Interestingly enough, 2014's peak viewership remains the high for HOTS (155k), as MMA's clash against Life was apparently the biggest draw (2013 peaked at 142k, this year at 149k). What the numbers do indicate is that while HOTS failed to grow the game, it remains relatively stable with its core audience. As for HOTS in terms of performance, when it came to best-on-best competition (GSL, SSL, this year's BlizzCon, and 2014's IEM finale):
2013: Soulkey, Maru, Dear
2014: Zest, sOs (IEM), Classic, INnoVation
2015: Life, Rain, Classic (SSL), herO (SSL), INnoVation, sOs
Overall Protoss took the most championships (8), with Terran and Zerg roughly even (3 and 2). I'd gauge sOs and INnoVation as the best/most consistent players of the expansion. The era also witnessed the virtual death of the NA pro scene and the falling off of most well-known foreign WOL pros; on the positive side we also saw new talent rise en masse out of France.
The Future of StarCraft panel talked about what's coming to LOTV and the most significant thing are upcoming changes to the ladder:
Currently, we plan on combining all of the Grandmaster and Master league divisions into one. In this new large division, the top 200 player are Grandmaster players. However, if you make it to the top, you can't rest on your laurels, because those below you can easily bump you out! This will allow the competitive experience to remain active in this tier of players.
Players in the middle and lower tiers want to know how close they are to advancing, and so our current solution is for each league to have 10 subdivisions to more clearly define a player’s skill. This means that if you’re a Gold 1 player, you’re among the best Gold players in the world and are close to reaching the Platinum tier. Divisions also won’t have a player cap – so if you’re ranked as Silver 5, you know you belong there because of your skill level, and not simply because another division has filled up. Finally, since rank isn’t currently indicative of skill, we’re looking at different ways of awarding points so that participation matters less than skill.
For players in the lowest league, improving is inevitable with practice and we want those improvements to be quickly reflected in your rank. In Wings of Liberty, about 20 percent of players were Bronze, so even if you were drastically improving in your skill you were still stuck in the lowest division. With ten subdivisions, it should become clear that you’re improving because you’ll begin moving up through subdivisions that have clear meaning.
We also plan to reduce the overall size of Bronze, since the difference in skill between someone at the bottom versus the top of Bronze is comparable to the difference in skill between the bottom of Silver and the top of Platinum.
Those are all positive changes and for those players at lower skill levels it will be a relief to not get annihilated by much better players on the ladder with regularity.
TotalBiscuit's latest version of ShoutCraft is almost upon us. The invitation-only tournament features a variety of Koreans--five are among the top-25 in WCS points (ParTing, Zest, TY, Rogue, and Solar), while there are two fan-favourites in Bomber and Stork, with ByuN thrown in for good measure (perhaps due to his Proleague results). I'm not sure what quality of games we'll see and I'm not normally that invested in invitation-only tournaments, but given the timing and casters I'll check it out.
With LOTV in its "final" version (at least to start) my primary concern from watching the beta is parasitic bomb in ZvT which seems overpowered--the next few weeks and months should make that clear.
It's funny how player returns to SC2 turn out. You may recall that CombatEX returned with some fanfare back in June, but he's already disappeared (at least as a streamer). Whatever his actual intentions he barely put in any effort to stream and hasn't done so since August. This doesn't mean he couldn't reappear and I think the scene is better the more streamers/personalities it has.
As it has been awhile since my last news digest a few things have been floating around that I'll comment on briefly:
-Chanman has brought back Unfiltered--the cynical part of me thought it might be just after his Reddit ban expired, but that ban may have been for life. The SC2 content is very light, but I think the show is entertaining
-Speaking of light SC2 content, The Late Game's revamp has been very bland of late, due to Destiny not playing LOTV beta of late leaving only iNcontroL's very safe (and brief) answers to whatever Lycan asks him--I think the show would have been better off with at least one more person involved to generate conversation. However, as Destiny is committed to playing LOTV on release I think it will improve going forward
-A couple of months ago Rifkin made what I thought was an offensive and stupid joke at the expense of avilo--a safe target to go after and there wasn't much fallout, but I hope this is the last time something like this comes up
-JaKaTaK (I lost the link, but it's among his semi-recent videos) said he's not going to discuss balance in LOTV, something I found a bit surprising, but it fits the Day9 approach of steering clear of balance and focusing on the other elements of the game
This article is written by Peter Levi (@eyeonthesens)
