First of all i don´t want to support the great Drama which is going on on TL and the Sc2 community. I think Destinys new reddit post is giving a good personal and insightful view on his thoughts and why he is so mad about all the things going wrong with Sc2.
What happen on ITG wasn´t a good thing for our community. Everyone should start to calm down and understand that there are different views on the same topic. Incontroll and Idra are not opponents they are only two guys with a different approach to the same problem. Both sides have valid points.
I am following this scene now since 2 1/2 years and it´s sad to see that there is nowadays so much hate. Guys are bashing over each other everywhere. SRS contacting sponsors because of the dispute of two guys!
Destiny committed so much in SC2 and loved the game so much - it´s no wonder he feels betrayed by blizzard and frustrated.
No reason to hate destiny, no reason to hate incontroll or ida, but many many reasons to love the Game and to stay calmed, objective and constructive.
+ Show Spoiler +
So it seems kind of strange to fly all the way to Poland, + fly out ex and child, + spent $x a month just to play a bunch of Dark Souls and LoL. The plan was to play SC2 hardcore for 3 months to see if I could be incredibly competitive when I left. If not, I'd switch off the competitive part of SC2 and either move into purely the entertainment side, or switch to a different game.
Over the course of the past few months, things have been bothering me with the progression (stagnation? regression?) of the scene. The people in the scene (casters, community figureheads, players) are completely out of touch, the community is confused and conflicted, and Blizzard is woefully inadequate.
After watching the game dwindle for quite some time, or at least not grow explosively like I'd hoped it to, I started to think about things that I could do, personally, to see some kind of growth. I thought about how people like Day9 and Husky bring people into the scene. I thought about the success of other games, like LoL and DotA 2, and what they're doing differently that could help us.
Then I thought about how I ever got into games.
I played Starcraft: Brood War for 10 years. I never played it "seriously" until the last year or so, and even at that I only made it to C+/B- by massing games at the end of a season on ICCup.
Here was my routine -
1) /f all to see which friends are online. I can see in one glance who's in a game, who's in a chat room, and who's idling/afk.
a) from here, I could go hang out with said friends in a chat channel and shoot the shit for a while. I'd also be introduced to/talk to anyone else in the channel that they'd had with them. It was a cool and incredibly laid back way to get introduced to people.
b) from here we could search for games together, no problem. Or, if we wanted to fuck around but didn't want to do it in a chat room, we could watch a replay together. If he had a funny game he wanted to show me, we could literally make the game and watch it together while chatting and laughing about it.
2) if no one was really on, I could host a game or join one that was already made. Very rarely (if ever) did I log onto b.net to grind out some 1v1's. Team games were okay, but the UMS scene was gold. "DIPLO 7.7 LAG=BAN" "2V2V2V2 BGH FREE BEER" "PHOTON D NO NOOB!!" "3V3 ZC LAG=BAN" "2V2V2V2 FASTEST NR20".
3) my favorite option, sometimes I'd head into channel sex, gay, Town Square, clan x17, clan lzh, clan sphere, or clan OD, just to fuck with people.
I met so many people through those Brood War chats. I remember one chick I met via the chats, isolationgirl. I haven't talked to her since Brood War, but I remember that we'd chat occasionally and one of the conversations we had somehow ended up on music. At the time of our chatting, my favorite bands were Shine Down, Taking Back Sunday, A New Found Glory, and 311. I also listened to a fair bit of video game music. She told me to check out a couple of bands, Pain of Salvation and Riverside. After opening me up to the world of prog, I haven't looked back since. I kind of wonder if I hadn't had been exposed at that point to other types of music (beyond what's found on the radio or talked about in school) what my tastes in music would be like today.
I remember me + Frank (a mutual friend of me and Kyle) trolling this kid online so hard, his name was "Meatwagon", we ended up getting his mom to ban him from Battle.net forever. Somehow we'd gotten his phone number and prank called him a few times, saying stupid shit to his parents (whatever 15 year olds do) when they'd finally picked up the phone.
I remember when I was 17 years old and living with my grandma and I had no ride to school because my grandma didn't drive, I literally was hanging out in a channel on U.S.East all night chatting with people and managed to stumble upon someone who lived only 30 minutes away. Looking back, that probably wasn't the safest or smartest thing I'd ever done, but hey, I was able to get to school that day.
I played quite a few games when I was younger. I remember absolutely loving Halo when it came out (OMG VEHICLES? and PLZ that last level EPIC AS FUCK). I remember loving FFVII and FFIX and hating FFVIII (junction system fuck you) and always disagreeing with Kyle about it. I loved Ocarina of Time and I cringed at the time system in Majora's Mask, but trudged through it anyway. I was absolutely fascinated by the idea of X-Box live and bought a few games to play online the first month it debuted, because playing people online using consoles was pretty much unheard of back then. Despite all of these different things going on, Brood War was a pretty central part of my life. I always found myself logging into Battle.net to hang out and chat with people.
When I compare all of these warm, fuzzy feelings to SC2, I realize that there is nothing comparable, and never will be, with the current system in place. Battle.net feels like a barren wasteland. We had to fight the developer just to get chat channels implemented, and even with them in it just doesn't feel right. There are so few lines of text that can fit, it's a pain in the ass to scroll up because any time someone hits enter the text resets, you're never even forced into a chat channel originally so you have the ability to never join one...It's just a mess. It feels absolutely terrible.
If I didn't play SC2 professionally, I could never see myself buying it. Why on Earth would I ever get a game that's so centered around this cut-throat competitive side that just doesn't appeal to most people? Fuck, even if I want to 2v2 with my girlfriend or 3v3 with a couple friends, I still get assigned a rating for it. So now, instead of fucking around and enjoying ourselves, I actually have friends that stress over winning team games? No way man, fuck that.
When I first came over to SC2, I was most excited because my two best (only?) friends were coming over with me, Joe and Kyle. I had a few friends from BW that I knew, too, who also came over. We all were in the Beta, and it was going to be super awesome because we were going to practice hard and all be professional gamers together. Just like when we watched Flash and Jaedong and all of these other guys in the OSL; that was going to be us.
Every person that I knew couldn't stand the game for more than a month. Kyle doesn't play, Joe got bored and still plays Brood War, and everyone else similarly lost interest.
This was after us being so incredibly hyped for this game that it was unbelievable. I remember sitting on AIM freaking out with a friend when SC2 was originally announced. My friend was fluent in Korean and was translating the Blizzard announcement as it was being broadcast live.
I've talked about stuff like this so much, and I know a lot of people are tired of hearing my thoughts on it by now. I'm not trying to nostalgia-fag anyone, I'm just hoping that you understand that I completely feel what it means to be a casual gamer. It's not dirty, there's nothing wrong with it, and I had more fun in that time period than at any other period in my life. Falling asleep in class because I played one too many 2v2v2v2's, sleeping in and being late to school because I really wanted to master Wizard on Ramza so I spent an hour the previous night with him in a corner screaming until I'd had enough JP to learn everything, etc...etc...
I'm pretty far removed from that, now, but I remember it, and I know what it was like. So when I see all of these other people "in the scene" speak about what we need to do to "grow the community" and "expand e-sports"...it just feels strange. It feels awkward, and alienating. It feels like I'm watching a politician on stage who's a multimillionaire saying "I know what it's like to be poor! I know what it's like to be working 60 hours a week just to make the rent!"..and all I can think is, "Man, fuck you, you don't know what it's like, stop feeding me that bullshit..."
Doa, Grubby, Artosis...all of these guys writing about the state of the metagame, or "just have hope and everything will get better!"....man, battle.net sucks, it's terrible. SC2 was supposed to be the flagship of e-sports. When SC2 came out, the foreign scene actually got involved and exploded as a result. For the first time ever there was more money to be made in the foreign scene than in Korea for Starcraft. If you'd had told anyone that 5 years ago, they'd have said it was impossible, that Korea will always be the mecca of Starcraft. Although that holds some truth today, the foreign scene still has a ton of interest.
You don't understand how angry it makes me...I've talked about it on stream before, that I cannot fucking stand politics...not because of anyone's particular views, but because it's all a big joke. These guys talk the talk, but they'll backstab you for their corporate lobbyists in a split second. Obama talks about unprecedented transparency and how the Democrats hate the Republicans for their wars and fear-mongering, yet the Patriot Act gets bipartisan support for re-approval for Congress. The Democrats have always been opposed to huge businesses getting government tax breaks, yet there was bipartisan support for the $700billion in bailout money...that all went to huge businesses. Why would a party that historically stands for "the working man" and "against big business" subsidize all of their losses with our tax money???
Sorry, this has nothing to do with politics. It's just, you don't understand how angry it makes me to hear someone like Idra talk about "Blizzard's done everything, we can't rely on them for anything, we just have to do what we can now for the scene." What the fuck, you're ready to throw in the towel, then? Battle.net will always be a barren wasteland?
Or Geoff's "The scene's doing fine, I'm getting a raise next month!".....do you think the average guy who doesn't log onto Battle.net anymore because it feels like a graveyard cares that you're getting a raise on your paycheck? Why would you even say that? What does that have to do with how the average person feels about Starcraft in any way, size, shape or form?
"You don't want to be part of this money grab, the big boys club, the e-sports gravy train? Then go back to LoL." So since the solution might be difficult or I'm acknowledging that there are problems, the only real answer is to just "fuck off" to a different game? Is that what you would tell every single fan who's tired of SC2 because the game offers nothing for the non-competitive person?
I may say some mean things, but I try to be the most inclusive guy ever. I hate cliques, I can't stand "scenes", and I love including as many people into things as possible. That's the reason why I'm the most visible person on forums like screddit and teamliquid, despite the haters/trolls. It's the reason why I make an effort to remain visible at public events and to stay and sign every single thing a person brings me, or talk to every single fan that wants a word. It's why I talk to and interact with my chat as much as possible. It's why I respond to every e-mail that's sent to me. It's why I've read almost every word said about me online, whether it's on screddit, teamliquid, or my youtube channel.
If we owe our livelihoods to the community, how can we ignore them so hard and pretend we live in a bubble that exists in a separate world from them?
So what now?
I'm not sure. I had the misfortune of speaking to a Blizzard rep, the same guy, coincidentally, that's going to give JP some "sick information". I'm pretty sure that I already know what information he's going to give him, and I know how the community will react. At first everyone will say it's pretty neat, because it gives players an incentive to play some more, but it's all still focused around "being competitive". After hearing him tell me about some of the problems that Blizzard has when dealing with some issues, I was 100% certain that nothing was going to change.
Nothing significant will change with the Battle.net interface. I've been so torn over the past few weeks whether or not I should just dump the chatlog on screddit and peace the fuck out (which is what most of you would do if you honestly saw it), but I literally promised him at the beginning of the message that I would keep everything private, and I'd feel like a scumbag for leaking it (and maybe even costing him his job? if there's enough negative blowback).
I thought about transferring to something else in SC2, such as entertaining or casting. I figure if SC2 has enough money in it to make a sustainable career in either of those, there should be enough money in it to continue streaming + training and playing.
So if that's a no-go, the next step is to switch games. The choices are then either LoL or DotA 2. As much as this community seems to love DotA 2, I honestly feel like LoL will be the bigger game for the next several years, making it the obvious choice to transfer to.
I'm not 100% switching yet; it's impossible right now for me to do it. My heart is still with SC2; I've put so much time into anything in my entire life. My marriage failed because I was too busy juggling work and school, and I flunked out of school, giving up really my last joy in life (music) trying to keep up with my 60 hours a week at a casino job, and then I even managed to lose that. SC2 is the only thing that I've been reasonably successful in, and the thought of all of the time I've put into it essentially being wasted by switching games destroys me. It's frustrating enough being "bad" at SC2, where I'm in the top .1% of players around the world, but to be "bad" in a game where I'm barely in the top 30-40% of players? It's absolutely excruciating, I almost can't even bring myself to stream the learning process and the growing pains that happen along the way.
This has been the most disorganized rambling of thoughts I've ever posted before. I thought about organizing this into a coherent something that I could post on the main screddit to try and get people united behind some changes for SC2, but I now know that Blizzard isn't really in a position to implement anything that would fix our problems. And even if they were, the main figureheads of this community are too out-of-touch with the average person to even know what they'd want, so all of the white noise would lead to nothing constructive getting done that increases the actual player base in the game.
I don't know what I'm planning on doing for the future, but right now it's really starting to look like LoL. Leaving this game is almost impossible for me, but I just don't see any other way out right now. Thanks for taking the time to read this, and thanks for supporting me by watching my stream. I promise that when I know something concretely I'll let you all know.
~Steven
Over the course of the past few months, things have been bothering me with the progression (stagnation? regression?) of the scene. The people in the scene (casters, community figureheads, players) are completely out of touch, the community is confused and conflicted, and Blizzard is woefully inadequate.
After watching the game dwindle for quite some time, or at least not grow explosively like I'd hoped it to, I started to think about things that I could do, personally, to see some kind of growth. I thought about how people like Day9 and Husky bring people into the scene. I thought about the success of other games, like LoL and DotA 2, and what they're doing differently that could help us.
Then I thought about how I ever got into games.
I played Starcraft: Brood War for 10 years. I never played it "seriously" until the last year or so, and even at that I only made it to C+/B- by massing games at the end of a season on ICCup.
Here was my routine -
1) /f all to see which friends are online. I can see in one glance who's in a game, who's in a chat room, and who's idling/afk.
a) from here, I could go hang out with said friends in a chat channel and shoot the shit for a while. I'd also be introduced to/talk to anyone else in the channel that they'd had with them. It was a cool and incredibly laid back way to get introduced to people.
b) from here we could search for games together, no problem. Or, if we wanted to fuck around but didn't want to do it in a chat room, we could watch a replay together. If he had a funny game he wanted to show me, we could literally make the game and watch it together while chatting and laughing about it.
2) if no one was really on, I could host a game or join one that was already made. Very rarely (if ever) did I log onto b.net to grind out some 1v1's. Team games were okay, but the UMS scene was gold. "DIPLO 7.7 LAG=BAN" "2V2V2V2 BGH FREE BEER" "PHOTON D NO NOOB!!" "3V3 ZC LAG=BAN" "2V2V2V2 FASTEST NR20".
3) my favorite option, sometimes I'd head into channel sex, gay, Town Square, clan x17, clan lzh, clan sphere, or clan OD, just to fuck with people.
I met so many people through those Brood War chats. I remember one chick I met via the chats, isolationgirl. I haven't talked to her since Brood War, but I remember that we'd chat occasionally and one of the conversations we had somehow ended up on music. At the time of our chatting, my favorite bands were Shine Down, Taking Back Sunday, A New Found Glory, and 311. I also listened to a fair bit of video game music. She told me to check out a couple of bands, Pain of Salvation and Riverside. After opening me up to the world of prog, I haven't looked back since. I kind of wonder if I hadn't had been exposed at that point to other types of music (beyond what's found on the radio or talked about in school) what my tastes in music would be like today.
I remember me + Frank (a mutual friend of me and Kyle) trolling this kid online so hard, his name was "Meatwagon", we ended up getting his mom to ban him from Battle.net forever. Somehow we'd gotten his phone number and prank called him a few times, saying stupid shit to his parents (whatever 15 year olds do) when they'd finally picked up the phone.
I remember when I was 17 years old and living with my grandma and I had no ride to school because my grandma didn't drive, I literally was hanging out in a channel on U.S.East all night chatting with people and managed to stumble upon someone who lived only 30 minutes away. Looking back, that probably wasn't the safest or smartest thing I'd ever done, but hey, I was able to get to school that day.
I played quite a few games when I was younger. I remember absolutely loving Halo when it came out (OMG VEHICLES? and PLZ that last level EPIC AS FUCK). I remember loving FFVII and FFIX and hating FFVIII (junction system fuck you) and always disagreeing with Kyle about it. I loved Ocarina of Time and I cringed at the time system in Majora's Mask, but trudged through it anyway. I was absolutely fascinated by the idea of X-Box live and bought a few games to play online the first month it debuted, because playing people online using consoles was pretty much unheard of back then. Despite all of these different things going on, Brood War was a pretty central part of my life. I always found myself logging into Battle.net to hang out and chat with people.
When I compare all of these warm, fuzzy feelings to SC2, I realize that there is nothing comparable, and never will be, with the current system in place. Battle.net feels like a barren wasteland. We had to fight the developer just to get chat channels implemented, and even with them in it just doesn't feel right. There are so few lines of text that can fit, it's a pain in the ass to scroll up because any time someone hits enter the text resets, you're never even forced into a chat channel originally so you have the ability to never join one...It's just a mess. It feels absolutely terrible.
If I didn't play SC2 professionally, I could never see myself buying it. Why on Earth would I ever get a game that's so centered around this cut-throat competitive side that just doesn't appeal to most people? Fuck, even if I want to 2v2 with my girlfriend or 3v3 with a couple friends, I still get assigned a rating for it. So now, instead of fucking around and enjoying ourselves, I actually have friends that stress over winning team games? No way man, fuck that.
When I first came over to SC2, I was most excited because my two best (only?) friends were coming over with me, Joe and Kyle. I had a few friends from BW that I knew, too, who also came over. We all were in the Beta, and it was going to be super awesome because we were going to practice hard and all be professional gamers together. Just like when we watched Flash and Jaedong and all of these other guys in the OSL; that was going to be us.
Every person that I knew couldn't stand the game for more than a month. Kyle doesn't play, Joe got bored and still plays Brood War, and everyone else similarly lost interest.
This was after us being so incredibly hyped for this game that it was unbelievable. I remember sitting on AIM freaking out with a friend when SC2 was originally announced. My friend was fluent in Korean and was translating the Blizzard announcement as it was being broadcast live.
I've talked about stuff like this so much, and I know a lot of people are tired of hearing my thoughts on it by now. I'm not trying to nostalgia-fag anyone, I'm just hoping that you understand that I completely feel what it means to be a casual gamer. It's not dirty, there's nothing wrong with it, and I had more fun in that time period than at any other period in my life. Falling asleep in class because I played one too many 2v2v2v2's, sleeping in and being late to school because I really wanted to master Wizard on Ramza so I spent an hour the previous night with him in a corner screaming until I'd had enough JP to learn everything, etc...etc...
I'm pretty far removed from that, now, but I remember it, and I know what it was like. So when I see all of these other people "in the scene" speak about what we need to do to "grow the community" and "expand e-sports"...it just feels strange. It feels awkward, and alienating. It feels like I'm watching a politician on stage who's a multimillionaire saying "I know what it's like to be poor! I know what it's like to be working 60 hours a week just to make the rent!"..and all I can think is, "Man, fuck you, you don't know what it's like, stop feeding me that bullshit..."
Doa, Grubby, Artosis...all of these guys writing about the state of the metagame, or "just have hope and everything will get better!"....man, battle.net sucks, it's terrible. SC2 was supposed to be the flagship of e-sports. When SC2 came out, the foreign scene actually got involved and exploded as a result. For the first time ever there was more money to be made in the foreign scene than in Korea for Starcraft. If you'd had told anyone that 5 years ago, they'd have said it was impossible, that Korea will always be the mecca of Starcraft. Although that holds some truth today, the foreign scene still has a ton of interest.
You don't understand how angry it makes me...I've talked about it on stream before, that I cannot fucking stand politics...not because of anyone's particular views, but because it's all a big joke. These guys talk the talk, but they'll backstab you for their corporate lobbyists in a split second. Obama talks about unprecedented transparency and how the Democrats hate the Republicans for their wars and fear-mongering, yet the Patriot Act gets bipartisan support for re-approval for Congress. The Democrats have always been opposed to huge businesses getting government tax breaks, yet there was bipartisan support for the $700billion in bailout money...that all went to huge businesses. Why would a party that historically stands for "the working man" and "against big business" subsidize all of their losses with our tax money???
Sorry, this has nothing to do with politics. It's just, you don't understand how angry it makes me to hear someone like Idra talk about "Blizzard's done everything, we can't rely on them for anything, we just have to do what we can now for the scene." What the fuck, you're ready to throw in the towel, then? Battle.net will always be a barren wasteland?
Or Geoff's "The scene's doing fine, I'm getting a raise next month!".....do you think the average guy who doesn't log onto Battle.net anymore because it feels like a graveyard cares that you're getting a raise on your paycheck? Why would you even say that? What does that have to do with how the average person feels about Starcraft in any way, size, shape or form?
"You don't want to be part of this money grab, the big boys club, the e-sports gravy train? Then go back to LoL." So since the solution might be difficult or I'm acknowledging that there are problems, the only real answer is to just "fuck off" to a different game? Is that what you would tell every single fan who's tired of SC2 because the game offers nothing for the non-competitive person?
I may say some mean things, but I try to be the most inclusive guy ever. I hate cliques, I can't stand "scenes", and I love including as many people into things as possible. That's the reason why I'm the most visible person on forums like screddit and teamliquid, despite the haters/trolls. It's the reason why I make an effort to remain visible at public events and to stay and sign every single thing a person brings me, or talk to every single fan that wants a word. It's why I talk to and interact with my chat as much as possible. It's why I respond to every e-mail that's sent to me. It's why I've read almost every word said about me online, whether it's on screddit, teamliquid, or my youtube channel.
If we owe our livelihoods to the community, how can we ignore them so hard and pretend we live in a bubble that exists in a separate world from them?
So what now?
I'm not sure. I had the misfortune of speaking to a Blizzard rep, the same guy, coincidentally, that's going to give JP some "sick information". I'm pretty sure that I already know what information he's going to give him, and I know how the community will react. At first everyone will say it's pretty neat, because it gives players an incentive to play some more, but it's all still focused around "being competitive". After hearing him tell me about some of the problems that Blizzard has when dealing with some issues, I was 100% certain that nothing was going to change.
Nothing significant will change with the Battle.net interface. I've been so torn over the past few weeks whether or not I should just dump the chatlog on screddit and peace the fuck out (which is what most of you would do if you honestly saw it), but I literally promised him at the beginning of the message that I would keep everything private, and I'd feel like a scumbag for leaking it (and maybe even costing him his job? if there's enough negative blowback).
I thought about transferring to something else in SC2, such as entertaining or casting. I figure if SC2 has enough money in it to make a sustainable career in either of those, there should be enough money in it to continue streaming + training and playing.
So if that's a no-go, the next step is to switch games. The choices are then either LoL or DotA 2. As much as this community seems to love DotA 2, I honestly feel like LoL will be the bigger game for the next several years, making it the obvious choice to transfer to.
I'm not 100% switching yet; it's impossible right now for me to do it. My heart is still with SC2; I've put so much time into anything in my entire life. My marriage failed because I was too busy juggling work and school, and I flunked out of school, giving up really my last joy in life (music) trying to keep up with my 60 hours a week at a casino job, and then I even managed to lose that. SC2 is the only thing that I've been reasonably successful in, and the thought of all of the time I've put into it essentially being wasted by switching games destroys me. It's frustrating enough being "bad" at SC2, where I'm in the top .1% of players around the world, but to be "bad" in a game where I'm barely in the top 30-40% of players? It's absolutely excruciating, I almost can't even bring myself to stream the learning process and the growing pains that happen along the way.
This has been the most disorganized rambling of thoughts I've ever posted before. I thought about organizing this into a coherent something that I could post on the main screddit to try and get people united behind some changes for SC2, but I now know that Blizzard isn't really in a position to implement anything that would fix our problems. And even if they were, the main figureheads of this community are too out-of-touch with the average person to even know what they'd want, so all of the white noise would lead to nothing constructive getting done that increases the actual player base in the game.
I don't know what I'm planning on doing for the future, but right now it's really starting to look like LoL. Leaving this game is almost impossible for me, but I just don't see any other way out right now. Thanks for taking the time to read this, and thanks for supporting me by watching my stream. I promise that when I know something concretely I'll let you all know.
~Steven
For the MODS. If this thread is not appreciated feel free to delete.