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.
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