On November 04 2025 04:22 Balnazza wrote:On November 03 2025 20:43 Waxangel wrote:On November 03 2025 17:44 doktordingerdonger wrote:On November 03 2025 09:05 WombaT wrote:On November 03 2025 08:50 doktordingerdonger wrote:
Serral would not be top 100 in 2014 with that level of competition, or if the level of competition be the same in 2025 as in 2014.
Serral would not make it into a KESPA team not even as a dishwasher.
If Serral was Korean, his achievements would be completely dismissed given the complete collapse of the scene post-2015. Because he is white, the complete collapse of the scene post-2015 is instead dismissed entirely by 90% of white dudes here. SC2 avg viewership is 1k. That is not a scene, that is a niche.
The whole glaze of Serral just reeks of ethnonationalism.
Well that’s… a take.
Here is the thing: during Kespa, 12 hour a day 7 days a week was the absolute norm for both a and b-teamers. No white dude was willing to do that.
So how many people active now actually play more than 8 hours a day? There have been koreans not even playing for months or laddering at all going into EWC.
Now with the uncertainty of EWC and that without saudi money, the prize pool would barely be able to finance 2 dudes full time, how many people are actually willing to put in the numbers for the magic of lifting a trophy of a, maybe, tournament in the 'highly prestigious' saudi tournament?
At least BW streamers make money with streaming more than ever.
You cannot seriously dismiss a sc2 scene on life support and yet believe that serral would thrive during kespa days. He would go down like any other foreigner before him. Serral, Reynor and Clem are nothing special. They just are playing sc2 during an era where nobody cares about it anymore.
While regimented KeSPA practice was definitely an advantage, I think you're somewhat overrating it compared to the general talent-scouting advantage that the institution of Korean esports has. Korea's edge in global esports (at least games it's popular in) is that it has a big player base combined with the best and most realistic path-to-pro ecosystem in the entire world (relatively speaking; it's still obviously very hard to become a successful pro). This leads to Korea being the best at discovering great
talents, and then pushing them along a semi-pro/pro path.
When you consider Serral's crazy level of natural ability, I feel like a TaeJa-esque career is a realistic low-end outcome if you dropped him into 2014, with the potential for a lot more upside (I don't know if he would dominate, but he could be a championship level player).
This is essentially why some people don't understand the impact of regionlock. The take "regionlock killed the korean scene and therefore everyone else did get better" is just false, there isn't even a reason why regionlock should have killed a scene.
What happened was it created a relatively speaking stable path into pro for foreigners aswell, without the pressure exerted by players that trained in the best teamhouses in the world and already had a stable monetary and experience base to compete on a very high level.
Without regionlock, Serral might just not happen. Not because he couldn't hack it, but because the risk of going fulltime pro and investing the time that he did might just not have been worth it otherwise or maybe just for a year.
The lack of new korean talents is certainly a popularity problem of the game in korea, but it is also linked to the fact that by now there is no money to be made in Korea if you start fresh. How many GSLs would you have to try starting "from 0" before you qualify for the international events, where the actual money lies? Imagine you start 'getting gud' in SC2 and the first hurdle you have to overtake to become a financially stable pro is...to take out Maru. Well good luck with that!
In reverse, that is why no one of these magical "Top 100 Gigachad Ultragamers" from before just jump into the game, qualify for EWC and take the big money from the scrub Serral. Because they can't. The time-investment they would need to put in to compete with Serral, Clem, Maru, herO and so on is just way too huge and the path is barred of much money.
Like...take Rain for example. Probably one of the most gifted players in Starcraft. Do you seriously think if he could he wouldn't just jump into the EWC qualifier, qualify and take the 200K home? He would probably not even miss an ASL for that. So why doesn't he do it? Altruism?
EPT
