StarCraft News & Notes

It has been awhile since I posted--I've been waiting for the WCS announcement and while hints and rumours have been floating around there's been nothing definitive (Richard Lewis reported that the ESL-run WCS-style tourney is gone).  Amongst the various bits of panic TotalBiscuit, CatZ, and others have appealed for calm and patience and that's where I stand as well.  There's no question that a WCS-system of some sort will continue, it's simply a matter of in what form.

I watched some of DreamHack Winter, which suffered from far too much down time.  Viewership was okay (a touch higher than Tours which was the prior 2015 high), but without a noticeable LOTV bump--I think the reason for that is a mix of the game's current balance along with the aforementioned dragging broadcast.

On a more positive note Nation Wars has been a blast and a small window into the form of various players in LOTV (from Stephano being terrible to Serral excelling).  It was also interesting to see PartinG lose to two foreign Zerg players (the aforementioned Finn as well as Petraeus).

BaseTrade has been running $100 regional cups via Corsair--I would have preferred them all region-locked (doesn't matter as much for EU because of the lag, admittedly), but c'est la vie (the NA-locked tourney suffered a bit from running just before ROOT's $2,000-tourney).  Regardless, lot's of fun and I've enjoyed them casting regularly again.

The Rival StarCraft League continues (you can see replays here); their Invitational was a few weeks ago with Bly beating PiLiPiLi in the final.

Kotaku wrote about the life of pro and semi-pro gamers focusing on Pokebunny (but also talking about former streamer Ms Spyte), and what stood out for me were the former's comments:

In the summer of 2012 I was going into my senior year of high school, and I thought that as soon as I finished I’d jump fully into StarCraft and go live in a team house and all that stuff. I didn’t think I wanted to go to college. I just wanted to keep playing, and that slowly changed over the course of that year. As more and more Koreans got involved it became harder for Americans to stay relevant who didn’t play full-time. Pretty much all I did was go to school and play StarCraft, but I still wasn’t full-time. It was inevitable that at a certain point I wouldn’t be able to keep up.

The American Terran hasn't kept completely out of the scene since he ended regular play in the summer of 2012--he last competed in the WCS qualifiers in season one, 2015.

Speaking of ex-pros, TitaN has re-emerged with LOTV.  I don't know if he's returning to competitive play or simply to streaming, but I'll never forget him losing to Snute in the old swarm host days where 12 bases to 4 wasn't enough.

I stumbled across MCanning's stream recently and highly recommend it (he was recently added to Flipsid3 Tactics).  I recognized the name from WCS qualifiers, but he normally streams too late for me so it was serendipity I found his stream.

This article is written by Peter Levi (@eyeonthesens)