vast numbers of new fans.
With LOTV i think they decided to go the right way, but it might prove to be to late.
EDIT: quote fail None of that matters. You don't make an RTS game that can be loved by casuals by introducing certain, cool-looking units, that's not even close to the problem. You gotta deal with much more fundamental problems. - massive amount macromanagement necessary - insanely complex control-tools necessary that are hidden all over the keyboard - core gameplay like combats that very often happen offscreen - BO and timing reliance which makes it impossible to experience even half of the content because you are dying left and right - massive anxiety to go out on the map through fog of war with defensive overcompensation - strategical noob-traps everywhere; the game becomes unwinable if you don't know or cannot manage key units like queens or the MsC - not enough motivation to interact to begin with and then interaction often turns into a slippery slope of snowballing advantages, causing fear of interaction to begin with LotV is just an escalation of what softcore players already cannot deal with. They get more money they can't spend, faster units they can't handle, more ways to fuck up the economy which they don't have the reaction time to prevent and less resources per base which they don't know how to compensate for because they are still scared to leave their main. Isn't that mostly just the nature of competitive RTS though? It's going to be really hard to play if it's going to have any room for distinction at the professional level. Maybe some things could be mitigated, sure, but ultimately SC2 is always going to be too difficult for the average player who doesn't want to learn the latest BO or work at 100+APM or play alone.
MobA's basically have taken that step already. You only need to look at one screen and control one unit, and those have a healthy proscene as well. Shooters, you can't even switch view. Most of what you need to be able to do is microing that one dot in front of you so that your shots hit the enemy. Both those genres have a healthy proscene.
Just look at 6 pools from life or 2 rax from maru and see that you don't need to spread player attention everywhere to have players outclassing each other. You increase the natural microability of units into the extremes so that every unit interction has the scaling of hellions vs zerglings or banelings vs marines and the question of a reachable skillceiling will never come up, regardless of how easy the game is.
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On January 21 2016 06:45 boxerfred wrote:
The current WCS system is shit, lets be honest. Congratulation, stuchiu!
WCS is probably the best thing to happen to Sc2, in any iteration. Only bad thing to say about it was that it should have been in place at the start of 2011.
Sc2 failed on just about every facet.
The inaugural BNet 2.0 was terrible.
Completely ignoring custom games and any form of social experience, making ladder the sole focus.
When gameplay has so many frustrating and unrewarding components to it, over time players will simply lose interest and motivation to play.
LotV was a big step in the right direction, but it is probably too little too late.
I'd honestly like to see TL create a poll for the ranking your most preferred expansion.
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Putting so much effort and money in popularizing the game in Korea was a huge mistake. For some reason Blizzard decided that Korea is somewhat special... Yeah, yeah BW this, KeSPA that. The fact is - Korea is special for BW. For SC2(and many other eSports) - not so much.
Imagine if we had WCS 2 years earlier...
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East Gorteau22261 Posts
On January 21 2016 20:47 Pr0wler wrote:
Putting so much effort and money in popularizing the game in Korea was a huge mistake. For some reason Blizzard decided that Korea is somewhat special... Yeah, yeah BW this, KeSPA that. The fact is - Korea is special for BW. For SC2(and many other eSports) - not so much.
Imagine if we had WCS 2 years earlier...
Indisputably, Korea is special. That is why all the best players have come from Korea.
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On January 21 2016 20:47 Pr0wler wrote:
Putting so much effort and money in popularizing the game in Korea was a huge mistake. For some reason Blizzard decided that Korea is somewhat special... Yeah, yeah BW this, KeSPA that. The fact is - Korea is special for BW. For SC2(and many other eSports) - not so much.
Imagine if we had WCS 2 years earlier...
Blizzard kicked all but a handful of Koreans out of NA/EU in 2015, and gave Ro64 nobodies two grand just for qualifying.
The result was Lilbow.
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Czech Republic12129 Posts
On January 21 2016 20:47 Pr0wler wrote:
Putting so much effort and money in popularizing the game in Korea was a huge mistake. For some reason Blizzard decided that Korea is somewhat special... Yeah, yeah BW this, KeSPA that. The fact is - Korea is special for BW. For SC2(and many other eSports) - not so much.
Imagine if we had WCS 2 years earlier...
You probably missed the first years of SC2 when foreigners actually mattered. EG won bags of money and where is their SC2 team now?!
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845 Posts
On January 21 2016 20:35 Agh wrote:
LotV was a big step in the right direction, but it is probably too little too late.
It's hilarious to watch people still hyping LoTV while making excuses like that because they have no proof to back up the hype. Accept it already. LoTV didn't change a thing. Viewership has the lowest values since 2010. And these "big changes" everybody was/is talking about have nothing to do with SC2 being unpopular.
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The true "core" of the piece doesn't come until the end. The PC Bang scene in SC2 was pretty much dead by 2012 in Korea, if it ever really took off. This meant that most of the 12-14 year old boys were playing LoL with friends. Apparently the Korean LoL server opened in December 2011, which would backup this point. While Korea is doing pretty good as a country as this point, ~$60 USD for a game and the computer to support it isn't that easy to swing over there. (And we've been told a number of times, over the years, that Koreans rarely have computers at home, compounding the issue.) So when you can play with friends (which is how most everyone started in SC:BW) on a game that's free, well, that's generally the place people will start. (Obviously, SC:BW could pretty easily be played for "free" as well. As, the days before DRM.)
So the scene has actually be starved for talent for a while. Which isn't good when it's a really hard game. I remember someone pointing out back in 2014, I believe, that all of the top Terran then were either BW players or had been playing SC2 since GSL Open Season 1. The implication being there already was a lack of new players (or that Terran was too hard to learn).
But, at the end of it all, the really core of the problem is that the entire social & computer gaming landscape has changed since they first started designing SC2, in ways they definitely didn't predict. We forget that the Beta tournaments were cast from replays, as Twitch didn't exist yet. I'm not sure that there was an independent streaming platform yet, when this all started. Between the global rise of Smart Phones, the shift to Free2Play games and the dominance of Social Media, SC2 was designed for a completely different environment. And environment that really wasn't going to have as long of a lifespan as SC:BW.
Still, even saying that, I'm fairly sure we'll get at least a WCS 2017. For as much money as Blizzard funds into the eSports side of things, it just acts as their Marketing Budget. That's what finally clicked starting in 2014 for the non-Valve companies. eSports is a brilliant marketing vehicle. And very cheap too. (Relative to the costs of Global Marketing in general.) LOTV sold 1+ million copies on the first day. It'll probably go on to sell ~4 million over its lifespan. 2016's eSports budget probably cost them the sales from 100k copies of the game. It'll help produce more sales than that over the year. So even as the scene is contracting, it's still valuable to Blizzard. Even if it's less so for most of the top Pros.
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look at blizzard sc2team doing, shrinking is soooooooo obvious....
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On January 21 2016 20:30 Gwavajuice wrote:
Why is football (soccer) still so popular? It's not because of Messi or Ronaldo, it's not because the premier league is crazy rich, it's because wherever you go in the world you give 2 kids a ball and they start to kick and play and they love it.
Our concern should not be about sc2 living as an esport but sc2 being fun and enjoyable to play as a game. BW became an esport and was so succesful because korean kids were playing SC in PC bangs, not the other way around.
Couldn't have said it better.
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On January 21 2016 08:00 NonY wrote:
I'm not so sure that anything about the current state of things concretely predicts a moment when the only players willing to sign up for tournaments are not as good at the game as their predecessors. My prediction is that fans will say the scene is suffering before any noticeable decline in the quality of the games is even observed. I've even read a lot of negative comments from fans about their WCS 2016 experience before they've even lived it. It's pretty nuts.
Are the quality of the games actually improving?
IMO The skill level of the scene was at the highest during 2014. Other than the LotV visual upgrade, I haven't seen many plays that could compare to the period where TotalBiscuit was supporting Axiom and foreigner Koreans running around everywhere. That year I saw the most improvement in foreign players, while foreigners had a bad showing in the tournaments instead of Scarlett and maybe Snute showing good games vs Koreans 2014 had players like Lilbow, MarineLord, Showtime, Firecake, and Bunny all make huge strides.
On January 21 2016 22:58 Douillos wrote:Show nested quote +On January 21 2016 20:30 Gwavajuice wrote:
Why is football (soccer) still so popular? It's not because of Messi or Ronaldo, it's not because the premier league is crazy rich, it's because wherever you go in the world you give 2 kids a ball and they start to kick and play and they love it.
Our concern should not be about sc2 living as an esport but sc2 being fun and enjoyable to play as a game. BW became an esport and was so succesful because korean kids were playing SC in PC bangs, not the other way around. Couldn't have said it better.
Ditto, it is the players+game that make the scene. The scene don't make players.
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On January 21 2016 06:18 Ctone23 wrote:
Not a big fan of the article personally but it's pretty awesome to see SC2 on a brand's website that I grew up watching every single day. Not once did I ever think ESPN would be covering video games. Truly awesome. Gratz
They used to cover MLG Halo games. Like 8 years ago :D golden era.
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845 Posts
On January 21 2016 22:58 Douillos wrote:Show nested quote +On January 21 2016 20:30 Gwavajuice wrote:
Why is football (soccer) still so popular? It's not because of Messi or Ronaldo, it's not because the premier league is crazy rich, it's because wherever you go in the world you give 2 kids a ball and they start to kick and play and they love it.
Our concern should not be about sc2 living as an esport but sc2 being fun and enjoyable to play as a game. BW became an esport and was so succesful because korean kids were playing SC in PC bangs, not the other way around. Couldn't have said it better.
Exactly
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On January 22 2016 00:24 alukarD wrote:Show nested quote +On January 21 2016 06:18 Ctone23 wrote:
Not a big fan of the article personally but it's pretty awesome to see SC2 on a brand's website that I grew up watching every single day. Not once did I ever think ESPN would be covering video games. Truly awesome. Gratz They used to cover MLG Halo games. Like 8 years ago :D golden era.
Ohh yeah, I vaguely remember that now! I stand corrected, but still awesome to see SC2 on there
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On January 21 2016 20:18 Hoofit wrote:Show nested quote +On January 21 2016 06:44 Djzapz wrote:On January 21 2016 06:39 LastManProductions wrote:
If people keep saying SC2 will die, it will die. I think people are saying SC2 is dying because it is. I don't know that you can successfully argue that it goes the other way around. If you're actually under the impression that the "SC2 is dying" concern is coming from no where and it has no foundation in reality, and that the concern by itself is undermining the game, you've got some serious work to do to prove that. Let me say it this way: games that are actually doing good don't have that systemic issue of passionate players raising the concerns about the game "dying". I dunno Kev. I find it hard to take the 'dying' thing seriously. There have been people saying Sc2 was dying/ 'ded' from when Sc2 was rising to its peak, to its troughs. The phrase did/does seem popular with LoL fans so I find it hard to take it seriously. I'd agree with Sc2 is not as big as it was, or the Korean Sc2 scene is looking less healthy currently, but I guess that is not as catchy as the ded game meme or the slightly more nuances Sc2 is dying. EDIT The argument that people not getting warned/banned despite saying it is a dead game is amazing. It doesn't for how someone puts their argument across nor whether the poster's views were generally in line with opinion.
i'd like if we could avoid an emotionally charged word like "dying".
Starcraft2 is slowly declining. According to the metrics i've abserved this is a slow decline. I'd say Sc2 is about 50% as popular and is garnering about 50% of the interest it did 5 years ago.
In the english speaking world, Starcraft2 is declining at about the same rate as the Borderlands franchise. On the Gearbox site people are happily running around creating new builds yapping about new techniques and tactics... discussing the lateste Gearbox balance patch and boss drop rates. The "slow decline" of Borderlands is very, very occasionally discussed. and, sometimes people get all worked up about it... but not often.
if the game were shedding 35% of the player base every month the way Act of Aggression or Grey Goo does then we're talking about something completely different from the "slow decline" i'm proposing.
if you'd like to debate whether or not a "slow decline" with SC2 is occurring IN A CONSTRUCTIVE MANNER i'd be happy to share the metrics i have to back up my point. I'd be more than happy to lose the debate and discover that the game i love is growing in popularity and garnering more interest with a growing player base.
On January 21 2016 19:17 OtherWorld wrote:
A game which is meant, by its very essence, to "never" decline declining as fast as a game which is meant to decline in ~2 or 3 years is normal?
Frank Pearce in 2010 is quoted as saying SC2 is a "10 year eSports experiment". We are almost 6 years into it. So the game is more than half-way into its life cycle. Starcraft2 is not Baseball 2.0
Borderlands2 and Borderlands:The PreSequel is still being re-balanced to this day.
Work was done on BL1 to make it work with Steam. 5+ years after its release.
Borderlands2 had a stream of DLC 2+ years after its release and new playable characters added and substantial modifications get made to their special abilities even very recently.
Source:
http://forums.gearboxsoftware.com/t/update-coming-to-borderlands-2-on-october-29-2015/819678/3
If Borderlands is pre-engineered to decline don't tell Gearbox.
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Congratulations and well deserved on the opportunity, stuchiu!
Not sure I agree with everything regarding cause and effect of the lack of newcomers but you raise some valid points and I hope some of the ESPN audience also find it worth reading.
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EPT
