But is Milkis saying that KeSpa worked? What the fuck world is he living in. You think 14 hours a day of practice - MANDATORY. SEVEN DAYS A WEEK. FOR MINIMUM WAGE. As GOOD? You think doing that, and NEVER getting a shot at competing in a major because you're on the managers shit list, or even more heinous - being foreign - as GOOD. Or never being able to have a girlfriend or friends outside of the organization as GOOD. Or the possibility of being forced around to different teams - for no fault of your own. Or banning players for chatting - EVEN ACCIDENTALLY - or wanting to change their settings mid game is GOOD?
And KeSpa(the Korean eSports players association) was actually an owners association, run by the sponsors and never actually took the players perspective into their discussion. Or that the financial backing - from company like Hite, OGN, pantech, stx, eStro - isn't necessarily as sturdy as they thought, leading to sudden shifts in sponsorship, forcing sales and movements of players from location to another. And sometimes even forcing players to lose what few intimate connections they have through trades or through dispersal drafts.
Maybe he's been living in a box, but those conditions are not what i consider GOOD.
I'm gonna try this again.
ReplyDeleteFact-checking man. You have good thought paths, but here the facts are way off.
KeSPA didn't work, and I was as appalled at the idea when Milkis seemed to suggest that, but the problems here aren't exactly what makes KeSPA such a bad model to follow.
eSTRO wasn't the "sponsor" of the team. eSTRO stood for e-Strongest, and was owned by IEG. They never actually seemed to have a real sponsor other than IEG and when you're constantly finishing at the bottom of the league, the sponsorship dollars aren't going to come flying in.
Players weren't "banned" for chatting accidentally or wanting to change their settings. They were DQ'd for harsh, inflexible rules that have no consideration clauses in them. This is bad, but they were't banished. BackHo still participated in OSL (I believe he played the next game, as his incident was a game 1), and Leta is still a Proleague regular.
Never getting a shot at competing in a major because of manager preference/being foreign - not sure where you get this from. I'm assuming by major you mean the OSL or MSL. Idra participated in the OSL and MSL qualifiers 6 times. Anyone with a progamer's license can participate in the offline preliminaries and attempt to qualify for the leagues. If you mean proleague? That can happen in the MLB, NFL or any other major sport too. Look at Jack McKeon benching Hanley Ramirez when he took over the Marlins last month because he didn't like his attitude. In team atmospheres, you have to bend to the will of the coach pretty much all the time.
The sponsorship shifts aren't as pronounced as you're making them out to be. Only 2 teams in the past 5 years - eSTRO and hite - have disbanded and/or been assimilated. eSTRO disbanding was not all that unpredictable, given their poor results both individually and team-wise. The only difference between them and, say, the Dodgers or the Hornets, is that the league didn't step in to help them stay afloat and put them on life-support. hite/OGN->CJ I don't remember the specifics of, but I believe it had at least something to do with the fact that CJ Corporation owns OnMedia, who owns OGN, who owned SPARKYZ. hite had no ownership of the team, just a sponsorship deal, and the revert back to CJ Entus was because hite's contract ran out, and CJ will obviously want their name back on the team, so they aren't going to resign it.
The trades that "force" players around aren't as frequent as you pronounce them to be, and while I don't know the intimate details, I have yet to see a transfer that was widely unfavored by the player himself. Maybe one of July's transfers might have been sour, I know his stint on SKT wasn't the best. But other than that, generally they aren't "OMG WHY WOULD YOU SHIP ME THERE?!?!"
The social lives bit isn't as pronounced either. For the B-teamers? Pretty much. But it's the same as minor leaguers in baseball, only a little more extreme. You deal with shit conditions to try and be the best you can and rise to the top. The top level players have freedoms, they have time out from the practice houses. Hell, even Idra got out some I do believe. I do know he had enough time to play in the various leagues and pull away from his actual practice schedule.
If you want a few hard points as to why a KeSPA-like organization would be a terrible idea, try their ideas on "free agency". And by free agency, they really mean "You get to choose whether you stay with your team or go to the highest bidder." Or their policy on the GOM Classic, where they decided that KeSPA sanctioned players could not play in the GOMTV Star League (Avaratech-Intel Classic or w/e it was actually called) after the whole Blizzard-GOMTV thing began brewing.
These are just a few of the points that would've been better to hit on at all than the stuff that seemingly gets pulled out of the air here man.
Addition: A lot of the sponsors have also been solid. STX, CJ, MBCGame, Samsung, SK Telecom, KT/KTF Communications... all long term sponsors. Woongjin stepped up and turned Hanbit around from a fairly bottom feeder into a playoff contender, allowing them to make key acquisitions/hold on to developing stars. Hwaseung owns Lecaf who sponsored OZ from 06 on. WeMade has also proven solid from 2007 on.
ReplyDeleteOn the eStro comment - i know they were a team, not a sponsor, but their disbanding because of lack of funding seemed to be true.
ReplyDeleteI used the term "banned" instead of DQ because i'm a moron.
I was getting that from the comments idra, ret and nony made on their stints in korea. They gave off the vibe that because they were foriegners they never got a shot to play on the team leagues or even get promoted to the A team even though they were better than the B-teamers(in idras case) - although that never did hold them back from the qualification process for OSL/MSL.
On the sponsorship shifts - that came from a book(korea's online gaming empire) which suggests that those are more frequent than i guess they are. THAT'S WHAT I GET FOR READING BOOKS.
ON the trades and social life thing i was speaking exclusively of B-teamers. I should have specified that.