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On June 13 2018 16:34 iCCup.Trent wrote: EDIT: Ok; I'm wrong about "just as hard". Still stand by the latter argument. Well, if you wanna say, that its harder nowadays, since everybody else already knows the game, then you forget, that learning the game still got easier since you can find any important information anytime nowadays.
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On June 13 2018 18:42 Qikz wrote:Show nested quote +On June 13 2018 04:43 Kare wrote: About 500 people online and 60 games being played is standard. Pretty horrible to be honest. as someone who played a lot of iCCUP during the "Dark Ages" of BW regularly I would only see about 100 people online at iCCUP at any one time during the day or evening in Europe. So this is a huge improvement.
When was that? We always had 250-350 people in European evenings, exept maybe for exactly the last year when SC:R came out. Seems like pretty much all of these players moved over by now or at least made an account in SC:R plus a few returnees.
As for why BW is not popular anymore, I agree with those who argue that you have to put it in historical perspective without playing today's generation off against earlier generations. BW is a gem of a game, but it has 2000ish level of graphics and control. If you grew up with it, you didn't really have a choice but to play and love it and you have a different, nostalgic relation to the game. Today you have thousands of other choices, not "easier" games overall (as if we didn't have easy games back then btw), just easier to control and with less of a mountain of knowledge/training to climb. You could also call BW cumbersome, annoyingly cumbersome, unnecessarily laborious mechanically from a today's gamers perspective used to multiple-building-mass-unit-selection-etc. And by now the veterans have an almost uncatchable head start. Given how fast games have evolved in the last two decades, you could compare BW to an early 20th century car that's competing with up-to-date cars... It has the charm of old times, runs stable (lel SC:R) and has a dedicated following, but it just doesn't fit with pretty much anything else you seek in that field of activity today, it lacks some very basic bottom-line-conveniences that have changed the gaming experience - and I mean: shifted the hardcore to somewhere else, not made all games easy.
The still/again lively Korean BW-community doesn't counteract this argument actually: I assume hundreds of thousands if not millions of Koreans followed BW back then, so of course you'd have tens of thousands of nostalgic re-followers by now - who additionally can take part in it in new ways, too, like Afreeca streams.
(I picked up the game in 2010/11 btw, having played the vanilla campagin when the game came out)
On June 13 2018 18:51 [AS]Rattus wrote:Show nested quote +On June 13 2018 16:34 iCCup.Trent wrote: EDIT: Ok; I'm wrong about "just as hard". Still stand by the latter argument. Well, if you wanna say, that its harder nowadays, since everybody else already knows the game, then you forget, that learning the game still got easier since you can find any important information anytime nowadays.
This is just a fairly unmeasured argument. Let's say it's 10-20% (or even more) easier to learn because of the access to information, but the mountain of knowledge and - didn't you forget that - skill that you have to climb is X times higher than it was back then. It's not so much about singled out information btw that you can look up just like that. Strategical concepts and weird, unintuitive tactics in BW are pretty hard to grasp and it's actually hard to find comprehensible, in-depths explanations.
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In my opinion the number of players outside of South Korea can't grow as much unless blizzard adds more features to the game such as Team Matchmaking, team ladder, automated tournaments and added social features such as being able to join multiple channels and a clan system etc. I think those features will have a long term positive effect on growth.
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yeah features like 'Team Matchmaking, team ladder, automated tournaments and added social features such as being able to join multiple channels and a clan system etc" are soooo gonna pry kids away from their pubg/fortnite/OW. Watch out!
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I second ggsmida. I doubt that it's about any feature Blizzard could add. If anything these features would stabilize what we have.
My feeling is that for the game to grow in this day and age we would need popular streamers who manage to draw people into the fascination of BW, show the complexity and fun in it and incite people to learn the game from scratch. It would have to be really likeable/sociable streamers - who wouldn't be rofl-stomped/ridiculed on ladder by the good foreigners - who can cross-over to the "not-already-BW-zealots" out there, maybe by playing other games also, who can give entertaining, illustrative commentary (in proper english, and at best while playing... this is incredibly hard though) and most of all engage into interacting with the viewers (if there should assemble any...). Such a person is not in sight. + Show Spoiler +Didn't watch much of Day9 for quite a while but from what I know - for all that he did/does for BW - his shows are too intrusively educational or, if they're meant to be fun, rather goofy/nerdy We have some really good foreign players who stream regularly, but I guess for a newcomer these streams are just an uncommented constant repetition of the same hectic, inaccessible, incomprehensible dinosaur of a game.
The members of the BW community would have to play their part, too. Populating these streams and behaving well and stuff...
In short: We need the Grubby of BW... oh wait, there is none...
edit: I guess I'm missing out on some of the recent initatives to cover foreign tours and such. Though whenever I watch those I just never feel as if they could appeal to newcomers in a convincing fashion to pick up the game. Maybe I do them wrong.
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On June 13 2018 10:32 tankgirl wrote:SCBW is just too challenging for today's generation. People who grew up with easy-mode tap-and-pray games like Angry Birds and LoL won't give 2 minutes to a hyper-competitive game where they will lose the first 1000 matchmaking games until they reach iccup D-rank level (ie some knowledge of hotkeys/build orders/timings) and are able to enjoy themselves. In summary, SCBW is the Badwater Ultramarathon of videogames. You're not ever going to have a huge participation. Besides, Blizzard acknowledged a year ago that SC:R was being released "for the fans" who had continually supported and played the game for 20 years. It was never intended to blow up to become the next League of Legends.
This no longer is an issue due to matchmaking. Yea it starts you off at 1500 so you might have to lose some games, but you'll quickly fall to sub 1000 where you'll begin to get games of opponents around your level.
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Russian Federation344 Posts
Wow, nice thoughts by all of you guys. I agree with those too. But we have to admit that since sc:r have released we lost the main thing at competitive game - its ladder, just simple as that. We have only tourneys, and time consuming matchmaking(please dont tell me about lag issues or player online count issue). We've had iccup and fish. But at the same time if we look deeper on those servers, they had lack of developing some features, no. changes over time.. Iccup switched his business eye on dota, fish was understandable only for koreans. We need or needed something new , and not to attract new players but satisfy our needs. I know some guys already doing that, to be honest i am developing an app for bw too, hope to release it this year. Will see.
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need massive boost from publisher to create interest these days. the game itself doesn't matter. even dota 2 realized if they dropped an exorbitant prize pool for a tournament you will instantly have thousands and thousands practicing out of nowhere. what does getting good at brood war get you? nothing, financially. if blizzard announced an open entry bracket tournament for bw with a 5 million dollar prize pool, you would have all the people that ever played back in the day coming out of the wood work. money drives it, and the only entity that is going to supply the money is the publisher. bw kr was an anomaly.
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Compared to how things used to be, we are honestly in a better place right now.
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On June 14 2018 00:12 L_Master wrote:Show nested quote +On June 13 2018 10:32 tankgirl wrote:SCBW is just too challenging for today's generation. People who grew up with easy-mode tap-and-pray games like Angry Birds and LoL won't give 2 minutes to a hyper-competitive game where they will lose the first 1000 matchmaking games until they reach iccup D-rank level (ie some knowledge of hotkeys/build orders/timings) and are able to enjoy themselves. In summary, SCBW is the Badwater Ultramarathon of videogames. You're not ever going to have a huge participation. Besides, Blizzard acknowledged a year ago that SC:R was being released "for the fans" who had continually supported and played the game for 20 years. It was never intended to blow up to become the next League of Legends. This no longer is an issue due to matchmaking. Yea it starts you off at 1500 so you might have to lose some games, but you'll quickly fall to sub 1000 where you'll begin to get games of opponents around your level.
Even at your correct MMR you still need to make an effort, if you play like garbage you're going to get stomped by your opponent.
Nowadays people prefer to play games that are overwhelmingly luck-based (e.g. battle royales and card games) or team games where your individual level of play matters little. These games offer instant gratification that SC will never be able to provide.
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Even tho i love bw, i don't think you can quite blame people for expecting a greater "gaming experience" both graphics and gameplay wise. I mean the game is old, it's not a bad thing, but it's already a struggle to explain to the younglings around us that a film can be cool and well shot before the IMAX and the whole HD business so i don't even want to get started with classic good games. Now it's all about the best graphics, preferably in an open world, with a learning curve and a game difficutly that wouldnt challenge a teenage monkey. Can't do much about that. Just look popular twitch streamers for the "good" games of the moment, it's all about money and having fake personalities that either act dumb or show cleavage to get viewers. I'd rather stay in a small comunity with a handful of decent people. SC:R managed to attract a few nostalgic people, but you can't be expecting a fresh new playerbase it's not going to happen. Maybe a few curious people but that's it. Like i said, customers/players are expecting more from a game in 2018. I feel like the actual playerbase is ok, a bit better actually.
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Almost a year in and we're still in beta stage. As much as I love this game, I can't see the population growing in the near future.
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Gotta say, there are a lot of cranky old men in this thread. "Those kids these days with their bad games, get off my lawn!"
The main problem is simply that if you start SC today, you instantly have to compete basically exclusively with people who have been playing for 20 years. Which means that you need to lose 1000 games until you can maybe start having fun. That wasn't true 20 years ago, because at that point everyone was bad at the game. Yes, winning is not everything, but if you are playing a competitive game and lose every single match, that usually isn't a fun experience and only a very small subset of people would keep doing that thing.
Just take a look at yourself and ask yourselves if you would have kept playing SC if you lost every single game you played for two years. Sure, you may have simply played UMS instead (Because SC was the one game that you owned), but nowadays, you just play another game in that situation.
But of course, it is much easier to blame the filthy casual kids nowadays. But what you need to realize is that they don't lose anything. They are playing games that are fun to them. The people losing something are you. Because you lose people to play the game you want to play with. And complaining about how the kids nowadays are just way worse than you were when you were their age is not gonna change that in the slightest. And it comes of as incredibly arrogant to simply dismiss anything in gaming that is not BW as boring while not actually having any idea what kinds of stuff exist.
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On June 13 2018 22:14 Highgamer wrote:I second ggsmida. I doubt that it's about any feature Blizzard could add. If anything these features would stabilize what we have. My feeling is that for the game to grow in this day and age we would need popular streamers who manage to draw people into the fascination of BW, show the complexity and fun in it and incite people to learn the game from scratch. It would have to be really likeable/sociable streamers - who wouldn't be rofl-stomped/ridiculed on ladder by the good foreigners - who can cross-over to the "not-already-BW-zealots" out there, maybe by playing other games also, who can give entertaining, illustrative commentary (in proper english, and at best while playing... this is incredibly hard though) and most of all engage into interacting with the viewers (if there should assemble any...). Such a person is not in sight. + Show Spoiler +Didn't watch much of Day9 for quite a while but from what I know - for all that he did/does for BW - his shows are too intrusively educational or, if they're meant to be fun, rather goofy/nerdy We have some really good foreign players who stream regularly, but I guess for a newcomer these streams are just an uncommented constant repetition of the same hectic, inaccessible, incomprehensible dinosaur of a game. The members of the BW community would have to play their part, too. Populating these streams and behaving well and stuff... In short: We need the Grubby of BW... oh wait, there is none... edit: I guess I'm missing out on some of the recent initatives to cover foreign tours and such. Though whenever I watch those I just never feel as if they could appeal to newcomers in a convincing fashion to pick up the game. Maybe I do them wrong. One example I guess is S2J. He hits a lot of the criteria, but not all.
S2J is perhaps the most popular Falcon player in Smash Melee, and he plays StarCraft from time to time on stream, and is around 1800 Terran if I'm not mistaken. I think Mango played for a bit as well.
Other popular streamers like Ninja, perhaps the most popular streamer in the world at the moment or at least near the top, mentions StarCraft here and there. It's a word that I think is in the back of every person's mind thanks to SC2 and BW's prominence covering more than 15 years of eSports. When people ask me what my hobbies are or what video games I play, I don't think I've ever talked to a person who didn't know what StarCraft is.
My point is that while more top streamers devoting time to StarCraft would certainly draw some players, I feel like the majority of the middle-class-and-above Western population, or at least the male one, already knows about the game. They either played it casually in campaign, or know someone that did. Thus, it's not a matter of exposure as much as it is a lack of motivating factors to actually commit to the game, as you and others have alluded to.
To combine the money idea ($5 million stated by someone earlier in the thread) with the streamer idea may be the best possible middleground - for example, taking the top 8 streamers on Twitch, and throwing them into two 4-player pools where every win nets you $x and every loss gets you $x/2. Then the top 2 seeds advance from each pool to the Ro4 where you get $y per game won and $z for the series win.
I know players have recently (in the past year) been lamenting the invite-only structure espoused by some of the bigger tournaments, and part of that issue according to them was that there was a veteran "in-group" or whatnot that got all of the attention despite devoting years to SC2 or being well past their prime compared to top foreigners from post-KeSPA BW era. I feel like this would be different because it's not using some sort of nebulous metric like "who was good in 2009" or "who were my buddies who I got along with in the Golden Era" or "who was the most popular player/commentator 10 years ago," but a metric which is specifically geared to giving people who are professional gamers with little-to-no BW skill the motivation to stream their play and having thousands of people watch them, which in turn could correlate to people seeing their favorite streamer suck at BW but still have a good time losing and learning, which normalizes being a bad player on the rise so to speak. I feel like our community has, due to many of our long years in the trenches, become hardened and we have an insular aversion to being bad. Certain community attempts like CPL and Rookie Tour come to mind as examples of positive outreach programs, but even those garnered a majority of currently active "bad" players who were way better than Day 1 starters and who for the most part had TL accounts. This type of tournament would reach out to players who are TRULY bad, and we as a community would need the structures and attitudes in place to welcome those players and put up with answering the same noobie question we've heard 100 times in the past 10 years over and over again. I think that the established community is getting older, less interested, and thus we don't have those community efforts in place.
Here are some examples of what I'm talking about from Fortnite. On the subreddit dedicated to Battle Royale, there are daily forum events like "Mentor Mondays" where people who have the skill level of a rock feel comfortable reaching out to better players and getting guided through the basics. In BW, we have clans and the SQSA thread and other similar things, but nowhere near that extent.
As a final thought, I would like to again revisit SSBM and Ninja. SSBM's scene in many ways is similar to the BW scene, with its longevity, its rise and fall, its underground scene and its local scenes and its reinvigoration. Recently, during the finals of a tournament, Ninja stopped played Fortnite and put SSBM up on his stream and he delivered admittedly infantile commentary that still demonstrated how hype he was about the game. "Forward slash! Forward slash! Up slash! OOOH M2K WHAT ARE YOU DOING MAN?! YOU GOTTA PUNISH THOSE!" etc. To a diehard SSBM fan, there might have been an instant of revulsion about it, and I did see many in the chat of the tournament stream saying things like "LOL THESE 15 YEAR OLD FORTNITE PLAYERS COMIN IN, HI KIDS." But at the end of the day, Ninja didn't care about any of that. He said something along the lines of "Smash is likes chess. It's like StarCraft. If you don't think this is one of the most competitive, real videogames, then you're not a gamer, simple as that." I am willing to bet that out of the thousands of people who watched that stream, at least some of them were motivated to dig up that GameCube or download Dolphin on their PC and give the game a go. This is what we need, in my opinion, for StarCraft to motivate people to put their hands on the keyboard again or for the first time.
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On June 14 2018 02:29 EndingLife wrote: Almost a year in and we're still in beta stage. As much as I love this game, I can't see the population growing in the near future. You just described every Battle Royal game. You know, the games that attract millions of player no matter how shitty they are
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Well what do you expect, most players now don't want to commit dozens of hours of practice before grasping the game they're playing to have some fun. Nothing wrong with hoping into a game that takes 10 minutes to understand, because you're having fun with your casual friends instantly. I'm not that much into this trend but it's obvious why people like these kind of games.
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i dont think that the difficult of bw is a problem because that would mean sc2 would be ez to learn because of all units/buildings on 1 hotkey and stuff like that. still most people in sc2 are skill level copper after all those years and dont know how to do basic macro... when sc:r came out, i thought sc2 gamer who know how to do basic macro and didnt play the old starcraft would learn bw fast, like some people who played age of empires or something like that, when they came to bw they could reach kinda high level of skill pretty fast. (i dont wanna flame sc2 i am just trying to say that people lack the knowlege of rts/management which should make wins on lower mmr easily possible)
also to learn games like LoL would take u many month, just to see all ~150 champions once to know what they can do... at least when friends and me started LoL , it took like 3 month just to be able to play ladder with 16 champs or something and lev 30? acc dunno anymore, but with the invested time u could ez learn the basics of every matchup in bw
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I agree with the idea that the one thing that would create an increase in the foreign playerbase would be more tournaments with significant prize pools. I think I read on TL an interview with Ret saying that his decision to start playing SC2 competitively again instead of SC:R was mainly driven by the amount of tournaments being held for the games. There's simply way more potential payoff for SC2 (or literally any other e-sport) than SC:R as a non-korean.
It would be awesome to see Blizzard funding a tournament here or there for SC:R. It would be even more awesome to see another TSL for SC:R. I feel like the TSLs were by far the most hype foreign BW tournament I've ever witnessed.
Having said that, I'm having fun playing a few games of ranked SC:R throughout the week at a relatively low (~1600) MMR. I run into a few of the same people on the ladder now and again, and though it may be symptomatic of a small player base, you can at least make friends and notice your own improvement by running into familiar names every now and then.
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the only way for the game population to grow is through teamgames. 1v1 is something very few like, and teamgames provide the most relaxed and socially fulfilled experience. I've been drawn into bw through hunters4v4 and gradually got into 1v1's once my mechanics started to show up. Insane that Blizzard don't quite get it...
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My opinion is what's already been echoed. It's a hard game to learn, simple as that.
And I'm not saying games like LoL aren't hard, but it's not as hard as BW. And I think this concept was known in the early 2000s of BW, so momentum never truly picked up outside of Korea.
In korea, though, some of the leading pioneers such as Boxer/Nada paved the way. Kudos to them for paving the way in that culture, but outside of Korea, there weren't many others that paved it.
There were some folks like Draco who did pave it a bit in Europe. And if you ask me, BW is much more popular in Europe than in USA. Sure, USA had some big hitters back in the day like IdrA/NonY, but it was just too late by the time these folks made it anywhere. BW was already not so accepted in the USA. [Yes, I know there's some more names I could mention between EU / NA, but you get the idea so let's not make this a conversation about "WHY DIDNT U MENTION WHITE RA OMG"]
And we see some of those observations today;
1. Korea still super popular with SC. 2. Europe kind of popular ... look at our foreigner community, I would think majority of them are in Europe 3. NA / SA pretty dead.
In conclusion, I think the way the past went paved the way for different regions.
P.S. When I mention starcraft, people have rarely ever heard of it. So my experience is different than others who have commented saying "people know what SC is"
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