StarCraft News & Notes

Activision, Blizzard's parent company, bought MLG saying:

"MLG’s ability to create premium content and its proven broadcast technology platform – including its live streaming capabilities – strengthens our strategic position in competitive gaming."

The article speculates:

The acquisition of MLG represents a desire to oversee all aspects of the eSports tournament process – much like Riot Games

Whether this will mean that SC2 events will be broadcast on the MLG platform remains to be seen, but it seems likely (if not, perhaps, exclusively).

Qualifiers for DreamHack Leipzig have begun and have witnessed some interesting results.  In SEA Probe won the spot over Seither; he had an incredible route to victory, losing his opening match to Wally and then overcoming players like PIG, Blysk, KingKong, and iaguz (essentially a who's-who of the SEA scene).  It's Probe's most significant result in the scene, although he did win ACL 2015 Melbourne back in September.  Seither, the other player in the final, I'm less familiar with as he's been active for less than a year competitively, but it's nice to see new blood in the SEA scene (he beat KingKong and iaguz on his way to the finals).  In Latin America there weren't any surprises as Kelazhur and MajOr fought for the qualifier, with the Brazilian winning when it mattered.  In Taiwan the relatively unknown Nice knocked off Sen to earn the spot (Has was knocked out early).  iAsonu won the Chinese qualifier over Clannad (who returns to SC2 after taking almost two years off); TooDming also fell to the eventual qualifier.

Nation Wars III is in the books and I, like most people, assumed it was going to finish with a Korean stomp in the final.  Instead, there was a shocking 5-0 by MarineLorD as he did something not seen since Stephano was riding Broodlord/Infestor bullshit back in WOL.  This result produced a great deal of buzz and viewership, but also some counterbuzz which prompted Nathanias to go on an epic rant about it right afterwards (around 2:15 of his stream):

All sorts of excuses for why the Koreans lost.  People just love shitting on foreigners first of all.  But MarineLorD had to play a match as well--they [he and INnoVation] both had to play semi-final matches.  MarineLorD also had to play six of seven games, whereas PartinG played two games, Hydra played literally one game... Innovation played two games was it?  So if you really think about it MarineLorD is the one who had a really really hard time.  He had to play five games in a row and win against players who were all fresh, you know what I mean?  I think that's an achievement, and trying to take that away from MarineLorD is just a bitch thing to do, because it wasn't easy for him to have that level of success.  For that reason alone I refuse to stand with the people that are trying to diminish MarineLorD's accomplishment.  Just because it's late in Korea doesn't mean that suddenly MarineLorD winning five-games in a row against players who have been able to watch him play.  Like, people want to diminish his result because people are trying to find excuses to hate on WCS this year.  People want excuses to hate on WCS, people want excuses to hate on Blizzard, people want excuses to say that foreigners don't deserve money that they shouldn't be able to play and that Koreans are the only people that are worth watching in StarCraft, and MarineLorD winning makes all those Korean circle-jerkers look so bad.  Like MarineLorD is such a god that all those Koreans--all those people that just sit there dick-riding Koreans endlessly about how great they are--"oh you know see look Koreans are the best at StarCraft--don't you see?"--but then MarineLorD wins and suddenly all of those people that just circle-jerk Koreans all the time, they're all scared now--"oh my god, he didn't even cheese our Korean overlords!  He beat Innovation in a macro game, he beat PartinG in a macro game--oh no Tasteless!"  That's where the anti-circle-jerk comes in.  All these people that want to believe that the Koreans are the literally gods, all these people that want to shit on WCS all year long basically get told to go fuck themselves, because MarineLorD just walks in, big swinging dick, and just wrecks them.  He played phenomenally well--MarineLorD played so well, and it is an embarrassing--it is embarrassing that there are people in this community that would immediately look to try and dismiss his accomplishment.  Honestly what kind of bully are you really?  Like you have nothing better to waste your time on then to try and talk down one of the best accomplishments a non-Korean has had in the last long-period of time?  How can you justify that?  Where do you get the right to suddenly shit-talk somebody for having a run like that?  Anyway I think it's frankly fucking embarrassing that there are people out there that are ready and willing to just shit on the accomplishments of such an awesome player like that, for no reason other than "well my favourite Korean player didn't win this tournament!"  That's a shit excuse--grow the fuck up. ... I absolutely hate the people that only want Koreans to play in tournaments [and what they] do to our community.  I for one hope we get more tournaments that require less Koreans to be able to play because I understand that the people that watch the streams aren't Korean and they want to see people like MarineLorD beat Koreans, so diminishing their accomplishments isn't going to do anything for you.  Just remember that all the sponsors who pay for all the shit you guys watch...those of you who really hate the idea of a foreigner being successful in StarCraft 2, I'd just like to remind you that all the sponsors who pay for all the content that you watch and bitch and whine about--obviously your Korean content is paid for my Korean companies--but those are all paid for by companies that expect to have an audience and viewership composed of aforementioned non-Koreans.  Those tournaments are not run...by people that "oh yeah I only want Koreans to play in this tournament that I'm going to sponsor"...can Koreans even buy your products?  "Oh no, no, we don't sell in Korea dude.  We're like an American company or we're a European company"--it's like, come on, get your head out of your ass.  If you only want to watch Koreans play don't watch tournaments like Nation Wars then. ... I've always been all about, and will continue to always be all about the non-Korean scene.  I believe our non-Korean players deserve respect for the time that they put in and I believe that they deserve an environment that caters to hard-working non-Korean players that want to be successful, that want to be pro-gamers, and that want to positively contribute to a scene in an active way, and I think that people who are opposed to that are the same people that are going to kill StarCraft if it ever dies.  People who only want to watch Koreans play should circle-jerk somewhere else.

This can all be summed up with this: 1) MarineLorD's achievement is worthy of praise, 2) the foreign scene can't thrive if it's asphyxiated by parachuting Korean players, 3) the loud minority that is only interested in Koreans tend to be toxic to the foreign scene.  I agree with all of that and it's been comically sad seeing the aforementioned fans bending over backwards to explain away the loss--accept it and move on--it doesn't diminish Koreans or the Korean scene.

The Late Game

Speaking of embarrassing performances, Wolf's confused, incoherent explanation for why the new WCS system was bad for Korea and Koreans on The Late Game was pretty sad to watch.  iNcontroL used the kid gloves in slapping him down, but if I'm Wolf and I'm that clueless I'd keep my comments short and more open-ended (talk about how it seems worse and then let people more informed provide you the information and context).

KeSPA published how much it pays pro-players (providing averages rather than specifics) and their 25 SC2 pros average just over 39k per year, which is more than the average household income in Korea (the average is 19.5k in disposable income).  I'd be interested to know how that's split between the players, but it does provide some perspective.  There was a response on Reddit that encapsulates my thoughts quite well:

Well, first thing's first, that's a terrible sample. Next, we can see that they are paid a lot more than foreingers [foreigners] in terms of base salary alone, and a fuckload more if you consider that they have no living expenses at all. The "foreigners getting rich off WCS" narative [narrative] needs to stop, none of the players who aren't paid ever really made money from foreign tournaments. Only EG players ever got paid more than this average. It's not as good as it should (or could) be, but we do need to remember that they get bed, board and travel to events paid for no matter what level they play at in KeSPA. The cases where they aren't should be thoroughly investigated and the people operating the teams need to be forced out of the sport (cough SlayerS cough). There needs to be a base mininmum [minimum] salary for KeSPA players, but I don't have a clue how to say what that is, they are all arguably paid a living wage already.

LADDER

There was some support for my belief that practice in Korea is not necessary for foreigners to improve, as Scarlett Tweeted about it:

foreigners dont need to play in korea to be able to compete with them. try thinking about how you play the game instead

GSL Code A

Speaking of Korea, the initial list of Code A participants included all the Koreans who played outside of Korea in 2015, but when the matches occurred only Jaedong participated.  I'm not sure if the NA Koreans signed up as a joke or if the person listing the participants had bad information.

Thorin posted an interesting video discussing how the term "Bonjwa" was ruined for SC2 by the narrowing of the definition to the point that essentially no player qualifies.  He then goes ahead and offers his own definition to rescue the term for use and applies it these SC2 players: MVP, Life, Taeja, MMA, and NesTea.  I don't really care about crowning players as Bonjwa or anything else, but it is excellent marketing so I'm interested to see if the term will get used on an active player.

This article is written by Peter Levi (@eyeonthesens)