The next thoughts were going through my mind for a long time while watching all the amazing SC2-tournaments of the last months. This is my first post on any SC-related, I'm not what you would call a gamer - I just play and watch Starcraft and have been following this wonderful, amazing and growing scene of fans and players since my days in school, when the original title was released.

As you can imagine I'm a little bit older than most of you guys and a lot older than some, but I think this doesn't matter here. It's my opinion i want to share, and I would like to encourage you to agree or disagree with it, to think about it in the first place.



The reason why I'm writing this post is the feeling of sheer joy and thankfulness I experienced last weekend when, as most of you know, the WCS-Finals went down in Cologne/Germany.

The Grand Final between Jaedong and Bomber marked, in my opinion, one the most important milestone in the evolution of Starcraft as an E-Sport-game, its global perception and soul. It didnt matter to me that much who won, but that it would be one of those two.

The fact that, of all the great players who attended this event – the best in the world – these „Oldschool-Dudes“ (along with Naniwa, Taeja, Polt, MMA etc.) advanced to the finals brought something up that I've been waiting for, for a long time in the E-Sports scene: a Global Scale you may call it, or Rules that stand higher than the metagame, Rules, that make SC2-Esport to an actual Sport.

Let me get into this.



When you are a basketball player who gets drafted by an NBA-Team and shock the basketball-world by scoring 34 points in your debut game, you are probably pretty good. You get some newsflashs, some interviews will be made from some basketball-magazines for a limited amount of time. Some people will call you talented, hopeful, but that will be it.

Is „good“ enough? „Very good“ even? No! Not by far! Not for you, not for your team and especially not for the sport in general.



To make a difference, you need to get even better, more sure of your abilities and the rules of the game you play. You must lead your team, get more balls in the basket, get even better, become more professional, more all-rounded or more specific, until you score an average of 33 points per game per season, and that over a period of 5 or more years in a row.



Then, and just then, when some start calling you „great“, people from the outside will start getting interested and start watching games simply because you play in them. They want to see you, you'll become more than the sport. You appear in tv-spots, where you fight against monsters, on posters in shopping-malls, you'll become an idol, and you will bring more people from the outside – noobs if you will - to the game you represent.

This will make the game grow, and that is what's the most important thing because growth means exposure, exposure means sponsors and money, and money (in Esport terms) means more tournaments, a better infrastructure, better content and more satisfied fan-experiences.



In SC2, this old pattern simply wasn't possible, hopefully until now. We never had a Michael Jordan or Tiger Woods, there was no full-time Roger Federer (or BW-Flash :-) around, just a lot of part-time ones.

The amount of players that were called „the best in the world“, if you only take the last year or so, is staggering. The Titans of our sport fall quickly and new ones are chosen by casters and fans on the fly, just for a couple of months, weeks even, until another new king is crowned.



This habit of hyping is understandable, because sportfans need someone to look up to, someone to follow, but in SC2-Esport it was (at least for me) frustrating and counterproductive for the reception of the sport in general, because no one, not a single one, wants to see idols fall so easily.



When a big magazine is interrested i an article about SC2-Esport, it's interresting that they will never interview just a player. It's almost always a caster that takes the frontpage, maybe with an accompanying picture of a big crowd of spectators, the two playing-booths somewhere in the backround. The face of SC-Esport today are not the players, like they would in any other sport (or were in Broodwar), but the representatives of the crowd outside the booths.

This WCS-Finals could (and its a big COULD) be the end of this habit. That two veterans killed everyone along their way shows that they know their game like good sportsmen do. This gets easier of course, as time goes by and the game gets figured out (and not so many patches come up)



My point is: Let the game grow, don't push it, because we're all but halfway through the evolution of HotS. Letting idols fall is dangerous, because it's frustrating for the fans so please don't call anyone (the best) until he (or she) is the best for a long long time.





