What happened to Starcraft 2?

[aznpie45]

So I thought since this forum had such a diverse gamer crowd it would be a good place to ask. What did we do wrong with Starcraft 2? Near the tail end of WoL, it seemed like it was the game all esports fans have been waiting for. There was legitimate talk of network deals and it was even shown on ESPN at one point. Then it all went sour and the game basically crashed dispite a slight bump when HotS was released. 

 

What do you guys think went wrong? Are these types of RTS games just on the way out with MOBAs taking? Will there be a way for LotV to save the franchise?

[ShadowCaptain]

never liked the game, maybe people just got bored of watching?

[Kinda Bottlenecked]

Wait it crashed? I thought I saw it in the intel extreme masters tournament thing...

[SkywardKkalox]

Honestly, it's kinda old atm, also it's e-sport scene has lost it's hype, games like LoL, DOTA 2 and CS:GO have replaced it.

[Not_Sean]

IMO for me its dying since there is not much Dev going on, How stupidly long have we been playing the same game. They have realeased two new games in the time and still no units or anything. I got very over it from that point. 

 

CS;GO is where its at with esports ! ! 

[ZetZet]

1v1 e-sports died out actually, because teamwork sports are much more fun to spectate. Actual sport examples:

 

hockey, football, basketball

lol, dota, cs:go

 

vs 

 

snooker, tennis

quake, starcraft

 

 

you play with friends, you watch teamwork, much more fun.

 

 

 

I think blizzard will revive sc2. Maybe next expansion works on 2v2 meta more or something, that would interest me.

[alphaproject]

Game was for pros anyhow, not very much fun for plebs.

[samcool55]

Riot invested a lot in the e-sports scene of LoL to make it big.

CS:GO is easy to understand and it's easy to see the how good they actually are.

SCII, well it's old, and to understand what's going on takes a while because you need to know how the game works, and that will turn new viewers away.

[Chronos5618]

Think new things came along. And I agree- I prefer to watch team games over 1v1

[pickledpie45]

Think new things came along. And I agree- I prefer to watch team games over 1v1

Well spectator wise, those clan vs clan things were acutally very entertaining for me. Gave a bit more insight into individual player personalities. 

[Not_Sean]

Riot invested a lot in the e-sports scene of LoL to make it big.

CS:GO is easy to understand and it's easy to see the how good they actually are.

SCII, well it's old, and to understand what's going on takes a while because you need to know how the game works, and that will turn new viewers away.

 

AGREE ! ! Even the girlfriend understands it, She watches more tournaments than me. she has her favorite teams and was saying as a spectator sport its very easy to follow and so exciting to watch. 

That been said Cloud9 All the way ! ! ! 

 

NIPlease are just such big let downs to even follow anymore 

[LogicalDrm]

For me it was HotS that killed my intress of it. Anything that changes game in some major way makes it important for viewer to get into what has changed and how it effects the game. Bigger the change, bigger chance that I move to spectate some other game. I remember that there were oversaturation of tournaments while other games had fewer major tournaments to keep me watching. And the player base. Last I remember there were only few good "international" players and Koreans were taking all the top spots in every tournament. For occasional watcher, that isn't really interesting. You want to see variation, chance that unknown player beats the best etc.

[HarmFull]

To put things in perspective Starcraft 2 (SC2) is a totally different beast than your MOBA or FPS.

 

First of all, RTS is a genre that in itself is a lot smaller than the FPS, MOBA etc. This means that there arren't as much active players out there as with other games like LoL or DotA (I believe SC2 active players is around half a million now and declining!). As a consequence of this, this means that the amount of potential viewers that understand the game (which is hard in SC2!) is a lot lower than with other games.

 

Not only that but Starcraft is a hard game to get into! The game itself is very demanding to the player.

 

If you play on ladder you have to make sure that you macro (building workers, army, buildings constantly) while also making sure that you know what the enemy is doing by scouting and checking the minimap. Also when you engage another army you have to make sure you posistion your army correctly and micromanage your units! (by the way are you still making workers?).

As you can see, the amount of multitasking required to play the game perfectly is a lot. You constantly need to keep doing like 6 things simultaniously which is very taxing on the player (there is a reason Korean Pro's average 300 actions per minute!). This makes the game tough to get into and hard to master and this scares off a lot of players I feel.

 

As an eSport, this game is to me (as a fan) amazing to watch because I've seen a lot of games and understand what happens. But I can imagine that this game is complicated to watch. As a new viewer, it's hard to understand what is going on.

 

For example: The first 5 minutes the two players are building up their infrastructure. Boring to watch if you don't know what is happening, but this pretty much determines the pace of the game, What kind of strategies will be used by the players etc. Not only that but most of the time there are multiple points of engagements on the map, making it even more complicated to keep track of what is happening. Even commentators (some of them ex players) have a hard time with this!

 

Not only that but there are a lot of factors that determine who's "ahead in the game". It's not like with MOBA's for example where you can quickly see who's ahead by looking at player level/kills/towers destroyed etc.

 

In Starcraft someone can have more supply (workers/army value) but still be in a bad posistion, having a base more doesn't automatically mean you're ahead.

 

The game is very complicated and therefore it's not easy to follow. If you see a game being played but you're half the time thinking WTF is going on, I can imagine that it's not as pleasant to view as a less complicated game where it's easier to understand what's going on and see the skill of a player easier expressed!