SC2SEA.com - Starcraft 2 SEA eSports Community Site

SEA Server in LoV
 

The SEA server has had low population problems late WoL and also for majority of HotS. The skill level has consistently gone down with time, although for a good reason. The best players opt to go to the Korean or north American ladder, for higher level players and shorter queue times. When the top tier players left, the next tier under then left for better opponents, and so on. The grandmaster league in SEA is essentially dead, with currently only 8 players in it at the time I'm writing this. The only real way to revive the SEA server is to make higher level players stay. In my opinion, the best way to do this is to provide a better service on SEA in some regards than what other servers can provide.

This is why I'm somewhat excited for the automated tournaments feature that was announced (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxzw...ailpage#t=2014). They seem to want to do one tournament a day for each region, which presumably would be in the evening of each region. For casual players at the higher levels that want to compete but can't make the times of NA/EU tournaments (due to work, etc.), they would be more inclined to play in SEA. According to blizzard, there’s also portrait or skin rewards likely for the tournaments, further inclining players to actually participate. However, this isn't a complete solution.

First, there’s the possibility that players just go to the Korean server instead, as the tournament would be at a similar time. Why not play with the better players? Would the SEA players stick around for laddering as well? I think that its likely the SEA automated tournaments will be populated at first, but gradually decline in popularity until its somewhat dead, similar to the ladder.

So, what can be changed to make people stay then? Here are some things I think could help:

Australian based server.
Okay, perhaps I’m biased on this one. I personally believe that the largest number of good players in the SEA region are from Australia. This isn't any disrespect to other countries in SEA of course. So, it makes sense to me that if you give more Australian players better pings, they will be more likely to practice on SEA. This would make LANs and online tournaments in the SEA region a lot more reliable for Australians, as there have been many cases of lag problems to our local server (Even at LAN events).

Allow players to make tournaments ingame
This would make it a lot easier for the SEA tournament scene to grow. As it stands, we have a small website that is known to competitive players, but not most casual players. It’d be a lot easier to attract players ingame, not to mention how it’d increase the feeling of an ingame community.

End of season rewards
Theres no reason to grind to the highest ranking you can towards the end of a ladder season. That is unless you think everyone will be foaming at the mouth at how many times you have achieved X ranking, which is unlikely. If theres a reward as simple as a portrait for finishing a certain league in a certain season, players will feel more incentivised towards making those goals.

I think with service improvements like these, the SEA server would be a lot more active and help more people enjoy sc2.