It wasn't only the 6-pool though, which she may or may not have held; the offensive spine crawler was the final nail in the coffin.

Her reaction when she saw is was kind of funny. The 'Fucking crap' face is priceless, although I wish it had been on the other side.

 

Honestly, it sucks ,but a games a game. You do what you have to do to win tbh.

 

Yup. Having read some more comments regarding it, JD looked pretty beat up with himself for doing it but, Scarlett's still through to Gamescom so far as I'm aware then it's September off for her wrists and back to Korea for the GSTL in October.

 

http://www.twitch.tv/wcs_europe

Get hype, season two finals starting.

Fuck my life, waking up at 3 a.m. for this.

As a side note: I'm gettin' real tired of Koreans cheesing Scarlett out in the final games. She was so fucking close.

 

She was. Was disappointing.

I find it hard to really care about this after The International 3 though.

Guess I'd like to see Taeja or Bomber take it. Mainly Taeja. I can always get behind a good zerg though. Guess I can't really lose.

 

I'm hoping Bomber will take it, he's a cool dude and I really like Startale as a team.

Taeja, in an interview before the finals, said that his TvT was really weak, and Bomber has been destroying in TvT lately. 89% win rate, if I recall correctly.

My prediction: Jaedong beats First. Bomber beats Taeja.

Bomber destroys Jaedong in the finals, forever cementing Jaedong as JaeKong.

(David Kim sees the light about how powerful Terran is and balances the match-up by allowing Zerg to tech to Hive with Spire OR infestation.)

 

Lol, Jaekong.

Also, what the fuck happened to like... everyone that was good from the end of WoL to 3 months ago?

 

HotS, just as a new expansion, was very volatile. Things changed up quickly and things are just starting to stabilize in the match-ups. So a lot of the folks that were doing really well in the first few months just didn't keep up with the changing metagame.

Hell, it's still not really all that stable. Only two people from WCS Season One finals made it to the WCS Season Two finals: Innovation and Alive. Both of them got kicked out pretty easily.

And Alive was a fluke because Jim had visa issues.

 

Man, I guess Jaedong really wasn't fucking around there.

Very well played games by him. Not so much by First.

 

Holy shit, that blink misclick.

I think Jaedong was dominating First's mind at the end there. He just reached in and forced mistakes out of Protoss there.

 

Lol Jaekong.

4-0's are pretty boring too. Meh.

 

Kekekekeke.

 

I feel pretty good about not watching any of today's games.

 

I feel like SC2 is starting to die pretty quickly as an esport.

Maybe just because i've jumped ship though.

 

How so? Based on viewer count it is hardly the case. I have to admit I don't keep track of prizes or stuff like that but I have not been under the impression that they're diminishing either.

 

It's more the fact that the scene isn't growing. It's not really losing any viewers, but it's definitely not growing either.

Also, I think MLG might be pretty close to dropping SC2. They already announced that it won't be at MLG columbus.

Also, some LoL streamers get more viewers than WoW tournaments.

 

The viewer count for tournaments is stable, if not growing. We're just not seeing a dramatic increase over time like we have been, so it seems like everything's going wrong.

Viewer count for streamers sucks at the moment, but that could just be a result of streamers just not being entertaining, to be honest. Seems like a lot of folks are "SC2 pros that happen to stream" rather than "An entertaining streamer that does SC2."

MLG probably isn't dropping SC2. There's a possibility, but Columbus may very well be a one time deal due to Red Bull scheduling a major event on the same weekend.

Which is something else, actually. Red Bull is going to announce something major today. People are predicting either a new league or a major LAN, considering the amount of content Red Bull has been producing lately with Day9 and folks.

MLG said they were changing stuff with events and thinking about doing "one-shot" tournaments this year, and the lack of SC2 at Columbus may simply be a result of that rather than a complete drop.


And finally, LoL: They're a free to play team game. That's pretty much the top of the chain for grabbing a lot of people playing your game, and thus watching your stuff.

As much as I think LoL is boring as fuck to watch/play, I know it's going to have the biggest numbers just from the way the game is marketed.

---

And with all that positivity, I'll still admit that I am actually concerned about the Starcraft 2 scene. I don't think it'll go anywhere anytime soon, and I think a lot of the freak out about it dying isn't true, but I'll be honest and say that I want Starcraft 2 to be the best eSport, not just #2 to LoL.

 

SC2 Will be fine, admittedly it's going to take time for it to start growing again but I think it'll be fine.

Why?

- Changing of the old guard, sort of - HotS has introduced a new wave of players, be they KESPA, old BW talent or otherwise, the old guard are very slowly retiring or disappearing with it, and it's good to see new blood continuously enter a scene.

- WCS. WCS is still in its infancy even if its 3rd season soon kicks off. It was hastily thrown together by Blizzard regardless of whatever they said about planning etc around it to compete against LoL's LCS. I don't think it'll ever beat the LCS, but it can certainly compete as Blizzard go about altering the WCS, improving it - now people think this can be achieved through various methods like region locking, but personally I think that doesn't need to happen. We've seen this season that both scenes can compete with Korea, and the more practice the better, as shown by Scarlett and Naniwa who both train in Korea.

- Variety of team leagues, LANs and 'just for fun' events such as Red Bulls training LANs and so on - it's something League can't really do and honestly it's nice to see pro's enjoying themselves and the fans getting some serious interaction.

So what can Blizzard/SC2 do to help the scene grow?

- Stop this bullshit about not allowing pro's/other tournaments to run whilst the WCS is live. Yes it helps focus the viewership on one particular set of streams and event, but it really fucks over smaller gigs that can help the smaller scenes grow or show something different to people. Admittedly WCS is unsurprisingly being dominated by Koreans but region locking wouldn't help either scene, specifically NA as the scene is severely crippled for reasons I don't know about as I haven't paid serious attention to the SC2 scene since they implemented WCS.

- The community as a whole needs to pull its head out its ass and realise SC2 isn't going to be the leading game that may one day bring E-Sports into the light of the world in some kind of glorious revolution for us fans and pros. THey also need to (alongside other communities such as DotA 2, LoL and several others) realise that bashing other games won't help the scene, it just makes E-Sports look like a bunch of 6 year olds complaining over something pathetic. SC2 already has numerous community figures who arguably do more for the scene than anyone in LoL does at helping show the world what SC2 is and how much it means to people, to us.

SC2 Probably won't get as big as it was way back in 2010/11 but that's simply due to it being out-grown by games like LoL, which can't really be avoided - There's no doubt about LoL being easier to pick up and play, compared to purchasing SC2 and having to learn all kinds of crazy timings, builds, bindings and the like.

For now, I hope they just focus on improving the WCS, ignore the minority and retards like Destiny who claim 'SC2 is dead' just becaue he got steamrolled repeatedly and now trolls LoL, improve contact with the community and honestly, ask what the community wants, what the pros want, rather than making stupid decisions for us that only hurt the scene (such as Korean WCS prizepool, no other tournaments during WCS live time).

 

God, I want region locking in WCS so much. 2014 WCS will be a good shifting point for a lot of things, I hope.


Also wish Blizzard would improve Battle.net. Make some changes that actually improve how people can get into Starcraft. Give me some automated tournaments that you had in Warcraft fucking 3. Let me unlock portraits based off of those tournament wins.

Give me some clan wars. DO SOMETHING with clans. I know you're really proud that you managed to implement chat channels for groups of players, Blizz, but I know you can do better.

 

Why do people care about region locking. Why would you want to watch shit tier players play against each other. If they region locked I wouldn't even waste my time watching the shitty players compete. And the only thing blizzard needs to do is something that will never happen, LAN. It is rather unfortunate as a zero lag system is essential in any esport.

On the sc2 is dying thing. It will never be the number one esport, it doesn't appeal to casual gamers, it is mechanically too hard of a game.