CyanEsports Profile Joined February 2015 Canada 128 Posts #1



Hello and thank you for taking time to check out the Starcraft History Project! I’ve spent a lot of time working on this and although the finished product is very different from what I set out to create, I still think that the information I’ve collected is relevant to the SC2 scene, and to all eSports in general. I believe that the history of Starcraft’s eSports scene offers us some very valuable lessons to learn from, including some important lessons that still are widely unknown or even not taken seriously.



Preface

Hello and thank you for taking time to check out the Starcraft History Project! I’ve spent a lot of time working on this and although the finished product is very different from what I set out to create, I still think that the information I’ve collected is relevant to the SC2 scene, and to all eSports in general. I believe that the history of Starcraft’s eSports scene offers us some very valuable lessons to learn from, including some important lessons that still are widely unknown or even not taken seriously.

You can skip to section three if you’re only interested in the scene from 2010 onwards. I included information of Broodwar (2004-2009) for context, to properly show the trends, and because it felt like the right thing to do, but the information in that section isn’t integral for the conclusion. You can also skip the individual article context sections if you are pressed for time. I’m hoping that this will be as accessible as possible for as many people as possible, while having as much depth as possible too.









With this article, I’m targeting the hardcore Starcraft 2 eSports fans - the fans who have joined the scene in more recent years who may not know the story of SC2 eSports, and perhaps most importantly (at least in my mind), I’m targeting the eSports tournament organizers, Blizzard’s WCS team, and team owners/operators. I really believe that the information I’ve found can be useful for any game trying to create its own space in eSports and professional gaming, not only Starcraft.



I’m going to try and keep this article as fact-based as possible, but from time to time I’ll be offering up some anecdotes based on what I remember about a given point in time, and obviously I’ll be bringing my own personal bias to the table because I’m a human being and it's not possible to be TOTALLY unbiased! You can take those pieces of information however you wish and I will try to avoid presenting my own memories without a disclaimer.



So what exactly are you looking at? Well, early in 2015 the professional streamer/ex-pro/community personality Destiny made a blog-style post to /r/starcraft talking about how dead the subreddit was in terms of casual content. That post really got me thinking about what I could do for the community that I love so much. I had been wanting to produce some sort of Starcraft content for ages but I had no idea what I could do that people would be interested in. This post really inspired me to finally get on the ball. I’ve been in school for the past few years working on a history degree. I’m by no means an expert historian but I know how to write a history paper so I thought that I could research the foreign SC2 community and draw a timeline of the rise and fall of SC2 as the number 1 eSport. As I got deeper and deeper into the project I decided to focus on TeamLiquid.net specifically, and to extend my timeline as far back as I could go. So now I have a reasonable number of statistics and factoids on the Starcraft scene from 2004 all the way to 2014. Ten years.



I used the Internet Archive’s ‘Wayback Machine’ tool to accomplish this. Each month, I loaded the log that was closest to the 29th of the month (that was as close to the end of the month that I could get in the first log) and I recorded which news post on the front page had the highest number of comments, as well as how many comments there were. For a while at the beginning, I also logged the total number of votes cast in that month’s poll. I then took this data and graphed it on scatter plots, dividing it into two sets (pre-2010 and post-2010), hoping to see first a positive trend indicating growth, and then a negative trend indicating decline. I ended up dropping the poll stats from the project altogether though because over the years they showed no trend at all. There were many months that were sadly NOT logged in the Wayback Machine, and there were many missing days. I tried to collect data in a manner that was as consistent as I possibly could, but please keep this in mind.



Before starting in I want to mention that this is by no means a comprehensive history of all the important events that occurred in StarCraft eSports’ history. There were many many stories that I didn’t see at all. Huge events like Idra being dropped from EG don’t show up in TL’s news section. I assume that this is because Team Liquid eventually became a major StarCraft team itself and didn’t report on major happenings from its competition. While it would have been interesting to see the statistics for EVERYTHING interesting that has happened in StarCraft, the goal of the project is to create sets of data that indicate the growth and then the decline that we would expect to see, and then analyze that data to see what the community was most interested in.



No more lollygagging, lets dive into this.







At the outset of this project, my goal was to attempt to identify key moments in Starcraft’s history that indicated what the community valued most, and therefore identifying exactly what it was that made the game so popular. I hypothesized that I would find that the foreign scene was a large draw for many people, and the announcement of WCS in 2013 ended up hurting the scene over the past two years because it forced many foreign players and teams out of the spotlight.



THE EARLY RESULTS



I originally wanted to start in the year 2010 and look exclusively at /r/starcraft. I thought that there was plenty of content on the internet already on the Broodwar years, and I felt that /r/starcraft was the internet’s hub for all things SC2. When I thought harder about how the project would work though, I realized that if I wanted to show decline in 2010-2014, I should first show growth pre-2010. The earliest log for /r/starcraft on The Wayback Machine is for 2009. The subreddit hadn’t existed long enough to be a viable resource of Broodwar information, so I went to TeamLiquid.net for my information. Before we jump straight into the numbers, I’d like to point out that although the comment totals on news posts is very low in the start, the number of votes cast in the polls is quite a bit higher. In 2004, the cumulative comments on the top news post from every month is 535, while the cumulative number of votes cast in the monthly polls is 12,770. This is a large part of why I wanted to measure the polls on TL. Had they shown the trends that would have made it a worthwhile set of data to study, they would have given a fantastic indication of how many lurkers there were on TL through the years. It also might have potentially shown any differences in opinion between the hardcore and the more casual audiences. Sadly, the poll scatter plot for 2004-2009 ended up looking like this :





There was no trend to look into with this set of data, so I dropped polls from the project.



2004-2009 TEAM LIQUID NEWS STATISTICS



Thankfully, the news comments were much kinder to me. This is the scatter plot of the highest total comments on a TL news article each month from 2004-2009:







So the strategy here is to examine the linear regression and identify which articles found themselves above the line. I’m working under the assumption that those news stories were either driving growth, or were written on topics that were controversial.





I want to mention before I start, that the point waaaaay up there





Is the thread for a showmatch between Idra and the Chinese Zerg player F91. I’ll offer some more context on this later, but I wanted to acknowledge this particular story right away because it's such an obvious outlier. Even without that article, there is still a very clear positive trend.



Article summaries/contextualization



I’ll go year by year, identifying which articles fell above the linear regression, and I'll try to contextualize what made them interesting:



2004



- July: A website specializing in gear for Korean eSports teams opens sales for foreign fans.



- November: TL writer/staffer ‘mensrea’s ‘ farewell/resignation letter is posted.



2005



- January: Foreign pro ‘Rekrul’ posts his retirement announcement and writes a blog explaining some of the hard facts about life in Korea, the Korean eSports scene, and Korean team houses. Tl;dr – eSports in Korea isn’t as big as everyone in the foreign scene thinks it is.



- February: Announcement of a clan war series featuring the European team ‘Templars of Twilight’ who would be playing against various ‘well-known’ Korean teams/clans, the first of which happened the day after this post vs the clan HyO. To quote directly from the post ‘…these Clanwars will be a rare opportunity similar to WCG of competition between Korean and non-Korean gosu Gamers’.



- March: Matchups are revealed for the ‘Starcraft Mystery Map Invitational’. Team Europe vs Team Asia. The tournament was organized by Blizzard. Player lineup for each team as seen here:





- April: Professional player ‘Elky’ attends a poker tournament and does quite well. This article was posted on day 2 of said tournament while Elky was in 12th place of 83 participants.



2006

- August: Biographical-style write up on Boxer before he entered military service.



2007



- January: Announcement of a showmatch/tournament for TeamLiquid users vs the Big Game Hunters community on BGHers.com



- March 1: Announcement of the 5th tournament in the ‘Superfight’ tournament series. First 3 players announced as those who were awarded at the KeSPA awards (Savior, NaDa, Bisu) and 6 players selected by fans through an online poll. Tournament series ‘Superfight #5’ update, revealing the players and map pool. The players participating are Nada, oov, Midas, Savior, July, Jaedong, Bisu, nal_ra, and Anytime.



- March 2: Tournament series ‘Superfight #5’ update, revealing the players and map pool. The players participating are Nada, oov, Midas, Savior, July, Jaedong, Bisu, nal_ra, and Anytime. (NOTE: I included two entries from March because the number of comments on them were 144 and 142 respectively, making them essentially tied.)



2008



- January: New map pool announced for the Korean league OSL



- May 1 & 2: Two separate articles in which the VODs for the Razer TSL semifinals were posted. The comments on the threads numbered 655 and 633 respectively. Players featured were Nony, BRAT_OK, lefNaij, and Draco.





- August: An order of CJentus team shirts arrive to be sold to TL.net users.



- September: ‘TeamLiquid Attack’ series with the German Zerg ‘MoonDragon’. TL Attack is a show where top foreigners played regular fans while the games are cast on stream. Moondragon is described in the thread as ‘the best Zerg in the world’ and ‘the master of BM’. Nony scheduled to commentate.



- October: TL Attack with Nony. Kennigit and Fakesteve to commentate.



- December: VODs and Replays for the ‘TeamLiquid.net Liquibition 2008’ tournament series. Canadian IefNaij played vs the Russian BRAT_OK. IefNaij wins.



2009



- March: VODs for the Liquibition Broodsport tournament series showmatch. Idra vs F91. F91 takes the series. This is by far the most popular news topic in the 2004-2009 period. Idra was viewed by many as the strongest American player. F91 was considered the best Chinese Zerg player. The Liquibition series was much like IPL’s Fight Club, with F91 winning 5 straight matches and left undefeated, building his fanbase in a similar way to Hyun circa 2012. This is perhaps the only topic that I would label as ‘controversial’ outright. F91 takes the series and much of the thread becomes fans either shitting on or defending Idra. I believe this is a large part of what made this thread so popular. I believe that it's important to note that a community figure who caused many polarizing opinions was the cause of this.



ALRIGHT. To restate, those are the articles that fell above the line of standard deviation on TeamLiquid.net from 2004 to 2009. So let’s analyze what we have. Its fine to have this but what does it MEAN!?





ANALYZING THE DATA (04-09)



I categorized each of these popular news post under either ‘Korean’, ‘Foreign’, or ‘Other’ (‘Other’ is anything that pertains specifically to TeamLiquid.net as a website). I then made this graph:





First off, to be clear, 2009 had only three (3) months logged in the WayBack Machine, as opposed to the twelve (12) I would be hoping to see. I don’t believe that this was a slow year for Starcraft necessarily, but I simply don’t know. The lack of logs are what account for the dip in statistics, not a decline of the scene.



In total, we’ve got seven (7) Korean stories, nine (9) foreign stories and two (2) stories classified as ‘other’. Is there anything that we can learn from this graph though? Well, I think so. The following is opinion and speculation coming up, so take it for what you will. It's simply my own analysis and I encourage you to draw your own conclusions on what I’m presenting!









Starcraft 2 Wings of Liberty went into beta in February of 2010 and was released in July of the same year. Starcraft 2 was released to an enormous amount of hype, built on the backs of a hugely successful professional scene in Korea and a rise of professional gaming in Europe and North America. It was an exciting time to be an eSports fan. For a couple of years, brands like MLG, Dreamhack, ESL, TeamLiquid, Evil Geniuses, and many more grew their businesses largely on the back of the Starcraft scene. Unfortunately though, Starcraft 2 went into decline.



Here’s the scatterplot for the comments on TeamLiquid news articles from 2010-2014:







Article summaries/contextualization



So just like I did in the 04-09 section, I’m going to list the stories that fell above the linear regression to provide you with some context.



2010



- April: Blizzard awards TL.net with 500 beta keys to give out to the community.



- May: The conclusion of the Kespa match-fixing scandal, perhaps one of the biggest eSports news stories of all time.



- September: GOMTV announces the Global Starcraft 2 Leauge (GSL). The goal of this league according to the announcement is to provide an accessible global StarCraft league for both players and viewers from all over the world.



2011



- January: TSL 3 is announced under PokerStrategy.net sponsorship. Featuring mainly NA and EU professionals.



- August: HuK parts ways with Team Liquid. As far as I can tell, this is the biggest news story that has ever been on TeamLiquid.net.



- November: New line of TeamLiquid shirts and posters is announced.



2012



- April: TSL 4 is announced.



- June: The ‘Liquid Rising’ documentary is released under a ‘pay what you can’ model.



- August: Jinro retires. The Wayback machine log for this month is unfortunately on the same day that the article was released (the seventh) so this isn’t an optimal statistic, which makes it even more impressive. The number of comments on the article in a matter of hours are staggering. It still doesn’t beat HuK though!



- December – EG and TL partner to produce English language casts of Proleague broadcasts. This is during the EG/TL Proleague partnership days.



2013



- January: TeamLiquid Legacy Starleague announced. The third edition of a Broodwar Tournament series.



- June: TL+ is announced for teamliquid.net, offering users premium features.





- October: Interview with Blizzard’s eSports director, Kim Phan. The state of WCS and the plans for the future are discussed.



2014



- February: Mana and Bunny join Team Liquid.



- September: TL power ranking for August 2014. A popular regular feature on Team Liquid, returning for the first time in a long time.











Analyzing ‘10-‘14’s numbers



Once again, I categorized each story under ‘Korean’, Foreign’, or ‘Other’ depending on what the article was addressing. Here’s the graph:







The picture that’s being painted seems fairly clear to me. Interest in Korean Starcraft outside of Korea just isn’t as high as the interest for foreign players. The involvement from the community on stories about foreign players and tournaments is just higher. In fact, it seems that interest in Korean players and the Korean scene is at an all-time low.



With this data, we can draw some conclusions about what happened to SC2 as a spectator sport and why it went into such harsh decline. This isn’t going to be anything new, but I have numbers to back it up. The dominance of Korean professionals who shut foreign players out from WCS and various other tournaments drove many viewers away.







People like cheering for the home team. People like cheering for the team/player that they can identify the most with. Nationality is often something that’s very identifiable. When a player wins a large tournament, there’s lots of potential for their local news agencies to report on them and expose their name, their team, and the game to brand new people. When people who have never heard of Starcraft tune into a tournament and they see their national flag next to a player’s name, they have incentive to watch that player, cheer for that player, and follow that player’s story.





Past round 16 at any given StarCraft tournament, the opportunities for fans to find those players that they can identify with in this way are very few. Korea is the strongest nation of gamers in the world, and by far and away the strongest nation for StarCraft. Within the SC2 community, it's really a joke. The fact that any player outside of Korea is called a ‘foreigner’ is itself indicative of the strength of Korean StarCraft. StarCraft lives there. That’s where its most at home. When a foreign player makes mistake in a tournament, the colloquial phrase used by fans is that they ‘went full foreigner.’ It really isn’t the best attitude to be broadcasting to potential fans. It really is just a fact of life though. Koreans win tournaments. Foreign players have very very rarely come out on top of Korean players, even B-teamers.



Not only does this matter in terms of attracting and retaining a casual audience, but it is also hugely important for attracting teams to the game.



In 2013 when WCS was announced, there were more than a few rumors that major League of Legends LCS teams were scouting for SC2 players. TSM, Cloud 9, and CLG were all names being tossed around within the community. CLG’s general manager even confirmed that the team was interested in expanding to Starcraft 2 both on twitter and on /r/starcraft . So what happened? Why didn’t any of these teams invest in Starcraft?



In my opinion, they didn’t invest because Blizzard’s WCS is simply too hostile to be a safe investment for NA and EU eSports organizations. These teams who are based in North America, and Europe, who have North American and European sponsors, these teams who target the North American and European eSports fans. They want a player who will grab as many eyes as possible and who can rep their organization and their sponsors as effectively as possible. Quite frankly, Korean players aren’t as effective at doing these things outside of Korea. There is often a language barrier, many players have a problem with shyness and they often come across as bland to casual viewers. There are obviously exceptions, and I am in no way trying to diss Korean professional StarCraft players, but these things do play a role in the decisions each team makes. NA and EU teams appear to prefer NA and EU players. Local heroes and fan favourites.



Having the major LCS teams announce StarCraft divisions would have been such a boon for SC2 in 2013. It would have exposed a huge portion of the League of Legends community to the game, bringing us back to the issue of players being easily identifiable with the audience. When I watch LoL or CS:GO with my friends, I cheer for teams I recognize. I know nothing about the scene, but I recognize EG, coL, Fnatic, TL, Flipsid3 and other STARCRAFT teams. It makes it exciting. It gives me a reason to watch and a reason to be excited for what's happening.



At the time of writing, TSM has 19 players signed across five games , CLG has 26 players across six games , and Cloud9 has 41 players across eight games (these numbers are all excluding management and coaching staff). Most of the games that these teams are involved in are 5-person-squad games (LoL, CS:GO, Smite, Halo, etc). A five person squad is a lot more of an investment than one Starcraft player. It's not good that these teams see more validity in paying five salaries, five sets of plane tickets, and five beds in a hotel to send their Smite team (for example) to a tournament than one Starcraft player. Management for these teams have decided that other eSport games are more marketable than StarCraft 2.







When it comes to eSports in general, this data suggests that the most important thing to stimulate growth is to ensure that the professional scene is locally involved. Try to base your scene as locally as possible. If you want to grow your scene in one region, focus your efforts and attention in that region. A European team winning an American tournament won’t stimulate as much growth in America as if an American team were to win. It does seem like fairly common sense.



It is possible that the trends seen in the data is representative of a decline in TL.net’s community rather than the SC2 scene at large. I think that’s highly unlikely though. TeamLiquid is still the largest fansite for all things Starcraft eSports. The upward trend from 2004-2009 and the decline shown in 2010-2014 fits everything that we know about the scene and what happened to StarCraft 2’s popularity. I believe that this data does not just represent trends for TeamLiquid.net as a self contained entity, but rather it represents the scene as a whole.



By now, if you’re still reading, you’re expecting me to say that the best way to help WCS and SC2’s pro scene is to region lock WCS completely and for tournament organizers to put a higher value on doing foreigner driven content. It isn’t as simple as that though.



Starcraft 2 has lost many of the professionals and personalities that were oh-so-popular ‘back in the day.' Remember the graph of data from 2004-2009? Remember the Idra outlier? That guy is gone now. Nony is gone. Grubby is playing Heroes. Even players who started to rise up in recent years are starting to leave us, such as Kane and for a brief and horrifying period of time, Scarlett and Naniwa. I’m not saying that there are no interesting players left in foreign Starcraft, but it will take time to make new and returning fans fall in love with these people in the way that people did in 2010 and earlier.

There’s also the issue that it may simply be too late. A very vocal set of people have always complained since the announcement of WCS that the only players worth watching are the players who are the most skilled, meaning the Koreans. It may be the case that too many of the more casual fans have moved on. To watch LCS for their region, to watch DotA where the playing field is fairly level, to watch CS:GO which is largely European dominated, or any other game that might be out there. It may simply be too late for Starcraft to grab these people back. I don’t know.



If it were my decision, I would make WCS completely region locked. I think that in the short term, the scene may suffer as Korean pros who were making their money outside of Korea may be forced into retirement, some Korean teams may fold as professionals return home and saturate the market with strong free agents, and the foreign scene may lose some of those ‘skill is the only thing that matters’ die-hards. But in the long run, I believe that such changes are the only investment worth making. I believe that such changes are the only thing that will keep professional Starcraft 2 relevant and thriving.



I truly believe that SC2 can be the biggest eSport in the world. The things that are keeping us from that size are all things that we can change. Games have changed their destiny before. Starcraft 2 is the most beautiful game in the world if you ask me. I’d love to see it on top, and that’s why I’ve written this.



If anyone has any questions please get in touch with me. I’d love to do a Q&A stream if there’s any interest. I’d also love to do a similar article on the history of /r/starcraft, though I will be unable to do it in the same way, as the Wayback Machine isn’t compatible with the way Reddit functions.



Please give me any feedback that you have. I worked really hard on this and I’m really nervous and excited for people to read it.



HUGE SPECIAL THANKS TO FEARDRAGON FOR READING THIS THING MORE THAN ONCE AND OFFERING SOME INCREDIBLE ENCOURAGEMENT!







Sources

+ Show Spoiler +



https://www.reddit.com/r/starcraft/comments/2r6of4/goodbye_destiny/cnd03i0

https://archive.org/web/

http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/news-archive/15312-gamerluxurycom-english-update

http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/news-archive/20755-and-goodbyes

http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=22425¤tpage=1

http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/news-archive/23225-tot-vs-hyo-tot-vs-gm

http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/news-archive/24247-mmi-match-ups-revealed

http://wiki.teamliquid.net/starcraft/Mystery-Map_Invitational

http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/news-archive/24873-elky-update

http://teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=42946¤tpage=1

http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/news-archive/48854-a-call-to-arms-bgh-style

http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/news-archive/50793-superfight-5-the-ultimate-race

http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/news-archive/51115-superfight-5-update-032307

http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/news-archive/65007-new-osl-maps

http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/news-archive/72036-razer-tsl-semifinal-1

http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/news-archive/72079-razer-tsl-semifinal-2

http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/news-archive/77561-cj-shirts-have-arrived

http://wiki.teamliquid.net/starcraft/Team_Liquid_Attack!

http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/news-archive/79060-team-liquid-attack-episode-4-mondragon

http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/news-archive/81048-tlattack-season-2-episode-5-liquidnony

http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/news-archive/84031-liquibition-24-vods-and-replays

http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/news-archive/88257-broodsport-vods

http://wiki.teamliquid.net/starcraft2/F91

http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/news-archive/120346-500-beta-keys-for-teamliquid

http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/news-archive/125601-match-fixing-scandal-conclusion

http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/news-archive/141496-gomtv-global-sc2-league-announced

http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/news-archive/180950-pokerstrategycom-tsl3

http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/news-archive/255528-farewell-liquidhuk

http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/news-archive/286244-new-tl-logos-shirts-and-poster

http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/tsl-4/332295-teamliquid-starleague-4

http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/news-archive/347190-liquid-rising-documentary

http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/news-archive/358724-liquidjinro-retires

http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/closed-threads/388131-eg-and-tl-to-produce-english-proleague-broadcasts

http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/brood-war/390936-teamliquid-legacy-starleague

http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/tl-community/418172-tl-announced

http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/starcraft-2/432243-blizzard-q-and-a-on-wcs-2014

http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/news-archive/444244-welcome-mana-and-bunny

http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/starcraft-2/466067-power-rank-august-2014



https://www.reddit.com/r/starcraft/comments/1bk6lq/clg_starcraft2_team/c97fz7w

http://www.tsm.gg/index.php/p/teams/

http://clgaming.net/teams/?team=5

http://cloud9.gg/teams/

https://www.reddit.com/r/esports/comments/jgu6q/an_open_letter_to_the_counterstrike_fps_esports/

I REALLY wish that TL could have done endnotes for citations. Oh well. 44 sources total. I included information of Broodwar (2004-2009) for context, to properly show the trends, and because it felt like the right thing to do, but the information in that section isn’t integral for the conclusion.I’m hoping that this will be as accessible as possible for as many people as possible, while having as much depth as possible too.With this article, I’m targeting the hardcore Starcraft 2 eSports fans - the fans who have joined the scene in more recent years who may not know the story of SC2 eSports, and perhaps most importantly (at least in my mind), I’m targeting the eSports tournament organizers, Blizzard’s WCS team, and team owners/operators. I really believe that the information I’ve found can be useful for any game trying to create its own space in eSports and professional gaming, not only Starcraft.I’m going to try and keep this article as fact-based as possible, but from time to time I’ll be offering up some anecdotes based on what I remember about a given point in time, and obviously I’ll be bringing my own personal bias to the table because I’m a human being and it's not possible to be TOTALLY unbiased! You can take those pieces of information however you wish and I will try to avoid presenting my own memories without a disclaimer.So what exactly are you looking at? Well, early in 2015 the professional streamer/ex-pro/community personality Destiny made a blog-style post to /r/starcraft talking about how dead the subreddit was in terms of casual content. That post really got me thinking about what I could do for the community that I love so much. I had been wanting to produce some sort of Starcraft content for ages but I had no idea what I could do that people would be interested in. This post really inspired me to finally get on the ball. I’ve been in school for the past few years working on a history degree. I’m by no means an expert historian but I know how to write a history paper so I thought that I could research the foreign SC2 community and draw a timeline of the rise and fall of SC2 as the number 1 eSport. As I got deeper and deeper into the project I decided to focus on TeamLiquid.net specifically, and to extend my timeline as far back as I could go. So now I have a reasonable number of statistics and factoids on the Starcraft scene from 2004 all the way to 2014. Ten years.I used the Internet Archive’s ‘Wayback Machine’ tool to accomplish this. Each month, I loaded the log that was closest to the 29th of the month (that was as close to the end of the month that I could get in the first log) and I recorded which news post on the front page had the highest number of comments, as well as how many comments there were. For a while at the beginning, I also logged the total number of votes cast in that month’s poll. I then took this data and graphed it on scatter plots, dividing it into two sets (pre-2010 and post-2010), hoping to see first a positive trend indicating growth, and then a negative trend indicating decline. I ended up dropping the poll stats from the project altogether though because over the years they showed no trend at all. There were many months that were sadly NOT logged in the Wayback Machine, and there were many missing days. I tried to collect data in a manner that was as consistent as I possibly could, but please keep this in mind.Before starting in I want to mention that this is by no means a comprehensive history of all the important events that occurred in StarCraft eSports’ history. There were many many stories that I didn’t see at all. Huge events like Idra being dropped from EG don’t show up in TL’s news section. I assume that this is because Team Liquid eventually became a major StarCraft team itself and didn’t report on major happenings from its competition. While it would have been interesting to see the statistics for EVERYTHING interesting that has happened in StarCraft, the goal of the project is to create sets of data that indicate the growth and then the decline that we would expect to see, and then analyze that data to see what the community was most interested in.No more lollygagging, lets dive into this.At the outset of this project, my goal was to attempt to identify key moments in Starcraft’s history that indicated what the community valued most, and therefore identifying exactly what it was that made the game so popular. I hypothesized that I would find that the foreign scene was a large draw for many people, and the announcement of WCS in 2013 ended up hurting the scene over the past two years because it forced many foreign players and teams out of the spotlight.I originally wanted to start in the year 2010 and look exclusively at /r/starcraft. I thought that there was plenty of content on the internet already on the Broodwar years, and I felt that /r/starcraft was the internet’s hub for all things SC2. When I thought harder about how the project would work though, I realized that if I wanted to show decline in 2010-2014, I should first show growth pre-2010. The earliest log for /r/starcraft on The Wayback Machine is for 2009. The subreddit hadn’t existed long enough to be a viable resource of Broodwar information, so I went to TeamLiquid.net for my information. Before we jump straight into the numbers, I’d like to point out that although the comment totals on news posts is very low in the start, the number of votes cast in the polls is quite a bit higher. In 2004, the cumulative comments on the top news post from every month is 535, while the cumulative number of votes cast in the monthly polls is 12,770. This is a large part of why I wanted to measure the polls on TL. Had they shown the trends that would have made it a worthwhile set of data to study, they would have given a fantastic indication of how many lurkers there were on TL through the years. It also might have potentially shown any differences in opinion between the hardcore and the more casual audiences. Sadly, the poll scatter plot for 2004-2009 ended up looking like this :There was no trend to look into with this set of data, so I dropped polls from the project.Thankfully, the news comments were much kinder to me. This is the scatter plot of the highest total comments on a TL news article each month from 2004-2009:So the strategy here is to examine the linear regression and identify which articles found themselves above the line. I’m working under the assumption that those news stories were either driving growth, or were written on topics that were controversial.I want to mention before I start, that the point waaaaay up thereIs the thread for a showmatch between Idra and the Chinese Zerg player F91. I’ll offer some more context on this later, but I wanted to acknowledge this particular story right away because it's such an obvious outlier. Even without that article, there is still a very clear positive trend.I’ll go year by year, identifying which articles fell above the linear regression, and I'll try to contextualize what made them interesting:- July: A website specializing in gear for Korean eSports teams opens sales for foreign fans.- November: TL writer/staffer ‘mensrea’s ‘ farewell/resignation letter is posted.- January: Foreign pro ‘Rekrul’ posts his retirement announcement and writes a blog explaining some of the hard facts about life in Korea, the Korean eSports scene, and Korean team houses. Tl;dr – eSports in Korea isn’t as big as everyone in the foreign scene thinks it is.- February: Announcement of a clan war series featuring the European team ‘Templars of Twilight’ who would be playing against various ‘well-known’ Korean teams/clans, the first of which happened the day after this post vs the clan HyO. To quote directly from the post ‘…these Clanwars will be a rare opportunity similar to WCG of competition between Korean and non-Korean gosu Gamers’.- March: Matchups are revealed for the ‘Starcraft Mystery Map Invitational’. Team Europe vs Team Asia. The tournament was organized by Blizzard. Player lineup for each team as seen here:- April: Professional player ‘Elky’ attends a poker tournament and does quite well. This article was posted on day 2 of said tournament while Elky was in 12th place of 83 participants.- August: Biographical-style write up on Boxer before he entered military service.- January: Announcement of a showmatch/tournament for TeamLiquid users vs the Big Game Hunters community on BGHers.com- March 1: Announcement of the 5th tournament in the ‘Superfight’ tournament series. First 3 players announced as those who were awarded at the KeSPA awards (Savior, NaDa, Bisu) and 6 players selected by fans through an online poll. Tournament series ‘Superfight #5’ update, revealing the players and map pool. The players participating are Nada, oov, Midas, Savior, July, Jaedong, Bisu, nal_ra, and Anytime.- March 2: Tournament series ‘Superfight #5’ update, revealing the players and map pool. The players participating are Nada, oov, Midas, Savior, July, Jaedong, Bisu, nal_ra, and Anytime. (NOTE: I included two entries from March because the number of comments on them were 144 and 142 respectively, making them essentially tied.)- January: New map pool announced for the Korean league OSL- May 1 & 2: Two separate articles in which the VODs for the Razer TSL semifinals were posted. The comments on the threads numbered 655 and 633 respectively. Players featured were Nony, BRAT_OK, lefNaij, and Draco.- August: An order of CJentus team shirts arrive to be sold to TL.net users.- September: ‘TeamLiquid Attack’ series with the German Zerg ‘MoonDragon’. TL Attack is a show where top foreigners played regular fans while the games are cast on stream. Moondragon is described in the thread as ‘the best Zerg in the world’ and ‘the master of BM’. Nony scheduled to commentate.- October: TL Attack with Nony. Kennigit and Fakesteve to commentate.- December: VODs and Replays for the ‘TeamLiquid.net Liquibition 2008’ tournament series. Canadian IefNaij played vs the Russian BRAT_OK. IefNaij wins.- March: VODs for the Liquibition Broodsport tournament series showmatch. Idra vs F91. F91 takes the series. This is by far the most popular news topic in the 2004-2009 period. Idra was viewed by many as the strongest American player. F91 was considered the best Chinese Zerg player. The Liquibition series was much like IPL’s Fight Club, with F91 winning 5 straight matches and left undefeated, building his fanbase in a similar way to Hyun circa 2012. This is perhaps the only topic that I would label as ‘controversial’ outright. F91 takes the series and much of the thread becomes fans either shitting on or defending Idra. I believe this is a large part of what made this thread so popular. I believe that it's important to note that a community figure who caused many polarizing opinions was the cause of this.ALRIGHT. To restate, those are the articles that fell above the line of standard deviation on TeamLiquid.net from 2004 to 2009. So let’s analyze what we have. Its fine to have this but what does it MEAN!?I categorized each of these popular news post under either ‘Korean’, ‘Foreign’, or ‘Other’ (‘Other’ is anything that pertains specifically to TeamLiquid.net as a website). I then made this graph:First off, to be clear, 2009 had only three (3) months logged in the WayBack Machine, as opposed to the twelve (12) I would be hoping to see. I don’t believe that this was a slow year for Starcraft necessarily, but I simply don’t know. The lack of logs are what account for the dip in statistics, not a decline of the scene.In total, we’ve got seven (7) Korean stories, nine (9) foreign stories and two (2) stories classified as ‘other’. Is there anything that we can learn from this graph though? Well, I think so. The following is opinion and speculation coming up, so take it for what you will. It's simply my own analysis and I encourage you to draw your own conclusions on what I’m presenting!Starcraft 2 Wings of Liberty went into beta in February of 2010 and was released in July of the same year. Starcraft 2 was released to an enormous amount of hype, built on the backs of a hugely successful professional scene in Korea and a rise of professional gaming in Europe and North America. It was an exciting time to be an eSports fan. For a couple of years, brands like MLG, Dreamhack, ESL, TeamLiquid, Evil Geniuses, and many more grew their businesses largely on the back of the Starcraft scene. Unfortunately though, Starcraft 2 went into decline.Here’s the scatterplot for the comments on TeamLiquid news articles from 2010-2014:So just like I did in the 04-09 section, I’m going to list the stories that fell above the linear regression to provide you with some context.- April: Blizzard awards TL.net with 500 beta keys to give out to the community.- May: The conclusion of the Kespa match-fixing scandal, perhaps one of the biggest eSports news stories of all time.- September: GOMTV announces the Global Starcraft 2 Leauge (GSL). The goal of this league according to the announcement is to provide an accessible global StarCraft league for both players and viewers from all over the world.- January: TSL 3 is announced under PokerStrategy.net sponsorship. Featuring mainly NA and EU professionals.- August: HuK parts ways with Team Liquid. As far as I can tell, this is the biggest news story that has ever been on TeamLiquid.net.- November: New line of TeamLiquid shirts and posters is announced.- April: TSL 4 is announced.- June: The ‘Liquid Rising’ documentary is released under a ‘pay what you can’ model.- August: Jinro retires. The Wayback machine log for this month is unfortunately on the same day that the article was released (the seventh) so this isn’t an optimal statistic, which makes it even more impressive. The number of comments on the article in a matter of hours are staggering. It still doesn’t beat HuK though!- December – EG and TL partner to produce English language casts of Proleague broadcasts. This is during the EG/TL Proleague partnership days.- January: TeamLiquid Legacy Starleague announced. The third edition of a Broodwar Tournament series.- June: TL+ is announced for teamliquid.net, offering users premium features.- October: Interview with Blizzard’s eSports director, Kim Phan. The state of WCS and the plans for the future are discussed.- February: Mana and Bunny join Team Liquid.- September: TL power ranking for August 2014. A popular regular feature on Team Liquid, returning for the first time in a long time.Once again, I categorized each story under ‘Korean’, Foreign’, or ‘Other’ depending on what the article was addressing. Here’s the graph:The picture that’s being painted seems fairly clear to me. Interest in Korean Starcraft outside of Korea just isn’t as high as the interest for foreign players. The involvement from the community on stories about foreign players and tournaments is just higher. In fact, it seems that interest in Korean players and the Korean scene is at an all-time low.With this data, we can draw some conclusions about what happened to SC2 as a spectator sport and why it went into such harsh decline. This isn’t going to be anything new, but I have numbers to back it up. The dominance of Korean professionals who shut foreign players out from WCS and various other tournaments drove many viewers away.People like cheering for the home team. People like cheering for the team/player that they can identify the most with. Nationality is often something that’s very identifiable. When a player wins a large tournament, there’s lots of potential for their local news agencies to report on them and expose their name, their team, and the game to brand new people. When people who have never heard of Starcraft tune into a tournament and they see their national flag next to a player’s name, they have incentive to watch that player, cheer for that player, and follow that player’s story.Past round 16 at any given StarCraft tournament, the opportunities for fans to find those players that they can identify with in this way are very few. Korea is the strongest nation of gamers in the world, and by far and away the strongest nation for StarCraft. Within the SC2 community, it's really a joke. The fact that any player outside of Korea is called a ‘foreigner’ is itself indicative of the strength of Korean StarCraft. StarCraft lives there. That’s where its most at home. When a foreign player makes mistake in a tournament, the colloquial phrase used by fans is that they ‘went full foreigner.’ It really isn’t the best attitude to be broadcasting to potential fans. It really is just a fact of life though. Koreans win tournaments. Foreign players have very very rarely come out on top of Korean players, even B-teamers.Not only does this matter in terms of attracting and retaining a casual audience, but it is also hugely important for attracting teams to the game.In 2013 when WCS was announced, there were more than a few rumors that major League of Legends LCS teams were scouting for SC2 players. TSM, Cloud 9, and CLG were all names being tossed around within the community. CLG’s general manager even confirmed that the team was interested in expanding to Starcraft 2 both on twitter and on /r/starcraft . So what happened? Why didn’t any of these teams invest in Starcraft?In my opinion, they didn’t invest because Blizzard’s WCS is simply too hostile to be a safe investment for NA and EU eSports organizations. These teams who are based in North America, and Europe, who have North American and European sponsors, these teams who target the North American and European eSports fans. They want a player who will grab as many eyes as possible and who can rep their organization and their sponsors as effectively as possible. Quite frankly, Korean players aren’t as effective at doing these things outside of Korea. There is often a language barrier, many players have a problem with shyness and they often come across as bland to casual viewers. There are obviously exceptions, and I am in no way trying to diss Korean professional StarCraft players, but these things do play a role in the decisions each team makes. NA and EU teams appear to prefer NA and EU players. Local heroes and fan favourites.Having the major LCS teams announce StarCraft divisions would have been such a boon for SC2 in 2013. It would have exposed a huge portion of the League of Legends community to the game, bringing us back to the issue of players being easily identifiable with the audience. When I watch LoL or CS:GO with my friends, I cheer for teams I recognize. I know nothing about the scene, but I recognize EG, coL, Fnatic, TL, Flipsid3 and other STARCRAFT teams. It makes it exciting. It gives me a reason to watch and a reason to be excited for what's happening.At the time of writing, TSM has 19 players signed across five games , CLG has 26 players across six games , and Cloud9 has 41 players across eight games (these numbers are all excluding management and coaching staff). Most of the games that these teams are involved in are 5-person-squad games (LoL, CS:GO, Smite, Halo, etc). A five person squad is a lot more of an investment than one Starcraft player. It's not good that these teams see more validity in paying five salaries, five sets of plane tickets, and five beds in a hotel to send their Smite team (for example) to a tournament than one Starcraft player. Management for these teams have decided that other eSport games are more marketable than StarCraft 2.When it comes to eSports in general, this data suggests that the most important thing to stimulate growth is to ensure that the professional scene is locally involved. Try to base your scene as locally as possible. If you want to grow your scene in one region, focus your efforts and attention in that region. A European team winning an American tournament won’t stimulate as much growth in America as if an American team were to win. It does seem like fairly common sense.It is possible that the trends seen in the data is representative of a decline in TL.net’s community rather than the SC2 scene at large. I think that’s highly unlikely though. TeamLiquid is still the largest fansite for all things Starcraft eSports. The upward trend from 2004-2009 and the decline shown in 2010-2014 fits everything that we know about the scene and what happened to StarCraft 2’s popularity. I believe that this data does not just represent trends for TeamLiquid.net as a self contained entity, but rather it represents the scene as a whole.By now, if you’re still reading, you’re expecting me to say that the best way to help WCS and SC2’s pro scene is to region lock WCS completely and for tournament organizers to put a higher value on doing foreigner driven content. It isn’t as simple as that though.Starcraft 2 has lost many of the professionals and personalities that were oh-so-popular ‘back in the day.' Remember the graph of data from 2004-2009? Remember the Idra outlier? That guy is gone now. Nony is gone. Grubby is playing Heroes. Even players who started to rise up in recent years are starting to leave us, such as Kane and for a brief and horrifying period of time, Scarlett and Naniwa. I’m not saying that there are no interesting players left in foreign Starcraft, but it will take time to make new and returning fans fall in love with these people in the way that people did in 2010 and earlier.There’s also the issue that it may simply be too late. A very vocal set of people have always complained since the announcement of WCS that the only players worth watching are the players who are the most skilled, meaning the Koreans. It may be the case that too many of the more casual fans have moved on. To watch LCS for their region, to watch DotA where the playing field is fairly level, to watch CS:GO which is largely European dominated, or any other game that might be out there. It may simply be too late for Starcraft to grab these people back. I don’t know.If it were my decision, I would make WCS completely region locked. I think that in the short term, the scene may suffer as Korean pros who were making their money outside of Korea may be forced into retirement, some Korean teams may fold as professionals return home and saturate the market with strong free agents, and the foreign scene may lose some of those ‘skill is the only thing that matters’ die-hards. But in the long run, I believe that such changes are the only investment worth making. I believe that such changes are the only thing that will keep professional Starcraft 2 relevant and thriving.I truly believe that SC2 can be the biggest eSport in the world. The things that are keeping us from that size are all things that we can change. Games have changed their destiny before. Starcraft 2 is the most beautiful game in the world if you ask me. I’d love to see it on top, and that’s why I’ve written this.If anyone has any questions please get in touch with me. I’d love to do a Q&A stream if there’s any interest. I’d also love to do a similar article on the history of /r/starcraft, though I will be unable to do it in the same way, as the Wayback Machine isn’t compatible with the way Reddit functions.I worked really hard on this and I’m really nervous and excited for people to read it. Esports Journalist/Content Creator | Youtube/Twitter/Twitch - CyanEsports