StarCraft News & Notes

The always thoughtful qxc posted a blog addressing the ladder.  The key thought for me is this:

Having only 6 (7 with gm) leagues to break up the entire skill base of a highly competitive game like Starcraft is insufficient. League of Legends built on Starcraft's league system by building divisions within each league. This would be the equivalent of every league except gm being split into 5 smaller leagues, bronze I-V, silver I-V and so forth. This creates more incremental goals and helps the 'carrot' effect. If you string out a goal ahead of a player just far enough that they have to make some effort to achieve it, but still close enough that they feel it's within reach they will be more likely to stretch for it. The issue right now is that there are not enough incremental goals and the jump from one league to another is too large. It's not hard to imagine the player that grinds for some number of seasons and finally gives up out of frustration because they feel like they've made little to no progress.

I like the idea of dividing up the ladder further--it's added transparency and as he argues it creates additional goals for players to strive for.

Feardragon has posted the specifics for his NA Ladder Heroes venture, which will begin in July.  I hope the effort pays off (Basetradetv tried something in conjunction with Harstem a couple of months ago, but it didn't have legs).  There are potential issues that could arise here--from win-trading to cheating--and I wasn't clear on how he was going to handle it, but here's what he said on Reddit:

I'll be using my contacts with people who are much more knowledgeable about this kind of stuff to help me identify and ban them from the event. I'll mostly be going on a report basis but will generally be doing basic checks on any of the winners. There will be a very low tolerance for hacking/win trading and if caught and confirmed.

Also as Troy mentioned in his comment, public reputation will be at stake with this since I'll be keeping and maintaining a public list of banned players and their offense. If I can, I'll also make a video for each player documenting the reason for the ban and linking to it on the ban list.

It will be interesting to see who signs up--will the best NA players participate, or will it be made up of ladder monsters who don't make an impact in tournaments?  I'll enjoy it either way, but it will be interesting to see.
 

Speaking of adjudicating, Spectrum was disqualified from Copa America (Tonho won the qualifier that was run to replace him), and Patchtoss was exposed as a hacker (Remax wasn't sure if he'd participated in WCS qualifiers, but he has).  There seems to be some disagreement on the former's DQ, but I don't know enough about the specifics to comment.

On Remax, Kane talked about his future in SC2 given his return to school in the fall--essentially if LOTV is successful and he's good at it, he'll return as a full-time player once he's finished.

Speaking of players, the cliche that no one ever quits SC2 permanently gets another boost as CombatEX announced he's returning for LOTV (after failing to make it as a pro in LOL).  He's been gone for almost as long as KiWiKaKi and it will be interesting to see how he does.  Given his plans to stream I wonder if his presence will help breath some life into the moribund LOTV viewership (which seems to boil down to Fenner and Lowko these days).   He told The Late Game the amount of SC2 he does will depend on how much money he can make from it.  Incidentally, KiWiKaKi has inexplicably forfeited his spot in Taketv's Legacy of the Ultras tournament [update: according to desRow it's because the time commitment was more than he could handle]--he's been replaced by another long-retired ROOT player, TT1.  I had no idea the latter had returned to SC2 and I'm curious why the former stepped away (DeMuslim also recently quit--if Reddit is to be believed it's because he didn't know it was an LOTV tournament, but I find that difficult to believe).

Conti's viewership numbers for May are out and they show almost no interest in LOTV at the moment.  For those who weren't around for the transition from WOL to HOTS, part of the appeal of the latter was it served as an escape from the wretched broodlord/infestor play that plagued WOL--whatever balance issues HOTS has, they are now more subtle than that.  Back to the numbers: as always, Conti includes them for WCS, so let's compare season one with season two (with a bit of rounding for simplicity):

Premier R32 (season one/season two)
NA broadcasts
Group A 18k/20k
Group B 20k/25k
Group G/C 17k/24k
Group H /D17k/23k
EU broadcasts
Group C/E 22k/20k
Group D/F 25k/24k
Group E/G 32k/24k
Group F/H 36k/31k
Overall: avg 23k/24k; NA broadcast 18k/23k, EU broadcast 29k/25k

Statistically the seasons are on par; the improvement in the NA numbers has to do (I think) with the change in when they were broadcast.  Fans can find good and bad in the numbers (fewer peaks, fewer valleys), but to my mind WCS remains fairly static.  While the tournament isn't a litmus test for the scene (whose casual side remains in slow decline), it does show that Blizzard's flagship for the game continues to limp along on roughly the same viewership core it had when HOTS came out.

On the random side of things: I'd completely forgotten that Artosis had a show about SC2 once upon a time (Meta); it's a bit sad that he gave up on it--while it was never as good as State of the Game, it had a focus we don't really get with Remax or The Late Game.  For pedants and the curious, here's a brief timeline of all the SC2 shows I'm aware of:
State of the Game (JP McDaniel): Apr/10-Aug/13 (100 episodes; WOL into early HOTS)
Inside the Game (DJ Wheat): May/11-June/14 (97 episodes, WOL-HOTS)
Unfiltered (Chanman): Mar/13-Aug/14 (66 episodes; HOTS)
Meta (Artosis): Apr/13-Sept/14 (27 episodes; HOTS)
Remax (desRow): Aug/14+ (42 episodes)
The Late Game (Lycan): Sept/14+ (30 episodes)

The shows I'm most familiar with are from the HOTS-era, although I saw the tail end of SotG and on rare occasion ItG.  I'm still sad that Chanman gave up on Unfiltered as I thought the show had been gradually improving.  Incidentally, Lycan requested feedback on Reddit and it will be interesting to see what (if anything) he changes because of it.  My main quibble with him was having too many guests, but he's already curbed that tendency.

Finally, there was a Day9 sighting as he did an episode to promote the release of the moribund Starbow.  I bring it up only to illustrate that the popularity of a game isn't want keeps him from doing shows about it, since Starbow has been essentially dead for months.

This article is written by Peter Levi (@eyeonthesens)