[PiG]

This is a post that was inspired by some of the points FXOBoss brought up in his private blog. It is in no way about FXO as a team or their management. I Repeat DO NOT go off on tangents about The team or their players. Please discuss only points related to the blog mentioned and those brought up in this post.

The purpose of this blog is to discuss the great growth we've seen in our scene, and also the areas we could be advancing faster and some methods to do so. Any suggestions and discussion are encouraged!

http://fxoboss.tumblr.com/

I'm still sick so this isn't going to be worded too well. Please bare with me

So guys and girls we're all looking forward to WCS in 1 months time aren't we? Lets' blabber a bit..

Heading :P

This blog will be a bit about esports in SEA/Australia in general as well as focusing especially on what we can do with future events such as WCS.

Dot was nice enough to read outloud to me FXOBoss' blog the other night while I was huddled underneath a heap of blankets in our hotel room and since then I've been thinking a lot about Starcraft 2 and it's growth. It's come a long way. A damn long way.

I remember when I first joined the competitive scene as a clanless NA ladder player a little over a year and a half ago. I came 2nd in my first Community Open tournament beating Edge and losing narrowly to Revenant in the finals. I got pwnt 2-0 by YoonYJ at my first LAN at eastwood in the ro8 and the next one at Cityhunter I won beating Light and Rossi and only dropping one map the entire tournament. So here I was a high master nobody who kept losing to Desrow in NA ESL but in SEA I was winning tournaments and beating known names! :O

And now today think of a clanless high master player on NA standing any chance of taking down the names I just mentioned seems laughable! Many SEA players even lesser known players frequent NA GM and many of us see very little difference between SEA and NA ladder. Right off the bat that's a pretty sick improvement! All of the clans, tournaments and events that have popped up as well as the growing SEA community has all helped build us into a position very similar to our American counterparts.

We are still lacking the Idras and Huks as well as the imported talents such as Violet and BeastyQT which does hold NA to a much higher standard then SEA at the top level. However our top level players are easily on par with all but the very top echelon of the NA region. Many of the recent TSL qualifiers had just as many Australian participants as Canadians despite starting at 1.15am AEST! Not only that but I remember by the ro16 there were often more Australian flags left in the running then American ones, despite them having more then double the number of signups!

Ok so we train harder, to win more tournaments and more money. To compete for our clans, teams and personal pride. We are one of the countries with the highest %/person of live GSL viewers and we now have events like ACL which are reminiscent of 2010 MLG albeit on a smaller scale.

So onto Boss' blog:

"There is talk in the SEA community how they just need more chances to prove themselves internationally so they get the recognition they deserve... however for one reason or another the majority of those players (5 out of 8)either had issues playing the games or simply left midway through the series"

I was really sad that I fell ill and was unable to move from my bed in my hotel room and had to abandon my plans to borrow infezas computer to play my series on Tuesday night. I was up against LiquidHero who in my eyes is the most talented starcraft 2 player in the world and would have been honoured to play him. The only time I vsed him on ladder it was Shattered Temple so I freaked out at no easy 3rd and tried a horribly executed lingbane allin... right after I had said how excited I was to play him and that I would try to give him a good game. All 5K+ stream viewers had a lot of sour words for me after the game when I hopped on his stream.

So this was a chance to redeem myself in my favourite matchup and a great opportunity to play the guy who lost his 2 base allin vs Idra's 4 base roachling and then proceeded to win using dual prism harass on metalopolis in a HSC game a year or two ago. Unfortunately I was sick and couldn't play. However if I did get a chance to play I think I would have put up an OK fight. Though I almost undoubtably would have lost.

However I'm really sad that other players didn't show up and I guess It's partly because ACL was just days before and a mixture of personal issues all hitting at bad times. I did hear some players left mid-series and that is really sad to me. I think if you're a progamer and you're leaving mid-series then you have the completely wrong attitude and won't win major tournaments that way. Please do your best to represent us professionally and always give the organisers as much forward notice as possible so they can replace you. If you feel you have no chance and will give-up halfway then tell the organisers ahead of time that you don't wish to play. Otherwise it just ruins the purpose of the tournament.

Now that being said, Australian's don't necessarily need so many spots in a tournament filled with top level Koreans. I wouldn't be surprise to see a lot of high profile NA and EU players get rolled in any of the groups in this FXO Invitational and so to hope for the less-experienced SEA players to do well is a bit of a stretch. I think Mafia, Glade and Targa and Tgun were the only 4 players with serious chances of taking many games from these players. The simple fact is Europe is far behind Korea, and NA is far behind Europe, and SEA is a little behind NA. It's great for a lot of fans to always think SEA players just need a chance to show their talents. But that's fan-talk, not necessarily the reality. And yes I'm prone to overhyping people I fanboy too!

In actuality SEA players need more chances to compete with the NA and EU players such as the recent TSL tournaments before progressing to having any serious expectation of progressing far in a tournament as difficult as the FXO Invitational. That being said the experience from these sort of tournaments is invaluable and gives huge inspiration to train harder! Thankyou FXOBoss, Frequency and Unstable for this opportunity and I'm sorry that circumstances disallowed many from participating. I also hope any who quit mid-series will think twice before doing this in future.


" In contrast to this is I must shout out Coach Choi who if one of his players couldn’t make it he instantly had a replacement"

Just a short mention that the comparison to coach Choi finding replacements when a player can't make it is clearly a completely different situation to us as players. Targa's managers don't know anything about sc2 as far as I know. My manager Mayo has limited knowledge as a CSS player and I'm his only player. Dox was disbled with the same disease I have but normally I would hope he would offer up an alternative such as Deth to replace YoonYJ well ahead of time. etc etc.

Unfortunately in the SEA scene the majority of managers, organisers and players are doing this on the side of busy careers and personal lives and it's an unfortunate fact that we simply don't have the time to be as professional as the Koreans. Don't get me wrong it's still something we aspire to, it's just not a possiblity! I think that the tone of comparison of SEA to Korea here, as well as FXO as a team's tendency to focus on money and business does cast a bit of light on Boss being a little out of touch with the SEA scene. I think the FXO approach always differed from most organisations but to use the business and professional discourses in the sea scene is especially at odds with how things happen down under.

Add the fact that FXO haven't helped the Australian/SEA esports scene very much/in a very visual way and you put yourself in an easy position to take a lot of flak.

I'm not going to go any further with that because I don't know the facts and I choose to take Boss' word that he is under pressure to make FXO economically viable and so they basically haven't been able to do work in Australia/SEA where there's no real chance of economic return.


Boss went on to talk about some things I agreed with. And some things I didn't agree with.

"There is so much talk of their events are getting better and better and their players too, but simply put, the numbers don’t lie, it’s been a long time since any SEA player has competed globally in GSL or an international event and placed well, also the viewer number for their events has declined."

The fact our players have improved drastically and our events are getting better and better is absolutely without a doubt. Targa did just place well in NASL, as did Glade at WCG last year, as did Tgun and Mafia in multiple TSL qualifiers and playhem dailies. When did we have any good results previously? Only when Moonglade had sick sponsorship deals with FXO did he have the chance to train ridiculously hard including in Korea and go around smashing IEMS. Other then that when did SEA ever have ANY wins at all in international events? I'm pretty sure Jazbas taking 2-3 series at blizzcon 2011 was massive compared to our nonexistant history in international events. What we have now is multiple players (mostly zerg unfortunately) who with limited sponsorship and local support have trained themself up to an internationally competitive level and are starting to compete at a very high NA/EU level. The overall results might not be as good as Glade's past IEM successes but trust me they are a tangible and solid growth in our scene. Most importantly they are a natural growth that comes from within the scene not from an investor suddenly putting money into a pre-established player who trained from the beta to dominate.

As for viewer numbers I don't know what numbers you're looking at but since Benji unlocked how to use the TL featured stream function and the rest of SEA slowly learned from that, the views on SEA events have been steadily rising higher and higher. (Edit: This was based off anecdotal evidence aka. nothing, and benji informs me numbers have stagnated over the past year:

Originally Posted by xGKingBenji

This is incorrect, on average our stream viewer numbers have not significantly increased in the last year or so.

Ok now that I basically just said why I disagree with a lot of what Boss said. I also kind of agree with it.
Whilst Boss' standards are a bit ridiculous for SEA and he is overly critical of what has been fantastic development, we still have a long way to go! Sure our views have gone up, our lans are up, our sponsors are up. But there is still so much further to go!


How you can help grow Starcraft

Right now at this moment there are SO GODDAMN MANY SC2 FANS IN AUSTRALIA! The most random people can tell you about "Idra killing his own base thing and then losing or something" and we have a MASSIVE number of Australians on TL. The problem is only a fraction of them know about or follow the SEA scene. This Has to change! With Mafia reaching GM on Korea and Targa smashing up NASL we need more people following the SEA scene, competing at ACL and tuning into SEA events.

One of the problems is getting the word out. Avertising. Marketing. Networking. Whatever the hell you want to call it. See this thread I wrote a while back for an attempted list of networking groups about sc2 in SEA for organisers to post to get more viewers/attendees etc.

http://www.sc2sea.com/showthread.php...working&page=1

And yet when I scroll through the incredibly active Sydney Collegiate SC2 group with over 500 active members I see zero posts about ACL on ACL weekend! Ughhhh why aren't we posting on these sites guys!? A massive part of the AU/NZ/SEA community is just being ignored because we're used to just posting on sc2sea, TL, and then tweeting and retweeting.

Well guess what, unfortunately our twitter networks just aren't that big yet. The NA scene was building twitter networks from day 1 and before whereas most of our top players still are too lazy to maintain a twitter page. Not just that but many thousands of sc2 fans in SEA don't use twitter. We NEED to reach these fans in alternative methods!

So here's what I suggest as our main goals for WCS and future events:

1. BUMP THE SHIT OUT OF TL THREADS. Doing this is Key to getting exposure for our events
2. Post in the major groups in my list and add to this list yourselves
3. Bring friends along to LAN events, share them on your facebook and who cares if your friends or family see that you like a game! Be proud of it!

Some other things I personally think should get pressed forward:

1) Integration of major tournament scene advertising with Battle.net. Battle.net should advertise ACL freely as they do for MLG and Dreamhack. When you logon to bnet it should have a link to the ACL event page around events. Same for barcrafts . Currently I've only seen this for WCS events...

2) ACL + SGL/Respawn style events:

SGL/Respawn have a sick casual gamers event with MASSIVE sponsorship, fanbase and backing. They usually get plenty of room to hold tournaments and just need some simple internet management (respawn figured this out on there first go) and you instantly have an event which viably can amuse hundreds of spectators for the length of the entire event. People play pingpong, fighting games, lan games, eat food, do cosplay competitions and get drunk. Basically it's a giant nerd party!

Dreamhack operates off this concept and it creates a sick atmosphere for the competitive games to be played amongst. The difficulty can be in providing computers for interstate players if there's a sponsorship clash, but normally this shouldn't be too huge an issue.

The Shit-slinging/Old-boys club point

As for the shit-slinging this was, I believe, Boss' best points. I talk to a lot of lesser known people in the sc2 SEA community and the consensus from a lot of them has been that they absolutely hate some of the forum behaviour exhibited by many of the SEA figures in sc2. Whether it started with the rep system or "TA vs Nirv: the endless rivalry" or just people being dicks I don't know. But basically a lot of people have been acting like morons lately. Including good friends of mine. I'm not going to name names but I would state as an example the way Light behaves on the forum as basically toeing the border between slightly amusing and complete moron. Ray you know I love you, and you know it's true. However there have been many people just being needlessly aggressive and antagonistic and it turns the community very sour.

EDIT: This was perfect example of me writing such a long post whilst sick. What I meant was that Light whilst antagonistic and self-admittedly an ass on the forums at times, would always draw the line and so i meant to point him as an example of someone who is somewhere between good and bad behaviour. The way I worded this was inappropriate and gave the wrong message. Sorry Ray!


In the past I've had problems with how people have acted as community figures and I usually try to bring it up in private on skype and at the very least understand where they are coming from. Unfortunately I've been very busy training and its tiring trying to help people remember to treat each other as human beings. Considering most people's attitudes to online interaction seems to be pretty much along the lines of "well if i take stuff seriously on the internet I'll just get offended every two seconds, so let's just act like dicks to make ourself immune to other people acting like dicks". That sort of attitude is one of the reasons why I never liked online interaction until SC2. This is meant to be the exception in that sc2 communities are somehow 500% better in general being bound together by the love of such a great game!

The "old boys club" or just tight-knit friends idea is something quite important. Remember if you only communicate with you direct group of friends or clanmates about the game it can never grow! And the sort of language and way to communicate in clan-chats, private skype-groups etc isn't suitable for forums especially if you're a community figure! When a community figure makes posts that seem outright offensive and stupid and miss the troll or the in-joke it alienates those not in on the pre-existing culture and limits growth.


Try to be inclusive, open and get out of your comfort zone to grow starcraft. Share your passion not just amongst those that already have the fire within them! But Light it anew in the hearts of your friends and family and make Starcraft something magical.

Edits (havent proofed it there will be many):
Added Quote re: coach choi
Added note about stream viewers stagnating - benji
Added my response re: ingame advertising and BYOC LAN integration
Added warning to stay on topic and summary of topic at start of OP
Added apology to Ray and a clarification on my intent there

Quick Comments

	TCPLemminks:	This is why we need uprep back
	mGGDaedalus:	Well said
	nirvAnA:	+1
	xGKingdelete:	very good points

[ToRSpartaz]

Whoally crap mate, I have always had a lot of respect for you, but even more reason to have it after reading your thread man.

I have to agree with you on most of your points man and I hope that people won't get offended or anything along those lines and people will come to realise what it means to be a part of this community because seriously I think all of us deeply value this community and it means a lot to I think would safe to say all of us.

I'm hoping that this thread people will respond positively to it and take some steps forward for the development of the scene and the community, by everyone adding and doing their part for SEA.

Much love piggy

[Benji]

Goddammit Pig, I did a video blog on this and am just getting around to proofing and rendering and you stole some of my points :P

Skim read as I am bout to go home from work, but one small error is:

As for viewer numbers I don't know what numbers you're looking at but since Benji unlocked how to use the TL featured stream function and the rest of SEA slowly learned from that, the views on SEA events have been steadily rising higher and higher.

This is incorrect, on average our stream viewer numbers have not significantly increased in the last year or so.

Quick Comments

breadfan:

post it anyway, damnit!

[iM tgun]

I have nothing to add until Systems podcast thing. Then I will have supplementary material (see: props) to help tell my story.

Quick Comments

	ToRSpartaz:	WOOOOOH MORE TGUN!
	Zealo:	NOW HE HAS TO INVITE YOU ON AGAIN MUHAHAHAAHA
	nirvAnA:	+1 for bouncing tgun on systems show

[PiG]

Originally Posted by xGKingBenji

Goddammit Pig, I did a video blog on this and am just getting around to proofing and rendering and you stole some of my points :P

Skim read as I am bout to go home from work, but one small error is:



This is incorrect, on average our stream viewer numbers have not significantly increased in the last year or so.

That's fascinating news, I was going off of anecdotal evidence of Masters cup + your stream numbers for the most part. Edited this into the OP

Quick Comments

TAriiChard:

As a viewer of many streams i haven't seen an increase in viewer numbers of SEA tournaments

[syfChadMann]

Well said,

But

Originally Posted by PiG

When a community figure makes posts that seem outright offensive and stupid and miss the troll or the in-joke it alienates those not in on the pre-existing culture and limits growth.

Saddle up yo.

Quick Comments

PiG:

haha good point :P

[Zealo]

link to what you're responding to at the top of the OP please?

Quick Comments

PiG:

done

[VoxMSI.Rogue]

I already kinda made what I thought of his blog known when I tweeted him some abuse.

But quite seriously, someone who leaves the community and doesn't continue to support it in anyway turning around and making revolting remarks about someone who has stood by and invested thousands of dollars and hours to make this community great is a slap in the face.

I have never lost respect for anyone that fast before, dude is a serious fuckhead.

[syfSoundwave]

I think if the matches were scheduled for the day after ACL or whatever then it's 100% understandable and even expected that some people miss their matches.

A shame that there were these kind of circumstances, because this was the best shot SEA ever had to prove they can compete.

EDIT: As a response to Maynarde's comment, best shot ever...so far.

Quick Comments

Maynarde:

I reckon WCS finals is a pretty good shot not to mention IEM / MLG plans for SEA teams

[Dox]

iaguz and yoon had only just got home when they had to play their matches i think, and yoon left his mouse at ACL, so that was unfortunate.

If circumstances were better (i was in transit back to Brisbane) I'd have loved to submit an alternate player, but unfortunately it's not really something we could have planned for. As far as I'm aware, Yoon played out his matches with a faulty mouse anyway.

I was under the impression that events like Masters Cup have been rising in viewers over the last 12 months. We've seen some pretty staggering numbers sometimes! Part of me wonders if this is because we omit any shred of "SEA" identity from the title of the event. I tend to think most people avoid SEA branded events because (as far as they're concerned) we have nothing to offer them.

[nirvAnA]

Rogue, boss is sharing his opinion from his perspective as a long time organizer of events, lets not hate but try and have some positive discussion about the points he brought up

The fact our players have improved drastically and our events are getting better and better is absolutely without a doubt.

PiG that was a fantastic post, never knew what happened behind the scenes with the FXO tournament so thanks for sharing your side, im sure the people who were bashing you on stream would sympathize with you if they knew you were so sick. From FXO's side I believe they were doing us a favor by opening the qualifiers to us but because of really unfortunate timing many couldn't make it so when that happened they were understandably frustrated.

I hope they still plan to include us in future events as that exposure is what SEA players need. IMO every time a player from our region stands out the world views our region a little better. glade did this at two iems and wcg, and mafia did this by getting kr gm on reddit. And what dox said about how people view sea branded events is unfortunately true too and i feel it applies to a lot of smaller scenes too that people are unfamiliar about.

We NEED to reach these fans in alternative methods!

So true, its amazing Australia & Singapore have one of the highest GSL subscription rates but it seems there are so little players on our servers! A big reason why sc2sea was created in the first place was because our threads kept getting buried in TL and we had nowhere to go. A few months after sc2 was released there still wasn't any community site for our region and it made me very frustrated. As I had limited knowledge in web development, me and sheepy had a talk with some admins in the scene and suggested to them the idea of creating a portal for the sc2 scene but sadly they weren't interested at all. And everywhere else in the world was progressing except ours so a while later I decided **** it ill just learn and do it myself so at least our scene could have that chance to grow. I thought it would just be a tiny site (like the old aLt site which SG war3 players used) but it exceeded all my initial expectations. I think we have done reasonably well in bringing our community together so lets go further from here - we can do even better if we combine our efforts, get along (civilly) with each another and work towards a common goal.

We already have a strong homebase now, but we can be so much bigger/stronger if we had everyone's help. So get your friends on the site, get the lurkers you know to start posting, tell everyone who may not know about our community. We want more people playing starcraft and forums generally help a ton as it lets people follow the game even when not playing it or at work etc and keep people in the game or playing it longer. I spam the site to everyone I don't recognize meet on ladder, most of them already know about it, they just don't post so i've never heard of them before. But they are the ones i guess who come to barcrafts and stuff so the scene is actually 10x bigger then it appears to be, it just doesn't feel that way More people = more sponsors = more tournaments = more pros = brings in more people and this cycle will just perpetuate.




Here's the banner i made that shows up if you haven't posted in 3 weeks, to encourage people to post! I've also introduced "New member of the month" and "quality member for the month" for similar reasons, to encourage non-posters to be more involved in our community and to recognize the efforts of whose who have been.

As for alternative methods, the people who post on sc2sea are the more "serious" gamers so I think facebook is one of the best alternative ways to reach out for the more casual players who just log in to fb and don't post much on forums and thats basically thats how the Thailand community operates now that they have no site, and theres quite a lot of interaction in the sg facebook community page too.

The whole "The Shit-slinging/Old-boys club point" section has so much perfection in it I feel like quoting the whole thing.

"its tiring trying to help people remember to treat each other as human beings. "

"the sort of language and way to communicate in clan-chats, private skype-groups etc isn't suitable for forums especially if you're a community figure! "

"Try to be inclusive, open and get out of your comfort zone to grow starcraft."

Alot of the site's values were created with the view of growing the scene and creating a friendly warm environment that would help in that growth. Because of this theres an aversion to bming, trolling, elitist attitudes, bullying and attacks on people as it just turns forums to shit quickly if its tolerated and its an eyesore that pushes people away. A lot of those unhappy with the site's values are just not able to see the big picture and often end up taking admin decisions carried out personally when they shouldn't.

Enjoyable read 11/10!

Quick Comments

	Nemo:	lol, I won't post for 3 weeks just to have this :D
	PiG:	Nemo why no post!? I miss you! Also nirv the hero game was a ladder story i meant! I was too sick to even logon!

[FvRelimzkE]

This is why my signature has what it has!
I agree with most of the points made. I especially have an issue with the tight-knit oldm8 thing. New people getting bullied usually ends up in one of two ways: 1) The bullied person gets mad, learns how to rape everything in half, then comes back as a pro or 2) Leaves and plays LoL

Coming from elitist communities and being one of those dickhead bullies myself, I got to see two communities I love slowly dissolve into a few members just circle jerking each other off. Please don't let me witness that again here!

Quick Comments

	nirvAnA:	This right here. I've seen so many newer players get bullied and leave its just so sad.
	iVnStinger:	LOL (LoL)

[ROOT`iaguz]

Yea, my story was coming back home tired as shit, turning on my pc to see frequency telling me I gotta play grubby in 90 minutes.

I played my series vs grubby cuz I like grubby. I played 1 game vs violet and then forfeit cuz I know that normally I wouldn't beat these people anyway, but doing it from this condition was just impossible, and the quality of games I was playing was absolute dogshit. So... yea. **** that.

It's not FXO's fault that they scheduled a tournament right after that weekend, and I should of remembered the date in advance and realised the schedule clash and turned it down ahead of time before this happened. My bad T_T. But at least I get 3 embarrassing pathetic games to be streamed so there's my punishment!

Quick Comments

	PiG:	bad luck man that's a shame bad scheduling :(
	frequency:	"so I'm vs gimli first" - Grubby

[Cordance]

Personally my thoughts on FXO Boss have never been too high. He is very selfish in his actions and motivations the only reason I have respect for him at all is that he is completely honest about those things.

Originally Posted by nirvAnA

Alot of the site's values were created with the view of growing the scene and creating a friendly warm environment that would help in that growth. Because of this theres an aversion to bming, trolling, elitist attitudes, bullying and attacks on people as it just turns forums to shit quickly if its tolerated and its an eyesore that pushes people away. A lot of those unhappy with the site's values are just not able to see the big picture and often end up taking admin decisions carried out personally when they shouldn't.

Ive got to say this one of the main reasons I was so supportive of the site and community opens when things where starting with SC2. The site was/is about community.

As far as expanding the ouch reach of SC2 I actually think it is more a case in Australia of expanding the acceptability of gaming. Im often watching GSL on lunch breaks and such at work and often to talk to people about the excitement of pro gaming. I would actually say that at least 50% of the people I talk to about it mention another game they play. I always mention if there is a competition that I know about in their game of choice too which more often than not I get the response "I had no idea."

Most SC2 players who are still playing the game know of team liquid but probably more than half of the SEA players dont know about sc2sea. So remeber to mention the site when laddering.
A few key things people need to remember when sharing the site.
Do so before the game. Doing it after the game will generally make people either think they dont need it if they win, or your being an ass if you win.
If your sharing the site keep in mind it is meant to be a friendly place dont mention it unless your going to be friendly in game. AKA if you are prone to BM, super cheesy strats you might save it for another night.
An offer to talk after the game at the start of the game is also a good way to find a friend to bring into the community.
Keep in mind the start of the game is the time to talk after the game people are normally not in a receptive frame of mind.
Its hard for the "pros" to expand the community from in game because pros tend mostly to see other pro gamers.

Outside of the game remember to promote gaming when you can. Mentioning that you plan to watch ACL over a weekend can spark a conversation about gaming. You might be surprised how many people you already know that you didnt know gamed or even played starcraft.

[Meatex]

The fate of SEA server was sealed when blizzard herped on real id and completely cut communication between servers
If the SEA scene wants to grow got to encourage players from other servers to jump on SEA enough to warrant them wanting to be part of the community. We have some koreans that hang out here and play in the open tournaments and I think need to encourage more players somehow.
This will become so much easier with HotS when anybody will be able to jump on any server without needing to buy separate accounts so we may have to work towards that timing?

And about Boss, I don't necessarily dislike him but I certainly don't trust his word
I spent a lot of my free time working on 2 video projects for him on empty promises and blind hope. I was under immense stress at the time and had my gf nagging me as to why I was spending all my time working for free. It was always me that had to chase him up despite him always telling me I will get in touch with you soon about blah blah
When I was half way through the second video hearing Boss saying he has moved away from e-sports and now looking at clothing lines I started to doubt that my time was being well spent and quit shortly after

Quick Comments

AxS.Sorathez:

Hopefully, with the global servers idea that's being tossed around for HotS will fix the first part.

[Benji]

Originally Posted by PiG

That's fascinating news, I was going off of anecdotal evidence of Masters cup + your stream numbers for the most part. Edited this into the OP

Yea, it can be misleading as some nights the stars align and you get a spike (the opposite happens too) but looking at the averages there isn't a great upward trend.

I'll scour my numbers when I get time (after xGTL tonight maybe) and get some more exact figures hopefully

Quick Comments

PiG:

eagerly awaiting your vod mate

[PiG]

Originally Posted by FaDeMeatex

The fate of SEA server was sealed when blizzard herped on real id and completely cut communication between servers
If the SEA scene wants to grow got to encourage players from other servers to jump on SEA enough to warrant them wanting to be part of the community. We have some koreans that hang out here and play in the open tournaments and I think need to encourage more players somehow.
This will become so much easier with HotS when anybody will be able to jump on any server without needing to buy separate accounts so we may have to work towards that timing?

And about Boss, I don't necessarily dislike him but I certainly don't trust his word
I spent a lot of my free time working on 2 video projects for him on empty promises and blind hope. I was under immense stress at the time and had my gf nagging me as to why I was spending all my time working for free. It was always me that had to chase him up despite him always telling me I will get in touch with you soon about blah blah
When I was half way through the second video hearing Boss saying he has moved away from e-sports and now looking at clothing lines I started to doubt that my time was being well spent and quit shortly after

Try to keep it on topic please guys (talking to you too rogue!). I don't know much about Boss and frankly don't care. I'm responding to the ideas expressed in his blog which was a talking point a few days ago. As for the Blizzard thing that reminded me of two points which I really think will grow esports!:

1) Integration of major tournament scene advertising with Battle.net. Battle.net should advertise ACL freely as they do for MLG and Dreamhack. When you logon to bnet it should have a link to the ACL event page around events. Same for barcrafts . Currently I've only seen this for WCS events...

2) ACL + SGL/Respawn style events:

SGL/Respawn have a sick casual gamers event with MASSIVE sponsorship, fanbase and backing. They usually get plenty of room to hold tournaments and just need some simple internet management (respawn figured this out on there first go) and you instantly have an event which viably can amuse hundreds of spectators for the length of the entire event. People play pingpong, fighting games, lan games, eat food, do cosplay competitions and get drunk. Basically it's a giant nerd party!

Dreamhack operates off this concept and it creates a sick atmosphere for the competitive games to be played amongst. The difficulty can be in providing computers for interstate players if there's a sponsorship clash, but normally this shouldn't be too huge an issue.

[inFeZa]

I'm gonna be totally blunt.

I Dislike FXO.

Sorry
¯\(°_o)/¯

Quick Comments

	syfChadMann:	LOL
	TAriiChard:	ROFL
	Zepph:	#winning
	x5_dot:	thanks for helping
	Pandan:	The constant self-promotion while doing nothing is what gets me the most...

[aLtShortizz]

Originally Posted by PiG

The Shit-slinging/Old-boys club point

This.

Unfortunately the people doing it are usually the most vocal and somwhat 'popular' people on these forums/Chatbox. U disagree with one of them and a herd of morons come at you even though your points might be valid.

2nd: Trolling. I never understood it and i bet 99% of you dont either. Someone made a fantastic blog about this topic as well although i cant seem to find it. It really isnt funny to pick on one person and have your friends come and laugh with you even though most of the ppl around dont know exactly whats so funny.

In short, alot of people are bullies on Sc2sea and ive seen alot of players left our community just because they said something silly or disagreed with a ''popular'' figure in our community.

On the topic of declining stream numbers and lack of SEA players in global tournaments. IMO it will only get worse. Stream numbers have not been increasing and will probably start to decline, the gap between top players and SEA players will only increase with the exception of a few(Mafia). I just dont see how we can compete without real Pro teams paying you wages to train. How is it possible to close the gap when you have school, jobs and other committments?

[syfSoundwave]

Originally Posted by inFeZa

I'm gonna be totally blunt.

I Dislike FXO.

Sorry
¯\(°_o)/¯

I don't dislike them, but I like them a hell of a lot less than I used to. They used to have tgun, SLoG, mOOnGLaDe and all these other foreigners and were pioneers, heading into the great unknown of Korea despite all the trolls and hecklers saying they couldn't do it. Then qxc got a ******* all-kill.

But now they're just another Korean team to me. Obviously BoSs is happy because KR FXO is a much stronger team, but they've lost their connection with the foreign fans.