Where Blizzard failed, the creators of DotA succeeded

[Wankey]

Blizzard grandiosely stated that Starcraft 2 would be built from the ground up as an "eSports" game, it's clear that isn't so much the case.

Case and point:
http://www.joystiq.com/2011/06/22/le...llion-viewers/

League of Legends Championship Draws nearly 1.7 million viewers. What was the highest viewership of Starcraft 2 tournaments? I think Justin TV hit 80k or something?

It's clear that there is a tremendous amount of viewership out there, and DotA style gameplay isn't exactly the easiest to pick up. There's an untapped market that Blizzard can seriously deal with but I just feel Blizzard isn't doing much at all nowadays, they're starting to become the Activision type company, put as little work as possible into the game for the biggest outcome.

Starcraft 2 is clearly not built from the ground up as an eSports game. With all the power that is blizzard, why haven't they started their own tournaments? The Blizzard Championship. Nevermind MLG, these are amateurs, why doesn't Blizzard do a global tournament if they're really serious about eSports?

Throw in a TON of money into eSports, make Starcraft 2 Multiplayer pretty much free to play for everyone and get everyone to play Starcraft 2. Make money off tournaments, BlizzTV, huge industry sponsors and stuff like that.

Why aren't they ramping it up? Why is Starcraft 2 still such an eSports after thought? No clans, no tournaments, not even a proper chat room.

They were thinking of something much better than chat rooms, where is that? What happened to it? The currently excuse for chat rooms doesn't come close to original chat rooms.

Where is the daily eSports feed?

What Blizzard did was make a balanced RTS game, nothing more. They've cornered companies in Korea in eSports and lowered the eSports viewing quality by not putting in LAN.

What exactly has blizzard done to eSports that other companies haven't? Why don't they have weekly meetings with the top pro players about the current balance and put out podcasts about the state of the game? Why is it an amateur approach? Can you imagine if Dustin Browder and David Kim had week end 1 hour talks with Idra, JP, and all the other pro players in well moderated discussions for everyone to listen to? Why don't they have weekly stats outputs of win loss ratios to show everyone what they're doing?

Why do we have to go to sc2ranks.com to even look at our ranks? Why this site a Blizzard created site?

It's frustrating to see how much the Starcraft community has put up with Blizzard, and turned a blind eye to the fact that Blizzard has screwed the community from day one.

If it wasn't for the community, the huge amount of time that people spent helping market Starcraft 2 for free, this game would disappear in all of history as just another RTS game with a mediocre single player.

Has the Starcraft community grown by itself when Starcraft 2 came out? Yes, but is it still growing?

Just looking at the influx of new players on SCL, it seems like the starcraft 2 community is basically stagnating. Out of 20-30 friends who played day in day out since the beginning of Starcraft 2, only 1 still plays rarely.

I attribute the problems with SC2 with the following:

Lack of a community building tool
- Chat channels not really being chat channels
- 100 player limit on popular chat channels usually means no new people can join this community
- No clan support
- No natural tournament support
- No way to quickly arrange 2v2, 3v3, 4v4 with friends

xBox LIVE approach to community doesn't work
- consoles involve inviting real life friends over and having fun
- PC games are played alone, without a good community function, lonely people usually decide to do other things if they feel lonely

Battle.net 2.0 interface is incredibly stale and uninteresting
- Start panel you're greeted with basically nothing, a short news panel and an empty "broadcast" panel
- No natural essaying into eSports
- Dumbed down interface that failed to understand consumers are smart individuals
No LAN removes the abillity to play the game in LAN parties or introduce a friend to Starcraft who hasn't bought it

10GB installation for a mediocre single player
- Need to have the ability to spawn install

Apparent lack of Blizzard anything. Coming into the game, it feels you're already neglected to do anything. Blizzard doesn't seem to be responsible for anything.

Blizzard gives off the vibe that anyone whining about the game is simply that, whining, and doesn't listen to well articulated constructive criticisms. In other words, they give off the image that they're full of themselves.

At the end of the day, I feel they haven't done much after the release of Starcraft to really encourage people to get into the game. They've left this to the hardwork of fans, and gleamed themselves off this free marketing. It feels like they think they deserve this kind of reward and is now biting at anyone who criticizes them in any degree, and if you watch most of the interviews, the fans treat Blizzard like a dictator, nervously laughing at their every joke.

Blizzard needs to understand that it's the fans that keep them alive, and they need to have a more active role in the community.

[JackhammerIV]

Can't really compare LoL viewers with SC2 viewers. They're different games. It's just how it is. And you've overexaggerating it....it was a total of 1.69million viewers overall. Max of 210k unique viewers for finals. Great for them. If they wanna keep it up then they can make their own tournaments and grow their community. Here's MLG Columbus' viewer stats for the overall event (meaning all games included Halo, COD, SC2).....
http://www.complexitygaming.com/news/2828/#

22.5million viewers total and roughly 14,700 people turned up to see the event live.

I would say it's only very recently that LoL is picking up steam. If they can keep those numbers that's good for them but I'll never be one of those viewers.

There was some reddit discussion saying it's not surprising seeing as it's a hugely popular game and that they have so few tournaments a year. Personally I wouldn't watch LoL. It's boring.

Also Riot Games made tournaments with their own money to basically make their game big in "eSports". Give it a big jumpstart. Blizzard has no need to do it for SC2. It's already big now. And in terms of tournament size (player pool and prize pool) it's larger for SC2. I've never liked DotA but ya it's huge everywhere for whatever reason. They promote tournaments much better than Blizzard for sure. That Blizzard can learn from. And they do have their Blizzcon Invitationals. As a company Blizzard is more focused on making balance changes and changes to B.Net 2.0 etc (most of which is questionable of course).

The viewing quality is not diminished due to lack of LAN. It only becomes an issue if lag latency comes up. Some tournaments get it and others don't. We just have to get used to it because Blizzard is really unlikely to give us LAN because of piracy fears.

If they talked to all the pro players...IdrA would pressure them to make huge changes to super buff zerg to the extent it's OP. Sure every zerg player likes that. Obviously Blizzard prefers their own way to balance and pro player feedback is not the highest priority.

It's stupid to believe you constantly have a big influx of new people. Upon release since it's a "new thing" tons of people jump on. These being the friends you talk about who have moved on to other things. That's normal. You'll always get a huge influx at the start or right after a huge media outlet turns the mainstream audience's eyes on that thing. If they don't really have a passion for the game they'll leave. It happens. Deal with it.

I agree BattleNet 2.0 is shit. But we just have to deal with it. Eventually they'll fix it. Probably in like 5 years but eventually.

[JackhammerIV]

Here's another note....why does LoL need to do so much to promote itself in eSports. Let me list the reasons (i might be missing a few):
-HoN
-DotA

Competition. A DotA style game is seemingly easy enough to make and get popular. There are these 3 big games. The grandaddy of them all and it's two bastard children. LoL needs to make an effort to make itself stand out and be the game of choice.

Now let's look at SC2. What's another competitive RTS game that comes close?? Warcraft 3?? Starcraft: Brood War?? Both Blizzard games. So they're basically competiting against themselves. So they see not much pressure to improve. The community dislikes how Blizzard is doing things now but Blizzard isn't making a huge ton of money from license fees to do tournaments. Hence that old news article from Activision's CFO/CEO or something saying SC2 is not really that profitable.

So overall we can complain all we want but we're basically in a monopoly. Blizzard can do all this shit. Make BNet crap. Have a ladder system I hate. Not have LAN. Have a severe lack of esports and community involvement. And still at the end of the day SC2 is still big. I'd still play and watch SC2. It's like a drug we're all addicted to.

[JackhammerIV]

Final thing....
Premature to say LoL has succeeded. It's the very first season. They're putting their own money into it. This is like one of...two...three tournaments a year?? Can they keep their audience engaged??

Probably they can and maybe LoL will eventually have a bigger eSports following than SC2. I'll still find it all retarded though.

Sorry mods for making like 3 posts in reply. I was too lazy to edit it all nicely into one post with headings and hiding points. I just wanna consume some SC2 content (namely GSL July group drawings video) right now instead of spend a lot of time on this.

Overall......is it the IdrA effect that makes Zerg players like this...or does Zerg just attract people like IdrA?? There are lots of exceptions but there are also lots of examples.

EDIT: Also the Broadcasts section is for RealID friends to broadcast I believe. I'm pretty sure that's accurate but need someone else to confirm or deny. Not many of my real life friends are that into SC2.

[Skyze]

not to mention LoL has the stream pop up IN GAME apparently.. its like if BNet 2.0 opened up with the MLG stream on the front page.. You would have 500,000 viewers easily.

LoL wont last, its a pretty bad game and can't even compare with HoN (as someone whos played both for at least a month, before SC2 was around) - LoL is only still alive because it somehow got partnerships in afew tournaments, which mean teams will send people out to play them.. And that its free, so for people who can't afford HoN or SC2 (weither they are under 16 and can't get their parents to purchase an internet game like HoN or are just cheap) so that inflates their user numbers.

[Twilice]

HoN = better engine for further updates.
Dota = better balance and easier to see what is going on.
LoL = lol?

[JackhammerIV]

not to mention LoL has the stream pop up IN GAME apparently.. its like if BNet 2.0 opened up with the MLG stream on the front page.. You would have 500,000 viewers easily.

LoL wont last, its a pretty bad game and can't even compare with HoN (as someone whos played both for at least a month, before SC2 was around) - LoL is only still alive because it somehow got partnerships in afew tournaments, which mean teams will send people out to play them.. And that its free, so for people who can't afford HoN or SC2 (weither they are under 16 and can't get their parents to purchase an internet game like HoN or are just cheap) so that inflates their user numbers.

No. It was just a link. So stream numbers not inflated. Also basically they partnered with the tournaments by paying everything themself. Unless I'm mistaken there is no LoL tournament currently that isn't sponsored in a large way by Riot Games. So a lot of the prize pool etc is coming out of Riot Games' pockets.

[Gradius]

Guess I mostly agree with the OP, at least about battle.net.

With all the power that is blizzard, why haven't they started their own tournaments?

2011 battle.net invitational. :P