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Invitation and Saturation - The Pitfalls in the SC2 Boom

By Lynskey - 27th March 2011 - 17:09 PM

What a day. I'm sat here on the morning after, mulling over the implications of three Korean superstars falling to lesser lights from Europe and America after an insanely entertaining run of games in the TSL. The discussion about the day of shocks that saw people's bracket predictions chewed up and spat out by an unlikely trio of qxc, Adelscott and Goody has been pretty heated with an interesting mixture of elation, justification and excuses coming forth from forums across the net.

Colouring the discussion we also have the FXOpen Invitational where Cloud, a player most see as a second-tier European Terran, beat GSL megastar oGsMC 2-0, while elsewhere Socke took down MarineKing among the other shock results. We're a long way from the general consensus provided by the IEM World Championships just a few weeks ago where practically everyone said that the skill gap between South Korea and the rest of the world was wider than even the most committed GSL fanboy had previously thought.

What wasn't colouring the debate though was The Champions Trophy, a world-wide event on the Asian and European servers and featuring some GSL viewer-magnet all-stars like Jinro, Huk, Losira and Ace competing with without doubt the deepest and strongest European line-up of any of the three worldwide tournaments.

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No-one really noticed it. Everyone was still reeling from the TSL and FXOpen results and were far too busy arguing about things like the transpacific internet cables being damaged by the Japanese quake and its effect on MKP's Marine splitting. The ridiculousness of that argument is a fine indicator of just how unexpected the results were, but people debating the events from the TSL and FXOpen didn't stop them tuning in a few hours later for the Champions Trophy.

It was probably this thing called over-saturation. The hyphenated phrase is appearing with growing regularity as people are getting knocked off their feet on what seems a bi-weekly basis by yet another big money tournament. An interesting article by Cameron Carson on the Fnatic website caught my eye last week with some well thought out insight into the matter, but a response from NASL commentator Gretorp caught my eye even more.

Gretorp's use of the phrase "seemingly limitless number of fans" worries me. Last time I checked viewer counts were quantifiable and the number of people on Earth wasn't infinity. "Seemingly" is the key word here. We're in a boom, it's the 80's all over again and everyone is wearing those T-shirts that change colour based on body heat and show your pit stains while they listen to the Eurythmics. We're on the up and the organisers of SC2 tournaments are like city traders doing coke in the toilets of futuristic nouvelle cuisine restaurants, figuratively speaking of course. Boom and bust is a fact of life, as much a part of the world as credit cards, SUVs and oak-ash woodland. However it's something that needs to managed carefully as how you restrain and organise yourself during the boom is far more important than playing damage limitation when the crunch finally comes, a topic that Cameron Carson goes into in interesting detail in his article.

Don't get me wrong, I'm as keen for SC2 to make this much talked about break through as anyone else. However the most important thing that is going to help with SC2's progress is not over-extending during the boom. The over-saturation of events look like a wonderful thing at the moment and is exciting for anyone with an interest in SC2, but remember that at the moment we're looking at things from the rising side of the wave.

I actually have a lot of hope for the future of StarCraft2 as despite the inevitable nature of boom-and-bust there is almost certainly going to be a fairly long boom period. With two expansion packs planned the game will freshen up and reinvent itself twice, which gives the game a longer period in which to grow. But how quickly we identify and how everyone reacts to that saturation point will be interesting. If things go well we'll see a gradual shrinkage as e-sports prepares for its next boom, if not we'll see a house of cards effect and we'll be back to square one.

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The first signs of this over-saturation came in Europe, where a proliferation of weekly tournaments saw a few of them run concurrently and fight for players and viewers alike. How much this devalued the tournaments is hard to say, as soon the general level interest in SC2 started growing with amazing speed, so although these tournaments were often running on top of each other viewing figures climbed across the board.

This weekend is the second chance we've had to look what happens when similar tournaments run close to each other and although their schedules didn't clash we had what was practically 24 hours of concurrent matches between players from every major server. One tournament lost out, although the interest level in SC2 still meant it performed well enough, very probably meeting organisers and sponsors expectations. However I still find myself wondering whether a third global tournament was necessary this weekend and whether it had carefully thought of where it was going to find its audience.

This is all arising due to a lack of centralisation in western SC2. We have one major hub, one vague Mecca in TeamLiquid.net. Their dominance of web attention in the west was a major contributing factor as to why the Champions Trophy was the least talked-about event of the weekend. For every other tournament organiser and SC2 content provider the main way that they get the word out about what they're doing is through TL. So when they you put your own similar tournament in close proximity to their flagship TSL tournament it's understandable that you're not going to get the most interest.

Is this a good thing? Well actually yes, but it's a yes with a caveat. The fact that TeamLiquid exists is without doubt a good thing and the SC2 community would be much worse off without it. It provides the central hub for people to talk about the game and the competitive scene and it glues the community together. The minor problem is that it's centralisation with bias. This is nothing to criticise TL about, they are first and foremost a gaming team and they should be expected to promote their own players, their own tournaments above all else and they've earned the right to be where they are through years of support for the StarCraft scene. The caveat is that it does make it hard for other organisations to make their mark as if something doesn't appear on TL it doesn't exist. Despite NASL being completely devoid of TL involvement it's telling that their Q&A threads have appeared on the Team Liquid forums.

While the current situation is working out for everyone at the moment, if viewing figures start to slip and over-saturation starts negatively affecting the SC2 scene then the possibility of dogs eating dogs arises as tournaments will start to forgo the current trend of working out scheduling sympathetically to each other. You could start to see tournaments run over each other and attempt to start killing off their rivals, try to tie players down to their tournaments and generally start to see the scene begin to cannibalise. This is speculation and might not be what ends up happening, but with the calendars for 2011 filling with tournaments at an alarming rate it's very soon going to come to a point where some tournaments will inevitably fall by the wayside.

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A lot of people around the SC2 scene look to Korea for guidance on how to grow the market for SC2 but unfortunately most of the information we can take out of Korea is not applicable. Gretech enjoy an unrivaled spot as having the only major SC2 tournament in the country. They got there early, had the teams and structure practically set up for them in advance, and knew from Kespa's massive success with Brood War that high production values and support for a team–based player pool was key. However they further improved their chances by trying to capture a chunk of the foreign market from day one, something they are now looking increasingly dependent on as audiences in their home country have not been as large as predicted. The Korean scene is still managing to flourish despite a lackluster fan-base at home due to the huge wave of interest across the world, but I'd also argue that there's something else that is a major contributor.

The GSL Grand Final carries weight. Hell, the first round of Code A carries weight. What GSL is currently head and shoulders above anyone else in the rest of the world isn't player skill, production value or mass appeal (although they are ahead in each of those to some degree); it's the sense of occasion. I can remember thinking to myself after watching the January Code A Final between Top and Byun that if you took away the flashing lights and slick, professional commentary that although the match was probably still the best TvT series in the GSL we'd seen to date, that the standard and the drama of the gameplay wasn't anywhere near what I saw in the Goody vs. DeMuslim Quarter Final at IEM a few weeks earlier.

Why? Because the GSL knows more than any other organisation how to provide that sense of occasion. I was far more on the edge of my seat for Top vs. Byun and with good reason. The GSL's episodic format and stark cut off points between the different Codes gives a real sense of drama with real consequences. The rest of the world sees their players operate with no clear divisions and a massive safety net. Lose at IEM, don't worry there's a Reddit Invitational next week. I'm a staunch believer that the reputations assigned to GSL players can quickly be overblown one way or the other based on a small sample size of games, and while they certainly contain a core of players who warrant the hype the willingness for people to ascribe some players huge reputations happens too fast with little basis in reality. This isn't something GOMTV is doing by accident; its part of creating entertainment and leads to a greater sense of hype the next time one of their superheroes enters the booth. I'm not belittling the players in any way here, despite this weekend's results only a fool would claim that the European and American servers are suddenly up there with Korea based on three TSL games. But for every MC there's a host of Makas who were never anything near to what we thought they were.

The reputations of the western players have been slogged out over months, through ups and downs in form and over a host of large and small scale tournaments. They suffer from having no platforms to stand on, no set-in-stone yardstick like the Codes of GSL. The result is that the western player base is something of a morass. What the GSL provides by its small handful of lauded players and its high stakes relates to a consequence of what is known as the "Tiger Woods Effect", which states that a sport with a dominant figure or small group of dominant figures will be more popular than one which has a large amount of players with an equal chance of winning each prize. This is the reason you hear those with a passion for e-sports demanding less luck and more skill in the balance of StarCraft as having those ultra-skillful Bonjwa's is a good thing all round for everyone involved. With a host of concurrent tournaments which have unquantifiable prestige levels in Europe, America and beyond it makes it almost impossible for these figures to players to emerge outside the Korean server and the GSL.

In America the first organisation to attempt to provide these arbitrary but necessary levels is the NASL. But with the MLG series running as well it will probably find that although it can make headway in providing the real sense of drama the GSL provides it will still not be quite able to achieve the necessary gravitas present in Korea. On the other hand if organisations take this idea of keeping a small group of players on a high pedestal too far you start to run into another problem that I've become aware of recently, the small matter of the invite.

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A good point was raised on the somethingawful.com forums during the last few days that in the whirlwind of recent SC2 events hadn't so far occurred to me, but the more I think about it the more important it seems. With all these tournaments seeking viewing figures there has been a large trend towards invitationals. This is understandable, these new tournaments are fighting for viewers and the viewers want to see their favourite players. To add to this the newer organisations want their tournaments to kick off with a high-quality line up sooner rather than later so arranging lengthy open tournaments would not only be a logistical nightmare but would impact on their start dates. These companies and sponsors realise that NOW is the time to act and they need their product on the table before their rival's products get established.

The long term problem with the invitational nature of these high money tournaments is that at some point it's going to start impacting on the ability for new players to break into the scene. If you look around the current player base it's almost entirely ex-Brood War and WC3 players. This is easily explainable as experienced RTS players will have picked up the game quicker than anyone new and as such they've been safe bets for teams looking for their initial SC2 rosters and, to be fair, the most successful players to date. But as the game progresses there will be a newer generation of players emerging and if the invitational nature of big money tournaments continues then there might become an artificial barrier between them and the top of the scene.

At this point we'll be relying on teams to provide the talent scouting but if only name players are the ones getting invited then teams will be more inclined to try to poach players with market value rather than take a chance on the next talented kid. The next generation of SC2 players might find themselves in a Catch-22 situation where they have to try and make a name for themselves in lesser tournaments, but as these will be under the radar of most SC2 fans they will struggle to do so.

The NASL has taken the most flak for this with their invited 50 man field for their first event. Questioning a completely invited field for such an ambitious event is valid, but after the first season they'll be providing a healthy amount of opportunities for new players to break through, something which is to be applauded given what they are trying to achieve. Coupled with the logistical problems of arranging an open tournament with a player base spread across different continents it's also very understandable. It could also be argued that the 50% Invite-only TSL is really just a series of glorified show-matches and despite its huge fanfare and it's high status it is in reality apropos of nothing and their invites exist merely to give the fans the best show they can. The FXOpen shows the most worrying level of this desire for invitationals, with the field of American players for their last event seemingly randomly drawn from a nearby hat. If organisations want to give an air of legitimacy to their events then unless they begin to run open tournaments people will eventually start to see them as having more in common with professional wrestling than professional boxing.

Even the GSL hasn't been immune to criticism over the issue in recent months and there is a feeling that some players who failed to make the cut in the first three Open tournaments are now struggling to make their way up the Code system while other players are enjoying a charmed life at the top for longer than they deserve. Yes this gave us the wonderful SanZenith fairytale but at the same time a Code S without Bomber, Squirtle and Leenock and many more is frustrating. There's a balance to be struck between the Code system and giving players from the lower levels a chance to advance and at the moment I'm undecided on whether Gretech have got it right, but they're probably not far off to tell the truth.

While these one-off or infrequent events like the TSL are to be forgiven for using a high level of invites if even more organisations seek to join the roster of big money SC2 events then there is a danger that this invite-only system will become the norm. While this may ensure that fans get to watch their favourite players duke it out in the short term, over the long term its effect might do more harm than good.

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How these issues get resolved, or if they never do, will be a huge contributing factor to just how high the wave will climb. There are always saturation points and whatever SC2's happens to be remains to be seen, but a less-fractured series of tournaments with firm levels of achievement would undoubtedly make for a more robust product that could achieve more than a host of piecemeal contests that lack the drama and tangible rewards of something like the GSL. To add to that it will be vital not to lock the door to the ivory tower and for organisers to realise that breeding new talent is going to be an important part of keeping the wave churning, far more than giving the sixteen most popular players they can a golden ticket in the hope of getting the most partner dollars out of justin.tv.

One possibility that I think is very likely is that sooner or later a Western version of Kespa is going to become a possibility, even a necessity. Preferably it would be without the draconian contracts and vague air of evil, but it would do SC2 well to have an organisation centralising competitive SC2 for the greater good. The current friendly partnership between NASL and MLG may achieve a facsimile of that, but with so many different organisations vying to be the top dog in the west it's very likely that their position will be challenged. While the future remains bright, dazzling so, there is a danger that the rise of competitive SC2 over the next few years might end up not being a steady journey but instead find itself a runaway train, with all the associated problems that entails.

-Porl "Lynskey" Henty