I’ve had an epiphany recently. It involves every one's darling. Starcraft 2. Sure it’s done alot to combine communities and bring people into the scene which were not active followers - or not even aware the the eSports scene existed prior to it’s launch. By i have one major complaint: What has Starcraft 2 done for the other communities?
For all their talk about how great and open minded their community is, i haven’t seen any cross community tournaments which are coming out of the Starcraft community. I see CS leagues, like ESL’s IEM and the ESEA league, sponsoring Starcraft events, quake events like ESWC stepping in an providing support. Hell even the close minded monstrosity MLG has stepped out of their comfortable little console world and started sponsoring SC2 events. Can anyone name a league - outside of Korea with eStars - which started in SC2 and moved out to other games?
And it’s not just the leagues which are helping out. All the G7 teams have Starcraft II teams, but not a single Starcraft II team has a CS, Quake, team fortress or other games in their lineup. I understand that their teams have been historically small and have lacked sponsored, but theirs no excuse when even a 2 bit 32 man bronze league tournament sponsors can find sponsors for their tournaments outside of lack of trying and lack of caring on the part of the teams.
It seems like the starcraft scene only takes care of its own. It’s like 2001 all over again - except instead of the quake scene extending an olive branch in sponsors and leagues to the new comers in CS while the SC scene sits back and watches we have a game that’s exploding but doesn’t give a shit about anyone else.
Woo, articles!
ReplyDelete"By i have one major complaint: What has Starcraft 2 done for the other communities?"
Simple answer: nothing. I think the reason is this: SCBW had a very small competitive following outside of Korea, and as a result, when SC2 rolled around everyone wanted to jump on board in an attempt to bring the success of Korea into Europe and NA.
Of course the SC2 scene only takes care of itself, it's mainly made up of people that have no interest or exposure to other Western esports and either shrug off QL, CS, DotA/HoN etc as "boring noob games" (spectators) or don't want to risk investing in games that have a fraction of the hardcore competitive viewership of SC2 (sponsors).
But hey, there's a still a few of us that have been around for more than 12 months and know about Quake, CS and WarCraft, maybe we'll just have to be elitist jerks for as long as SC2 stays as top dog.