StarCraft News & Notes

 

Lycan decided to tackle why foreign players don't measure up to Koreans on The Late Game.  This has been addressed numerous times, but it remains an issue.  The focus was on foreign habits: should players practice more? do they need coaching? should they play more custom games together? should they participate in Skype groups? Etc.  As interesting as all this is, none of it addresses the underlying problem.  Every region outside Korea lacks the infrastructure and money required to create a player base that can compete with Koreans.  There's very little money available in SC2--in terms of prize winnings last year only 10 foreign players made 20k or more; there's a shortage of teams that actually pay a salary (almost none of whom pay a living wage), so not many parents are going to indulge their children and allow them to focus all their time on becoming better.  Once a player is living on their own the idea of being a full-time pro is economically almost impossible.  Given how few tournaments a foreigner can reasonably expect to make a name for themselves in, they're left to streaming and doing that successfully involves skills that have nothing to do with pro play.  Until someone (a company, an individual) wants to spend the money to create the necessary infrastructure, Korea will remain forever ahead regardless of whatever tweaks players make to their practice regime.  As it stands that white knight can only be Blizzard and we can only hope they make the necessary changes for LOTV.

 

 

This leads into a lot of confusion about a full region lock--some fans wonder what the benefit is--won't players suffer by missing out on the stronger competition Koreans offer?  The answer to the latter is yes, but only to an extent and only in the short term.  Region-lock provides a space for players to make a name for themselves, to make some money, and targets to aspire too.  The expenditure needn't be extraordinary (Rotterdam thought 10k-15k would set up an appropriate EPS-style NA tournament, for example).  Whatever anyone thinks of how Copa America is run, it draws in a larger player base than WCS NA--clearly a region-locked league is attractive to the local talent.  Despite interest in the community to create something like this, at the moment it's just a pipe dream.

 

 

TL continues to work on their economy model and as well-intended as they are, comments like this do make me wonder just how much they've thought through things:

A nonlinear curve encourages various 1-base cheese and all-ins as well. Frankly, we didn't look at it much when designing Double Harvesting model

How did they not consider cheese?  Especially when people commenting on their model have specifically brought it up as a problem prior to this?  Regardless, putting incredulity aside, I'm curious what the end-game of the TL experiment is.  There's nothing wrong with perusing the point as an intellectual exercise, but unless they have a pipeline to the LOTV designers it's ultimately not going to impact anything.  On the positive side, if there's ever an SC3 it's the kind of data that could be used for design consideration.

Speaking of the economy, qxc offered his current thoughts on LOTV and they are well worth looking into.  He notes:

Overall, Legacy is filled with more action than HoTS. The 2 main reasons for this are the economic changes. The starting workers means that the first ~2 minutes are gone from the game. You jump right into making your first depot/rax almost immediately and have at least some units out shortly thereafter. This removes certain early game plays such as 6 pools, proxy 1 gate, and proxy 2 rax, but there still seems to be potential for larger econ busts. The timing window that a 6 pool took advantage of doesn't really exist for the equivalent 12 pool, but things like a fast 15 hatch into ling/bane aggression off minimal drones still seem reasonable. While some of the early builds are gone, the game benefits from their absence. Some of the most frustrating and coin-flippy builds were builds like 6 pool and so on. The early game of Starcraft becomes a little less luck based as the options for scouting open up and there's fewer threats before scouting is really an issue

I agree wholeheartedly about being happy to lose the early all-ins in SC2 (IEM Katowice last year between sOs and herO is a great example of how a series can flop because of cheese).  Among the other things in the post is about how powerful the viper's parasitic bomb is (which players are slowly starting to use in LOTV tournaments), along with how the buffed adept is helping Protoss.  He doesn't get into balance per se, but at least in match-ups with Terran he suggests TvZ is fine (the Lycan League, which gets better sign-ups than desRow's tournament, has had 3 Terrans and 1 Zerg as its top-four the last two weeks, with Bly winning both).  From what I've observed, Protoss still needs some tweaks--as good as adepts are, it's easy to counter them if that's all your opponent is going to do (as KiWiKaKi discovered in Take's Legacy of the Ultralisk tournament).

The latest LOTV update is out with a few nerfs to Terran, one to Zerg, along with the new Terran unit.  I'm surprised nothing was done to Protoss, which still has issues (the roach change will help PvZ a bit), but it will be interesting to see how the changes play out.

Maynarde gave a long and interesting interview over a week ago and those interested in the Aussie caster should check it out.

Viewership is one of those things SC2 fans like to fret about--more so than is rational in some cases--but as a game that was the vanguard of eSports when it came out it's no surprise that fans embrace the "ded game" meme and keep tabs on things.  Numbers aren't always easy to get hold of (apparently the Chinese scene can hit 100k views), but there's always Conti at TL doing his best to provide them.  A year or so ago (link below) I looked at how WCS was trending in terms of views and I thought it was worth revisiting the numbers to see how HOTS is trending in its final days (I picked WCS since that's Blizzard's flagship product for SC2).  First, numbers for season one and two (all via Conti: here, here, here, and here, with some rounding for simplicity):

Qualifiers
Season One
NA 17k/14k/12k/12k (average 14k)
EU 13k/13k/14k/13k/15k/13k (avg 13k)
Season Two
NA 6k/7k/8k/8k (7k)
EU 9k/18k/13k/12k (13k)

Challenger
Season One
NA 13k/14k (13k)
EU 19k/15k/20k/13k (17k)
Season Two
NA 9k/9k (9k)
EU 18k/19k/19k (19k)

Premier R32 (season one)
Group A 18k (Snute's group)
Group B 20k (Polt's group)
Group C 22k (Bunny's group)
Group D 25k (Kane's group)
Group E 32k (FireCake's group)
Group F 36k (NaNiwa's group)
Group G 17k (Hydra's group)
Group H 17k (HuK's group)
Overall: avg 23k; NA broadcast 18k, EU broadcast 29k
R16 35k/38k
R8-Finals 54k

In terms of comparison, using the R32 as a baseline, compared to season one in 2014 (granting that EU/NA regions are now combined), EU viewership for the R32 is slightly better on average (29k vs 25k), while NA viewership is largely unchanged.  The numbers for EU are not much lower than the HOTS high point of season one in 2013 (with a 31k average).  All of this is to say the common consensus that SC2 core viewership remains steady seems true, but clearly LOTV is required to push for growth (along with some tweaks to how WCS is done).  Other stray observations: NA viewership for the qualifiers and Challenger were down in season two, perhaps due to the involvement of more Koreans (the R32 matches this past weekend were unaffected)--certainly neither Hydra, StarDust, or Jaedong have done anything to boost numbers in NA.

A brief note about balance in the GSL/SSL, since we've moved far enough along in season two to compare (keep in mind the GSL is still using the old map pool--apparently they can't get enough of Overgrowth).

GSL Season One R32: 13 Terrans, 12 Protoss, 7 Zergs
GSL Season One R16: 6 Terrans, 5 Protoss, 5 Zergs
GSL Season Two R32: 12 Terrans, 10 Protoss, 10 Zergs
GSL Season Two R16: 7 Terrans, 5 Protoss, 4 Zergs

With the identical map pool similar results are to be expected and that's what we see here; the only notable change is that there are more Zergs in the R32, but once we hit the R16 everything is essentially as it was.

SSL Season One R16: 7 Protoss, 5 Terrans, 4 Zergs
SSL Season One R8: 3 Protoss, 3 Zergs, 2 Terrans
SSL Season Two R16: 8 Protoss, 6 Zergs, 2 Terrans
SSL Season Two R8: 4 Protoss, 2 Zergs, 2 Terrans

Given the general lack of change at the top level in either league I think the small variance is less a matter of balance and more a matter of who the better players are (8 players have been in the R16 of the GSL each season, and 9 have repeated in the SSL--herO, Life, Maru, and Dream have done it in both).

This article is written by Peter Levi (@eyeonthesens)