[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