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On April 07 2013 11:03 StarVe wrote:Show nested quote +Mike Morhaime @mikemorhaime 8m
@LorangerChris @_inso @idrajit Understood. Working to get you guys more details ASAP. Ruuuuuush. Chief himself has to intervene and bother with PR.
Sounds like he doesn't even know himself. awesome!
The whole region choice thing is just stupid because they treat every region the same. If there were 9 places for SKorea, 4 for Europe and 2 for the US per season with an active region lock in place it would be just much more balanced in the main tournament. Koreans are just better. Of course these numbers could be changed if the other regions catch up in skill or maybe make it through the main tournament in big numbers (a system that would lead to good players from a region dragging more players from that redion to the next WCs etc.)
The current system will work but it's a mess for teams, players and of course Koreans in particular
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On April 07 2013 11:28 Canucklehead wrote:Show nested quote +On April 07 2013 08:42 FXOdesRow wrote:On April 07 2013 08:32 Cyrak wrote:On April 07 2013 08:26 FXOdesRow wrote: Make players have to relocate and go live in NA/EU to compete and that solves the problem . Why should they have the opportunity to compete risk free ?
EDIT: Grammar wtf Because the leagues exist to entertain viewers and not to provide welfare to "pro gamers"? Morhaime himself said that having Koreans involved increases the entertainment level. Oh okay welfare... Koreans playing for WCS NA will do nothing for the US scene in terms of skills growth. We have Polt right now and all he does is play on KR, it's gonna be even worse if they can play the season online. If they can play online, each team should have a lot of B teammers(3-5 players per team) playing for WCS NA and it's gonna turn into another NASL. Sure they're better but it's because we have no infrastructure or incentives to play full time so stop acting like an elitist douchebag. Problem is if it was only NA vs NA, I don't think it would raise the skill gap much at all and the skill cap will stagnate. Someone will only work as hard as to beat other NA players. If someone can only practice say 8 hours or less and still remain competitive and make decent money, then he really has no incentive to work harder. He'll find the perfect balance of saying I can party more, goof off, etc and how much he needs to practice to beat NA players. That person won't care if he can't beat koreans because he'll earn enough money beating NA players. I think it's a fallacy to say a regional lock will raise the skill level of foreigners. I think they will work just hard enough to be good enough to beat other NA players and no harder. If they can earn enough while never needing to ever beat a single korean, then that will be good enough for them. I think you need to play better players to raise your skill level otherwise your skill level will just plateau to what is good enough to beat current competition. A lot will come down to the prize pool breakdown. If a person doesn't even need to win wcs or even be top 10, then that will lead to even more complacency if they can earn good money just by being top 32, etc. Of course this will lead to a more healthy foreign scene with more pros able to sustain themselves full time. I just don't believe it will lead to any skill increase or increased motivation to be the best. The motivation will be to be just good enough to earn enough money to keep being a pro gamer.
I so disagree with this. At the moment the main reason there is so little incentive for foreigners to treat the game as a full time job is because there is so little chance at it being sustainable. At the moment there really isn't much money going around, most of the prize money goes to the top players at big tournaments. If you aren't capable of beating the top Koreans the chances of making any sort of decent money is incredibly small. Being a full time pro right now as a foreigner is a pretty big risk that is unlikely to pay off.
I disagree with your assessment of how things will play out if there was a region lock. If the current top players in NA become complacent and didn't bother trying to get better others would step in. Right now a lot of players aren't willing to take that step because it is such a huge mountain to climb (you have to be able to come close to winning tournaments full of Koreans).
The other thing your ignoring is that the players in NA would still be playing against Koreans (for example they can still play ladder against Koreans). The end of year tournament which would have the real big prizes would be against Koreans so there is still incentive to beat them.
I think your argument that you have to play better players to get better is a logical fallacy. How did the Koreans reach this level in the first place?
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Would like a statement from Blizzard addressing this issue, as this is their doing and things clearly need to be clarified.
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On April 07 2013 20:09 Gr33d wrote: You seem to be pretty mad about a side remark. If you don't like that I mentioned TB name, put some other team manager in there. Its not Blizzards responsibility to talk months (years?) in advance with every teammanager. They have to provide the rules to the organisators, then the team either chooses to play with them, or does not start in WCS. The european or american events are not even announced yet, there is no need to go all "omg they did not tell me yet, this is soooooo bad". Their first goal was to get this thing running, maybe give it more than a few days to sort out all edges. Its the biggest SC tournament so far afterall.
It IS their responsibility, with WCS they effectively took the role of the scene regulator, for better and worse. It is not "months in advance", remember that Blizzard said that EU and NA events are scheduled to start in April and that nobody knows anything about them yet. It's just sloppy and I understand why people are complaining. They need to release some kind of rulebook and make it clear for everyone.
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There are still 23 days left for those tournaments to start in april, but anyway: The first (formerly GSL) WCS korea started already. If you take a look at the timetable that was posted here, you will see that all three regional events run from april up to the final event in june. (GSL ends 1st of june iirc). They could even just make a two weekend event (one online, Ro16 offline) and be done with it. Sure, they will not do it this way, but without the need to play in a studio, a bit more than one month is plenty of time for ONLINE play. You can be sure that they will release some kind of rulebook (or MLG / ESL will distribute it), but why send out things for events that are not even announced (with date or time)?
My point is, that this announcement for such a big league is like 4 days old. Maybe give it a few days more time so that, for example, MLG can put up a news on their website like "WCS america will start X.X.2013, if you want to participate sumbit your application. Notice that when you decide to play here you will only be able to further earn WCS points in american events, if you not already have earned WCS points in another region before" or something. They probably had the choice to start it NOW or wait for another year. The price to leave some players / teammanagers in the dark for a few days is acceptable, its not like years of planning someones life are depending on this.
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On April 07 2013 21:18 Gr33d wrote:There are still 23 days left for those tournaments to start in april, but anyway: The first (formerly GSL) WCS korea started already. If you take a look at the timetable that was posted here, you will see that all three regional events run from april up to the final event in june. (GSL ends 1st of june iirc). They could even just make a two weekend event (one online, Ro16 offline) and be done with it. Sure, they will not do it this way, but without the need to play in a studio, a bit more than one month is plenty of time for ONLINE play. You can be sure that they will release some kind of rulebook (or MLG / ESL will distribute it), but why send out things for events that are not even announced (with date or time)? My point is, that this announcement for such a big league is like 4 days old. Maybe give it a few days more time so that, for example, MLG can put up a news on their website like "WCS america will start X.X.2013, if you want to participate sumbit your application. Notice that when you decide to play here you will only be able to further earn WCS points in american events, if you not already have earned WCS points in another region before" or something. They probably had the choice to start it NOW or wait for another year. The price to leave some players / teammanagers in the dark for a few days is acceptable, its not like years of planning someones life are depending on this. 23 days means plane tickets etc might start getting expensive... especially since no one is exactly sure what will be required to participate.
23 days may seem like a lot of time, unless you are a smaller team with fewer dedicated staff, or a team with a limited budget. The other issue is that as Huk's tweet pointed out, Code A starts a lot sooner than that...
You need people to announce dates and times so teams and players can get organised, it's common sense and common courtesy, but Blizzard don't seem to have actually planned all of this properly with the wider world. They had their idea and ran with it, forgetting that there's a lot more work to do, and it creates a lot of work for other people to do.
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What a mess. Killing eSports.
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I told people from the start that Blizzard is by and large an incompetent company, and that they will screw this up. Blizzard is really, really lucky that they don't have competition, and that people still trust them because they were competent in the past. Their recent actions speak for themselves, from Diablo 3 release, to unit ideas like the Warhound and Replicant, to this. These actions have been half hearted and rushed, and enough thought wasn't put into them.
And here we are. The fact that they've made a total mess of WCS is not surprising. We have to demand better, the players deserve it, Starcraft deserves it, and we deserve it.
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What is so unbelievable about the dilemma is that it was not hard to foresee how it would turn out if you announce something in such short notice. What did they expect really?
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Why don't they just make it you can play where you live or where you have citizenship/were born.
They also should have a tournament eligible for any region that feeds into the season finals. Imagine if the top 4 from each wcs went to the finals and another 4 from a large offline/online tournament.
This large tournament could have people ranked 5-8 from WCS NA/EU, top 8 from a large Korean tournament which code a and b players were eligible for and the winners of a few other regional tournaments ie SEA, china. That way other regions have a chance to join and all the code b/a players (like mvp) still have a shot at joining the first hots season finals.
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The big announcement in Korea was very anticlimactic as all information was leaked. The important details was however left out which was something that should have been included in the BIG announcement. So it's now somewhat ironic that they have announced a new announcement for the very important WCS details.
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Why did they made an announcement when things were not figured out yet? What a joke.
Blizzard should be left to make games only.
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Im suspecting that this whole mess is caused because one or two of the organizers are unhappy about some terms which delays finalizing the details. Coming up with a format is not exactly a rocket science, but getting competing organizations to work together is actually brain surgery times rocket science.
My bet is on MLG being the problem. Tweets from MLGSundance seem to suggest that he is under the impression that every region will have same prize pool, period - i.e. blizzard gives every region like 100k and thats it - GSL cant add its own money on top of it. It's pretty obvious that this cant be the case - lowering prize pool of GSL just... it would be just really really bad PR. 10x worse than the mess this thread is about - so its suggested that GSL can add bit of his own money on top of blizzard bucks.
MLG also seems to be bit delusional about the quality of their product ( remember when they made the PPV arena thing cost as much as GSL ) and think WCS NA deserves to be equal in both points and prize pool - so they might try to convince blizzard to enforce a prize pool cap on GSL so they can go around saying "we are as good as GSL" .
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On April 07 2013 23:34 rename wrote: Im suspecting that this whole mess is caused because one or two of the organizers are unhappy about some terms which delays finalizing the details. Coming up with a format is not exactly a rocket science, but getting competing organizations to work together is actually brain surgery times rocket science.
My bet is on MLG being the problem. Tweets from MLGSundance seem to suggest that he is under the impression that every region will have same prize pool, period - i.e. blizzard gives every region like 100k and thats it - GSL cant add its own money on top of it. It's pretty obvious that this cant be the case - lowering prize pool of GSL just... it would be just really really bad PR. 10x worse than the mess this thread is about - so its suggested that GSL can add bit of his own money on top of blizzard bucks.
MLG also seems to be bit delusional about the quality of their product ( remember when they made the PPV arena thing cost as much as GSL ) and think WCS NA deserves to be equal in both points and prize pool - so they might try to convince blizzard to enforce a prize pool cap on GSL so they can go around saying "we are as good as GSL" . that's very speculative, but i kinda could see it happen. MLG have made a lot of terrible business decisions in the past, including the one you mentioned.
imo Blizzard should've included NASL and Dreamhack as well in the WCS thing. sure, it would've made it more difficult to coordinate everything, but it would be more fair and Korea also has both of its big organizations partaking together. plus they could've used NASL production for the online part of WCS NA and MLG production (perhaps with some NASL help - especially casters) for the offline part, and the same thing in EU with IEM taking care of the online part and Dreamhack doing the big LAN event.
ah well, i'm still positive that this is gonna turn out great, but the planning could've been a little bit better by Blizzard the announcement less rushed. they were like "sup guys we got a new tournament that's gonna run a year and be the most important thing on the scene. oh, by the way, it starts tomorrow. can't give you any details on how exactly it'll work yet though"
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On April 07 2013 08:26 FXOdesRow wrote: Make players have to relocate and go live in NA/EU to compete and that solves the problem . Why should they have the opportunity to compete risk free ?
EDIT: Grammar wtf
LOL lets just say i'd rather watch to good koreans duke it out than you vs some random NA player so that you can feel good about yourself.
Koreans bring competition...if you don't think you will ever beat koreans stop trying to play SC2 competitively. Put in as many hours as they do, then maybe when you're at their level you can complain that koreans make this game terrible coming to NA.
I say bring all the koreans over to show the foreigners how to play and actually work hard to achieve a tourney win instead of working off high salary workout sessions.
So please stop complaining CatZ...i mean Desrow
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I feel like all these problems would be solved if it was entirely offline.
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On April 07 2013 23:34 rename wrote: Im suspecting that this whole mess is caused because one or two of the organizers are unhappy about some terms which delays finalizing the details. Coming up with a format is not exactly a rocket science, but getting competing organizations to work together is actually brain surgery times rocket science.
My bet is on MLG being the problem. Tweets from MLGSundance seem to suggest that he is under the impression that every region will have same prize pool, period - i.e. blizzard gives every region like 100k and thats it - GSL cant add its own money on top of it. It's pretty obvious that this cant be the case - lowering prize pool of GSL just... it would be just really really bad PR. 10x worse than the mess this thread is about - so its suggested that GSL can add bit of his own money on top of blizzard bucks.
MLG also seems to be bit delusional about the quality of their product ( remember when they made the PPV arena thing cost as much as GSL ) and think WCS NA deserves to be equal in both points and prize pool - so they might try to convince blizzard to enforce a prize pool cap on GSL so they can go around saying "we are as good as GSL" . Each region does have the same number of points and prize pool, it has nothing to do with MLG.
http://www.pcgamer.com/2013/04/04/blizzards-starcraft-2-wcs-2013-explained-by-company-ceo-mike-morhaime/
On April 08 2013 00:09 HuKPOWA wrote:Show nested quote +On April 07 2013 08:26 FXOdesRow wrote: Make players have to relocate and go live in NA/EU to compete and that solves the problem . Why should they have the opportunity to compete risk free ?
EDIT: Grammar wtf LOL lets just say i'd rather watch to good koreans duke it out than you vs some random NA player so that you can feel good about yourself. Koreans bring competition...if you don't think you will ever beat koreans stop trying to play SC2 competitively. Put in as many hours as they do, then maybe when you're at their level you can complain that koreans make this game terrible coming to NA. I say bring all the koreans over to show the foreigners how to play and actually work hard to achieve a tourney win instead of working off high salary workout sessions. So please stop complaining CatZ...i mean Desrow And this is so ignorant it amazes me. Read some previous posts, there are plenty of good reasons.
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On April 08 2013 00:30 Prplppleatr wrote:Show nested quote +On April 07 2013 23:34 rename wrote: Im suspecting that this whole mess is caused because one or two of the organizers are unhappy about some terms which delays finalizing the details. Coming up with a format is not exactly a rocket science, but getting competing organizations to work together is actually brain surgery times rocket science.
My bet is on MLG being the problem. Tweets from MLGSundance seem to suggest that he is under the impression that every region will have same prize pool, period - i.e. blizzard gives every region like 100k and thats it - GSL cant add its own money on top of it. It's pretty obvious that this cant be the case - lowering prize pool of GSL just... it would be just really really bad PR. 10x worse than the mess this thread is about - so its suggested that GSL can add bit of his own money on top of blizzard bucks.
MLG also seems to be bit delusional about the quality of their product ( remember when they made the PPV arena thing cost as much as GSL ) and think WCS NA deserves to be equal in both points and prize pool - so they might try to convince blizzard to enforce a prize pool cap on GSL so they can go around saying "we are as good as GSL" . Each region does have the same number of points and prize pool, it has nothing to do with MLG. http://www.pcgamer.com/2013/04/04/blizzards-starcraft-2-wcs-2013-explained-by-company-ceo-mike-morhaime/
I think they were drunk during that interview, due to the "StarCraft is bigger than the NHL" thing - so i think there is still hope that they wont do something as stupid as removing all codeA prizemoney, and lowering CodeS to 100k ( like the EU rumour states).
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This all just validates 2 things...
1. My fear of Devs getting into the business of running events will actually stifle growth.
2. Most dev companies do not have the right people working there to 'structure' large scale compeition models.
Had to be said. I have said this on Climbing The Ladder several times.. and when you look at the stagnet growth in competitiion in the League of Legends Community and you follow that up with the mess thats been created already with WCS.. I think the point has been validated.
Message to Dev Companies: Stop hiring people without proper 'sports' knowledge. Stop hiring only those that understand your specific game. Start hiring people that fully understand how different sports structures work, how each can build or stifle growth and finally.. have those individuals draw up the infographic that explains it all.
/end rant.
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If anything Blizzard should had released the details along with support regarding this new system much earlier. This very thread proves how crucial it is to get out critical information right away or people will start making up their own stuff and actually believe in it, no matter how fucked up that made up information might be.
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