Reddit thread is pondering this very question right now. I've been called a "Korean Elitist" here but there are some facts i can't deny.
GSL qualifiers are a ghostown and Ro32 reduced to 24 players: Even with the tournament size being reduced, GSL qualifiers are still easier than ever and RO24 is mostly(IMO) a formality before things begin.
Maru finishing 4th in a group with 2 foreigners. TY, the GSL champion, 3-0ed by NA runner up: We don't even need to bring Serral and Reynor into this,this goes beyond "upset" territory(upset would be TY making it close or Maru getting 3rd) this is just getting outclassed.
Region lock removed: Even people who faithfully preached the"faceless koreans are ruining starcraft" dogma think its ok to end region lock.
International tournament winrate: Koreans have won Blizzcon and Katowice, but they're getting outperformed by foreigners overall, losing every single circuit final. The Serral/Reynor finals are no longer only a WCS circuit issue.
I could go on with this for ages, there's plenty to be said about it but i think the most notable facts that concern this discussion are here.
The problem with ending region lock is that Foreigner tournaments are either online or weekenders, so Koreans can attend them and still live in Korea, while foreigners have to move to Korea to attend GSL.
More international tournaments would work, but ending region lock 100% is not a good idea.
Well, as one of the redditors said, on the top 20 players, there are a least 12 to 15 koreans. They are less dominants but it's fine, if anything, it could motivate them. Now, it's sure that the region lock has way less impact.
The single best moment in SC2 history was when Serral won Blizzcon. Why? Because he demonstrated to other foreigners that it was possible to take down the Koreans. Once the mental barrier is gone, it is gone forever.
Personally I find it awesome that the Korean dominance over SC2 has ended. They were never more talented, they just had the teamhouse advantage. Take that away and they are nothing special.
No, Korean Starcraft has obviously not hit rock bottom--it could obviously be worse off than currently and almost certainly will be in a few months when Stats and others have to do their military service.
look at the spots to Global Finals/IEM Katowice in March that each region gets! Korea has by far the most and do you disagree with that? I don't! Ranking the best 36 players, I might have a few more Europeans and leave out a few from other regions but no more than 1 from Korea
On November 17 2020 04:39 Morbidius wrote: Reddit thread is pondering this very question right now. I've been called a "Korean Elitist" here but there are some facts i can't deny.
GSL qualifiers are a ghostown and Ro32 reduced to 24 players: Even with the tournament size being reduced, GSL qualifiers are still easier than ever and RO24 is mostly(IMO) a formality before things begin.
Maru finishing 4th in a group with 2 foreigners. TY, the GSL champion, 3-0ed by NA runner up: We don't even need to bring Serral and Reynor into this,this goes beyond "upset" territory(upset would be TY making it close or Maru getting 3rd) this is just getting outclassed.
Region lock removed: Even people who faithfully preached the"faceless koreans are ruining starcraft" dogma think its ok to end region lock.
International tournament winrate: Koreans have won Blizzcon and Katowice, but they're getting outperformed by foreigners overall, losing every single circuit final. The Serral/Reynor finals are no longer only a WCS circuit issue.
I could go on with this for ages, there's plenty to be said about it but i think the most notable facts that concern this discussion are here.
Foreigners dominated every... King of Battles. But... Stats was second, but... of all the rock bottom Koreans only 1 lost WC titles... but! BUT... in the top 20 there are like 15 Koreans...
Sure, talent is leaving and no new is coming, especially visible it is at the Protoss where no foreigner can do anything substantial(like win a bigger tournament) nor Korean kongs.
Oh noez, Maru ended last after he finished 2nd and won a tournament. WHAT A DISASTER! TY was beaten by a NA runner up. After he spent streaming BW more time than preparing for this tournament(if any time was put into the preparation)... oh noez, Cure didn't deliver and didn't beat Serral again. Oh, wait, Cure wasn't here. Rogue didn't deliveR! Blame the patch zerg. Wait, he wasn't here either. Damn... blame Classic and military!
Edit> Oh noez, it appears as if some Koreans are taking a break from SC2!!!! WHAT A DISASTER AND TRAGEDY. AFter a year of SC2!!!!
Maybe, just maybe, they are finally getting the well earned break. While a little bit ignoring tournaments which are ignoring their timezone (or not, who knows? )
Edit 2> I dare to say Korean SC2 is in the same state as 2 years ago, but with less talent which was lost to the army. Now is too late to do anything anyway.
Katowice is the real Test, I give All the Korean elitists and apologists that one. The EPT season Finals where nice and all that, but in the end the world champion is crowned offline, at Katowice. Still the top 20 in the world is way more than half KR. We have maybe 8-10 foreigners in top 30 and Down from there, there are quite a lot more foreigners, just because there are so many more Players in the world outside of Korean than in that tinny country
This has been almost ten years in the making. The last KeSPA rookie draft was held in 2013 and there has been almost no influx of talent since. (If you really want to dig into the drafts, 2008 was the last year that produced a bunch of championship caliber players, though 2009 had some solid players as well).
So you have a scene that was never going to get a bunch of new players for a number of reasons, (less pay/less exposure/their friends are playing lol or overwatch or whatever team game is popular/the current pros were too good) that was always inevitably going to be gutted by military service, and where players are picking up all sorts of injuries that limits the amount of time they can play and you have the perfect recipe for stagnation.
You can go back if you're really curious and find the interview where Zest remarks on how he tries (and I'm am paraphrasing) "half as hard as he used to". And remember, he said that YEARS ago. Or look to 2016 when players like INnoVation or soO basically mailed it in, playing Proleague (since this was what SKT paid them to do) but not putting any effort into individual leagues. There are countless other examples of players simply not putting in the time or just coasting because they were so far ahead of the second tier of competition that it wouldn't affect their bottom line all that much. It's also worth reading some stuff Jaedong said about not enjoying sc after awhile. It's quite possible a lot of the players are just burnt out after all these years.
Anyway, the INnoVation's soO's, Rogue's etc regularly reached the opening stages of individual events despite not grinding ceaselessly because they were simply so far ahead of everyone else. Players like bravo, guilty, trust, etc etc were never going to have some sudden breakthrough no matter how hard they practiced. Like I said, sc2 reached a point of stagnation a very long time ago. The result is just more obvious now that so many players have gone to military and the players in eu/na are putting more time in relative to the koreans.
It has nothing to do with region lock. It has nothing to do with some collusion against the Koreans. Korean sc2 was always destined to reach this point and the life matchfixing scandal simply accelerated the process by a couple of years by killing off proleague (which was already on its way out, but offered some stability to players). Even then, sc2 gave us some great games, great players, great rivalries and incredible memories. Who cares if Korean sc2 is at its lowest point? Everyone should have seen this coming years ago and the truth is it's only going to get worse. My advice is go back and watch some good games from yesteryear and celebrate the joy sc2 gave us.
On November 17 2020 04:39 Morbidius wrote: Reddit thread is pondering this very question right now. I've been called a "Korean Elitist" here but there are some facts i can't deny.
GSL qualifiers are a ghostown and Ro32 reduced to 24 players: Even with the tournament size being reduced, GSL qualifiers are still easier than ever and RO24 is mostly(IMO) a formality before things begin.
Maru finishing 4th in a group with 2 foreigners. TY, the GSL champion, 3-0ed by NA runner up: We don't even need to bring Serral and Reynor into this,this goes beyond "upset" territory(upset would be TY making it close or Maru getting 3rd) this is just getting outclassed.
Region lock removed: Even people who faithfully preached the"faceless koreans are ruining starcraft" dogma think its ok to end region lock.
International tournament winrate: Koreans have won Blizzcon and Katowice, but they're getting outperformed by foreigners overall, losing every single circuit final. The Serral/Reynor finals are no longer only a WCS circuit issue.
I could go on with this for ages, there's plenty to be said about it but i think the most notable facts that concern this discussion are here.
Foreigners dominated every... King of Battles. But... Stats was second, but... of all the rock bottom Koreans only 1 lost WC titles... but! BUT... in the top 20 there are like 15 Koreans...
Sure, talent is leaving and no new is coming, especially visible it is at the Protoss where no foreigner can do anything substantial(like win a bigger tournament) nor Korean kongs.
Oh noez, Maru ended last after he finished 2nd and won a tournament. WHAT A DISASTER! TY was beaten by a NA runner up. After he spent streaming BW more time than preparing for this tournament(if any time was put into the preparation)... oh noez, Cure didn't deliver and didn't beat Serral again. Oh, wait, Cure wasn't here. Rogue didn't deliveR! Blame the patch zerg. Wait, he wasn't here either. Damn... blame Classic and military!
Edit> Oh noez, it appears as if some Koreans are taking a break from SC2!!!! WHAT A DISASTER AND TRAGEDY. AFter a year of SC2!!!!
Maybe, just maybe, they are finally getting the well earned break. While a little bit ignoring tournaments which are ignoring their timezone (or not, who knows? )
Edit 2> I dare to say Korean SC2 is in the same state as 2 years ago, but with less talent which was lost to the army. Now is too late to do anything anyway.
We can look at international tournaments and say its just luck, but all korean tournaments don't paint the brightest picture out there.
the big worry for Korean SC2 is that there is no real viewership combined with no new blood.
The lack of new blood has been talked of recently in Snow's interview series with TY & Stats and they address this very issue saying that it is big worry they are not seeing anyone new around that can challenge the current pro level/lead the next generation. Combine this with the looming defunding from Blizzard on Korean SC2 tournaments, there is going to be big gap between tournaments Koreans can participate in and the next one, only really filled in by online tournaments. With GSL being gone, I can see many of the current roster moving to coaching another esports like League/ moving on to BW streaming/ retiring.
As TY & Stats also mentioned, Life's matchfixing accelerated this process and dismantling of the Kespa teams preventing recruitment of new talent just stopped Korean SC2 in tracks. Combine that with low viewership and interest means this was really inevitable.
Hell, even BW, which still has big following in Korea has this very same problem with lack of new blood (other than Soma). If game with much bigger viewerbase is struggling and looking likely to be on the tail end due to lack of new blood due to there being no supportive infrastructure (teams), SC2 would go the same path as well.
[link to the translated interview with TY & Stats on this issue (ENG sub on CC)] + Show Spoiler +
On November 17 2020 05:59 MockHamill wrote: The single best moment in SC2 history was when Serral won Blizzcon. Why? Because he demonstrated to other foreigners that it was possible to take down the Koreans. Once the mental barrier is gone, it is gone forever.
Personally I find it awesome that the Korean dominance over SC2 has ended. They were never more talented, they just had the teamhouse advantage. Take that away and they are nothing special.
Agree with everything except the very last sentence. I think it was a very good call to region lock to bring up the rest of the world for the scene overall and the longevity of the game. It's now in a place where new and young players are coming up all outside of Korea. Hopefully Korea catches up and gets back into it, but as a collectivistic country, they all follow the crowd and the crowd is not in RTS/SC atm.
On November 17 2020 05:59 MockHamill wrote: The single best moment in SC2 history was when Serral won Blizzcon. Why? Because he demonstrated to other foreigners that it was possible to take down the Koreans. Once the mental barrier is gone, it is gone forever.
Personally I find it awesome that the Korean dominance over SC2 has ended. They were never more talented, they just had the teamhouse advantage. Take that away and they are nothing special.
Agree with everything except the very last sentence. I think it was a very good call to region lock to bring up the rest of the world for the scene overall and the longevity of the game. It's now in a place where new and young players are coming up all outside of Korea. Hopefully Korea catches up and gets back into it, but as a collectivistic country, they all follow the crowd and the crowd is not in RTS/SC atm.
The cost was just the Korean scene. But hey, once the Blizzard deal is over, the BW can prepare for the influx of players. I heard Parting is good, TY is good and maybe others will join as well (I'm not watching BW, but hey I wish them a proper future)
Korea, as a collectivivistic, fuck, again, vivisection... screw that. Korea follows BW. That's why BW featured streams have so many people watching.
On November 17 2020 04:39 Morbidius wrote: Reddit thread is pondering this very question right now. I've been called a "Korean Elitist" here but there are some facts i can't deny.
GSL qualifiers are a ghostown and Ro32 reduced to 24 players: Even with the tournament size being reduced, GSL qualifiers are still easier than ever and RO24 is mostly(IMO) a formality before things begin.
Maru finishing 4th in a group with 2 foreigners. TY, the GSL champion, 3-0ed by NA runner up: We don't even need to bring Serral and Reynor into this,this goes beyond "upset" territory(upset would be TY making it close or Maru getting 3rd) this is just getting outclassed.
Region lock removed: Even people who faithfully preached the"faceless koreans are ruining starcraft" dogma think its ok to end region lock.
International tournament winrate: Koreans have won Blizzcon and Katowice, but they're getting outperformed by foreigners overall, losing every single circuit final. The Serral/Reynor finals are no longer only a WCS circuit issue.
I could go on with this for ages, there's plenty to be said about it but i think the most notable facts that concern this discussion are here.
Foreigners dominated every... King of Battles. But... Stats was second, but... of all the rock bottom Koreans only 1 lost WC titles... but! BUT... in the top 20 there are like 15 Koreans...
Sure, talent is leaving and no new is coming, especially visible it is at the Protoss where no foreigner can do anything substantial(like win a bigger tournament) nor Korean kongs.
Oh noez, Maru ended last after he finished 2nd and won a tournament. WHAT A DISASTER! TY was beaten by a NA runner up. After he spent streaming BW more time than preparing for this tournament(if any time was put into the preparation)... oh noez, Cure didn't deliver and didn't beat Serral again. Oh, wait, Cure wasn't here. Rogue didn't deliveR! Blame the patch zerg. Wait, he wasn't here either. Damn... blame Classic and military!
Edit> Oh noez, it appears as if some Koreans are taking a break from SC2!!!! WHAT A DISASTER AND TRAGEDY. AFter a year of SC2!!!!
Maybe, just maybe, they are finally getting the well earned break. While a little bit ignoring tournaments which are ignoring their timezone (or not, who knows? )
Edit 2> I dare to say Korean SC2 is in the same state as 2 years ago, but with less talent which was lost to the army. Now is too late to do anything anyway.
We can look at international tournaments and say its just luck, but all korean tournaments don't paint the brightest picture out there.
It's not luck, but considering Major said(allegedly) that Maru didn't play any SC2 at all after the Code S finals, TY was massively streaming BW it may appear that Koreans are taking a time off.
The talent is leaving, that's undeniable. And I am acknowledging it, but rock bottom? I wouldn't say so, but the next year may tell us more.
On November 17 2020 05:59 MockHamill wrote: The single best moment in SC2 history was when Serral won Blizzcon. Why? Because he demonstrated to other foreigners that it was possible to take down the Koreans. Once the mental barrier is gone, it is gone forever.
There was never a mental barrier. Koreans had a more competitive scene so they were performing better than they are now.
The scene was going to weaken anyway but the region lock didn't help, so sure I would hope it gets removed now.
On November 17 2020 05:59 MockHamill wrote: The single best moment in SC2 history was when Serral won Blizzcon. Why? Because he demonstrated to other foreigners that it was possible to take down the Koreans. Once the mental barrier is gone, it is gone forever.
There was never a mental barrier. Koreans had a more competitive scene so they were performing better than they are now.
The scene was going to weaken anyway but the region lock didn't help, so sure I would hope it gets removed now.
How will removing the region lock help developing the Korean scene exactly?
On November 17 2020 07:09 jinjin5000 wrote: the big worry for Korean SC2 is that there is no real viewership combined with no new blood.
The lack of new blood has been talked of recently in Snow's interview series with TY & Stats and they address this very issue saying that it is big worry they are not seeing anyone new around that can challenge the current pro level/lead the next generation. Combine this with the looming defunding from Blizzard on Korean SC2 tournaments, there is going to be big gap between tournaments Koreans can participate in and the next one, only really filled in by online tournaments. With GSL being gone, I can see many of the current roster moving to coaching another esports like League/ moving on to BW streaming/ retiring.
As TY & Stats also mentioned, Life's matchfixing accelerated this process and dismantling of the Kespa teams preventing recruitment of new talent just stopped Korean SC2 in tracks. Combine that with low viewership and interest means this was really inevitable.
Hell, even BW, which still has big following in Korea has this very same problem with lack of new blood (other than Soma). If game with much bigger viewerbase is struggling and looking likely to be on the tail end due to lack of new blood due to there being no supportive infrastructure (teams), SC2 would go the same path as well.
[link to the translated interview with TY & Stats on this issue (ENG sub on CC)] + Show Spoiler +
Not sure about the talent and BW stuff. Artosis said that they get many more people trying ASL qualis than for the Code S so maybe they don't qualify but at least they try it. He said it during some of the last pylon shows(not the jeopardy one, those before, can't remember which one)
On November 17 2020 05:59 MockHamill wrote: The single best moment in SC2 history was when Serral won Blizzcon. Why? Because he demonstrated to other foreigners that it was possible to take down the Koreans. Once the mental barrier is gone, it is gone forever.
There was never a mental barrier. Koreans had a more competitive scene so they were performing better than they are now.
The scene was going to weaken anyway but the region lock didn't help, so sure I would hope it gets removed now.
I agree that a mental barrier was never the issue. The issue was serral himself. Once he appeared Europe now had a player in the region that could push new talent up higher. It's after Serral that we see europeans generally rise up in ability, but we also get the 2 new young players - one who is Z like serral and the other who not-coincidentally is best at TvZ.
On November 17 2020 05:59 MockHamill wrote: The single best moment in SC2 history was when Serral won Blizzcon. Why? Because he demonstrated to other foreigners that it was possible to take down the Koreans. Once the mental barrier is gone, it is gone forever.
There was never a mental barrier. Koreans had a more competitive scene so they were performing better than they are now.
The scene was going to weaken anyway but the region lock didn't help, so sure I would hope it gets removed now.
I agree that a mental barrier was never the issue. The issue was serral himself. Once he appeared Europe now had a player in the region that could push new talent up higher. It's after Serral that we see europeans generally rise up in ability, but we also get the 2 new young players - one who is Z like serral and the other who not-coincidentally is best at TvZ.
Funny thing, there was a time when many Koreans were living in the Europe and playing on the European ladder. I wonder what drove them away (and I honestly believe that if the rules were more subtle we would have had many more foreigners being good much earlier)
Apollo already teased region lock will be loosened next year which disproportionately effects NA. Koreans are less likely to take over the eu scene not only because the players are generally better but because for koreans to play there they have to overcome 330ms. On NA west you get 130. Rip na except Neeb, Scarlett, Astrea.
There are no longer team houses, so I think the era of Korean dominance is pretty much over. Now it's just a tossup between the best folks in each region.
On November 17 2020 07:25 deacon.frost wrote: Not sure about the talent and BW stuff. Artosis said that they get many more people trying ASL qualis than for the Code S so maybe they don't qualify but at least they try it. He said it during some of the last pylon shows(not the jeopardy one, those before, can't remember which one)
numbers are naturally higher because more people play it in korea of course, but the problem is the competition. There isn't as many new people who can stay competitive against the "old" kespa pros (except Soma), and real lack of new players coming through that are young and talented.
On November 17 2020 07:25 deacon.frost wrote: Not sure about the talent and BW stuff. Artosis said that they get many more people trying ASL qualis than for the Code S so maybe they don't qualify but at least they try it. He said it during some of the last pylon shows(not the jeopardy one, those before, can't remember which one)
numbers are naturally higher because more people play it in korea of course, but the problem is the competition. There isn't as many new people who can stay competitive against the "old" kespa pros (except Soma), and real lack of new players coming through that are young and talented.
Can there be? I don't know the BW scene, but aren't it just full of former pros? That's a high bar to pass, maybe even higher than in SC2 considering SC2 natural volatility.
On November 17 2020 07:25 deacon.frost wrote: Not sure about the talent and BW stuff. Artosis said that they get many more people trying ASL qualis than for the Code S so maybe they don't qualify but at least they try it. He said it during some of the last pylon shows(not the jeopardy one, those before, can't remember which one)
numbers are naturally higher because more people play it in korea of course, but the problem is the competition. There isn't as many new people who can stay competitive against the "old" kespa pros (except Soma), and real lack of new players coming through that are young and talented.
Can there be? I don't know the BW scene, but aren't it just full of former pros? That's a high bar to pass, maybe even higher than in SC2 considering SC2 natural volatility.
And that's why its a problem. There isn't new blood that can challenge the current roster, much like SC2's situation. Even with larger playerbase and viewerbase, it shares the same problem due to same lack of infrastructure and support.
I wouldn't say Korean SC2, and SC2 in general has hit rock bottom, but it's definitely declined in terms of viewership, tournaments, competitiveness, and the amount of players. Ever since we lost Korean teams and team league, the Korean skill level has gone down. Region locking certainly doesn't help. Remember when we had SKT, KT, Jin Air, Afreeca, CJ Entus, Samsung, and LG? Those games look so crazy back then compared to the games being played today.
Now keep in mind SC2 is a 10 year old game and it's only natural we don't get a lot of new players. There's way better games out there to play. How many people start playing a game by themselves? Outside of mobile games and AAA titles, people usually play games where they can play in a team environment or interact with other players and their friends. Growing up, I played Gunbound, RuneScape, MU Online, and MapleStory all because my friends played it with me. We all still play video games where we can play together. Out of all my friends, I'm the only one left playing SC2, and even then I've moved over to playing more CS:GO.
If you're a foreigner looking to go competitive and become a professional, SC2 is not as popular as the other e-sports and rightfully so. You get paid more as a CS:GO or League professional with better contracts to sign and bigger prize pools. Even if you're not the best of the best, you can still sign with a tier 2 team and compete in tournaments or play in the LCS or LEC "not as good leagues." These tier 2 teams and competitions still pay a lot more than what someone would make in SC2. I can't say the same for Koreans as I don't know what Koreans play outside of League since there's no professional CS:GO team, but I'm sure a similar concept applies to the Eastern world.
On November 17 2020 07:25 deacon.frost wrote: Not sure about the talent and BW stuff. Artosis said that they get many more people trying ASL qualis than for the Code S so maybe they don't qualify but at least they try it. He said it during some of the last pylon shows(not the jeopardy one, those before, can't remember which one)
numbers are naturally higher because more people play it in korea of course, but the problem is the competition. There isn't as many new people who can stay competitive against the "old" kespa pros (except Soma), and real lack of new players coming through that are young and talented.
Can there be? I don't know the BW scene, but aren't it just full of former pros? That's a high bar to pass, maybe even higher than in SC2 considering SC2 natural volatility.
Its like SC2,almost zero new talent, the difference being that no other region ever reached A team quality, lets alone S tier like Flash. BW is pretty messed up,, but unlike SC2 we had guys who could shake up the rigid hierarchy(Jangbi, Fantasy). SC2 is mostly koreans who peaked before 2015 trying to be relevant.
On November 17 2020 07:38 CicadaSC wrote: Apollo already teased region lock will be loosened next year which disproportionately effects NA. Koreans are less likely to take over the eu scene not only because the players are generally better but because for koreans to play there they have to overcome 330ms. On NA west you get 130. Rip na except Neeb, Scarlett, Astrea.
What am I reading? How can you think any korean would have chances to do anything playing on EU server when online tournament on the "fairest" servers are hard fought right now? It's utter silliness to even think about that in the post Serral era.
Also, I wouldn't expect removing/loosening region lock to lead to online regional tournaments allowing korean presence, it would make no sense.
On November 17 2020 07:38 CicadaSC wrote: Apollo already teased region lock will be loosened next year which disproportionately effects NA. Koreans are less likely to take over the eu scene not only because the players are generally better but because for koreans to play there they have to overcome 330ms. On NA west you get 130. Rip na except Neeb, Scarlett, Astrea.
What am I reading? How can you think any korean would have chances to do anything playing on EU server when online tournament on the "fairest" servers are hard fought right now? It's utter silliness to even think about that in the post Serral era.
Also, I wouldn't expect removing/loosening region lock to lead to online regional tournaments allowing korean presence, it would make no sense.
That's actually precisely what I said. A removal of region lock would have little to no effect on the eu scene
On November 17 2020 07:25 deacon.frost wrote: Not sure about the talent and BW stuff. Artosis said that they get many more people trying ASL qualis than for the Code S so maybe they don't qualify but at least they try it. He said it during some of the last pylon shows(not the jeopardy one, those before, can't remember which one)
numbers are naturally higher because more people play it in korea of course, but the problem is the competition. There isn't as many new people who can stay competitive against the "old" kespa pros (except Soma), and real lack of new players coming through that are young and talented.
Tbh calling Soma 'new' is itself shows just how stagnant the water is, given that his first forays into competitive BW were evidently 8 or 9 years ago. So, looks like the problem is exact same between BW and SC2, it's just that BW is naturally bigger in Korea.
One thing that isn’t mentioned as much is how open the scene has been all over the years.
The Kespa regime didn’t just breed formidable BW players, it largely kept its secrets locked within practice houses. Outsiders could see its results in action but were left merely with trying to reconstruct builds, never mind mechanical optimisations from tournament VoDs. Sure we could see what a Flash was doing, we didn’t really know how he was doing it.
It did subsequently open up in the streaming era, but the gap mechanically between veteran full-time progamers and new blood is just too difficult to bridge.
SC2 scene has always been much more open, plebs like me can study replays from all sorts of tournaments, with hotkey info. Never mind streaming too.
And unlike BW the mechanical side of the game isn’t something unbridgeable outside of the Kespa regime. Sure it’s extremely difficult, that’s why it’s only a handful of foreigners who are mechanically the equal of Korean’s vets, but it is doable.
Koreans don’t have that mechanical advantage, nor are they an unknown quantity either, there’s lots to study.
Speaking of openness as it pertains to SC2, another factor is I that it’s just bigger in foreign land, which I think is a factor as well in terms of development.
There’s a lot of theorycrafting, optimisation (see the Core, although few pros use it iirc) and just general discussion and development of the game that occurs where the audience is, and it’s largely the foreign scene and its largely in English too. The foreign scene seems to have pushed on a little in terms of small optimisations. Outside of a few situations like stutter stepping backwards mouse scrolling is probably just outright better than the more common scrolling of the edge of the screen, but it’s mostly foreign players I’ve seen thus far adopting it.
In a scene where players are largely practicing and thinking about the game semi-independently, that’s actually a pretty big resource advantage for foreign players.
We have examples of Koreans doing this, usually a player doing a Catz build or Parting doing the MaxPax, but they’re probably so notable that I remember them because they’re relatively rare (at least in being acknowledged). Whereas a foreign pro is exposed to a lot more of this on a daily basis.
On November 17 2020 06:56 dbRic1203 wrote: Katowice is the real Test, I give All the Korean elitists and apologists that one. The EPT season Finals where nice and all that, but in the end the world champion is crowned offline, at Katowice. Still the top 20 in the world is way more than half KR. We have maybe 8-10 foreigners in top 30 and Down from there, there are quite a lot more foreigners, just because there are so many more Players in the world outside of Korean than in that tinny country
Too bad though that it's not guaranteed to be offline... If it's online the cross server games will be kinda meaningless :|
On November 17 2020 06:56 dbRic1203 wrote: Katowice is the real Test, I give All the Korean elitists and apologists that one. The EPT season Finals where nice and all that, but in the end the world champion is crowned offline, at Katowice. Still the top 20 in the world is way more than half KR. We have maybe 8-10 foreigners in top 30 and Down from there, there are quite a lot more foreigners, just because there are so many more Players in the world outside of Korean than in that tinny country
Too bad though that it's not guaranteed to be offline... If it's online the cross server games will be kinda meaningless :|
For sure.
If it comes to it honestly I’d rather them just push it back a bit and tweak the calendar than us end up with a de facto world championship played with conditions that aren’t optimal for the players.
On November 17 2020 05:59 MockHamill wrote: The single best moment in SC2 history was when Serral won Blizzcon. Why? Because he demonstrated to other foreigners that it was possible to take down the Koreans. Once the mental barrier is gone, it is gone forever.
There was never a mental barrier. Koreans had a more competitive scene so they were performing better than they are now.
The scene was going to weaken anyway but the region lock didn't help, so sure I would hope it gets removed now.
How will removing the region lock help developing the Korean scene exactly?
In no ways most likely. Still an extremely trash thing that we did and it should be removed.
Korean scene will keep declining gradually of course but I don't think a few online tournaments is enough to say they are at parity with NA or EU. Korean scene might be at "rock bottom" but that does not mean they have gotten way worse than a few years ago in my opinion.
Players like Maru, TY and Rogue usually care more if there is a big prize pool so they don't do as well in most weekenders/online tournaments. Another big issue for Koreans this year is that players like Dark and Maru are a little bit less serious this year, probably because they don't want to risk injuries. It's possible to me that they decided, since they are still pretty young, it would be a good idea to put health first this year when stakes are a bit lower (since most tournaments are online and don't have huge prize pools). So considering these factors, even though players like Stats, INnoVation, Zest and soO will retire, I think they will perform better next year. They still have Maru, Trap, Rogue, Dark and TY who have collectively won I'm guessing like 80%+ of all Korean tournaments for the past few years.
Koreans aren't genetically better than non koreans at playing videogames, not even at playing Brood War; and it's not the fact that LoTV allows more units to be selected the factor that makes non koreans able to compete. Look at Serral's EAPM, at how fast Reynor is or how insane is Clem's multitasking and tell me they wouldn't have the mechanics to play BW at the highest level.
There was just a whole generation of potential progamers in Korea focusing their efforts on Starcraft and rightfully so, since the game was immensely popular, well paid and treated like a real sport. These players then transitioned to Sc2; not only KeSpa's players, but also youngsters who lived in the myth of BW as an esport and tried their luck in Sc2 once it came out(Maru, Life, Creator were too young to be recruited but also TaeJa and Polt did not play BW and had great success in Sc2).
Despite the almost total majority of both Warcraft 3 and Brood War non korean scenes transitioning to Sc2, there just wasn't the infostructure to compete against koreans; they were better at the top and many more at mid/high level. During HoTS, especially the latter were actively suppressing the growth of the foreign scene by going oversea to just win tournaments; only few were actually residing and laddering in the region they chose to play in.
That's why Blizzard decided for the region lock and that's not why the korean scene in Korea fell. KeSpa collapsed without Blizzard having any role in it; the far future of korean Sc2, in retrospective, was doomed once it happened, The game was never as popular and as appreciated as Brood War in Korea and, without teamhouses nurturing new talents and other esports being more widespread and more appealing, evidently there was no more interest for new players to start or keep playing Sc2 at low level.
On the other hand, region lock successfully allowed new players from outside of Korea(Europe, especially), to safely grow without facing a floor way too high for them to handle. The popularity of Sc2 and the number of aspiring new players were simply higher outside of Korea so that the interest in the game persisted even against the already mentioned potentially more appealing esports. Now, in 2020, there still exists an influx of promising teen players so that sc2 as a high profile esport will most likely end not because of lack of new blood but because of lack of funds.
On November 17 2020 04:39 Morbidius wrote: Reddit thread is pondering this very question right now. I've been called a "Korean Elitist" here but there are some facts i can't deny.
GSL qualifiers are a ghostown and Ro32 reduced to 24 players: Even with the tournament size being reduced, GSL qualifiers are still easier than ever and RO24 is mostly(IMO) a formality before things begin.
Maru finishing 4th in a group with 2 foreigners. TY, the GSL champion, 3-0ed by NA runner up: We don't even need to bring Serral and Reynor into this,this goes beyond "upset" territory(upset would be TY making it close or Maru getting 3rd) this is just getting outclassed.
Region lock removed: Even people who faithfully preached the"faceless koreans are ruining starcraft" dogma think its ok to end region lock.
International tournament winrate: Koreans have won Blizzcon and Katowice, but they're getting outperformed by foreigners overall, losing every single circuit final. The Serral/Reynor finals are no longer only a WCS circuit issue.
I could go on with this for ages, there's plenty to be said about it but i think the most notable facts that concern this discussion are here.
Foreigners dominated every... King of Battles. But... Stats was second, but... of all the rock bottom Koreans only 1 lost WC titles... but! BUT... in the top 20 there are like 15 Koreans...
Sure, talent is leaving and no new is coming, especially visible it is at the Protoss where no foreigner can do anything substantial(like win a bigger tournament) nor Korean kongs.
Oh noez, Maru ended last after he finished 2nd and won a tournament. WHAT A DISASTER! TY was beaten by a NA runner up. After he spent streaming BW more time than preparing for this tournament(if any time was put into the preparation)... oh noez, Cure didn't deliver and didn't beat Serral again. Oh, wait, Cure wasn't here. Rogue didn't deliveR! Blame the patch zerg. Wait, he wasn't here either. Damn... blame Classic and military!
Edit> Oh noez, it appears as if some Koreans are taking a break from SC2!!!! WHAT A DISASTER AND TRAGEDY. AFter a year of SC2!!!!
Maybe, just maybe, they are finally getting the well earned break. While a little bit ignoring tournaments which are ignoring their timezone (or not, who knows? )
Edit 2> I dare to say Korean SC2 is in the same state as 2 years ago, but with less talent which was lost to the army. Now is too late to do anything anyway.
After seeing non koreans do relatively well at BlizzCon(the most prestigious and well paid international tournament) for four consecutive years, witnessing to Neeb winning KeSpa Cup and Serral dominating Sc2 for nine months, watching the foreign dominated GSL vs the World 2019 taking place in Korea and observing the meteoric growth of Clem and Reynor your best excuse for these last DH Season Finals is that koreans are distracted/not caring/playing too late in the night/not taking it serious? It can't be that we have come to the point that the disparity in average skill is low enough that tournaments like this one can happen(just as much as tournaments such KoB can)?
Korean scene is dimished(in number, not in skill) now if compared to two years ago while non korean scene keeps getting better with the rise of the young ones. Reynor's and, especially, Clem's lack of experience beating top koreans offline will maybe mean that they might not perform as dominantly as they are doing online for a while but after they have adjusted I expect non koreans to obtain their best results as a whole in the next years.
Removing region lock can't do anything for the growth of korean scene but wouldn't do much against the upcoming non korean players.
On November 17 2020 07:38 CicadaSC wrote: Apollo already teased region lock will be loosened next year which disproportionately effects NA. Koreans are less likely to take over the eu scene not only because the players are generally better but because for koreans to play there they have to overcome 330ms. On NA west you get 130. Rip na except Neeb, Scarlett, Astrea.
This is exactly why NA has historically suffered in SC2. There was a brief period in 2010-2011 where NA had tournaments like MLG and IPL, then Koreans started coming over and then the scene was destroyed. Meanwhile EU had Dreamhack and IEM that had smaller prize pools that paid out to more than the top 8 that most Koreans didn't attend, so they could actually make a living playing the game. WCS NA killed whatever was left, by the Ro8 the only NA player left was usually Scarlett.
On November 17 2020 06:56 dbRic1203 wrote: Katowice is the real Test, I give All the Korean elitists and apologists that one. The EPT season Finals where nice and all that, but in the end the world champion is crowned offline, at Katowice. Still the top 20 in the world is way more than half KR. We have maybe 8-10 foreigners in top 30 and Down from there, there are quite a lot more foreigners, just because there are so many more Players in the world outside of Korean than in that tinny country
Too bad though that it's not guaranteed to be offline... If it's online the cross server games will be kinda meaningless :|
Given the situation in Katowice and the arena being used as a hospital, it's most definitely going to be online unless ESL flies everyone into one of their studios in Europe for offline play. But if ESL doesn't even do that for CS:GO, there's no way they'll do it for SC2. They haven't done it for any of their CS:GO tournaments as of late so I doubt they will for SC2.
On November 17 2020 07:38 CicadaSC wrote: Apollo already teased region lock will be loosened next year which disproportionately effects NA. Koreans are less likely to take over the eu scene not only because the players are generally better but because for koreans to play there they have to overcome 330ms. On NA west you get 130. Rip na except Neeb, Scarlett, Astrea.
It's not quite that bad, the game server is like 15ms along the line from me to seoul
On November 17 2020 05:59 MockHamill wrote: The single best moment in SC2 history was when Serral won Blizzcon. Why? Because he demonstrated to other foreigners that it was possible to take down the Koreans. Once the mental barrier is gone, it is gone forever.
There was never a mental barrier. Koreans had a more competitive scene so they were performing better than they are now.
The scene was going to weaken anyway but the region lock didn't help, so sure I would hope it gets removed now.
I agree that a mental barrier was never the issue. The issue was serral himself. Once he appeared Europe now had a player in the region that could push new talent up higher. It's after Serral that we see europeans generally rise up in ability, but we also get the 2 new young players - one who is Z like serral and the other who not-coincidentally is best at TvZ.
Funny thing, there was a time when many Koreans were living in the Europe and playing on the European ladder. I wonder what drove them away (and I honestly believe that if the rules were more subtle we would have had many more foreigners being good much earlier)
100% agree: Thorzain when Koreans were in Europe was as good as Clem is now, IMHO.
On November 17 2020 09:23 Xain0n wrote: Koreans aren't genetically better than non koreans at playing videogames, not even at playing Brood War; and it's not the fact that LoTV allows more units to be selected the factor that makes non koreans able to compete. Look at Serral's EAPM, at how fast Reynor is or how insane is Clem's multitasking and tell me they wouldn't have the mechanics to play BW at the highest level.
There was just a whole generation of potential progamers in Korea focusing their efforts on Starcraft and rightfully so, since the game was immensely popular, well paid and treated like a real sport. These players then transitioned to Sc2; not only KeSpa's players, but also youngsters who lived in the myth of BW as an esport and tried their luck in Sc2 once it came out(Maru, Life, Creator were too young to be recruited but also TaeJa and Polt did not play BW and had great success in Sc2).
Despite the almost total majority of both Warcraft 3 and Brood War non korean scenes transitioning to Sc2, there just wasn't the infostructure to compete against koreans; they were better at the top and many more at mid/high level. During HoTS, especially the latter were actively suppressing the growth of the foreign scene by going oversea to just win tournaments; only few were actually residing and laddering in the region they chose to play in.
That's why Blizzard decided for the region lock and that's not why the korean scene in Korea fell. KeSpa collapsed without Blizzard having any role in it; the far future of korean Sc2, in retrospective, was doomed once it happened, The game was never as popular and as appreciated as Brood War in Korea and, without teamhouses nurturing new talents and other esports being more widespread and more appealing, evidently there was no more interest for new players to start or keep playing Sc2 at low level.
On the other hand, region lock successfully allowed new players from outside of Korea(Europe, especially), to safely grow without facing a floor way too high for them to handle. The popularity of Sc2 and the number of aspiring new players were simply higher outside of Korea so that the interest in the game persisted even against the already mentioned potentially more appealing esports. Now, in 2020, there still exists an influx of promising teen players so that sc2 as a high profile esport will most likely end not because of lack of new blood but because of lack of funds.
Largely agree.
Really my view is, if you combine the tournament structure of all of SC2’s phases together, things would be perfect, or as close to as is reasonable.
So basically if you take the ‘lots of international tournaments’ phase where we had MLGs, IPLs, Dreamhacks, IEMs. Then the period where Korea had 2 Starleagues, Proleague and STs. Then add region locked WCS tournaments
Unfortunately we’ve never had them all at once.
A singular region locked tournament would have made no impact whatsoever negatively to the Korean scene if they had 2 starleagues, proleague and lots of international open qualifier tournaments to play in.
It would have made the regions better because being the best in Europe, or NA would have been still a way to find being a pro gamer, play full time and make that viable. But it wouldn’t have detracted from Korea at all.
In this model you get say a Serral who starts dominating EU, then had to make the step up and play vs the Koreans in all sorts of open tournaments. That still works fine. If he can step up then the Koreans have to step up, if not they still rule Starcraft.
The problem has never been region locking, its that the overall structure hasn’t aligned. Ideally you want an EU tournament, or an NA one that is lucrative enough to foster talent, and then feed into a wider, harder level of open international competition.
Instead we’ve dropped a lot of tournaments that could be more outright meritocratic in terms of Starcraft ability, and we have an EU circuit that is roughly equivalent to the Korean one in terms of money, but isn’t of the same level play wise. And there’s just not enough to compensate in terms of open international tournaments.
Comment from Solar's stream- "Korean starcraft cannot grow, because young talented players have no reason to play starcraft. They will play league, because league is big here."
On November 17 2020 05:59 MockHamill wrote: The single best moment in SC2 history was when Serral won Blizzcon. Why? Because he demonstrated to other foreigners that it was possible to take down the Koreans. Once the mental barrier is gone, it is gone forever.
There was never a mental barrier. Koreans had a more competitive scene so they were performing better than they are now.
The scene was going to weaken anyway but the region lock didn't help, so sure I would hope it gets removed now.
I agree that a mental barrier was never the issue. The issue was serral himself. Once he appeared Europe now had a player in the region that could push new talent up higher. It's after Serral that we see europeans generally rise up in ability, but we also get the 2 new young players - one who is Z like serral and the other who not-coincidentally is best at TvZ.
Funny thing, there was a time when many Koreans were living in the Europe and playing on the European ladder. I wonder what drove them away (and I honestly believe that if the rules were more subtle we would have had many more foreigners being good much earlier)
100% agree: Thorzain when Koreans were in Europe was as good as Clem is now, IMHO.
Absolutely not, or if so in different ways. Thorzain was a great strategist and he came up with fiendish builds like for his TSL win.
Clem is a mechanical monster with crazy micro chops that equal basically anyone. As good as Thorzain was he’s never been a Terran that plays like a top Korean Terran, basically as well as they do.
Sadly I agree with this sentiment. The Korean sc2 scene is in a terrible spot, with the bare minimum amount of players filling a 24 player GSL and with the skill level clearly dropping, it actually makes little sense to continue having GSL Code S tournaments as the quality and prestige simply isn't what it used to be during its height (back when we had Code A up-downs and Code S).
The players are clearly not as invested in SC2 as well with most players either just focused on streaming or even other games, and the viewership just keeps dropping. I truly believe AfreecaTV would be better off cancelling Code S next year, and just use those resources on expanding ASL, maybe have a Code A style tournament for BroodWar as well as more team leagues in between ASLs.
On November 17 2020 10:17 chipmonklord17 wrote: My extreme worry is that with Jin Air getting rejected from LCK franchising, the team has no reason to exist.
Don't worry, even if JAGW disbanded chinese teams would be willing to support its players.
Afreeca should have a hybrid proleague to allow Korean pros to transition back to BW. That would be truly sad, funny, ironic... and yet, perfectly poetic.
Epi IV: A New Starcraft is Born Epi V: EU Strikes Back Epi VI: Return of the Elephants
On November 17 2020 10:17 chipmonklord17 wrote: My extreme worry is that with Jin Air getting rejected from LCK franchising, the team has no reason to exist.
Only their SC2 division is left, if you can even call it a SC2 team.
Why are people still talking about region lock when the situation is hugely advantageous to Koreans right now?
Tournaments in which Europeans can participate but not Koreans: DH summer regional, DH fall regional, DH winter regional.
Tournaments in which Koreans can participate but not Europeans: ST 1, Code S S1, Code S S2, Code S S3, ST 2.
Am I missing something here, are there some tournaments I've forgotten about during the chaos this year? Because it seems to me that FIVE OFFLINE EVENTS is a hell of a lot better than THREE ONLINE EVENTS.
So WHY can the European scene thrive off a pittance of online events while Afreeca can't get anyone to show up to the qualifiers for their high production value offline events? Why are Koreans so "greedy" when there are leagues of lesser European pros who continue playing despite making fuck all money?
The elephant in the room is that the European scene is NOT thriving. Rather, the Korean scene was massively oversized to begin with. Consider that Europe's population is 14 times that of Korea's, yet Europe still has fewer S-tier players. Imagine if France, Germany, Britain, Italy, Russia, Scandinavia, Spain, Benelux, Visigrad, the Balkans, Ukraine, and three more regions on top of that, each had their own equivalent of the GSL system. It boggles the mind to think of such a thing. But when you do, you realise that the European scene is relatively tiny.
The Korean scene, which was enormous due to the legacy of Broodwar, and Blizzard's cash injections, is now regressing towards the mean. But Korea will probably still have more top-100 players in five years' time than Spain's (population 47 millIon) present three.
On November 17 2020 12:54 Archerylady wrote:Tournaments in which Koreans can participate but not Europeans: ST 1, Code S S1, Code S S2, Code S S3, ST 2.
Am I missing something here, are there some tournaments I've forgotten about during the chaos this year? Because it seems to me that FIVE OFFLINE EVENTS is a hell of a lot better than THREE ONLINE EVENTS.
Foreigners can participate in GSL. If they choose not to, that is their own decision. Did you forget when Astrea, Scarlett, Special, and NoRegrets were in Code S?
On November 17 2020 10:17 chipmonklord17 wrote: My extreme worry is that with Jin Air getting rejected from LCK franchising, the team has no reason to exist.
Also, the reason for Korean SC2's decline are (not in order of importance):
1. Jingoism. 2. Xenophobia. 3. Life's match fixing - and all of the bullshit that happened after. 4. SC2 not being BW. 5. Region lock. 6. Blizzard's decision-making (this is sorta a combination of the previous points).
Like, many of these obstacles were (and still are) actively propped up by the community, as can be readily seen in this and other threads. Is it really any surprise that a wounded giraffe is bleeding out and barely able to move - while many on TL are the metaphorical hyenas waiting to feast on the corpse? There are some posters, and you know well who you are, who are downright ecstatic at the relative rise of foreigners to their Korean counterparts regardless of what the underlying reasons for this gap being bridged are... Because all that matters is your hometown hero had a chance at European Local 2017 and now you can say your favorite player is the tallest animal in the world after consistently cheering for death of the giraffe.
I really miss the Korean scene of 2014 and 2015. When you had GSL, starleague, proleague, you had basically sc2 everyday. It was awesome. But today, the lack of new blood and funds is slowly killing the Korean scene. When the old generation finally retires and go to military this will be the end of the Korean sc2. Now is it the end of global sc2? Certainly not. There are many young players in other regions. I wish there was more tournaments though. Sc2 will end when Frost Giant studio releases the new competitive RTS game in a few years.
On November 17 2020 12:54 Archerylady wrote: Why are people still talking about region lock when the situation is hugely advantageous to Koreans right now?
Tournaments in which Europeans can participate but not Koreans: DH summer regional, DH fall regional, DH winter regional.
Tournaments in which Koreans can participate but not Europeans: ST 1, Code S S1, Code S S2, Code S S3, ST 2.
Am I missing something here, are there some tournaments I've forgotten about during the chaos this year? Because it seems to me that FIVE OFFLINE EVENTS is a hell of a lot better than THREE ONLINE EVENTS.
So WHY can the European scene thrive off a pittance of online events while Afreeca can't get anyone to show up to the qualifiers for their high production value offline events? Why are Koreans so "greedy" when there are leagues of lesser European pros who continue playing despite making fuck all money?
The elephant in the room is that the European scene is NOT thriving. Rather, the Korean scene was massively oversized to begin with. Consider that Europe's population is 14 times that of Korea's, yet Europe still has fewer S-tier players. Imagine if France, Germany, Britain, Italy, Russia, Scandinavia, Spain, Benelux, Visigrad, the Balkans, Ukraine, and three more regions on top of that, each had their own equivalent of the GSL system. It boggles the mind to think of such a thing. But when you do, you realise that the European scene is relatively tiny.
The Korean scene, which was enormous due to the legacy of Broodwar, and Blizzard's cash injections, is now regressing towards the mean. But Korea will probably still have more top-100 players in five year's time than Spain's (population 47 millIon) present three.
Foreigners can participate in GSL but most of them don't because of logistical reasons. I think a better point is that Koreans have better access to the biggest tournaments, practically speaking.
I will agree with you that the prize pools for EU events are a bit too low this year.
The real test on BW popularity is when Flash (and to a lesser lesser extent; Bisu, Stork, Soulkey etc.) stops playing.
When the "greats"/popular people stops competing in ASL, im pretty sure "Pro BW" is as good as dead. There will ofc still be streaming and smaller tournament, but i will not live on this level of popularity without these players.
People really underestimate the power of fan favorites. Im pretty sure the foreign SC2 scene suffered from players like IdrA, Naniwa, Thorzain, Snute, not only for their talent the scene lost, but because of all the fans who left with them. Same thing with the Korean SC2: How many people stopped watching when Jaedong retired? How many people are gonna watch ASL when the KESPA pros are gone? Not many.
If, say, Flash and Bisu made a bet on who could win a GSL first and started playing SC2 briefly, it would give a (huge?) spike in terms of viewership. Sure alot of "BW elitits" wouldn´t watch because they don´t like the game, but i am pretty sure the wast majority of Flash fans will watch whatever Flash´plays.
Last thing: Starcraft (both BW and SC2) was going to suffer and decline with the rise of MOBAs, no matter what. For all the wrongs Blizzard, KESPA and matchfixing did, it was unavoidable that it would take away viewerships and players talent the more time went on.
No it hit rock buttom when Blizzard decided to sue following the matchfixing scandal and then decided to force the entire pool of top players to switch games.
Oh wait wrong game. Yes korean SC2 will end whenever Blizzard pulls the plug on GSL, which is probably once their 3 year contract ends.
Brood War on the other hand has survived the worst possible thing that could ever happen to a game. Its fine. Actually more than fine. Given that most of Overwatch's viewers are bots, its Blizzards most popular eSport atm. It's never gonna go away. It went on when every single pro was forced to leave and it'll continue on should the current tier of pros slowly fade away. Though as its looking now, Brood War will set new standards for how long you can continue to be a pro gamer. Military service used to be the end of a career, now its just a small break.
It's such a shame that we'll most likely never get to see how good Serral,Reynor, Clem could be at brood war.
I was just watching Serral vs Neeb with endless nydus and swarmhost spam and it made me wish I could watch those guys playing a ZvP in BW against each other.
While the Korean scene has definitely struggled a lot lately, I don‘t think the season finals are a good indicator here.
1. Break: GSL is what the Korean scene is all about. With the last season of the year being over, many Koreans simply took a break. We heard from some sources that some Korean players that played the season finals came into the tournament more or less unprepared. And I‘m not blaming them whatsoever, especially in a year like this, the value of such season finals is not that big, in my opinion.
2. Servers: even if it did not affect the matches themselves, I could imagine that the server discussion de-valued the tournament from a Korean perspective. It‘s just not the same and one of the players HAS to be given a disasvantage over a best of 3/5/7. And obviously it takes something away from the sincerety of the tournament.
3. Playtime: Again, probably no major affect on the outcome, but most definitely an effect on the perception of the tournament. I cannot imagine someone taking a tournament truly serious if he has to play far past midnight. It is obvious why the times were chosen that way, but Koreans were definitely put in the worst position among all players.
In an offline tournament, I would still see Koreans outperform the Europeans (minus Clem, Serral, Reynor) by quite a margin. And I hope the Katowice can take place as an offline event next spring.
What region lock? This year pretty much didn't have any region lock. It's not ESL's fault that some Koreans have a "don't care" attitude when it comes to season finals. It's also not ESL's fault that NA servers seem to suck this year, so cross region play is suboptimal
I don't think you understand what "rock bottom" is. Rock bottom is the point where the pain overcomes whatever you are doing to keep the pain at bay and you are forced to make changes in your life. It's a rock because the pain stops you from sinking further. Believe me, nothing is stopping Korean SC2 from sinking further.
The results from the season finals do indicate korean sc2 has hit rock bottom in the context of being in the worst place ever compared to other regions. Korea has never before been this not-dominating. You can say anything you want about breaks and laps in motivation but the fact is both GSL finalists got stomped on by the rest of the world. Only Stats had a good showing.
No one has been saying that korea as a sc2 region is as strong as before, them losing domination is something we have known for a long time and as others have said they will probably keep dropping as time goes by. A new low though yes
On November 17 2020 19:38 Shuffleblade wrote: You can say anything you want about breaks and laps in motivation but the fact is both GSL finalists got stomped on by the rest of the world. Only Stats had a good showing.
"breaks and laps in motivation" are both pretty glaring factors though. TY was literally streaming BW all week after the GSL final (he's still streaming now even) and Maru apparently (and presumably, due to injuries) hasn't played at all.
An online weekender isn't going to be priority over GSL for these guys, but it's the most important event foreigners have. What did you expect?
Go back go HotS, the sheer amount of different ,maps, styles, compositions, build orders and mindgames will increase strategic variability. Koreans would dominate again in such environment.
LOTV made the game streamlined in some senses. Applying to most races, yet more true for Terran and Protoss, the game becomes too much of a question of mastering tactics rather than overall strategic planning, outthinking and outperforming throughout a series of games.
Some foreigners would still be able to go on par with koreans, but if they were to go back to HotS the gap between foreigners and koreans would expand again.
On November 17 2020 19:38 Shuffleblade wrote: You can say anything you want about breaks and laps in motivation but the fact is both GSL finalists got stomped on by the rest of the world. Only Stats had a good showing.
"breaks and laps in motivation" are both pretty glaring factors though. TY was literally streaming BW all week after the GSL final (he's still streaming now even) and Maru apparently (and presumably, due to injuries) hasn't played at all.
An online weekender isn't going to be priority over GSL for these guys, but it's the most important event foreigners have. What did you expect?
Yeah of course, if the two latest GSL finalists took a few weeks off getting crushed by EU and NA players is expected, I am sure 5 years ago not a single korean ever had a break or a lap in motivation.
Some players ahve their best results after taking some space from the game, it is known many top tier players don't practise like hell every day. It varies.
It is so strange to me, Neeb 3-0 the recent GSL champion and thats expected because of lack of motivation? Is that what this game is about now, the playuer with most motivation wins its not about skill.
What did I expect? I expected the best players to win, maybe thats what happened, which means we are looking at a huge change in how not dominated korea is compared to the rest of the world.
How come koreans can win every single time in the old days, it was expected, a loss to a foreigner was a huge deal. No matter how unmotivated, jetlagged or sick he was. When a foreigner won, guess what, no one said "I guess X was just unmotivated".
To answer the thread, you can only see if that’s the case in offline events to be honest. Nothing has changed in foreigners vs Koreans compared to 2019, except that now Clem probably has a good shot vs them offline too (especially zergs). No new blood because sc2 isn’t as popular as LoL/BW doesn’t help either, but the current gen of KR pros can hold till the end of the ESL contract... only question is if vaccine or something will allow us to have offline tourneys before this contract ends ; or if the current situation will affect the contract in the first place.
If GSL stops next year, depending on what ESL has to bring for the Koreans, some / a lot might stop their career so that would actually be rock bottom in that case.
About the Neeb vs TY: TvP is difficult, TY played BW and it’s cross server low stakes (for already IEM qualified Koreans) tournament. Remember Neeb beating Serral online right before his BlizzCon win? Same thing really.
On November 17 2020 19:38 Shuffleblade wrote: You can say anything you want about breaks and laps in motivation but the fact is both GSL finalists got stomped on by the rest of the world. Only Stats had a good showing.
"breaks and laps in motivation" are both pretty glaring factors though. TY was literally streaming BW all week after the GSL final (he's still streaming now even) and Maru apparently (and presumably, due to injuries) hasn't played at all.
An online weekender isn't going to be priority over GSL for these guys, but it's the most important event foreigners have. What did you expect?
Yeah of course, if the two latest GSL finalists took a few weeks off getting crushed by EU and NA players is expected, I am sure 5 years ago not a single korean ever had a break or a lap in motivation.
Some players ahve their best results after taking some space from the game, it is known many top tier players don't practise like hell every day. It varies.
It is so strange to me, Neeb 3-0 the recent GSL champion and thats expected because of lack of motivation? Is that what this game is about now, the playuer with most motivation wins its not about skill.
TY literally spent the last 2 weeks streaming broodwar all day. You can be mad at him for not going straight back to the practice routine if you want. But it doesn't change the fact that the most important event for him was GSL, and the final just happened. He's going to take a break.
Hell, how many times have you seen TY and Maru two do great in GSL then bomb out of smaller events right after? There's a reason those two barely play in online events unless they're straight up invited to them as well.
Dreamhack is the #1 event for foreigners. They're going to put all their preperation into it because they have nothing else to really practice for. This isn't 2014, there are more than 2 foreigners actually practicing and playing full time now, they're going to beat two guys who care so little they'd only played BW for 2 weeks or straight up not play at all.
And these are actual champions like Clem and Neeb as well, not random NA/EU scrubs.
Also when you think about it, Stats being the Koreans performing best in this tournament is not very surprising considering he will have to retire soon.
On November 17 2020 14:44 Jealous wrote: Also, the reason for Korean SC2's decline are (not in order of importance):
1. Jingoism. 2. Xenophobia. 3. Life's match fixing - and all of the bullshit that happened after. 4. SC2 not being BW. 5. Region lock. 6. Blizzard's decision-making (this is sorta a combination of the previous points).
Like, many of these obstacles were (and still are) actively propped up by the community, as can be readily seen in this and other threads. Is it really any surprise that a wounded giraffe is bleeding out and barely able to move - while many on TL are the metaphorical hyenas waiting to feast on the corpse? There are some posters, and you know well who you are, who are downright ecstatic at the relative rise of foreigners to their Korean counterparts regardless of what the underlying reasons for this gap being bridged are... Because all that matters is your hometown hero had a chance at European Local 2017 and now you can say your favorite player is the tallest animal in the world after consistently cheering for death of the giraffe.
I don’t really think that’s fair at all. Perhaps I’m biased from my rl friends and basically only browsing TL, where the general tenor seems to both be happy at the emergence of S tier foreigners while bemoaning the decline of the Korean scene, Proleague etc etc.
On November 17 2020 14:44 Jealous wrote: Also, the reason for Korean SC2's decline are (not in order of importance):
1. Jingoism. 2. Xenophobia. 3. Life's match fixing - and all of the bullshit that happened after. 4. SC2 not being BW. 5. Region lock. 6. Blizzard's decision-making (this is sorta a combination of the previous points).
Like, many of these obstacles were (and still are) actively propped up by the community, as can be readily seen in this and other threads. Is it really any surprise that a wounded giraffe is bleeding out and barely able to move - while many on TL are the metaphorical hyenas waiting to feast on the corpse? There are some posters, and you know well who you are, who are downright ecstatic at the relative rise of foreigners to their Korean counterparts regardless of what the underlying reasons for this gap being bridged are... Because all that matters is your hometown hero had a chance at European Local 2017 and now you can say your favorite player is the tallest animal in the world after consistently cheering for death of the giraffe.
Well said. This is why I can't really stand people hyping up foreigners catching up to koreans currently.
The rise of foreigners is legit. It's not like the remaining Koreans are worse in skill, or playing worse than 3-4 years ago. Serral, Reynor, Clem would be able to go to toe to toe, win championships, vs koreans, in any era, 100%, in SC2.
There's just less koreans now than there were before.
On November 17 2020 14:44 Jealous wrote: Also, the reason for Korean SC2's decline are (not in order of importance):
1. Jingoism. 2. Xenophobia. 3. Life's match fixing - and all of the bullshit that happened after. 4. SC2 not being BW. 5. Region lock. 6. Blizzard's decision-making (this is sorta a combination of the previous points).
Like, many of these obstacles were (and still are) actively propped up by the community, as can be readily seen in this and other threads. Is it really any surprise that a wounded giraffe is bleeding out and barely able to move - while many on TL are the metaphorical hyenas waiting to feast on the corpse? There are some posters, and you know well who you are, who are downright ecstatic at the relative rise of foreigners to their Korean counterparts regardless of what the underlying reasons for this gap being bridged are... Because all that matters is your hometown hero had a chance at European Local 2017 and now you can say your favorite player is the tallest animal in the world after consistently cheering for death of the giraffe.
I don’t really think that’s fair at all. Perhaps I’m biased from my rl friends and basically only browsing TL, where the general tenor seems to both be happy at the emergence of S tier foreigners while bemoaning the decline of the Korean scene, Proleague etc etc.
Well the Korean scene is dead and has been for years. If they wanted to do anything, they should have when it was alive and being killed while they were trying to save the NA as the EU scene was fine(Koreans were living and playing there, which was the point). Then Blizzard had the genius idea about region locking Koreans because Koreans are genetically superior to foreigners and NOBODY important voiced against it. It was fine. And it was mostly about the NA scene, let's admit it. Let's forward few years to the now point. NA scene is dead, Korean scene is dead and some people are shocked. Not like people were warning about this.
But it's too late to change anything anyway. The Korean scene will hit rock bottom once the Code S is officially over, we're 6 seasons from it, maybe less, depends on the region locking plan of Apollo, which is like having a plan to save the Titanic when it broke apart and is almost sunk.
On November 17 2020 14:44 Jealous wrote: Also, the reason for Korean SC2's decline are (not in order of importance):
1. Jingoism. 2. Xenophobia. 3. Life's match fixing - and all of the bullshit that happened after. 4. SC2 not being BW. 5. Region lock. 6. Blizzard's decision-making (this is sorta a combination of the previous points).
Like, many of these obstacles were (and still are) actively propped up by the community, as can be readily seen in this and other threads. Is it really any surprise that a wounded giraffe is bleeding out and barely able to move - while many on TL are the metaphorical hyenas waiting to feast on the corpse? There are some posters, and you know well who you are, who are downright ecstatic at the relative rise of foreigners to their Korean counterparts regardless of what the underlying reasons for this gap being bridged are... Because all that matters is your hometown hero had a chance at European Local 2017 and now you can say your favorite player is the tallest animal in the world after consistently cheering for death of the giraffe.
I don’t really think that’s fair at all. Perhaps I’m biased from my rl friends and basically only browsing TL, where the general tenor seems to both be happy at the emergence of S tier foreigners while bemoaning the decline of the Korean scene, Proleague etc etc.
Well to be fair, that might be the general tenor on SC2 TL because the points raised by Jealous made the people with the opposing view go away. I stopped watching SC2 when region lock started to become a thing (and LotV completely killed sc2 for me).
Like me, many people that just wanted great games and didnt care about the flags next to the players names were slowly filtered out by being unable to tune in to what we wanted to watch, but instead only being able to frequently watch something that left us with a meh taste at the end.
To simplify my view, had region lock never happened, probably the current crowd watching SC2 would have the opposite general tenor of what you see now in TL, as the people that wanted to see their foreigner heroes regardless, would have been slowly filtered out of the spectator pool over time. Same applies to people who rather watch WoL or HotS over LotV over time they are gone, so you get nobody saying that today. but one cannot conclude from that that nobody wanted that, people were just pushed away.
I dont see it as right or wrong or even better or wose, just that current viewers are a direct consequence of evolution of the game and scene, thus it is not surprising that after all this time views of the current viewers are aligned.
On November 17 2020 05:59 MockHamill wrote: The single best moment in SC2 history was when Serral won Blizzcon. Why? Because he demonstrated to other foreigners that it was possible to take down the Koreans. Once the mental barrier is gone, it is gone forever.
Personally I find it awesome that the Korean dominance over SC2 has ended. They were never more talented, they just had the teamhouse advantage. Take that away and they are nothing special.
Oh please, alot of koreans weren't just better because of teamhouse. Alot of them are just that talented and put in the work as well. I only reply to this because your post seems very negative towards koreans.
Also, it's only really Serral and Reynor that truly threaten koreans. Koreans still win plenty of tournaments and the real problem to korean sc2 is the viewership and no new talent coming in.
On November 17 2020 21:52 Comedy wrote: The rise of foreigners is legit. It's not like the remaining Koreans are worse in skill, or playing worse than 3-4 years ago. Serral, Reynor, Clem would be able to go to toe to toe, win championships, vs koreans, in any era, 100%, in SC2.
There's just less koreans now than there were before.
that's very arguable. They don't practice in teamhouses anymore, multiple koreans have stated that they aren't as motivated anymore (Rogue) or that they got slower with advanced age (Inno). others struggle with injuries (Dark, Maru). I agree that Serral, Reynor and Clem could compete in any era but it would be naive to think their winrate vs top koreans in 2015 would be as high as it is currently.
On November 17 2020 06:58 Mizenhauer wrote: This has been almost ten years in the making. The last KeSPA rookie draft was held in 2013 and there has been almost no influx of talent since. (If you really want to dig into the drafts, 2008 was the last year that produced a bunch of championship caliber players, though 2009 had some solid players as well).
So you have a scene that was never going to get a bunch of new players for a number of reasons, (less pay/less exposure/their friends are playing lol or overwatch or whatever team game is popular/the current pros were too good) that was always inevitably going to be gutted by military service, and where players are picking up all sorts of injuries that limits the amount of time they can play and you have the perfect recipe for stagnation.
You can go back if you're really curious and find the interview where Zest remarks on how he tries (and I'm am paraphrasing) "half as hard as he used to". And remember, he said that YEARS ago. Or look to 2016 when players like INnoVation or soO basically mailed it in, playing Proleague (since this was what SKT paid them to do) but not putting any effort into individual leagues. There are countless other examples of players simply not putting in the time or just coasting because they were so far ahead of the second tier of competition that it wouldn't affect their bottom line all that much. It's also worth reading some stuff Jaedong said about not enjoying sc after awhile. It's quite possible a lot of the players are just burnt out after all these years.
Anyway, the INnoVation's soO's, Rogue's etc regularly reached the opening stages of individual events despite not grinding ceaselessly because they were simply so far ahead of everyone else. Players like bravo, guilty, trust, etc etc were never going to have some sudden breakthrough no matter how hard they practiced. Like I said, sc2 reached a point of stagnation a very long time ago. The result is just more obvious now that so many players have gone to military and the players in eu/na are putting more time in relative to the koreans.
It has nothing to do with region lock. It has nothing to do with some collusion against the Koreans. Korean sc2 was always destined to reach this point and the life matchfixing scandal simply accelerated the process by a couple of years by killing off proleague (which was already on its way out, but offered some stability to players). Even then, sc2 gave us some great games, great players, great rivalries and incredible memories. Who cares if Korean sc2 is at its lowest point? Everyone should have seen this coming years ago and the truth is it's only going to get worse. My advice is go back and watch some good games from yesteryear and celebrate the joy sc2 gave us.
For some reason noone but Waxangel quoted this. There is a lot of finer points to argue about, and it is fun doing it. But this is the center of it all.
In terms of tournament play, I don't see a decline of skill at all. But clearly the ping favours Zerg players the most and this year for good reasons we only see tournaments where ping continues to be an issue.
I do get depressed when I watch PartinG stream and the Kr ladder can't find him any players though. Imagine being a new player, you're forced to play at a certain time of day and when you actually get good, you need to have those player connections to get any decent practice.
On November 17 2020 21:52 Comedy wrote: The rise of foreigners is legit. It's not like the remaining Koreans are worse in skill, or playing worse than 3-4 years ago. Serral, Reynor, Clem would be able to go to toe to toe, win championships, vs koreans, in any era, 100%, in SC2.
There's just less koreans now than there were before.
If you honestly believe that no longer having team houses and weekly pro league matches was not the key factor behind Koreans no longer dominating, you are delusional. They were the best because they played in the most competitive environment (that includes regular offline matches + team houses + best ladder). If you take that away, they are no different from any other sc2 player in the world and shockingly enough that is what ended up happening.
On November 18 2020 00:18 ejozl wrote: In terms of tournament play, I don't see a decline of skill at all. But clearly the ping favours Zerg players the most and this year for good reasons we only see tournaments where ping continues to be an issue.
I do get depressed when I watch PartinG stream and the Kr ladder can't find him any players though. Imagine being a new player, you're forced to play at a certain time of day and when you actually get good, you need to have those player connections to get any decent practice.
Uh, I see a skill decline. For example check how many good Protoss players there are around. And then check how many was there 4 years ago. You can do this with any race. Soulkey, soO, Classic, herO, Hero, MMA, GumiHo, Snute, JD, Flash, Rain, Hydra, Lilbow , Hyun, Dear
Now to those who are still active but less good. sOs, would you believe he's a 3-time world champion? Taeja, Zest, Bomber
Tell me who replaced these guys in terms of quality. And then tell me how the quality didn't go down when we lost so many players without replacing them. Sure, the top matches are good, but until these are played...?
Polt, Fantasy, ForGG, Leenock, MC
Edit> not everyone was the bestest everest player, but they were competitive. Now they're not. Which is a bit of unfair towards Zest, but i want him much better than he's now.
On November 18 2020 00:18 ejozl wrote: In terms of tournament play, I don't see a decline of skill at all. But clearly the ping favours Zerg players the most and this year for good reasons we only see tournaments where ping continues to be an issue.
I do get depressed when I watch PartinG stream and the Kr ladder can't find him any players though. Imagine being a new player, you're forced to play at a certain time of day and when you actually get good, you need to have those player connections to get any decent practice.
Uh, I see a skill decline. For example check how many good Protoss players there are around. And then check how many was there 4 years ago. You can do this with any race. Soulkey, soO, Classic, herO, Hero, MMA, GumiHo, Snute, JD, Flash, Rain, Hydra, Lilbow , Hyun, Dear
Now to those who are still active but less good. sOs, would you believe he's a 3-time world champion? Taeja, Zest, Bomber
Tell me who replaced these guys in terms of quality. And then tell me how the quality didn't go down when we lost so many players without replacing them. Sure, the top matches are good, but until these are played...?
Polt, Fantasy, ForGG, Leenock, MC
Edit> not everyone was the bestest everest player, but they were competitive. Now they're not. Which is a bit of unfair towards Zest, but i want him much better than he's now.
I guess I should say the top 16~ Koreans. I definitely agree the pool has shrinked and in fact hugely so. And even the top players are not always on peak form, you can sort of see that they all try to hit their top condition around GSL season 3 -> Global finals. The winner of Season 1 and in a lesser degree Season 2, are usually the ones that take this time of the year the most serious.
Edit: I was also sort of thinking throughout LotV time in my head, not that I think this changes my statement.
On November 17 2020 21:52 Comedy wrote: The rise of foreigners is legit. It's not like the remaining Koreans are worse in skill, or playing worse than 3-4 years ago. Serral, Reynor, Clem would be able to go to toe to toe, win championships, vs koreans, in any era, 100%, in SC2.
There's just less koreans now than there were before.
that's very arguable. They don't practice in teamhouses anymore, multiple koreans have stated that they aren't as motivated anymore (Rogue) or that they got slower with advanced age (Inno). others struggle with injuries (Dark, Maru). I agree that Serral, Reynor and Clem could compete in any era but it would be naive to think their winrate vs top koreans in 2015 would be as high as it is currently.
Byun won in 2016 without having a team. KeSpa was still there, the teamhouses were still there. Serral's win ratio against koreans rose to insanely high peaks against Dark and Maru free from injuries and Rogue motivated enough.
If we still had 2015's system you would have never seen Serral, Reynor and Clem become this good because they probably wouldn't have fully committed to Sc2 but it is simply insane to think that players as skilled as they are now would have struggled more against the top players of 2015, 2013 or 2011 even if their knowledge of the game had to be adjusted to those of the period we are considering.
On November 17 2020 21:52 Comedy wrote: The rise of foreigners is legit. It's not like the remaining Koreans are worse in skill, or playing worse than 3-4 years ago. Serral, Reynor, Clem would be able to go to toe to toe, win championships, vs koreans, in any era, 100%, in SC2.
There's just less koreans now than there were before.
If you honestly believe that no longer having team houses and weekly pro league matches was not the key factor behind Koreans no longer dominating, you are delusional. They were the best because they played in the most competitive environment (that includes regular offline matches + team houses + best ladder). If you take that away, they are no different from any other sc2 player in the world and shockingly enough that is what ended up happening.
Indeed. It’s not just the quality of practice within the houses either, it’s what it takes away in terms of practice for everyone else, as well as the connections forged in terms of good practice. Especially when Proleague was running.
The top guys are practicing internally and getting great high level practice, but they’re trying to hide their plans for that week’s Proleague match as well, so it’s unlikely they’ll be laddering all that much.
For anyone who isn’t in a team house, you’re laddering in a pool that doesn’t feature much of the best talent, while trying to bridge the gap to the very best.
Which doesn’t seem particularly doable. Within Korea very, very few have ever been at the top without having spent at least some time in the team house system.
The guys at the top have still kept up a high level, but it’s been years since a real new talent has shone at that level in Korea.
On November 17 2020 06:58 Mizenhauer wrote: This has been almost ten years in the making. The last KeSPA rookie draft was held in 2013 and there has been almost no influx of talent since. (If you really want to dig into the drafts, 2008 was the last year that produced a bunch of championship caliber players, though 2009 had some solid players as well).
So you have a scene that was never going to get a bunch of new players for a number of reasons, (less pay/less exposure/their friends are playing lol or overwatch or whatever team game is popular/the current pros were too good) that was always inevitably going to be gutted by military service, and where players are picking up all sorts of injuries that limits the amount of time they can play and you have the perfect recipe for stagnation.
You can go back if you're really curious and find the interview where Zest remarks on how he tries (and I'm am paraphrasing) "half as hard as he used to". And remember, he said that YEARS ago. Or look to 2016 when players like INnoVation or soO basically mailed it in, playing Proleague (since this was what SKT paid them to do) but not putting any effort into individual leagues. There are countless other examples of players simply not putting in the time or just coasting because they were so far ahead of the second tier of competition that it wouldn't affect their bottom line all that much. It's also worth reading some stuff Jaedong said about not enjoying sc after awhile. It's quite possible a lot of the players are just burnt out after all these years.
Anyway, the INnoVation's soO's, Rogue's etc regularly reached the opening stages of individual events despite not grinding ceaselessly because they were simply so far ahead of everyone else. Players like bravo, guilty, trust, etc etc were never going to have some sudden breakthrough no matter how hard they practiced. Like I said, sc2 reached a point of stagnation a very long time ago. The result is just more obvious now that so many players have gone to military and the players in eu/na are putting more time in relative to the koreans.
It has nothing to do with region lock. It has nothing to do with some collusion against the Koreans. Korean sc2 was always destined to reach this point and the life matchfixing scandal simply accelerated the process by a couple of years by killing off proleague (which was already on its way out, but offered some stability to players). Even then, sc2 gave us some great games, great players, great rivalries and incredible memories. Who cares if Korean sc2 is at its lowest point? Everyone should have seen this coming years ago and the truth is it's only going to get worse. My advice is go back and watch some good games from yesteryear and celebrate the joy sc2 gave us.
For some reason noone but Waxangel quoted this. There is a lot of finer points to argue about, and it is fun doing it. But this is the center of it all.
First of all, there is no need at all to go back in time to watch amazing Sc2 played at the highest level. While the density of talents in Korea has declined without any doubt, you must be lying to everyone and to yourself if you are convinced that low quality games are being played in the bracket stages of korean and international tournaments right now; TY vs Maru has been praised as one of the best Code S finals, for example.
The whole part about koreans not caring and not practicing may be true for single players but there have also been others who stepped up during LoTV. soO, Inno, Zest and sOs got worse? Stats, Dark, TY, Rogue were better in LoTV that they had been in HoTS, by far.
The part you underlined is just as true for Brood War, as jinjin has been saying in this thread. Sure, viewership can be amazing but there hasn't been new korean players capable of competing with the old pros for years. However, koreans were so immensely ahead in BW that nobody would be able to catch up with them and also except for maybe China, the foreign scene is basically dead in BW. In Sc2 the gap, despite being very significant during HoTS, was never that big and the non koreans were able to mantain a living scene with influx of new talents, partly because of region lock.
On November 17 2020 21:52 Comedy wrote: The rise of foreigners is legit. It's not like the remaining Koreans are worse in skill, or playing worse than 3-4 years ago. Serral, Reynor, Clem would be able to go to toe to toe, win championships, vs koreans, in any era, 100%, in SC2.
There's just less koreans now than there were before.
that's very arguable. They don't practice in teamhouses anymore, multiple koreans have stated that they aren't as motivated anymore (Rogue) or that they got slower with advanced age (Inno). others struggle with injuries (Dark, Maru). I agree that Serral, Reynor and Clem could compete in any era but it would be naive to think their winrate vs top koreans in 2015 would be as high as it is currently.
Byun won in 2016 without having a team. KeSpa was still there, the teamhouses were still there. Serral's win ratio against koreans rose to insanely high peaks against Dark and Maru free from injuries and Rogue motivated enough.
and Byun was the first one to ever do it. Serral played during his first reign 2 bo5s against Dark, 1 bo5 against Rogue and 1 bo5 + a bo1 against Maru. not really representative enough to draw any conclusions from except that he had the ability to beat any player in the world which I agree with.
If we still had 2015's system you would have never seen Serral, Reynor and Clem become this good because they probably wouldn't have fully committed to Sc2 but it is simply insane to think that players as skilled as they are now would have struggled more against the top players of 2015, 2013 or 2011 even if their knowledge of the game had to be adjusted to those of the period we are considering.
I think it's insane to think the koreans are still playing exactly at the skill level they did when they were practicing in teamhouses, playing every week in Proleague and had thrice the amount of practice partners as they do now.
The biggest reason for the decline of SC2 in Korea is competition from LoL, and to a lesser extent, Brood War. The popularity of LoL and the staying power of BW means that the SC2 player and viewership numbers in KR cannot sustain the level of competition we saw earlier in the decade, when SC2 was the only show in town.
The second biggest reason is simply the age of the game. SC2 is 10 years old now, and it's not hard to imagine that its viewership and player base can't match that of a 1-3 year old game.
I see some people claim region locking as a factor in KR's decline. I don't buy that. Region locking excludes Koreans from just the NA/EU regional tournaments - there are tons of other tournaments Koreans can participate in. For example, in 2015 there were 22 premier tournaments, of which 19 did not have region locking. Playing 3 fewer tournaments per year is not a big detriment, certainly not enough to cause the decline of an entire scene. (Also, region locking was only introduced in 2015, which is really really late in the lifecycle of SC2. KR had started to decline before then, with GSTL ending in 2013 and 2016 being the last Proleague.)
That said, although Korea's domination of SC2 is diminishing, it is far from over. Korea still claims 19 of the top 40 spots on aligulac, which is amazing for a country with 2% of the world GDP. The United States and China both have economies >10 times the size of Korea, but with only 2 and 1 aligulac spots respectively. Japan, UK, and India, all with larger economies, don't appear on the top 40 at all. Korea can drop to 5 spots and still be considered a powerhouse.
On November 17 2020 21:52 Comedy wrote: The rise of foreigners is legit. It's not like the remaining Koreans are worse in skill, or playing worse than 3-4 years ago. Serral, Reynor, Clem would be able to go to toe to toe, win championships, vs koreans, in any era, 100%, in SC2.
There's just less koreans now than there were before.
that's very arguable. They don't practice in teamhouses anymore, multiple koreans have stated that they aren't as motivated anymore (Rogue) or that they got slower with advanced age (Inno). others struggle with injuries (Dark, Maru). I agree that Serral, Reynor and Clem could compete in any era but it would be naive to think their winrate vs top koreans in 2015 would be as high as it is currently.
Byun won in 2016 without having a team. KeSpa was still there, the teamhouses were still there. Serral's win ratio against koreans rose to insanely high peaks against Dark and Maru free from injuries and Rogue motivated enough.
and Byun was the first one to ever do it. Serral played during his first reign 2 bo5s against Dark, 1 bo5 against Rogue and 1 bo5 + a bo1 against Maru. not really representative enough to draw any conclusions from except that he had the ability to beat any player in the world which I agree with.
If we still had 2015's system you would have never seen Serral, Reynor and Clem become this good because they probably wouldn't have fully committed to Sc2 but it is simply insane to think that players as skilled as they are now would have struggled more against the top players of 2015, 2013 or 2011 even if their knowledge of the game had to be adjusted to those of the period we are considering.
I think it's insane to think the koreans are still playing exactly at the skill level they did when they were practicing in teamhouses, playing every week in Proleague and had thrice the amount of practice partners as they do now.
There are mechanical metrics one can look at when evaluating performance. Koreans may be less ahead of meta, may have less 1x builds and may study the game less but LoTV is a more mechanically demanding game than HoTS and if you don't consider currently injuried or much older players who may very well have become slower, top players have to be faster than ever to compete.
As for Serral, there can't be any discussion. Those series weren't representative? Maybe his aggregate against top koreans and the tournaments he won could be?
On November 18 2020 01:29 warnull wrote: The biggest reason for the decline of SC2 in Korea is competition from LoL, and to a lesser extent, Brood War. The popularity of LoL and the staying power of BW means that the SC2 player and viewership numbers in KR cannot sustain the level of competition we saw earlier in the decade, when SC2 was the only show in town.
The second biggest reason is simply the age of the game. SC2 is 10 years old now, and it's not hard to imagine that its viewership and player base can't match that of a 1-3 year old game.
I see some people claim region locking as a factor in KR's decline. I don't buy that. Region locking excludes Koreans from just the NA/EU regional tournaments - there are tons of other tournaments Koreans can participate in. For example, in 2015 there were 22 premier tournaments, of which 19 did not have region locking. Playing 3 fewer tournaments per year is not a big detriment, certainly not enough to cause the decline of an entire scene. (Also, region locking was only introduced in 2015, which is really really late in the lifecycle of SC2. KR had started to decline before then, with GSTL ending in 2013 and 2016 being the last Proleague.)
That said, although Korea's domination of SC2 is diminishing, it is far from over. Korea still claims 19 of the top 40 spots on aligulac, which is amazing for a country with 2% of the world GDP. The United States and China both have economies >10 times the size of Korea, but with only 2 and 1 aligulac spots respectively. Japan, UK, and India, all with larger economies, don't appear on the top 40 at all. Korea can drop to 5 spots and still be considered a powerhouse.
What you say is true, and what Mizenhauer said is also true.
The Korean SC2 scene has been slowly bleeding out since 2012, mostly due to a combination of matchfixing and League of Legends. Matchfixing took away StarCraft's credibility with viewers, and League of Legends took away the Korean youth & new blood. There is no undoing what has been done. Eventually players like TY, Classic, SoO, Stats, and INnoVation will all end up back playing & streaming BW either casually or full-time. Maybe Rogue as well.
Now, that being said, the level of Korean players is still very high regardless if they don't dedicate themselves to SC2 all the time. Truth is they don't need to be to continue being successful in tournaments.
We've always put the Korean StarCraft 2 scene on a pedestal compared to the rest of the world, but does it need to be on that pedestal to still be a strong region? And is it really that bad if EU and KR are on relatively equal footing?
Everyone is avoiding the elephant in the room: No one is watching SC2, and it was kept artificially alive by Blizzard for the past years through tournament money. Now that Blizzard pulled out, which was 100 percent expected, Koreans will lose their only source of income in the next months. So what's the point in trying hard, also given that most of these guys haven't been to the military yet.
Stats, TY have already started streaming BW where the money is. When even low viewer numbers in the 100-200 gives you a stable income of 11k dollars a month through donations, why would you keep playing SC2?
On November 18 2020 04:02 Duke_nk wrote: Everyone is avoiding the elephant in the room: No one is watching SC2, and it was kept artificially alive by Blizzard for the past years through tournament money. Now that Blizzard pulled out, which was 100 percent expected, Koreans will lose their only source of income in the next months. So what's the point in trying hard, also given that most of these guys haven't been to the military yet.
Stats, TY have already started streaming BW where the money is. When even low viewer numbers in the 100-200 gives you a stable income of 11k dollars a month through donations, why would you keep playing SC2?
11k dollars a month for 100-200 viewers? Is that even remotely accurate? If so wonder why anyone plays SC2!
On November 18 2020 04:02 Duke_nk wrote: Everyone is avoiding the elephant in the room: No one is watching SC2, and it was kept artificially alive by Blizzard for the past years through tournament money. Now that Blizzard pulled out, which was 100 percent expected, Koreans will lose their only source of income in the next months. So what's the point in trying hard, also given that most of these guys haven't been to the military yet.
Stats, TY have already started streaming BW where the money is. When even low viewer numbers in the 100-200 gives you a stable income of 11k dollars a month through donations, why would you keep playing SC2?
No one is watching, have you like, ever, checked the numbers? 10k viewers for Code S during a late night/early morning in the US and working hours for Europe. (yeah, saturdays is bad) Harstem has a45k subscribers, Winter has 160k subscribers. Videos have between 10k - 25k views, older/more interesting can get over 100k.
HeroMarine right now has 1,2k viewers(1275 acording to the TL bar)
WardiTV 1,7k viewers (+- few hundred) streaming some Invitational.
Maybe you want to reword your statement, because no one watching is pretty interesting statement.
Also the community may be small, but is quite rich, which has shown during selling the ... uh... those crate things to increase the prize pools. Or when Take asked for monies to support his tourneys.
I don't blame Koreans to go to stream BW, because being a foreign streamer sucks. (bad timezone, English, SC2 )
On November 18 2020 04:02 Duke_nk wrote: Everyone is avoiding the elephant in the room: No one is watching SC2, and it was kept artificially alive by Blizzard for the past years through tournament money. Now that Blizzard pulled out, which was 100 percent expected, Koreans will lose their only source of income in the next months. So what's the point in trying hard, also given that most of these guys haven't been to the military yet.
Stats, TY have already started streaming BW where the money is. When even low viewer numbers in the 100-200 gives you a stable income of 11k dollars a month through donations, why would you keep playing SC2?
No one is watching, have you like, ever, checked the numbers? 10k viewers for Code S during a late night/early morning in the US and working hours for Europe. (yeah, saturdays is bad) Harstem has a45k subscribers, Winter has 160k subscribers. Videos have between 10k - 25k views, older/more interesting can get over 100k.
HeroMarine right now has 1,2k viewers(1275 acording to the TL bar)
WardiTV 1,7k viewers (+- few hundred) streaming some Invitational.
Maybe you want to reword your statement, because no one watching is pretty interesting statement.
Also the community may be small, but is quite rich, which has shown during selling the ... uh... those crate things to increase the prize pools. Or when Take asked for monies to support his tourneys.
I don't blame Koreans to go to stream BW, because being a foreign streamer sucks. (bad timezone, English, SC2 )
On November 17 2020 21:52 Comedy wrote: The rise of foreigners is legit. It's not like the remaining Koreans are worse in skill, or playing worse than 3-4 years ago. Serral, Reynor, Clem would be able to go to toe to toe, win championships, vs koreans, in any era, 100%, in SC2.
There's just less koreans now than there were before.
that's very arguable. They don't practice in teamhouses anymore, multiple koreans have stated that they aren't as motivated anymore (Rogue) or that they got slower with advanced age (Inno). others struggle with injuries (Dark, Maru). I agree that Serral, Reynor and Clem could compete in any era but it would be naive to think their winrate vs top koreans in 2015 would be as high as it is currently.
Byun won in 2016 without having a team. KeSpa was still there, the teamhouses were still there. Serral's win ratio against koreans rose to insanely high peaks against Dark and Maru free from injuries and Rogue motivated enough.
and Byun was the first one to ever do it. Serral played during his first reign 2 bo5s against Dark, 1 bo5 against Rogue and 1 bo5 + a bo1 against Maru. not really representative enough to draw any conclusions from except that he had the ability to beat any player in the world which I agree with.
If we still had 2015's system you would have never seen Serral, Reynor and Clem become this good because they probably wouldn't have fully committed to Sc2 but it is simply insane to think that players as skilled as they are now would have struggled more against the top players of 2015, 2013 or 2011 even if their knowledge of the game had to be adjusted to those of the period we are considering.
I think it's insane to think the koreans are still playing exactly at the skill level they did when they were practicing in teamhouses, playing every week in Proleague and had thrice the amount of practice partners as they do now.
There are mechanical metrics one can look at when evaluating performance. Koreans may be less ahead of meta, may have less 1x builds and may study the game less but LoTV is a more mechanically demanding game than HoTS and if you don't consider currently injuried or much older players who may very well have become slower, top players have to be faster than ever to compete.
the game rewards multitasking more but that doesn't mean players are better at it. If you rewatch series like Maru vs Dear, Life vs Dream or INnoVation vs Soulkey their multitasking was at least as good as their multitasking today with less mistakes.
also which korean is even left playing at his best right now? Maru and Dark struggle with injuries, Rogue only gets motivated for the big prizepools, Zest and Inno weren't really championship contenders for quite some time now, Stats is in his last year... I guess Trap is still playing at his best but he never was a championship level player. oh and TY.
I hold the highest upvoted post on the mentioned Reddit thread. I believe this gives me some power here.
The title of this thread is very not good, (because rock bottom is certainly not where the Korean scene is,) and I demand it be changed to something less flashy.
The discussion here has proved to be fruitful though, so I won’t demand a lock. That is all I have to say.
On November 18 2020 04:02 Duke_nk wrote: Everyone is avoiding the elephant in the room: No one is watching SC2, and it was kept artificially alive by Blizzard for the past years through tournament money. Now that Blizzard pulled out, which was 100 percent expected, Koreans will lose their only source of income in the next months. So what's the point in trying hard, also given that most of these guys haven't been to the military yet.
Stats, TY have already started streaming BW where the money is. When even low viewer numbers in the 100-200 gives you a stable income of 11k dollars a month through donations, why would you keep playing SC2?
No one is watching, have you like, ever, checked the numbers? 10k viewers for Code S during a late night/early morning in the US and working hours for Europe. (yeah, saturdays is bad) Harstem has a45k subscribers, Winter has 160k subscribers. Videos have between 10k - 25k views, older/more interesting can get over 100k.
HeroMarine right now has 1,2k viewers(1275 acording to the TL bar)
WardiTV 1,7k viewers (+- few hundred) streaming some Invitational.
Maybe you want to reword your statement, because no one watching is pretty interesting statement.
Also the community may be small, but is quite rich, which has shown during selling the ... uh... those crate things to increase the prize pools. Or when Take asked for monies to support his tourneys.
I don't blame Koreans to go to stream BW, because being a foreign streamer sucks. (bad timezone, English, SC2 )
I think what Duke_nk was trying to say is that the prize pools of major tournaments cannot be sustained by the viewership alone. The GSL and DH NA/EU prize pools are too large to be funded from just ad revenue and brand sponsorship. The gap is being filled by Blizzard, to the tune of $1-3m per year.
The rule of thumb I like to use is: SC2 is 1/10 the size of Dota, and Dota is 1/3 the size of LoL. This is accurate for most metrics (monthly active users, daily active users, twitch viewer-hours, peak viewer count). The only exception is tournament prize pool - Valve is much better at monetizing its player base for TI than Blizzard or Riot. And there is greater regional variation in popularity between Dota/LoL than SC2.
If Blizzard begins decides to stop funding SC2 after the current 3-yr commitment, tournaments will have to adapt. We will likely see more of the following: - Smaller prize pools - Lower production - Structuring tournaments for more content hours, like what DH NA/EU has done with their group stages this year - More Twitch ads - More Chinese tournaments - Piggybacking off csgo/dota/lol tournaments for cross-marketing and cost sharing - Sponsorships from betting sites - Corporate sponsorship from tech/finance companies as recruiting pipeline, and not as marketing. (Shopify might be the first of this kind) - Pay per view, or sub requirement for 1080p
So it's not that nobody's watching - SC2 is still among the top 30 games on twitch, which extremely impressive for a 10 year old non-moba/br game. Rather it's that tournament prize pools cannot be sustained without more viewers or improved ways of monetizing existing viewers. KR pros are especially reliant on tournament winnings because they don't stream as much. Team salaries are their only other source of income.
On November 18 2020 06:25 Husyelt wrote: I hold the highest upvoted post on the mentioned Reddit thread. I believe this gives me some power here.
The title of this thread is very not good, (because rock bottom is certainly not where the Korean scene is,) and I demand it be changed to something less flashy.
The discussion here has proved to be fruitful though, so I won’t demand a lock. That is all I have to say.
On November 18 2020 06:25 Husyelt wrote: I hold the highest upvoted post on the mentioned Reddit thread. I believe this gives me some power here.
The title of this thread is very not good, (because rock bottom is certainly not where the Korean scene is,) and I demand it be changed to something less flashy.
The discussion here has proved to be fruitful though, so I won’t demand a lock. That is all I have to say.
While a fine and reasonable post, get back to Toast and Taste dagnabbit!
On November 18 2020 06:25 Husyelt wrote: I hold the highest upvoted post on the mentioned Reddit thread. I believe this gives me some power here.
The title of this thread is very not good, (because rock bottom is certainly not where the Korean scene is,) and I demand it be changed to something less flashy.
The discussion here has proved to be fruitful though, so I won’t demand a lock. That is all I have to say.
While a fine and reasonable post, get back to Toast and Taste dagnabbit!
On November 18 2020 04:02 Duke_nk wrote: Everyone is avoiding the elephant in the room: No one is watching SC2, and it was kept artificially alive by Blizzard for the past years through tournament money. Now that Blizzard pulled out, which was 100 percent expected, Koreans will lose their only source of income in the next months. So what's the point in trying hard, also given that most of these guys haven't been to the military yet.
Stats, TY have already started streaming BW where the money is. When even low viewer numbers in the 100-200 gives you a stable income of 11k dollars a month through donations, why would you keep playing SC2?
No one is watching, have you like, ever, checked the numbers? 10k viewers for Code S during a late night/early morning in the US and working hours for Europe. (yeah, saturdays is bad) Harstem has a45k subscribers, Winter has 160k subscribers. Videos have between 10k - 25k views, older/more interesting can get over 100k.
HeroMarine right now has 1,2k viewers(1275 acording to the TL bar)
WardiTV 1,7k viewers (+- few hundred) streaming some Invitational.
Maybe you want to reword your statement, because no one watching is pretty interesting statement.
Also the community may be small, but is quite rich, which has shown during selling the ... uh... those crate things to increase the prize pools. Or when Take asked for monies to support his tourneys.
I don't blame Koreans to go to stream BW, because being a foreign streamer sucks. (bad timezone, English, SC2 )
I think what Duke_nk was trying to say is that the prize pools of major tournaments cannot be sustained by the viewership alone. The GSL and DH NA/EU prize pools are too large to be funded from just ad revenue and brand sponsorship. The gap is being filled by Blizzard, to the tune of $1-3m per year.
The rule of thumb I like to use is: SC2 is 1/10 the size of Dota, and Dota is 1/3 the size of LoL. This is accurate for most metrics (monthly active users, daily active users, twitch viewer-hours, peak viewer count). The only exception is tournament prize pool - Valve is much better at monetizing its player base for TI than Blizzard or Riot. And there is greater regional variation in popularity between Dota/LoL than SC2.
If Blizzard begins decides to stop funding SC2 after the current 3-yr commitment, tournaments will have to adapt. We will likely see more of the following: - Smaller prize pools - Lower production - Structuring tournaments for more content hours, like what DH NA/EU has done with their group stages this year - More Twitch ads - More Chinese tournaments - Piggybacking off csgo/dota/lol tournaments for cross-marketing and cost sharing - Sponsorships from betting sites - Corporate sponsorship from tech/finance companies as recruiting pipeline, and not as marketing. (Shopify might be the first of this kind) - Pay per view, or sub requirement for 1080p
So it's not that nobody's watching - SC2 is still among the top 30 games on twitch, which extremely impressive for a 10 year old non-moba/br game. Rather it's that tournament prize pools cannot be sustained without more viewers or improved ways of monetizing existing viewers. KR pros are especially reliant on tournament winnings because they don't stream as much. Team salaries are their only other source of income.
Top 30 game with a prize pool as heavily subsidized as SC2 is not impressive at all. Don't kid yourselves. GSL gets twice the prize money compared to ASL, despite 1/10th to 1/20th the viewership, which is scattered around the globe and despite the 90k dollars fee Afreeca has to pay Blizzard each season. From an advertisers view, you want to have all the viewers in a single region for maximum effectiveness, which is the case especially for BW. BW is the second most watched esport in Korea, only next to LoL, despite being older than some people in this forum. THIS is impressive. Not a game that has been kept artificially alive since 2012-13, and where at its peak in Korea, they had to pay cheer girls/free hamburgers so the audience doesn't seem empty
When Blizzard stops funding, what will happen that there will be considerably lower prize pools, in the dimension of foreign BW during its hey day, so about a few thousands a tournament. NO SC2 player will be able to sustain their life with that. The popularity of SC2 is even lower than AOE2 right now. At most we will see some popular streamers living a life close to poverty streaming, most players will have to find an actual job. SC2 will at most be a hobby, not a career. The level of play will hit rock bottom.
TY, Stats and Roro have already started streaming BW and are playing in tournaments. They'll know that since the support of Blizzard will end soon, there will be no money left to grab. 99% of their income was from tournaments. Soon there will be none. At least with BW, they will earn some good money from donations through streaming.
On November 18 2020 04:02 Duke_nk wrote: Everyone is avoiding the elephant in the room: No one is watching SC2, and it was kept artificially alive by Blizzard for the past years through tournament money. Now that Blizzard pulled out, which was 100 percent expected, Koreans will lose their only source of income in the next months. So what's the point in trying hard, also given that most of these guys haven't been to the military yet.
Stats, TY have already started streaming BW where the money is. When even low viewer numbers in the 100-200 gives you a stable income of 11k dollars a month through donations, why would you keep playing SC2?
No one is watching, have you like, ever, checked the numbers? 10k viewers for Code S during a late night/early morning in the US and working hours for Europe. (yeah, saturdays is bad) Harstem has a45k subscribers, Winter has 160k subscribers. Videos have between 10k - 25k views, older/more interesting can get over 100k.
HeroMarine right now has 1,2k viewers(1275 acording to the TL bar)
WardiTV 1,7k viewers (+- few hundred) streaming some Invitational.
Maybe you want to reword your statement, because no one watching is pretty interesting statement.
Also the community may be small, but is quite rich, which has shown during selling the ... uh... those crate things to increase the prize pools. Or when Take asked for monies to support his tourneys.
I don't blame Koreans to go to stream BW, because being a foreign streamer sucks. (bad timezone, English, SC2 )
I think what Duke_nk was trying to say is that the prize pools of major tournaments cannot be sustained by the viewership alone. The GSL and DH NA/EU prize pools are too large to be funded from just ad revenue and brand sponsorship. The gap is being filled by Blizzard, to the tune of $1-3m per year.
The rule of thumb I like to use is: SC2 is 1/10 the size of Dota, and Dota is 1/3 the size of LoL. This is accurate for most metrics (monthly active users, daily active users, twitch viewer-hours, peak viewer count). The only exception is tournament prize pool - Valve is much better at monetizing its player base for TI than Blizzard or Riot. And there is greater regional variation in popularity between Dota/LoL than SC2.
If Blizzard begins decides to stop funding SC2 after the current 3-yr commitment, tournaments will have to adapt. We will likely see more of the following: - Smaller prize pools - Lower production - Structuring tournaments for more content hours, like what DH NA/EU has done with their group stages this year - More Twitch ads - More Chinese tournaments - Piggybacking off csgo/dota/lol tournaments for cross-marketing and cost sharing - Sponsorships from betting sites - Corporate sponsorship from tech/finance companies as recruiting pipeline, and not as marketing. (Shopify might be the first of this kind) - Pay per view, or sub requirement for 1080p
So it's not that nobody's watching - SC2 is still among the top 30 games on twitch, which extremely impressive for a 10 year old non-moba/br game. Rather it's that tournament prize pools cannot be sustained without more viewers or improved ways of monetizing existing viewers. KR pros are especially reliant on tournament winnings because they don't stream as much. Team salaries are their only other source of income.
Top 30 game with a prize pool as heavily subsidized as SC2 is not impressive at all. Don't kid yourselves. GSL gets twice the prize money compared to ASL, despite 1/10th to 1/20th the viewership, which is scattered around the globe and despite the 90k dollars fee Afreeca has to pay Blizzard each season. From an advertisers view, you want to have all the viewers in a single region for maximum effectiveness, which is the case especially for BW. BW is the second most watched esport in Korea, only next to LoL, despite being older than some people in this forum. THIS is impressive. Not a game that has been kept artificially alive since 2012-13, and where at its peak in Korea, they had to pay cheer girls/free hamburgers so the audience doesn't seem empty
When Blizzard stops funding, what will happen that there will be considerably lower prize pools, in the dimension of foreign BW during its hey day, so about a few thousands a tournament. NO SC2 player will be able to sustain their life with that. The popularity of SC2 is even lower than AOE2 right now. At most we will see some popular streamers living a life close to poverty streaming, most players will have to find an actual job. SC2 will at most be a hobby, not a career. The level of play will hit rock bottom.
TY, Stats and Roro have already started streaming BW and are playing in tournaments. They'll know that since the support of Blizzard will end soon, there will be no money left to grab. 99% of their income was from tournaments. Soon there will be none. At least with BW, they will earn some good money from donations through streaming.
I think bringing up AOE2 is actually really important in this discussion. The timeline of AoE2 is in many ways similar to BW, and both games are seeing a sort of overdue renaissance in terms of attention and viewership, both got remastered editions (Microsoft, for the most part, doing a much better job of being involved with and involving their content creators and audience), both have a strong history of grassroots support during the trough of their history, both relied on volunteers + 3rd party software for the bulk of their competitive play at one point, and neither had any support from their host company for years at a time.
To me, the question is whether or not SC2 will go through a similar renaissance period after the lights and water get shut off and suddenly the SC2 scene has to fend for itself. You bring up the point that SC2 is much more global than BW, but I honestly feel that this is about as true for SC2 as is it for AoE2 - with representation spanning from China to Scandinavia, North America to South America, and viewership also being representative of that diversity. However, AoE2 is growing year in and year out, in large part due to non-player viewers, strong content creators, great tournaments and storylines, and of course the fact that it is a great game. I may be overly cynical, but I think SC2 and its current community would not be able to muster that kind of effort. However, I think that after a few years of even more dire stagnation, deflation, and relative lack of support, grassroots efforts can bring about a revival. Perhaps that is what the SC2 community should be planning/hoping for, and not more artificial Blizzardbux, Korean dominance/activity, or any jingoistic dreams of foreign heroes being "omg the best evar" in a deteriorating competitive environment.
On November 18 2020 04:02 Duke_nk wrote: Everyone is avoiding the elephant in the room: No one is watching SC2, and it was kept artificially alive by Blizzard for the past years through tournament money. Now that Blizzard pulled out, which was 100 percent expected, Koreans will lose their only source of income in the next months. So what's the point in trying hard, also given that most of these guys haven't been to the military yet.
Stats, TY have already started streaming BW where the money is. When even low viewer numbers in the 100-200 gives you a stable income of 11k dollars a month through donations, why would you keep playing SC2?
No one is watching, have you like, ever, checked the numbers? 10k viewers for Code S during a late night/early morning in the US and working hours for Europe. (yeah, saturdays is bad) Harstem has a45k subscribers, Winter has 160k subscribers. Videos have between 10k - 25k views, older/more interesting can get over 100k.
HeroMarine right now has 1,2k viewers(1275 acording to the TL bar)
WardiTV 1,7k viewers (+- few hundred) streaming some Invitational.
Maybe you want to reword your statement, because no one watching is pretty interesting statement.
Also the community may be small, but is quite rich, which has shown during selling the ... uh... those crate things to increase the prize pools. Or when Take asked for monies to support his tourneys.
I don't blame Koreans to go to stream BW, because being a foreign streamer sucks. (bad timezone, English, SC2 )
I think what Duke_nk was trying to say is that the prize pools of major tournaments cannot be sustained by the viewership alone. The GSL and DH NA/EU prize pools are too large to be funded from just ad revenue and brand sponsorship. The gap is being filled by Blizzard, to the tune of $1-3m per year.
The rule of thumb I like to use is: SC2 is 1/10 the size of Dota, and Dota is 1/3 the size of LoL. This is accurate for most metrics (monthly active users, daily active users, twitch viewer-hours, peak viewer count). The only exception is tournament prize pool - Valve is much better at monetizing its player base for TI than Blizzard or Riot. And there is greater regional variation in popularity between Dota/LoL than SC2.
If Blizzard begins decides to stop funding SC2 after the current 3-yr commitment, tournaments will have to adapt. We will likely see more of the following: - Smaller prize pools - Lower production - Structuring tournaments for more content hours, like what DH NA/EU has done with their group stages this year - More Twitch ads - More Chinese tournaments - Piggybacking off csgo/dota/lol tournaments for cross-marketing and cost sharing - Sponsorships from betting sites - Corporate sponsorship from tech/finance companies as recruiting pipeline, and not as marketing. (Shopify might be the first of this kind) - Pay per view, or sub requirement for 1080p
So it's not that nobody's watching - SC2 is still among the top 30 games on twitch, which extremely impressive for a 10 year old non-moba/br game. Rather it's that tournament prize pools cannot be sustained without more viewers or improved ways of monetizing existing viewers. KR pros are especially reliant on tournament winnings because they don't stream as much. Team salaries are their only other source of income.
Top 30 game with a prize pool as heavily subsidized as SC2 is not impressive at all. Don't kid yourselves. GSL gets twice the prize money compared to ASL, despite 1/10th to 1/20th the viewership, which is scattered around the globe and despite the 90k dollars fee Afreeca has to pay Blizzard each season. From an advertisers view, you want to have all the viewers in a single region for maximum effectiveness, which is the case especially for BW. BW is the second most watched esport in Korea, only next to LoL, despite being older than some people in this forum. THIS is impressive. Not a game that has been kept artificially alive since 2012-13, and where at its peak in Korea, they had to pay cheer girls/free hamburgers so the audience doesn't seem empty
When Blizzard stops funding, what will happen that there will be considerably lower prize pools, in the dimension of foreign BW during its hey day, so about a few thousands a tournament. NO SC2 player will be able to sustain their life with that. The popularity of SC2 is even lower than AOE2 right now. At most we will see some popular streamers living a life close to poverty streaming, most players will have to find an actual job. SC2 will at most be a hobby, not a career. The level of play will hit rock bottom.
TY, Stats and Roro have already started streaming BW and are playing in tournaments. They'll know that since the support of Blizzard will end soon, there will be no money left to grab. 99% of their income was from tournaments. Soon there will be none. At least with BW, they will earn some good money from donations through streaming.
I think bringing up AOE2 is actually really important in this discussion. The timeline of AoE2 is in many ways similar to BW, and both games are seeing a sort of overdue renaissance in terms of attention and viewership, both got remastered editions (Microsoft, for the most part, doing a much better job of being involved with and involving their content creators and audience), both have a strong history of grassroots support during the trough of their history, both relied on volunteers + 3rd party software for the bulk of their competitive play at one point, and neither had any support from their host company for years at a time.
To me, the question is whether or not SC2 will go through a similar renaissance period after the lights and water get shut off and suddenly the SC2 scene has to fend for itself. You bring up the point that SC2 is much more global than BW, but I honestly feel that this is about as true for SC2 as is it for AoE2 - with representation spanning from China to Scandinavia, North America to South America, and viewership also being representative of that diversity. However, AoE2 is growing year in and year out, in large part due to non-player viewers, strong content creators, great tournaments and storylines, and of course the fact that it is a great game. I may be overly cynical, but I think SC2 and its current community would not be able to muster that kind of effort. However, I think that after a few years of even more dire stagnation, deflation, and relative lack of support, grassroots efforts can bring about a revival. Perhaps that is what the SC2 community should be planning/hoping for, and not more artificial Blizzardbux, Korean dominance/activity, or any jingoistic dreams of foreign heroes being "omg the best evar" in a deteriorating competitive environment.
By what metrics is AoE2 currently more popular than SC2? Not disputing this, more that it’s news to me.
I’m not sure where your cynicism as to SC2 and it’s community’s ability to do anything similar in terms of grass roots stuff comes from. As to whether Blizz actually enable it to be possible is another thing entirely.
On November 18 2020 04:02 Duke_nk wrote: Everyone is avoiding the elephant in the room: No one is watching SC2, and it was kept artificially alive by Blizzard for the past years through tournament money. Now that Blizzard pulled out, which was 100 percent expected, Koreans will lose their only source of income in the next months. So what's the point in trying hard, also given that most of these guys haven't been to the military yet.
Stats, TY have already started streaming BW where the money is. When even low viewer numbers in the 100-200 gives you a stable income of 11k dollars a month through donations, why would you keep playing SC2?
No one is watching, have you like, ever, checked the numbers? 10k viewers for Code S during a late night/early morning in the US and working hours for Europe. (yeah, saturdays is bad) Harstem has a45k subscribers, Winter has 160k subscribers. Videos have between 10k - 25k views, older/more interesting can get over 100k.
HeroMarine right now has 1,2k viewers(1275 acording to the TL bar)
WardiTV 1,7k viewers (+- few hundred) streaming some Invitational.
Maybe you want to reword your statement, because no one watching is pretty interesting statement.
Also the community may be small, but is quite rich, which has shown during selling the ... uh... those crate things to increase the prize pools. Or when Take asked for monies to support his tourneys.
I don't blame Koreans to go to stream BW, because being a foreign streamer sucks. (bad timezone, English, SC2 )
I think what Duke_nk was trying to say is that the prize pools of major tournaments cannot be sustained by the viewership alone. The GSL and DH NA/EU prize pools are too large to be funded from just ad revenue and brand sponsorship. The gap is being filled by Blizzard, to the tune of $1-3m per year.
The rule of thumb I like to use is: SC2 is 1/10 the size of Dota, and Dota is 1/3 the size of LoL. This is accurate for most metrics (monthly active users, daily active users, twitch viewer-hours, peak viewer count). The only exception is tournament prize pool - Valve is much better at monetizing its player base for TI than Blizzard or Riot. And there is greater regional variation in popularity between Dota/LoL than SC2.
If Blizzard begins decides to stop funding SC2 after the current 3-yr commitment, tournaments will have to adapt. We will likely see more of the following: - Smaller prize pools - Lower production - Structuring tournaments for more content hours, like what DH NA/EU has done with their group stages this year - More Twitch ads - More Chinese tournaments - Piggybacking off csgo/dota/lol tournaments for cross-marketing and cost sharing - Sponsorships from betting sites - Corporate sponsorship from tech/finance companies as recruiting pipeline, and not as marketing. (Shopify might be the first of this kind) - Pay per view, or sub requirement for 1080p
So it's not that nobody's watching - SC2 is still among the top 30 games on twitch, which extremely impressive for a 10 year old non-moba/br game. Rather it's that tournament prize pools cannot be sustained without more viewers or improved ways of monetizing existing viewers. KR pros are especially reliant on tournament winnings because they don't stream as much. Team salaries are their only other source of income.
Top 30 game with a prize pool as heavily subsidized as SC2 is not impressive at all. Don't kid yourselves. GSL gets twice the prize money compared to ASL, despite 1/10th to 1/20th the viewership, which is scattered around the globe and despite the 90k dollars fee Afreeca has to pay Blizzard each season. From an advertisers view, you want to have all the viewers in a single region for maximum effectiveness, which is the case especially for BW. BW is the second most watched esport in Korea, only next to LoL, despite being older than some people in this forum. THIS is impressive. Not a game that has been kept artificially alive since 2012-13, and where at its peak in Korea, they had to pay cheer girls/free hamburgers so the audience doesn't seem empty
When Blizzard stops funding, what will happen that there will be considerably lower prize pools, in the dimension of foreign BW during its hey day, so about a few thousands a tournament. NO SC2 player will be able to sustain their life with that. The popularity of SC2 is even lower than AOE2 right now. At most we will see some popular streamers living a life close to poverty streaming, most players will have to find an actual job. SC2 will at most be a hobby, not a career. The level of play will hit rock bottom.
TY, Stats and Roro have already started streaming BW and are playing in tournaments. They'll know that since the support of Blizzard will end soon, there will be no money left to grab. 99% of their income was from tournaments. Soon there will be none. At least with BW, they will earn some good money from donations through streaming.
I think bringing up AOE2 is actually really important in this discussion. The timeline of AoE2 is in many ways similar to BW, and both games are seeing a sort of overdue renaissance in terms of attention and viewership, both got remastered editions (Microsoft, for the most part, doing a much better job of being involved with and involving their content creators and audience), both have a strong history of grassroots support during the trough of their history, both relied on volunteers + 3rd party software for the bulk of their competitive play at one point, and neither had any support from their host company for years at a time.
To me, the question is whether or not SC2 will go through a similar renaissance period after the lights and water get shut off and suddenly the SC2 scene has to fend for itself. You bring up the point that SC2 is much more global than BW, but I honestly feel that this is about as true for SC2 as is it for AoE2 - with representation spanning from China to Scandinavia, North America to South America, and viewership also being representative of that diversity. However, AoE2 is growing year in and year out, in large part due to non-player viewers, strong content creators, great tournaments and storylines, and of course the fact that it is a great game. I may be overly cynical, but I think SC2 and its current community would not be able to muster that kind of effort. However, I think that after a few years of even more dire stagnation, deflation, and relative lack of support, grassroots efforts can bring about a revival. Perhaps that is what the SC2 community should be planning/hoping for, and not more artificial Blizzardbux, Korean dominance/activity, or any jingoistic dreams of foreign heroes being "omg the best evar" in a deteriorating competitive environment.
By what metrics is AoE2 currently more popular than SC2? Not disputing this, more that it’s news to me.
I’m not sure where your cynicism as to SC2 and it’s community’s ability to do anything similar in terms of grass roots stuff comes from. As to whether Blizz actually enable it to be possible is another thing entirely.
Looking at some data from ESCharts and similar sites, it seems the two scenes at peak are actually quite more comparable than I expected, with 2020 SC2 hitting slightly higher peak viewership for premier tours like GSL (35k vs 30k for AOE2 Hidden Cup and similar, notably 48k and 80k in 2019 for some SC2 tours I saw). The player base numbers are a bit more difficult to compare because they are reliably calculated differently but it seems that SC2 is actually potentially more active (13k average users per month for AoE2, 200k total unique per season for SC2 from what I could find). So, I will admit that it was probably wrong for Duke_nk to say AoE2 is more popular than SC2 in the moment, but in many ways they are more comparable than some would expect given the respective ages of the games (DE of course being only 1 year old but not much different in its release than BW RM save for the aforementioned superior support and involvement of Microsoft vs. Blizzard).
The reason why I am cynical about the SC2 community as it is now has been explained in my previous posts in this thread to an extent, but I also feel that it is just a pattern, too. SC2 has to be deader before there is enough impetus to reinvigorate it. Progamers have to go to the military or find full time jobs and start families - same as content creators and personalities. Then after a few years, during which some diehards will continue to carry the torch, when the stable income is attained and the first child nears 3 years old and is less of a daily strain on family life, people may say - "hey, I feel like playing a game of SC2" or "I wonder what's going on in SC2 right now?" Etc. Basically, the scene has to take a break so that the fatigue wears off and the more dedicated participants start to miss the game. Maybe. Seems to me that is how it went for BW and AOE2.
EDIT: If Duke_nk has a better stats source I'd love to see it myself!
On November 18 2020 04:02 Duke_nk wrote: Everyone is avoiding the elephant in the room: No one is watching SC2, and it was kept artificially alive by Blizzard for the past years through tournament money. Now that Blizzard pulled out, which was 100 percent expected, Koreans will lose their only source of income in the next months. So what's the point in trying hard, also given that most of these guys haven't been to the military yet.
Stats, TY have already started streaming BW where the money is. When even low viewer numbers in the 100-200 gives you a stable income of 11k dollars a month through donations, why would you keep playing SC2?
No one is watching, have you like, ever, checked the numbers? 10k viewers for Code S during a late night/early morning in the US and working hours for Europe. (yeah, saturdays is bad) Harstem has a45k subscribers, Winter has 160k subscribers. Videos have between 10k - 25k views, older/more interesting can get over 100k.
HeroMarine right now has 1,2k viewers(1275 acording to the TL bar)
WardiTV 1,7k viewers (+- few hundred) streaming some Invitational.
Maybe you want to reword your statement, because no one watching is pretty interesting statement.
Also the community may be small, but is quite rich, which has shown during selling the ... uh... those crate things to increase the prize pools. Or when Take asked for monies to support his tourneys.
I don't blame Koreans to go to stream BW, because being a foreign streamer sucks. (bad timezone, English, SC2 )
I think what Duke_nk was trying to say is that the prize pools of major tournaments cannot be sustained by the viewership alone. The GSL and DH NA/EU prize pools are too large to be funded from just ad revenue and brand sponsorship. The gap is being filled by Blizzard, to the tune of $1-3m per year.
The rule of thumb I like to use is: SC2 is 1/10 the size of Dota, and Dota is 1/3 the size of LoL. This is accurate for most metrics (monthly active users, daily active users, twitch viewer-hours, peak viewer count). The only exception is tournament prize pool - Valve is much better at monetizing its player base for TI than Blizzard or Riot. And there is greater regional variation in popularity between Dota/LoL than SC2.
If Blizzard begins decides to stop funding SC2 after the current 3-yr commitment, tournaments will have to adapt. We will likely see more of the following: - Smaller prize pools - Lower production - Structuring tournaments for more content hours, like what DH NA/EU has done with their group stages this year - More Twitch ads - More Chinese tournaments - Piggybacking off csgo/dota/lol tournaments for cross-marketing and cost sharing - Sponsorships from betting sites - Corporate sponsorship from tech/finance companies as recruiting pipeline, and not as marketing. (Shopify might be the first of this kind) - Pay per view, or sub requirement for 1080p
So it's not that nobody's watching - SC2 is still among the top 30 games on twitch, which extremely impressive for a 10 year old non-moba/br game. Rather it's that tournament prize pools cannot be sustained without more viewers or improved ways of monetizing existing viewers. KR pros are especially reliant on tournament winnings because they don't stream as much. Team salaries are their only other source of income.
Top 30 game with a prize pool as heavily subsidized as SC2 is not impressive at all. Don't kid yourselves. GSL gets twice the prize money compared to ASL, despite 1/10th to 1/20th the viewership, which is scattered around the globe and despite the 90k dollars fee Afreeca has to pay Blizzard each season. From an advertisers view, you want to have all the viewers in a single region for maximum effectiveness, which is the case especially for BW. BW is the second most watched esport in Korea, only next to LoL, despite being older than some people in this forum. THIS is impressive. Not a game that has been kept artificially alive since 2012-13, and where at its peak in Korea, they had to pay cheer girls/free hamburgers so the audience doesn't seem empty
When Blizzard stops funding, what will happen that there will be considerably lower prize pools, in the dimension of foreign BW during its hey day, so about a few thousands a tournament. NO SC2 player will be able to sustain their life with that. The popularity of SC2 is even lower than AOE2 right now. At most we will see some popular streamers living a life close to poverty streaming, most players will have to find an actual job. SC2 will at most be a hobby, not a career. The level of play will hit rock bottom.
TY, Stats and Roro have already started streaming BW and are playing in tournaments. They'll know that since the support of Blizzard will end soon, there will be no money left to grab. 99% of their income was from tournaments. Soon there will be none. At least with BW, they will earn some good money from donations through streaming.
I think bringing up AOE2 is actually really important in this discussion. The timeline of AoE2 is in many ways similar to BW, and both games are seeing a sort of overdue renaissance in terms of attention and viewership, both got remastered editions (Microsoft, for the most part, doing a much better job of being involved with and involving their content creators and audience), both have a strong history of grassroots support during the trough of their history, both relied on volunteers + 3rd party software for the bulk of their competitive play at one point, and neither had any support from their host company for years at a time.
To me, the question is whether or not SC2 will go through a similar renaissance period after the lights and water get shut off and suddenly the SC2 scene has to fend for itself. You bring up the point that SC2 is much more global than BW, but I honestly feel that this is about as true for SC2 as is it for AoE2 - with representation spanning from China to Scandinavia, North America to South America, and viewership also being representative of that diversity. However, AoE2 is growing year in and year out, in large part due to non-player viewers, strong content creators, great tournaments and storylines, and of course the fact that it is a great game. I may be overly cynical, but I think SC2 and its current community would not be able to muster that kind of effort. However, I think that after a few years of even more dire stagnation, deflation, and relative lack of support, grassroots efforts can bring about a revival. Perhaps that is what the SC2 community should be planning/hoping for, and not more artificial Blizzardbux, Korean dominance/activity, or any jingoistic dreams of foreign heroes being "omg the best evar" in a deteriorating competitive environment.
By what metrics is AoE2 currently more popular than SC2? Not disputing this, more that it’s news to me.
I’m not sure where your cynicism as to SC2 and it’s community’s ability to do anything similar in terms of grass roots stuff comes from. As to whether Blizz actually enable it to be possible is another thing entirely.
Looking at some data from ESCharts and similar sites, it seems the two scenes at peak are actually quite more comparable than I expected, with 2020 SC2 hitting slightly higher peak viewership for premier tours like GSL (35k vs 30k for AOE2 Hidden Cup and similar, notably 48k and 80k in 2019 for some SC2 tours I saw). The player base numbers are a bit more difficult to compare because they are reliably calculated differently but it seems that SC2 is actually potentially more active (13k average users per month for AoE2, 200k total unique per season for SC2 from what I could find). So, I will admit that it was probably wrong for Duke_nk to say AoE2 is more popular than SC2 in the moment, but in many ways they are more comparable than some would expect given the respective ages of the games (DE of course being only 1 year old but not much different in its release than BW RM save for the aforementioned superior support and involvement of Microsoft vs. Blizzard).
The reason why I am cynical about the SC2 community as it is now has been explained in my previous posts in this thread to an extent, but I also feel that it is just a pattern, too. SC2 has to be deader before there is enough impetus to reinvigorate it. Progamers have to go to the military or find full time jobs and start families - same as content creators and personalities. Then after a few years, during which some diehards will continue to carry the torch, when the stable income is attained and the first child nears 3 years old and is less of a daily strain on family life, people may say - "hey, I feel like playing a game of SC2" or "I wonder what's going on in SC2 right now?" Etc. Basically, the scene has to take a break so that the fatigue wears off and the more dedicated participants start to miss the game. Maybe. Seems to me that is how it went for BW and AOE2.
EDIT: If Duke_nk has a better stats source I'd love to see it myself!
Aye AoE2 is doing the kind of numbers WC3 should have done/exceeded if they didn’t horribly botch that Remaster.
If you keep the die-hards who are playing anyway, you get guys of my advanced age fancying picking up an old favourite, some new players and that’s a lot of potential momentum, especially in RTS where there’s not a huge amount of choice. Both returning casuals who have other life commitments plus any new players kind of need each other, otherwise the multiplayer experience equals getting stomped by the diehards who never stopped playing (part of the problem with Quake Champions from what I’ve read). Diehards get new blood, new exposure and more potential for tournaments and the likes, so everyone’s a winner really.
AoE2 both through being a great game and a great remaster definitely did a great job in opening things up. Quite like to try it myself.
I do sort of agree with you that perhaps the community in SC2 needs weaned off the Blizzard teat, but the scene is not yet declined enough for people to take the step.
The pessimism I would have is that unlike BW, AoE or WC3 in the olden days, how can the community step up with a game client that doesn’t let you do things the third party way?
It’s a big hurdle, one I think the community could overcome but if Blizz just stop updating say, the map pool one day and you can’t run easily accessible third party ladders where’s the next stage of growth, or at least ways to stem further decline?
Well, but there were no qualifiers for this one. I could perfectly well see that the professional ethics wouldn't allow any of the players to decline playing in a tournament for which their other wins had gotten them invited by default.
I think at the end of the day, we should just be thankful that SC2 was such a impressive scene at one stage. People will always remember the sheer amount of skill and hard work that was required to be a pro gamer especially when looking back at the height of its glory days, when 8 Korean Kespa teams each fielded dozens of top players flooding Code S and Code A with talent. Having said that, I really wish people would stop saying that the current level of SC2 is higher than it ever was, it both removes all credibility of that person and disrespects all the hard work pro-gamers of the old era had put in to perfect themselves to the skill they had achieved at that point in time.
On November 19 2020 22:41 MinixTheNerd wrote: I think at the end of the day, we should just be thankful that SC2 was such a impressive scene at one stage. People will always remember the sheer amount of skill and hard work that was required to be a pro gamer especially when looking back at the height of its glory days, when 8 Korean Kespa teams each fielded dozens of top players flooding Code S and Code A with talent. Having said that, I really wish people would stop saying that the current level of SC2 is higher than it ever was, it both removes all credibility of that person and disrespects all the hard work pro-gamers of the old era had put in to perfect themselves to the skill they had achieved at that point in time.
It arguably is though, perhaps with less consistency though that’s probably true. Extra years of practice, even if less intense and structured probably gives some gains, plus people discover little optimisations here and there.
Maru and Serral at their absolute peaks in recent years for example stack up pretty well with what we’ve seen in the Kespa period. Where there is a decline that’s definitely visible in terms of military, other retirements and guys like Zest or $o$ are clearly not as good as they used to be.
In an alternate timeline where you have Kespa and Proleague, another Starleague etc it would be an even higher level again. Not just for the practice regime but the very format as well as prestige of Proleague made for really high level gameplay.
On November 19 2020 22:41 MinixTheNerd wrote: I think at the end of the day, we should just be thankful that SC2 was such a impressive scene at one stage. People will always remember the sheer amount of skill and hard work that was required to be a pro gamer especially when looking back at the height of its glory days, when 8 Korean Kespa teams each fielded dozens of top players flooding Code S and Code A with talent. Having said that, I really wish people would stop saying that the current level of SC2 is higher than it ever was, it both removes all credibility of that person and disrespects all the hard work pro-gamers of the old era had put in to perfect themselves to the skill they had achieved at that point in time.
It arguably is though, perhaps with less consistency though that’s probably true. Extra years of practice, even if less intense and structured probably gives some gains, plus people discover little optimisations here and there.
Maru and Serral at their absolute peaks in recent years for example stack up pretty well with what we’ve seen in the Kespa period. Where there is a decline that’s definitely visible in terms of military, other retirements and guys like Zest or $o$ are clearly not as good as they used to be.
In an alternate timeline where you have Kespa and Proleague, another Starleague etc it would be an even higher level again. Not just for the practice regime but the very format as well as prestige of Proleague made for really high level gameplay.
So my counter argument to what you said about Maru and Serral, would be that their dominance was mostly due to lack of competition, (Mass retirements post kespa for Maru, and region lock for Serral). I know the game has changed in LotV strategically (with the extra starting workers that expanded mid game and shortened early game, which happens to be great for zerg fyi); but you have to keep in mind that back in that 2014 era, the pros were still doing what was the optimal strategies for that build of SC2, what made them better back then comparing to now is just the execution of the strategies, these days in Code S (even in the later parts of the tournament) you see some really clumsy and uncharacteristic mistakes way too often, mistakes that in the KESPA were all ironed out by their training regiment. While I know that was hard on the players, it also made me respect their skills so much more than now, where pros basically only practice right before a tournament, and rarely do anything more than just their ladder builds. At the end of the day Koreans don't have magical powers, they were best in sc2 because of practice environment they had that was built up over decades of team house culture, with it gone their decline in skill was just a given.
As for Serral, he really is a great player even back in HotS days, but I really wish he was tested more post 2016, I would have loved to see him or Reynor play against the very best of the koreans with the kespa teams to support them, instead of the shadows of the korean's progamers now. I do think Reynor for example was definitely comparable to Life in terms of skill and play style, but remember even Life wasn't the favourite of big tournaments back then, we had a lot of really strong contenders to keep him in check especially in HotS.
On November 17 2020 07:09 jinjin5000 wrote: the big worry for Korean SC2 is that there is no real viewership combined with no new blood.
The lack of new blood has been talked of recently in Snow's interview series with TY & Stats and they address this very issue saying that it is big worry they are not seeing anyone new around that can challenge the current pro level/lead the next generation. Combine this with the looming defunding from Blizzard on Korean SC2 tournaments, there is going to be big gap between tournaments Koreans can participate in and the next one, only really filled in by online tournaments. With GSL being gone, I can see many of the current roster moving to coaching another esports like League/ moving on to BW streaming/ retiring.
As TY & Stats also mentioned, Life's matchfixing accelerated this process and dismantling of the Kespa teams preventing recruitment of new talent just stopped Korean SC2 in tracks. Combine that with low viewership and interest means this was really inevitable.
Hell, even BW, which still has big following in Korea has this very same problem with lack of new blood (other than Soma). If game with much bigger viewerbase is struggling and looking likely to be on the tail end due to lack of new blood due to there being no supportive infrastructure (teams), SC2 would go the same path as well.
[link to the translated interview with TY & Stats on this issue (ENG sub on CC)] + Show Spoiler +
On November 17 2020 07:09 jinjin5000 wrote: the big worry for Korean SC2 is that there is no real viewership combined with no new blood.
The lack of new blood has been talked of recently in Snow's interview series with TY & Stats and they address this very issue saying that it is big worry they are not seeing anyone new around that can challenge the current pro level/lead the next generation. Combine this with the looming defunding from Blizzard on Korean SC2 tournaments, there is going to be big gap between tournaments Koreans can participate in and the next one, only really filled in by online tournaments. With GSL being gone, I can see many of the current roster moving to coaching another esports like League/ moving on to BW streaming/ retiring.
As TY & Stats also mentioned, Life's matchfixing accelerated this process and dismantling of the Kespa teams preventing recruitment of new talent just stopped Korean SC2 in tracks. Combine that with low viewership and interest means this was really inevitable.
Hell, even BW, which still has big following in Korea has this very same problem with lack of new blood (other than Soma). If game with much bigger viewerbase is struggling and looking likely to be on the tail end due to lack of new blood due to there being no supportive infrastructure (teams), SC2 would go the same path as well.
[link to the translated interview with TY & Stats on this issue (ENG sub on CC)] + Show Spoiler +
When people talk about past skill, are they talking about it relatively speaking? I don't think any player in 2013-2014 could beat the top players of today. I guess HotS and LotV being much different makes a difference.
It's debatable whether post-KeSPA* period can be considered peak SC2. The assumption is that the players really level up as years go by. While that may be true to any mature sport or game in general, the counter factors are the disbandment of teamhouses, lower viewership, dilution of player pool, and so on.
BW is the perfect analogy. Is ASL post-KeSPA peak BW? Likely not. I recall a recent Flash interview 1-2 years back. The question was whether Flash-present was better than Flash-past during the KeSPA days. His answer was rather enlightening. In the short term or short series - yes, he would beat Flash-past because of the new knowledge gained in recent years through mind-games. But if you gave Flash-past some time to learn the new meta and knowlege - no, Flash-past would absolutely demolish him. Of course, he's probably factoring that his mechanical skills are getting rustier with age. But I think the same general principle can apply to most BW pros.
Back to SC2 - Are foreigners playing better than any period before? That's a tough question. But the fact that they have an impressive record of beating Korean 'old hats' proves little (in the GOAT discussion context). Just like how no one can safely say that Soma beating Flash proves that Soma would've beaten peak Flash, neither can anyone safely say that Serral and Reynor would have beaten peak Rain, Inno, the-Zerg-that-shalt-not-be-named, and so on.
Ultimately, it's quite evident that the Korean SC2 is in decline. The only question is how far they have fallen from their pedestal (and brought down the overall quality and competitiveness of the game as a consequence).
* not sure when exactly the dividing line is - the death of Prologue?
On November 18 2020 04:02 Duke_nk wrote: Everyone is avoiding the elephant in the room: No one is watching SC2, and it was kept artificially alive by Blizzard for the past years through tournament money. Now that Blizzard pulled out, which was 100 percent expected, Koreans will lose their only source of income in the next months. So what's the point in trying hard, also given that most of these guys haven't been to the military yet.
Stats, TY have already started streaming BW where the money is. When even low viewer numbers in the 100-200 gives you a stable income of 11k dollars a month through donations, why would you keep playing SC2?
No one is watching, have you like, ever, checked the numbers? 10k viewers for Code S during a late night/early morning in the US and working hours for Europe. (yeah, saturdays is bad) Harstem has a45k subscribers, Winter has 160k subscribers. Videos have between 10k - 25k views, older/more interesting can get over 100k.
HeroMarine right now has 1,2k viewers(1275 acording to the TL bar)
WardiTV 1,7k viewers (+- few hundred) streaming some Invitational.
Maybe you want to reword your statement, because no one watching is pretty interesting statement.
Also the community may be small, but is quite rich, which has shown during selling the ... uh... those crate things to increase the prize pools. Or when Take asked for monies to support his tourneys.
I don't blame Koreans to go to stream BW, because being a foreign streamer sucks. (bad timezone, English, SC2 )
Its hilarious that you are using these numbers unironically. Those numbers are god awful. If these are the standards to consider sc2 alive, well it speaks for itself.
On November 20 2020 10:39 RKC wrote: It's debatable whether post-KeSPA* period can be considered peak SC2. The assumption is that the players really level up as years go by. While that may be true to any mature sport or game in general, the counter factors are the disbandment of teamhouses, lower viewership, dilution of player pool, and so on.
BW is the perfect analogy. Is ASL post-KeSPA peak BW? Likely not. I recall a recent Flash interview 1-2 years back. The question was whether Flash-present was better than Flash-past during the KeSPA days. His answer was rather enlightening. In the short term or short series - yes, he would beat Flash-past because of the new knowledge gained in recent years through mind-games. But if you gave Flash-past some time to learn the new meta and knowlege - no, Flash-past would absolutely demolish him. Of course, he's probably factoring that his mechanical skills are getting rustier with age. But I think the same general principle can apply to most BW pros.
Back to SC2 - Are foreigners playing better than any period before? That's a tough question. But the fact that they have an impressive record of beating Korean 'old hats' proves little (in the GOAT discussion context). Just like how no one can safely say that Soma beating Flash proves that Soma would've beaten peak Flash, neither can anyone safely say that Serral and Reynor would have beaten peak Rain, Inno, the-Zerg-that-shalt-not-be-named, and so on.
Ultimately, it's quite evident that the Korean SC2 is in decline. The only question is how far they have fallen from their pedestal (and brought down the overall quality and competitiveness of the game as a consequence).
* not sure when exactly the dividing line is - the death of Prologue?
No, Brood War definitely is not a perfect analogy. Starcraft 2 was not abandoned completely for four years by the same apparatus you seem to consider so important when it comes to the competitiveness of the game; also, Sc2's players who are now competing at the top are not the same ones who used to dominate ten years ago, only ten years older.
Top foreigners are better than ever before, only Stephano and Neeb achieved a similar status in the past when it comes to competitiveness against top koreans but Serral is obviously above them and we now have other two who are on pair with his current skill and the potential to be on equal footing against the best koreans(Reynor partly did, already, while Clem hasn't even started yet). I actually believe that foreign scene in early LoTV had higher density and was more uniform in skill making it pleasantly unpredictable while already showcasing a level good enough to challenge koreans ,despite not having top players so strong to beat those on a regular basis.
Watch SC2 while you can, I honestly don't see ESL/DH or sponsors footing the bill for prize pools that pros are used to. I do hope a movement happens, but I don't see it honestly with the sc / sc2 community; that window to capture new people in a significant amount passed long ago. Which is important, because a bigger audience attracts more new player blood, affects all sc2 regions.
On November 17 2020 07:09 jinjin5000 wrote: the big worry for Korean SC2 is that there is no real viewership combined with no new blood.
The lack of new blood has been talked of recently in Snow's interview series with TY & Stats and they address this very issue saying that it is big worry they are not seeing anyone new around that can challenge the current pro level/lead the next generation. Combine this with the looming defunding from Blizzard on Korean SC2 tournaments, there is going to be big gap between tournaments Koreans can participate in and the next one, only really filled in by online tournaments. With GSL being gone, I can see many of the current roster moving to coaching another esports like League/ moving on to BW streaming/ retiring.
As TY & Stats also mentioned, Life's matchfixing accelerated this process and dismantling of the Kespa teams preventing recruitment of new talent just stopped Korean SC2 in tracks. Combine that with low viewership and interest means this was really inevitable.
Hell, even BW, which still has big following in Korea has this very same problem with lack of new blood (other than Soma). If game with much bigger viewerbase is struggling and looking likely to be on the tail end due to lack of new blood due to there being no supportive infrastructure (teams), SC2 would go the same path as well.
[link to the translated interview with TY & Stats on this issue (ENG sub on CC)] + Show Spoiler +
There is more viewership from korea stuff htan for foreigenr stuff no?
Specially in the youtube vods no?
If i am wrong please correct me.
The problem is that even with big viewership, there isnt any new blood coming in to challenge the current top pros in bw
Unless you mean sc2, then it has much, much more foreign views than koreans
Sorry I express myself terrible, what I wanted to say is that in youtube a vod with a korean player in it draw much more viewership than a match between foreigners.
On November 17 2020 07:09 jinjin5000 wrote: the big worry for Korean SC2 is that there is no real viewership combined with no new blood.
The lack of new blood has been talked of recently in Snow's interview series with TY & Stats and they address this very issue saying that it is big worry they are not seeing anyone new around that can challenge the current pro level/lead the next generation. Combine this with the looming defunding from Blizzard on Korean SC2 tournaments, there is going to be big gap between tournaments Koreans can participate in and the next one, only really filled in by online tournaments. With GSL being gone, I can see many of the current roster moving to coaching another esports like League/ moving on to BW streaming/ retiring.
As TY & Stats also mentioned, Life's matchfixing accelerated this process and dismantling of the Kespa teams preventing recruitment of new talent just stopped Korean SC2 in tracks. Combine that with low viewership and interest means this was really inevitable.
Hell, even BW, which still has big following in Korea has this very same problem with lack of new blood (other than Soma). If game with much bigger viewerbase is struggling and looking likely to be on the tail end due to lack of new blood due to there being no supportive infrastructure (teams), SC2 would go the same path as well.
[link to the translated interview with TY & Stats on this issue (ENG sub on CC)] + Show Spoiler +
There is more viewership from korea stuff htan for foreigenr stuff no?
Specially in the youtube vods no?
If i am wrong please correct me.
The problem is that even with big viewership, there isnt any new blood coming in to challenge the current top pros in bw
Unless you mean sc2, then it has much, much more foreign views than koreans
Sorry I express myself terrible, what I wanted to say is that in youtube a vod with a korean player in it draw much more viewership than a match between foreigners.
If the Korean scene crumbles, it is a disaster for the SC2 scene in general. Foreigners won't keep people entertained, historically the best viewership is when there's a foreigner against a Korean, preferably offline. Once we lose this(and we will), the viewership will go downhill faster than the value of the Zimbabwean dollar.
At some point, SC2 is going to be come the next WC3 as far as Esports goes. It's inevitable. It may ebb and flow up and down a couple more times though.
And AFAIK, the current WC3 scene is pretty much just Grubby's stream, sometimes playing against other ex-wc3 pros like Thorzain/Happy, etc, and no real corporate subsidized tournaments.
On November 23 2020 02:31 Sadistx wrote: At some point, SC2 is going to be come the next WC3 as far as Esports goes. It's inevitable. It may ebb and flow up and down a couple more times though.
And AFAIK, the current WC3 scene is pretty much just Grubby's stream, sometimes playing against other ex-wc3 pros like Thorzain/Happy, etc, and no real corporate subsidized tournaments.
you know absolutely nothing about the WC3 scene then lmao.. Grubby not even playing in any tournaments
ESL WC3 Championship actually going on right now, too btw
There are tournaments basically every day. European, korean and chinese ones. Corporate sponsored or community sponsored. It's a really healthy scene that would have been even healthier if not for COVID and Bli$$ard fucking up the remaster.
It's quite small, yes.. but still very enjoyable and you will not be able to watch everything even if you would want to.
As always in this discussion one has to consider: While obviously the gap between foreign and Korean scene has diminished substantially and some foreigners are on par with top Koreans, we don't have any tournament which features global participation purely based on actual performance delivered in global competition.
What does this mean? In this regard we have 3 types of tournaments right now, in which players from all regions can participate:
1) Offline or "regional" tournaments which require big logistic investments in order to participate if you're not from that region. This is the case with GSL and Dreamhack-Master regionals. You basically have to live in the region to participate.
2) small to semibig tournaments which are totally open (or almost at least) but not attractive or just not big enough to feature all the best players. Asus Rog is such a tournament.
3) Big international tournaments with regionally distributed spots. This means that only a certain amount of players from a region can participate. For a region with few top players this is a boost, for regions with many top players this is a bottleneck. Even if great regions get more spots, they still won't be able to perform to their best potential because the players that got qualified are never the best players at the moment when the actual tournament happens. This was the case with any WCS global finals and any GSL vs The World in the past and is the case with any Dreamhack Masters Season Finals this year.
The ultimate test to my assumption has been the exceptional IEM Katowice for quite some years now. This tournament had the best combination of being a huge tournament and having a very open qualification process since 2017.
Let's have a closer look.
2017 group stage: 14 Koreans (K) - 10 foreigners (f) 2017 bracket Ro12: 10 K - 2 f 2017 bracket Ro8: 7 K - 1 f 2017 bracket Ro4: 4 K
2018 group stage: 16 K - 8 f 2018 bracket Ro12: 11 K - 1 f 2018 bracket Ro8: 7 K - 1 f 2018 bracket Ro4: 3 K - 1 f 2018 final: 2 K
2019 group stage: 18 K - 6 f 2019 bracket Ro12: 10 K - 2 f 2019 bracket Ro8: 6 K - 2 f 2019 bracket Ro4: 4 K
2020 group stage: 17 K - 7 f 2020 bracket Ro12: 10 K - 2 f 2020 bracket Ro8: 7 K - 1 f 2020 bracket Ro4: 3 K - 1 f 2020 final: 2 K
We see a significant rise in skill of few certain foreigners while from the high amount of top Koreans there will be always enough who perform and thus kick out the majority of the foreigners out of the tournament in the group stage. With Clem and Reynor catching up with Serral this year, the field might look different this year. Also it's hard to assess the new IEM Katowice format as it won't be as open this time - 9 foreigners are already set for Ro24 which is quite big, considering that they had no Korean competition to get there.
On November 18 2020 04:02 Duke_nk wrote: Everyone is avoiding the elephant in the room: No one is watching SC2, and it was kept artificially alive by Blizzard for the past years through tournament money. Now that Blizzard pulled out, which was 100 percent expected, Koreans will lose their only source of income in the next months. So what's the point in trying hard, also given that most of these guys haven't been to the military yet.
Stats, TY have already started streaming BW where the money is. When even low viewer numbers in the 100-200 gives you a stable income of 11k dollars a month through donations, why would you keep playing SC2?
No one is watching, have you like, ever, checked the numbers? 10k viewers for Code S during a late night/early morning in the US and working hours for Europe. (yeah, saturdays is bad) Harstem has a45k subscribers, Winter has 160k subscribers. Videos have between 10k - 25k views, older/more interesting can get over 100k.
HeroMarine right now has 1,2k viewers(1275 acording to the TL bar)
WardiTV 1,7k viewers (+- few hundred) streaming some Invitational.
Maybe you want to reword your statement, because no one watching is pretty interesting statement.
Also the community may be small, but is quite rich, which has shown during selling the ... uh... those crate things to increase the prize pools. Or when Take asked for monies to support his tourneys.
I don't blame Koreans to go to stream BW, because being a foreign streamer sucks. (bad timezone, English, SC2 )
Yeah obviously, if Koreans had better time zones, and foreigners had prime time slots, we would have 200k viewers minimum for each GSL final because the 200k BW followers for ASL would have instead watched the superior GSL. Instead, we have 10k. Must be time zones. The ratio of 20 to 1, must be time zones.
Imagine the reverse time zone, all koreans would be watching Winter (biggest streamer) instead of Flash, and GSL instead of ASL.
With the renewed popularity of Brood War and the release of SC: Remastered eventually the two scenes were going to hit a kind of "crossroads" with the Korean scene going full-bore BW and the foreigner scene staying on SC2. Now I don't reasonably expect players like Maru, ByuN, or Creator to switch to BW but many of the Korean players are heading in the direction of Brood War.
And with the uncertainty of professional play after 2022, when the Koreans return from military service there may not be much of a SC2 pro scene to return to. But Korean BW will survive well beyond 2022. Plus as been stated streaming BW on AfreecaTV can be very financially lucrative, and will likely continue to be lucrative for quite some time.
On November 18 2020 04:02 Duke_nk wrote: Everyone is avoiding the elephant in the room: No one is watching SC2, and it was kept artificially alive by Blizzard for the past years through tournament money. Now that Blizzard pulled out, which was 100 percent expected, Koreans will lose their only source of income in the next months. So what's the point in trying hard, also given that most of these guys haven't been to the military yet.
Stats, TY have already started streaming BW where the money is. When even low viewer numbers in the 100-200 gives you a stable income of 11k dollars a month through donations, why would you keep playing SC2?
No one is watching, have you like, ever, checked the numbers? 10k viewers for Code S during a late night/early morning in the US and working hours for Europe. (yeah, saturdays is bad) Harstem has a45k subscribers, Winter has 160k subscribers. Videos have between 10k - 25k views, older/more interesting can get over 100k.
HeroMarine right now has 1,2k viewers(1275 acording to the TL bar)
WardiTV 1,7k viewers (+- few hundred) streaming some Invitational.
Maybe you want to reword your statement, because no one watching is pretty interesting statement.
Also the community may be small, but is quite rich, which has shown during selling the ... uh... those crate things to increase the prize pools. Or when Take asked for monies to support his tourneys.
I don't blame Koreans to go to stream BW, because being a foreign streamer sucks. (bad timezone, English, SC2 )
Yeah obviously, if Koreans had better time zones, and foreigners had prime time slots, we would have 200k viewers minimum for each GSL final because the 200k BW followers for ASL would have instead watched the superior GSL. Instead, we have 10k. Must be time zones. The ratio of 20 to 1, must be time zones.
Imagine the reverse time zone, all koreans would be watching Winter (biggest streamer) instead of Flash, and GSL instead of ASL.
What now? How did you get this of my post? oO What drugs do you take? If Koreans had a better timezones, they would be streaming in their prime time to the foreigners. There's nowhere written in my posts that Koreans are not watching SC2 because of timezones, stop deducing what I think and read what I write.
[B] Hell, even BW, which still has big following in Korea has this very same problem with lack of new blood (other than Soma). If game with much bigger viewerbase is struggling and looking likely to be on the tail end due to lack of new blood due to there being no supportive infrastructure (teams), SC2 would go the same path as well.
[link to the translated interview with TY & Stats on this issue (ENG sub on CC)] [spoiler]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPig5JWrPos&list=PLdqi0o4auh2HWTaLfI33PCPwiD6yk02N6&index=2[/spoiler]
Is it possible that the supporting infrastructure (Team) will ever return?
[B] Hell, even BW, which still has big following in Korea has this very same problem with lack of new blood (other than Soma). If game with much bigger viewerbase is struggling and looking likely to be on the tail end due to lack of new blood due to there being no supportive infrastructure (teams), SC2 would go the same path as well.
[link to the translated interview with TY & Stats on this issue (ENG sub on CC)] [spoiler]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPig5JWrPos&list=PLdqi0o4auh2HWTaLfI33PCPwiD6yk02N6&index=2[/spoiler]
Is it possible that the supporting infrastructure (Team) will ever return?
Nope, mostly thanks to the matchfixing scandal around Life, there are no big companies, that want to even touch SC2.
BW is part of Korean culture and other, newer games are more exciting. In Korea, if you play RTS, you play BW, if not you play a completly different game. There is no market for SC2 in terms of new players, new audience or new sponsors. So there are no teams coming up either.
SC2 is pretty big in China, though. The CTC has done wonders and has supoosedly KESPA level payouts for the top Players. If there is something, carrying the Korean SC2 scene, it s that more than anything else. Afaik, they don t have team houses though.
[B] Hell, even BW, which still has big following in Korea has this very same problem with lack of new blood (other than Soma). If game with much bigger viewerbase is struggling and looking likely to be on the tail end due to lack of new blood due to there being no supportive infrastructure (teams), SC2 would go the same path as well.
[link to the translated interview with TY & Stats on this issue (ENG sub on CC)] [spoiler]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPig5JWrPos&list=PLdqi0o4auh2HWTaLfI33PCPwiD6yk02N6&index=2[/spoiler]
Is it possible that the supporting infrastructure (Team) will ever return?
Nope, mostly thanks to the matchfixing scandal around Life, there are no big companies, that want to even touch SC2.
BW is part of Korean culture and other, newer games are more exciting. In Korea, if you play RTS, you play BW, if not you play a completly different game. There is no market for SC2 in terms of new players, new audience or new sponsors. So there are no teams coming up either.
SC2 is pretty big in China, though. The CTC has done wonders and has supoosedly KESPA level payouts for the top Players. If there is something, carrying the Korean SC2 scene, it s that more than anything else. Afaik, they don t have team houses though.
Oh that's interesting I totally forgot about china, could that be the new home for Premier Sc2 if GSL falls apart after the 2-year deal? I actually haven't tuned into any of the recent Team league things, mainly cuz in the past, the china tournaments had poor promotion of their event or inconsistent production quality. Has that changed?
Hell, even BW, which still has big following in Korea has this very same problem with lack of new blood (other than Soma). If game with much bigger viewerbase is struggling and looking likely to be on the tail end due to lack of new blood due to there being no supportive infrastructure (teams), SC2 would go the same path as well.
[link to the translated interview with TY & Stats on this issue (ENG sub on CC)] [spoiler]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPig5JWrPos&list=PLdqi0o4auh2HWTaLfI33PCPwiD6yk02N6&index=2[/spoiler]
Is it possible that the supporting infrastructure (Team) will ever return?
Nope, mostly thanks to the matchfixing scandal around Life, there are no big companies, that want to even touch SC2.
BW is part of Korean culture and other, newer games are more exciting. In Korea, if you play RTS, you play BW, if not you play a completly different game. There is no market for SC2 in terms of new players, new audience or new sponsors. So there are no teams coming up either.
SC2 is pretty big in China, though. The CTC has done wonders and has supoosedly KESPA level payouts for the top Players. If there is something, carrying the Korean SC2 scene, it s that more than anything else. Afaik, they don t have team houses though.
Funny thing, the scandal around Life is bad and companies won't touch SC2, but somewhow the BW matchfixing scandal isn't an issue? I agree on everything else, just find pretty weird the treatment.
I for one will enjoy the 2 more years of Starcraft we have. After that, who knows. Maybe something else will fill the RTS void, mabye not.
I completely understand that young blood is rather playing LoL / Dota. There is way more exposure, money and it isn't on a timer (yet). It is easier to get in and get hooked compared to Starcraft IMO. You can play it with your friends and get them in, too
[B] Hell, even BW, which still has big following in Korea has this very same problem with lack of new blood (other than Soma). If game with much bigger viewerbase is struggling and looking likely to be on the tail end due to lack of new blood due to there being no supportive infrastructure (teams), SC2 would go the same path as well.
[link to the translated interview with TY & Stats on this issue (ENG sub on CC)] [spoiler]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPig5JWrPos&list=PLdqi0o4auh2HWTaLfI33PCPwiD6yk02N6&index=2[/spoiler]
Is it possible that the supporting infrastructure (Team) will ever return?
Nope, mostly thanks to the matchfixing scandal around Life, there are no big companies, that want to even touch SC2.
BW is part of Korean culture and other, newer games are more exciting. In Korea, if you play RTS, you play BW, if not you play a completly different game. There is no market for SC2 in terms of new players, new audience or new sponsors. So there are no teams coming up either.
SC2 is pretty big in China, though. The CTC has done wonders and has supoosedly KESPA level payouts for the top Players. If there is something, carrying the Korean SC2 scene, it s that more than anything else. Afaik, they don t have team houses though.
I would question about the Chinese scene, there are not really much grass root players in China anymore, just SCBOY with bunch of rich friends who are throwing money around?
Rarely anyone young is playing SC2 at all. When I went to the net cafes in China, I was the only one who even bothered to open SC2. I went to a lot of them, and that was pretty much the case.
Wait 1 or 2 years, Stats, Rogue, Dark, TY, etc will all leave for the military service, and there are no Reynor or Clem to fill up the spot. If GSL is still running, we would see 5K MMR making it to the Ro16.
On November 17 2020 05:59 MockHamill wrote: The single best moment in SC2 history was when Serral won Blizzcon. Why? Because he demonstrated to other foreigners that it was possible to take down the Koreans. Once the mental barrier is gone, it is gone forever.
Personally I find it awesome that the Korean dominance over SC2 has ended. They were never more talented, they just had the teamhouse advantage. Take that away and they are nothing special.
If the game was more popular, Koreans would still dominate. But there isn't enough sponsors and cash in the scene to support new talent, hence the popularity of the game has fallen and with it the level of the Korean scene. Training traditions and know-how is more advanced in Korea, but that's all gone now. No coaches, no salaries, no schedule training and no practice partners.
It's not about talent or any kind of mental barrier. The Korean system was just better, the Koreans just practiced way more and with better quality in a better working environment.
There is a reason why China dominates for example table tennis. They are just years ahead of everyone else, their dedication is on an other level compared to other countries.
I wouldn't celebrate the fall of the Korean scene, which is signaling the fall of the SC2 scene in general. When I watch a sport I would want to watch the highest quality and the highest skills, something like watching Maru vs TY in TvT now. But before we had way more competition the scene was more dynamic it was harder for someone to dominate completely and we had more champions. Nationality doesn't matter when you had a fierce line-up of all star players all of which were championship material...
Now we have like 3 championship level foreigners and a couple of championship level Koreans. No more then 10 players and no body else to cause any upsets, because of no new talent we would get the same players over and over again, no up and coming players... That could surprise the competition like in other sports.
I think match fixing scandals since BW killed the Korean scene, after that lack of sponsors, region lockdowns were the nail in the coffin. Moving from centralized training to personal training... and that was the end of the Korean model...
On November 25 2020 12:35 redloser wrote: Wait 1 or 2 years, Stats, Rogue, Dark, TY, etc will all leave for the military service, and there are no Reynor or Clem to fill up the spot. If GSL is still running, we would see 5K MMR making it to the Ro16.
In 2 years Blizzard pulls out and SC2 in Korea disappears. We already know this.
Edit> Disappear is maybe a too strong word, but I don't think we will have anything near the current level.
On November 25 2020 19:31 raga4ka wrote: There is a reason why China dominates for example table tennis. They are just years ahead of everyone else, their dedication is on an other level compared to other countries.
I find games are more fun when there is less money involved. If SC2 is going more amateur and has less giant corps involved there is a decent chance it'll be more fun not less fun.
Canadians take hockey very seriously.. Playing hockey when I was 13, 14, 15 felt like a job. I had more fun playing basketball and baseball because no one cared... it was just pure stupid fun.
Canadians take hockey very seriously.. Playing hockey when I was 13, 14, 15 felt like a job. I had more fun playing basketball and baseball because no one cared... it was just pure stupid fun.
I agree with you sometimes it's a breath of fresh air to play just for fun. It's the same for CS when everybody is so serious playing the fun is not there anymore.
On November 25 2020 19:31 raga4ka wrote: There is a reason why China dominates for example table tennis. They are just years ahead of everyone else, their dedication is on an other level compared to other countries.
I find games are more fun when there is less money involved. If SC2 is going more amateur and has less giant corps involved there is a decent chance it'll be more fun not less fun.
Canadians take hockey very seriously.. Playing hockey when I was 13, 14, 15 felt like a job. I had more fun playing basketball and baseball because no one cared... it was just pure stupid fun.
I kinda didn't get how was fun involved in what you quote xD
Considering the jokes flying even at the GSL studio, I am not sure if it's that serious though
On November 29 2020 03:06 daruka2073 wrote: I am embarassed to see this thread right now. People just should stop judging after one online tournament....
If you didnt bump it, you wouldnt have to look at it
I have warned of this development a long time ago. Koreans have overharvested their fishing grounds. A smart regulator would have prevented that.
They drove the global audience away from Starcraft, the market shrank drastically and now even semi-pro foreigners have a chance to compete with what is left of the Korean scene. Unfortunately this development comes way too late as Starcraft's decline was sealed when Koreans regularly made top 16 in every major global tournament.
On November 29 2020 05:15 marcesr wrote: I have warned of this development a long time ago. Koreans have overharvested their fishing grounds. A smart regulator would have prevented that.
They drove the global audience away from Starcraft, the market shrank drastically and now even semi-pro foreigners have a chance to compete with what is left of the Korean scene. Unfortunately this development comes way too late as Starcraft's decline was sealed when Koreans regularly made top 16 in every major global tournament.
starcraft 2 wouldn't have declined if the game managed to capture attention the same way brood war has done for 20 years and still going.
The dissapointment of the game can't be ignored. Even now that it is a finished product, there are a lot of dissapointing unit interactions and strategies still in play.
On November 29 2020 05:15 marcesr wrote: I have warned of this development a long time ago. Koreans have overharvested their fishing grounds. A smart regulator would have prevented that.
They drove the global audience away from Starcraft, the market shrank drastically and now even semi-pro foreigners have a chance to compete with what is left of the Korean scene. Unfortunately this development comes way too late as Starcraft's decline was sealed when Koreans regularly made top 16 in every major global tournament.
starcraft 2 wouldn't have declined if the game managed to capture attention the same way brood war has done for 20 years and still going.
The dissapointment of the game can't be ignored. Even now that it is a finished product, there are a lot of dissapointing unit interactions and strategies still in play.
This is funny, because the Brood War Scene crashed like no other. Why didnt Gameplay safe this game?
On November 29 2020 05:15 marcesr wrote: I have warned of this development a long time ago. Koreans have overharvested their fishing grounds. A smart regulator would have prevented that.
They drove the global audience away from Starcraft, the market shrank drastically and now even semi-pro foreigners have a chance to compete with what is left of the Korean scene. Unfortunately this development comes way too late as Starcraft's decline was sealed when Koreans regularly made top 16 in every major global tournament.
starcraft 2 wouldn't have declined if the game managed to capture attention the same way brood war has done for 20 years and still going.
The dissapointment of the game can't be ignored. Even now that it is a finished product, there are a lot of dissapointing unit interactions and strategies still in play.
This is funny, because the Brood War Scene crashed like no other. Why didnt Gameplay safe this game?
I'm not sure what you mean when GSL finals gets 3k viewers in korea and 200k tune in to watch ASL. And that is after the entire BW scene collapsed and tried to switch to starcraft 2, and came back years later after the entire pro scene and league structure for brood war has been eradicated.
Few days ago the news of OGN the tv channel that hosted starleagues and proleague closing hit. Did you really just make an account to say this? lol..
On November 29 2020 05:15 marcesr wrote: I have warned of this development a long time ago. Koreans have overharvested their fishing grounds. A smart regulator would have prevented that.
They drove the global audience away from Starcraft, the market shrank drastically and now even semi-pro foreigners have a chance to compete with what is left of the Korean scene. Unfortunately this development comes way too late as Starcraft's decline was sealed when Koreans regularly made top 16 in every major global tournament.
starcraft 2 wouldn't have declined if the game managed to capture attention the same way brood war has done for 20 years and still going.
The dissapointment of the game can't be ignored. Even now that it is a finished product, there are a lot of dissapointing unit interactions and strategies still in play.
You are trying to say that Sc2 is objectively bad? Koreans have loved Brood War for one entire generation and it's the only Rts they want to watch, it seems. Warcraft 3 was a relative fail in Korea as well, people apparently found it boring.
On November 29 2020 05:15 marcesr wrote: I have warned of this development a long time ago. Koreans have overharvested their fishing grounds. A smart regulator would have prevented that.
They drove the global audience away from Starcraft, the market shrank drastically and now even semi-pro foreigners have a chance to compete with what is left of the Korean scene. Unfortunately this development comes way too late as Starcraft's decline was sealed when Koreans regularly made top 16 in every major global tournament.
starcraft 2 wouldn't have declined if the game managed to capture attention the same way brood war has done for 20 years and still going.
The dissapointment of the game can't be ignored. Even now that it is a finished product, there are a lot of dissapointing unit interactions and strategies still in play.
This is funny, because the Brood War Scene crashed like no other. Why didnt Gameplay safe this game?
I'm not sure what you mean when GSL finals gets 3k viewers in korea and 200k tune in to watch ASL. And that is after the entire BW scene collapsed and tried to switch to starcraft 2, and came back years later after the entire pro scene and league structure for brood war has been eradicated.
Few days ago the news of OGN the tv channel that hosted starleagues and proleague closing hit. Did you really just make an account to say this? lol..
You have to take into account other statistics though as well, for instance:
Afreeca GSL vs ASL Finals youtube viewer count that currently sits at
SC2 307K views BW 121K views
Usually the SC2 GSL finals get about 100k views by the end of the first day as well
On November 29 2020 05:15 marcesr wrote: I have warned of this development a long time ago. Koreans have overharvested their fishing grounds. A smart regulator would have prevented that.
They drove the global audience away from Starcraft, the market shrank drastically and now even semi-pro foreigners have a chance to compete with what is left of the Korean scene. Unfortunately this development comes way too late as Starcraft's decline was sealed when Koreans regularly made top 16 in every major global tournament.
starcraft 2 wouldn't have declined if the game managed to capture attention the same way brood war has done for 20 years and still going.
The dissapointment of the game can't be ignored. Even now that it is a finished product, there are a lot of dissapointing unit interactions and strategies still in play.
This is funny, because the Brood War Scene crashed like no other. Why didnt Gameplay safe this game?
I'm not sure what you mean when GSL finals gets 3k viewers in korea and 200k tune in to watch ASL. And that is after the entire BW scene collapsed and tried to switch to starcraft 2, and came back years later after the entire pro scene and league structure for brood war has been eradicated.
Few days ago the news of OGN the tv channel that hosted starleagues and proleague closing hit. Did you really just make an account to say this? lol..
You have to take into account other statistics though as well, for instance:
Afreeca GSL vs ASL Finals youtube viewer count that currently sits at
SC2 307K views BW 121K views
Usually the SC2 GSL finals get about 100k views by the end of the first day as well
Probably because the majority watch Afreeca SL finals on ... Afreeca? Hello?
On November 29 2020 05:15 marcesr wrote: I have warned of this development a long time ago. Koreans have overharvested their fishing grounds. A smart regulator would have prevented that.
They drove the global audience away from Starcraft, the market shrank drastically and now even semi-pro foreigners have a chance to compete with what is left of the Korean scene. Unfortunately this development comes way too late as Starcraft's decline was sealed when Koreans regularly made top 16 in every major global tournament.
starcraft 2 wouldn't have declined if the game managed to capture attention the same way brood war has done for 20 years and still going.
The dissapointment of the game can't be ignored. Even now that it is a finished product, there are a lot of dissapointing unit interactions and strategies still in play.
This is funny, because the Brood War Scene crashed like no other. Why didnt Gameplay safe this game?
I'm not sure what you mean when GSL finals gets 3k viewers in korea and 200k tune in to watch ASL. And that is after the entire BW scene collapsed and tried to switch to starcraft 2, and came back years later after the entire pro scene and league structure for brood war has been eradicated.
Few days ago the news of OGN the tv channel that hosted starleagues and proleague closing hit. Did you really just make an account to say this? lol..
You have to take into account other statistics though as well, for instance:
Afreeca GSL vs ASL Finals youtube viewer count that currently sits at
SC2 307K views BW 121K views
Usually the SC2 GSL finals get about 100k views by the end of the first day as well
Probably because the majority watch Afreeca SL finals on ... Afreeca? Hello?
My point was that the GSL finals dont get 3k viewers and fade into obscurity.
On November 29 2020 05:15 marcesr wrote: I have warned of this development a long time ago. Koreans have overharvested their fishing grounds. A smart regulator would have prevented that.
They drove the global audience away from Starcraft, the market shrank drastically and now even semi-pro foreigners have a chance to compete with what is left of the Korean scene. Unfortunately this development comes way too late as Starcraft's decline was sealed when Koreans regularly made top 16 in every major global tournament.
starcraft 2 wouldn't have declined if the game managed to capture attention the same way brood war has done for 20 years and still going.
The dissapointment of the game can't be ignored. Even now that it is a finished product, there are a lot of dissapointing unit interactions and strategies still in play.
This is funny, because the Brood War Scene crashed like no other. Why didnt Gameplay safe this game?
I'm not sure what you mean when GSL finals gets 3k viewers in korea and 200k tune in to watch ASL. And that is after the entire BW scene collapsed and tried to switch to starcraft 2, and came back years later after the entire pro scene and league structure for brood war has been eradicated.
Few days ago the news of OGN the tv channel that hosted starleagues and proleague closing hit. Did you really just make an account to say this? lol..
You have to take into account other statistics though as well, for instance:
Afreeca GSL vs ASL Finals youtube viewer count that currently sits at
SC2 307K views BW 121K views
Usually the SC2 GSL finals get about 100k views by the end of the first day as well
I’m not sure why comparing SC2’s popularity via its popularity in Korea vs BW which isn’t so much a game as a cultural phenomenon over there is really that worthwhile an exercise.
It’s hard enough to trap lightning in a bottle once, never mind to repeat the trick, indeed some of the various factors involved I think make it nearly impossible.
Be it PC bang culture, be it the subsequent development of accessible VoIP chat or whatever, all sorts of factors. I don’t think it’s coincidental that team games became way more popular when you could play and talk to your friends easily.
Prior to that, I don’t think playing 1v1 games felt as isolating, because the alternative of that easy social experience didn’t actually exist yet.
I mean going on a tangent but some people seem to want to call SC2 a failure when I’m not sure it was actually possible for it to replicate its success in Korea, and via other metrics it’s done pretty well, and exceptionally well if we consider it vs other 1v1 focused games in general, and RTS games in general.
On November 29 2020 05:15 marcesr wrote: I have warned of this development a long time ago. Koreans have overharvested their fishing grounds. A smart regulator would have prevented that.
They drove the global audience away from Starcraft, the market shrank drastically and now even semi-pro foreigners have a chance to compete with what is left of the Korean scene. Unfortunately this development comes way too late as Starcraft's decline was sealed when Koreans regularly made top 16 in every major global tournament.
starcraft 2 wouldn't have declined if the game managed to capture attention the same way brood war has done for 20 years and still going.
The dissapointment of the game can't be ignored. Even now that it is a finished product, there are a lot of dissapointing unit interactions and strategies still in play.
This is funny, because the Brood War Scene crashed like no other. Why didnt Gameplay safe this game?
I'm not sure what you mean when GSL finals gets 3k viewers in korea and 200k tune in to watch ASL. And that is after the entire BW scene collapsed and tried to switch to starcraft 2, and came back years later after the entire pro scene and league structure for brood war has been eradicated.
Few days ago the news of OGN the tv channel that hosted starleagues and proleague closing hit. Did you really just make an account to say this? lol..
You have to take into account other statistics though as well, for instance:
Afreeca GSL vs ASL Finals youtube viewer count that currently sits at
SC2 307K views BW 121K views
Usually the SC2 GSL finals get about 100k views by the end of the first day as well
I’m not sure why comparing SC2’s popularity via its popularity in Korea vs BW which isn’t so much a game as a cultural phenomenon over there is really that worthwhile an exercise.
It’s hard enough to trap lightning in a bottle once, never mind to repeat the trick, indeed some of the various factors involved I think make it nearly impossible.
Be it PC bang culture, be it the subsequent development of accessible VoIP chat or whatever, all sorts of factors. I don’t think it’s coincidental that team games became way more popular when you could play and talk to your friends easily.
Prior to that, I don’t think playing 1v1 games felt as isolating, because the alternative of that easy social experience didn’t actually exist yet.
I mean going on a tangent but some people seem to want to call SC2 a failure when I’m not sure it was actually possible for it to replicate its success in Korea, and via other metrics it’s done pretty well, and exceptionally well if we consider it vs other 1v1 focused games in general, and RTS games in general.
Again, I was only focusing on the mr.funguy's "GSL only gets 3k viewers" comment. Which is simply not true.
And I don't think any RTS that sells 3 million units in its first month will ever be considered a failure. Let alone having a healthy pro scene 10 years on that continues push the games limits.
You would of had to have played both games to an expert level to understand on a deeper level why one is less than the other, but in the end, any such opinion will always be subjective. But Korea agrees, at least.
On November 29 2020 12:02 Comedy wrote: You would of had to have played both games to an expert level to understand on a deeper level why one is less than the other, but in the end, any such opinion will always be subjective. But Korea agrees, at least.
So you have nothing to add except comments that border on trolling
On November 29 2020 12:02 Comedy wrote: You would of had to have played both games to an expert level to understand on a deeper level why one is less than the other, but in the end, any such opinion will always be subjective. But Korea agrees, at least.
On November 29 2020 12:02 Comedy wrote: You would of had to have played both games to an expert level to understand on a deeper level why one is less than the other, but in the end, any such opinion will always be subjective. But Korea agrees, at least.
only the viewers, not the players (and that's probably because they never gave sc2 a chance) TY, Stats, Inno and others said they enjoy sc2 more and even Flash said he really liked sc2.
On November 29 2020 12:02 Comedy wrote: You would of had to have played both games to an expert level to understand on a deeper level why one is less than the other, but in the end, any such opinion will always be subjective. But Korea agrees, at least.
only the viewers, not the players (and that's probably because they never gave sc2 a chance) TY, Stats, Inno and others said they enjoy sc2 more and even Flash said he really liked sc2.
Did they not understand bw on a deeper level? 🤔
Holly lack of context batman. Please stop throwing such things around, otherwise people might start to believe it at face value and another internet myth arises.
On November 29 2020 05:15 marcesr wrote: I have warned of this development a long time ago. Koreans have overharvested their fishing grounds. A smart regulator would have prevented that.
They drove the global audience away from Starcraft, the market shrank drastically and now even semi-pro foreigners have a chance to compete with what is left of the Korean scene. Unfortunately this development comes way too late as Starcraft's decline was sealed when Koreans regularly made top 16 in every major global tournament.
starcraft 2 wouldn't have declined if the game managed to capture attention the same way brood war has done for 20 years and still going.
The dissapointment of the game can't be ignored. Even now that it is a finished product, there are a lot of dissapointing unit interactions and strategies still in play.
This is funny, because the Brood War Scene crashed like no other. Why didnt Gameplay safe this game?
I'm not sure what you mean when GSL finals gets 3k viewers in korea and 200k tune in to watch ASL. And that is after the entire BW scene collapsed and tried to switch to starcraft 2, and came back years later after the entire pro scene and league structure for brood war has been eradicated.
Few days ago the news of OGN the tv channel that hosted starleagues and proleague closing hit. Did you really just make an account to say this? lol..
You have to take into account other statistics though as well, for instance:
Afreeca GSL vs ASL Finals youtube viewer count that currently sits at
SC2 307K views BW 121K views
Usually the SC2 GSL finals get about 100k views by the end of the first day as well
Probably because the majority watch Afreeca SL finals on ... Afreeca? Hello?
Also comparing the BW ENGLISH vods to the SC2 ENGLISH vods. 90% of Koreans watch the restreams of progamers. Few koreans watch the Tastosis cast.
How is it everytime that you guys conveniently leave out 90% of korean BW viewers when you count this shit. Do you REALLY believe that when ASL gets 200k+, and SC2 barely gets 10k viewers, that somehow SC2 has more vod views than BW in total across ALL streams, restreams and korean stream, on afreeca as well??
On November 29 2020 05:15 marcesr wrote: I have warned of this development a long time ago. Koreans have overharvested their fishing grounds. A smart regulator would have prevented that.
They drove the global audience away from Starcraft, the market shrank drastically and now even semi-pro foreigners have a chance to compete with what is left of the Korean scene. Unfortunately this development comes way too late as Starcraft's decline was sealed when Koreans regularly made top 16 in every major global tournament.
starcraft 2 wouldn't have declined if the game managed to capture attention the same way brood war has done for 20 years and still going.
The dissapointment of the game can't be ignored. Even now that it is a finished product, there are a lot of dissapointing unit interactions and strategies still in play.
This is funny, because the Brood War Scene crashed like no other. Why didnt Gameplay safe this game?
I'm not sure what you mean when GSL finals gets 3k viewers in korea and 200k tune in to watch ASL. And that is after the entire BW scene collapsed and tried to switch to starcraft 2, and came back years later after the entire pro scene and league structure for brood war has been eradicated.
Few days ago the news of OGN the tv channel that hosted starleagues and proleague closing hit. Did you really just make an account to say this? lol..
You have to take into account other statistics though as well, for instance:
Afreeca GSL vs ASL Finals youtube viewer count that currently sits at
SC2 307K views BW 121K views
Usually the SC2 GSL finals get about 100k views by the end of the first day as well
I’m not sure why comparing SC2’s popularity via its popularity in Korea vs BW which isn’t so much a game as a cultural phenomenon over there is really that worthwhile an exercise.
It’s hard enough to trap lightning in a bottle once, never mind to repeat the trick, indeed some of the various factors involved I think make it nearly impossible.
Be it PC bang culture, be it the subsequent development of accessible VoIP chat or whatever, all sorts of factors. I don’t think it’s coincidental that team games became way more popular when you could play and talk to your friends easily.
Prior to that, I don’t think playing 1v1 games felt as isolating, because the alternative of that easy social experience didn’t actually exist yet.
I mean going on a tangent but some people seem to want to call SC2 a failure when I’m not sure it was actually possible for it to replicate its success in Korea, and via other metrics it’s done pretty well, and exceptionally well if we consider it vs other 1v1 focused games in general, and RTS games in general.
Again, I was only focusing on the mr.funguy's "GSL only gets 3k viewers" comment. Which is simply not true.
And I don't think any RTS that sells 3 million units in its first month will ever be considered a failure. Let alone having a healthy pro scene 10 years on that continues push the games limits.
Aye not really sure why I replied to your post with what I said rather than others haha.
With the conclusion of the most recent tournament, should we rename this thread to "Has European StarCraft hit rock bottom?" Only 37% of the ro8 were Europeans, while the rest were Koreans. Even then, those 3 EU guys are ro8 regulars. Those guys couldn't even manage to beat koreans who were playing during non-optimal time, ping, and broken wrists/back (seriously, why are Korean T's so fragile?). With no new EU blood making it through, the EU scenes look like it's heading towards the same direction as the NA and KR scene.
Seriously though, we should just accept that the top of sc2 is super competitive at the moment and any of the top guys can win any given tournament depending on their condition that day/weekend.
There was a fantastic interview by stats and ty where they discuss the worrying state of korean sc2. But you can see the game is also highly imbalanced. The fact that tier 4 foreigners are taking down tier 1 koreans shows the state of the game. Thats what happens when a company stops investing in a game that isn't profitable and you lose people like David Kim. For allllll the problems with WoL or HoTs, it was never this imbalanced (among races but also between early-mid-late game).
On November 30 2020 08:00 luxon wrote: There was a fantastic interview by stats and ty where they discuss the worrying state of korean sc2. But you can see the game is also highly imbalanced. The fact that tier 4 foreigners are taking down tier 1 koreans shows the state of the game. Thats what happens when a company stops investing in a game that isn't profitable and you lose people like David Kim. For allllll the problems with WoL or HoTs, it was never this imbalanced (among races but also between early-mid-late game).
Well the issue with the interview is that the Korean scene has been dead and locked in this state for at least 3 years now. Probably even more. THe region lock didn't help, just killed the lower and mediocre Koreans faster because they were Korean and as such they are genetically better at SC2. (remember, the region lock is still a thing) So it's a nice thing they talk about it now, but it's way too late. It's like discussing the Titanic state when all the life boats were already launched and the ship is broken into the two parts and 80 % under the water
On November 30 2020 08:00 luxon wrote: There was a fantastic interview by stats and ty where they discuss the worrying state of korean sc2. But you can see the game is also highly imbalanced. The fact that tier 4 foreigners are taking down tier 1 koreans shows the state of the game. Thats what happens when a company stops investing in a game that isn't profitable and you lose people like David Kim. For allllll the problems with WoL or HoTs, it was never this imbalanced (among races but also between early-mid-late game).
Tier 4 foreigners taking down tier 1 koreans? Which ones? And you think LotV's current state to be the most imbalanced in the history of Sc2?
On November 30 2020 08:00 luxon wrote: There was a fantastic interview by stats and ty where they discuss the worrying state of korean sc2. But you can see the game is also highly imbalanced. The fact that tier 4 foreigners are taking down tier 1 koreans shows the state of the game. Thats what happens when a company stops investing in a game that isn't profitable and you lose people like David Kim. For allllll the problems with WoL or HoTs, it was never this imbalanced (among races but also between early-mid-late game).
David Kim was the guy that had the bright idea of throwing all known balance principles off by deciding to launch the 12 worker start. David Kim admitted to being diamond max during late wol/early hots and still thought he could decide about balance. Under David Kim we have seen some of the most abusive metas in history prevail for months on end.
David Kim is very good at PR, but this game is better off without him.
On November 30 2020 08:00 luxon wrote: There was a fantastic interview by stats and ty where they discuss the worrying state of korean sc2. But you can see the game is also highly imbalanced. The fact that tier 4 foreigners are taking down tier 1 koreans shows the state of the game. Thats what happens when a company stops investing in a game that isn't profitable and you lose people like David Kim. For allllll the problems with WoL or HoTs, it was never this imbalanced (among races but also between early-mid-late game).
David Kim was the guy that had the bright idea of throwing all known balance principles off by deciding to launch the 12 worker start. David Kim admitted to being diamond max during late wol/early hots and still thought he could decide about balance. Under David Kim we have seen some of the most abusive metas in history prevail for months on end.
David Kim is very good at PR, but this game is better off without him.
Can you provide the sources for the following: 1) David Kim decided to use the 12 worker start 2) David Kim was diamond
EPT
(I'm not watching BW, but hey I wish them a proper future)
![[image loading]](https://i.imgur.com/ag3jILW.png)
