Okay so as everyone has seen and witness this year has been dead for stracraft 2, expecially in the sea scene for lans and just for the local community itself, Eddie has been running these OSC tournaments and trying to hype up the SEA scene and improve it but has done the complete opposite.
Everyday you see loads of tournaments or just stuff happening that is "tournament" based with osc and it looks good and all but is it really?, From all the tournament results i would say no, unless they are SEA based events only, You dont ever really see a SEA player doing well or placing first 2nd or 3rd, I think before the Scene is completly Dead there needs to be a change and a big one.
For starters you need to stop the mass production of tournaments for other players outside of SEA to win, for For example most of the tournaments weekly based are for everyone around the world which the SEA scene in general do not want, It looks good and all having all these tournaments but the players of SEA dont want to allways play against others outside, we are to small of a player base and we only really enjoy playing against ourselfs which honestly we were doing fine with, Some players like to play against other top players around the world but there is other tournaments out there that do that.
There needs to be more SEA only tournaments and MUCH more less of these other tournaments constantly being played and showed around the scene, In the top 32 of the osc rankings 22 of the 32 players in the top arnt even from the SEA scene, like seriously that is bad considering you want to support the SEA scene, its way to easy for these outsiders to come in play 1 or 2 tournaments win it and be placed in the top 32 soooo easy,
I feel osc should be more focused on helping the SEA scene and should be supporting our players rather then the players in other countrys who are just better then all of us, and its a true fact we are to small and honestly most of us in the top 16 of SEA are casuals who work go to uni, tafe etc, we dont play fulltime like the rest of the world.
So there needs to be a change on how this osc shit is and just the Scene in general otherwise give it another 6 months and this scene will be completly dead, For example https://strivewire.com/tournament/7398/grid < 5 players showed up to a "sea" based event that just shows how pathetic and small this community is, unless its a ESL cup with $1000 or WCS noone in the scene cares anymore. they dont try its pointless, i feel OSC is for the rest of the world to benefit from, not talking $$ im talking just fun and in general our scene gets crushed by the skill of others.
If you look at the pigsty cup, pig has been running literally the smallest pool of prizes just fun prizes and a small pig trophy, (which is awesome nice job pig) it had a total of 40+ players at the event? Without alot of the "pro" SEA players attending apart from the few who live in sydney or did fly over, That just shows there is a scene still out there willing to attend events or even play the game everyone here wants to play, but it has to be for the right reason, these online tournaments are not for the right reason noone wants to play against these "pro" americans, koreans, chinese, europeans, its not fun its not worth the time to go 0-2 or 0-1 or just get flogged, the scene loves to play against each other.
I feel if ACL or ESL or someone wants to do a lan with even a $500 prize pool at a proper place like ACL has done, the turn out of players would be amazing 50+ if it was in sydney i would say, So lets hope ACL or ESL or someone does that and keeps it in the SEA region, Even eddie save some money instead of investing all this money into others who arnt in our country save a few tournaments and invest into a big LAN tournament? i think everyone would attend if you are throwing 100k+ at osc i think a 1k tournament or even 2k? lan tournament people would attend and it would be awesome.
If the scene is to be revived again which would be dam hard to do considering its very dead atm, you would need to stop 90% of these tournaments for other countries and actually invest in on the SEA scene only, I will say it again, We are way to small and way to casual to play against these other countries, there are tournaments we can go play but most of us dont because we enjoy playing against each other, its more fun and gets hype between the scene, you open us up to the world and we just die.
I know i have said i hate this scene etc, but ive been apart of it from nearly the beggining and it would be sad to see it die because of these OSC tournaments, Lets fix the scene and make it more SEA based again like the old times when this site and the scene thrived.
I think it's a very common misconception that 'OSC killed SEA tournaments'. The reason why the number of 'SEA only' tournaments have gone down is because all the people who were running them before have left or just stopped hosting them, not because OSC is stopping them (friday fun night, wt weekly, seacraft weekly, etc). If OSC didn't expand into other regions, there would just be flat out less OSC tournaments, not more SEA ones. Anyone is free to host SEA only tournaments if they wanted to. Like the one-off SEA only David Filth League or Xtreme Dude Championship that Elusory has been running recently is partnered with OSC, although it seems to be struggling to complete.
Alot of the people who attended PiGsty Cup don't even sign up for things like the ESL cups or WCS qualifiers. The only reason that there were so many was because it was a LAN, not because it was 'ANZ/SEA only'. If PiGsty Cup was a SEA only online tournament, no way there would be that many sign ups. If ESL decided to host a big international-scale LAN, those same people would probably still go due to it being a LAN. Playing in online tournaments just doesn't interest these people. You say everyone here wants to play, yet the SEA only tournament you linked that only had 5 sign ups proves otherwise.
Hosting LANs at venues like ACL has done in the past costs ALOT of money and to put it bluntly, it isn't worth it. At the end of the day these organisations are businesses, and you have to show them your worth if you want them to do something for you. ESL SEA Cups struggle to get 30 sign ups every month, yet there were 40+ people at PiGsty Cup? How can ESL justify reallocating their resources for a local ACL-like LAN from their other games with those kind of sign up numbers?
If you want something to change, do something about it. Don't just ask other people to do it for you. That's what PiG did when he decided to host the PiGsty Cups.
'Okay so as everyone has seen and witness this year has been dead for stracraft 2, expecially in the sea scene for lans and just for the local community itself, Eddie has been running these OSC tournaments and trying to hype up the SEA scene and improve it but has done the complete opposite.'
StarCraft 2 this year for foreigners (maybe not our region, but EU/NA etc) has been the best yet in terms of financial sustainability & possible gains. 'SEA scene LANs' were affected by ESL taking over the ACL dudes, and we all saw the lack of Sc2 LANs coming a mile away.
The lack of community is due in part to the separation of OSC and Sc2sea, I think we can all see it didn't pan out well for either site, but what can you do.
I was going to quote more parts of this and go over them, but it's just too easy to sum up why we don't have almost daily SEA cups anymore: The money/streams just isn't there. If we were to somehow have bi-daily SEA cups start up again, we A) wouldn't have the casters for game coverage, and B) wouldn't have the sustainable funding (as seen with multiple SEA cups that have stopped running, the funding just dries up).
Would it really be anything but smart to invest time, resources and money into more successful international events/scenes/players? Especially if you were looking to grow your own brand, thus producing more money and resources from a wider range of sponsors (which are often available/limited to international scenes btw, there's nothing for them here).
I've believed for a little while now that 'reviving' the SEA online tournament scene, or even getting the community back together so we can get some cogs turning is almost completely out of reach, I'd even venture so far as to say impossible (without some massive spark to kickstart it atleast).
With LANs though, yeah PiG's LAN had a massive turnout for such a small-scale LAN... but this is something you'd need to ask ESL/the old ACL organizers about or whatever. As far as the public knows, something MASSIVE was planned for this year, but pushed back/delayed for some reason... so it's not like Baldiemate and co. have completely forgotten about us.
I'm sure they're aware of the relatively large turnout PiGsty cup had, and the possible turnout/attention something simply twice the size would get.
I feel like I've been pissing into the wind writing this, as I do whenever I write anything about the current state of SEA's online cups, community and the lack of big LANs to get the community together again.
Sorry I got your hopes up friends. It was so close to eventuating and I was looking forward to doing some more StarCraft live action (Eddie and others have been doing great online work in the meantime). We're looking at reigniting the plans for the event in 2017 but I can't comment if StarCraft will still be one of the chosen titles - and before anybody asks I won't be able to share or confirm any information on the possible event so don't even bother asking.
We had hoped in our absence of doing LAN events that somebody or organisation would step up but as Law noted, they aren't cheap to run so it somewhat doesn't surprise me that little movement has occurred.
We haven't forgotten about you, it's just we're super busy. To put it into perspective from August through November I will have worked on 10 separate events. I can't promise anything for the future but I do miss you all and I'll hopefully be able to run something for you in soon.
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