Been calling for Fire Bo for years.

BISU NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

who's going to get hilariously knocked out of the OSL by bad zergs all the time now?

Following this game is just getting depressing.

the only very good player to retire is jangbi really.

also its about time more people realize that being an esports pro is probably the worst career plan of all, let's not even mention the 2nd tier of foreigners trying to make it as pro that are on teams that no one knows about full-time.

the odds of making it are way way way worse than poker really... the viewers can still have fun watching the select few who succeed while the rest will suffer for years because of their choices.

Even though it may be a smart decision, it's still a signal of how people in the scene are feeling.

Is it clearly worse than being a tennis pro or something like that?

you cant compare esports to tennis man. as of august 26th the 100th ranked tennis player (in terms of money earned in tournaments) has banked $260k. they also have more lucrative endorsement deals.

according to sc2earnings.com the 100th ranked sc2 player has banked a whopping $3545 ie 1/73.3 of their tennis counterpart.

just fyi rafa nadal has made $6.85 million compared to innovation's $75k if you compare the money leaders for the year (1/90th).

in short yes its WAY worse than being a tennis pro. about 80 times worse if you're going by tournament earnings.

but does Marc Gicquel command the respect of goofyballer the way yonghwa does???

of course its worse.

And even moreso than what blah says, being or trying to be a "pro" is pretty much a hole in your CV for years, a big detriment for your next career.

Then you can add that being a progamer favours poor lifestyle and health (much like poker).

I mean, more than half the progamers in the world dont have a SALARY. I really thought by 2015 or 2020 progaming would be almost a normal job and there would be huge stages and games on TV and stuff but apparently even if videogames are ultra popular, progaming is still a TERRIBLE option.

What's worse is we get all that promotion from tournament winners saying their parents wouldnt let them play too much at first or something and yadda yadda and now theyre following their dreams and you can do it if you try!

Bull****, really. You can clearly see that guys like incontrol have brighter futures ahead of them than 99.99% of progamers just because he can branch out of actually playing for a living, which is a pit for almost everybody.

One day maybe not, but for now I feel like there's about to be a monstrous wave of wannabe progamers that ruin their lifes because its not talked about enough. Its almost like its taboo to say that you shouldnt try to be a progamer. I dont think I've EVER seen an article about the downfalls of being a progamer in like 10 or 12 years of following wc3 and sc2 extensively.


You see guys like flash giving interviews saying pretty much taht he's depressed and cant even get a girlfriend cause you just cant at the top or you lose. We see guys like stephano and jangbi quitting, we're talking about two of the top... lets say top 40 player in the world just quitting because they feel its not worth it. 40 out of thousands of people below them trying to become like them.

The worst part being that some people are like oh wow I guess progaming isnt that great from the players perspective! after reading about flash or stephano in korea when theyre down and not winning everything, but that just blinds you into not seeing the way worst cases of lesser players. And there are layers and layers of players below guys like these. Some just wasting a few years while in their parents basements, others ruining even more by jumping head first into it without much backup plans except flipping burgers years down the road with dept and other crap to deal with.

I feel I might make a thread on teamliquid about it. I think its a huge elephant in the room that nobody ever mentions. Being a mediocre progamer might be the worst job I can imagine. Unless you just absolutely love waking up and playing the same game 8 hours a day or more for 5+ years.

That is, of course, if your favourite game that you become a progamer in doesnt crash and burn and leave you with nothing. Nothing but years to try and catch up and be a pro at the current popular game or roll your thumbs play 20 hours a day when the next halo or RTS comes and pray it becomes the next big thing.

Shhhh they're obviously just doing it for our entertainment

At least there are streams now, I will say that. But its still a minuscule and for most, a worthless source of income.

My opinion is that while the vast, vast majority of American (and probably euro/korean) progamers are doing what they do because they truly love the game, most are doing it out of laziness/fear of having to be a 'real adult'. Many of the more well named ones (and even the lesser named ones) are either living in a team house or are being supported by their parents. Others make just enough to afford a room in a house and food. Still others make nothing- yet as long as they cling to the title of an 'aspiring progamer', they can temporarily not have to think about other things. Like finding a job, or saving money.

I dunno about that, there's a lot better ways to be lazy as hell.

while i certainly agree with you kirby, there are also a lot of people who do equally useless jobs for the same amount of money, most of whom i would assume have even less desire to succeed at least on some level. plenty of my friends didn't go to college and still live at home and work for single digit hourly, not exactly something that'll get you too far when they realize its time to do something.

obv not the time commitment of a top level korean gamer, but they also actually make some money. so while its not great, i dont think its the worst thing ever. if you try and cant even make money streaming, its pretty silly to keep doing it; people like that would be hard pressed to do well anywhere in life. it also seems like the vast majority need the support of family, as they are still living at home/being an expense, so at some point you'd think a large % will have to give up trying due to the demands of others as well.

ill def agree its not like trying to succeed in poker, but if you are uninformed/acting on a whim enough to blindly give it a shot, i would hardly feel bad for you once you've failed. do articles really need to be written for people to look into their own life decisions?

minimum wage jobs at least dont compromise your curriculum and are better than just hanging on getting your food and roof paid while surviving at 0$/hour.

I think bsball hit a nail with his last comment, a lot of wannabe progamers or smalltime progamers must cling onto the dream just as an escape mechanism from what they actually should do.

I was kind of like that when I was around 15 years old and "semi-pro" at warcraft 3. I used it to escape the really ****ty years I was having back then.

Many do the same with games like world of warcraft of course, the difference is those guys dont actually have delusions of making it something that it's not, like a job.

Exactly

I disagree with this, firing Bo now would be a huge negative. You can't just fire coaches that get 9 wins every single year or your program will never attract a decent coach again. Bo has been getting better year by year, I truly believe that. Last year was probably the rock bottom because it was his first recruiting class being seniors, a class that was pretty godawful.

If you look at the young guys on this defense they're gonna be really good in years to come and you can tell that Bo is recruiting better. We're not going to jump to a top-5 level overnight but it just feels like he's got a solid foundation in place now.

A couple more 600 yard games and I might change my tune.

Meh if you can use it to network, get experience in other computing-related stuff, or broadcasting, advertising, marketing, whatever you can find to do while you're gaming, then it doesn't seem quite so horrible

And if you're like Polt and can be in school while competing in the scene, doesn't seem quite so godawful.

I mean if you're living in mom's basement and only streaming and trying to qualify for WCS then yeah, forget it, but I think people with a little sense wouldn't necessarily try that - and those that would probably wouldn't be doing anything with their lives anyway. Basically what I'm trying to argue is it's still bad, but maybe not quite life-ending.

Low profile players cant get into broadcasting or any sort of marketing. THey are worth 0.

And progaming doesnt help you at all in computing stuff really. If anything, it takes all your focus into just playing and you lack in several areas.

"trying to qualify for wcs and streaming" is already more than the average progamer does. Most progamers dont stream cause they wouldnt get viewers anyway.


Also, polt is a goddamn genius and one out of a million.

I mean if koreans didnt exist part-time progaming could be an option... lol.

Video games as a whole just seems like a bad industry to get involved in (sorry goofy!)

Kind of like the golf industry, no money in golf, no jobs in golf, brutal long hours, market oversaturated because lots of people want to work in their hobby, everyone's solid, etc.

polt is not a relevant example because he is both one of the best progamers (both talent-wise and in terms of $$ won) and one of the most successful students/has the best career potential from a non Starcraft sense.

think someone like catz- his career earnings are 6.2k. sure, he says he makes 'enough' by streaming, but he's 27. what is he going to do in 10 years? more specifically, what is he going to tell his employers he has done for the last three+ years?

to pretty much everything Kirby said, it's stuff I've often wondered about myself. And obviously everyone on TL is worried to death about OMG IF WE TALK ABOUT STARCRAFT DYING TOO LOUDLY IT WILL ACTUALLY HAPPEN so nobody there would ever bring it up.

The one part of the equation we don't really know is how team finances/sponsorships work. I'd be very curious to know how much teams get from stuff like sponsorships, and how that's dispersed to players (if at all), because obviously tournament winnings alone are worse than poverty for 99.99% of "professional" SC2 players (as far as I can tell, "professional" means you don't have another job, because the way it's thrown around for most people it sure as hell doesn't mean "capable of financially supporting myself playing SC2").

But yeah, if being a not-top-tier pro SC2 player is what we think it is - you (maybe) get free room + board in a team house, get flown out to tournaments sometimes, but other than that are playing SC2 full-time, maybe if you're lucky you're making $10k a year (even that's probably on the high side?) from streaming + tournaments for discretionary spending/future savings - it's kinda cool if it means you can spend all your time playing a game you love I guess, but there's still the rest of your life to think about and you're probably ****ing up your future earning potential BIG time doing things like
- putting off/skipping college
- having a huge resume gap that won't look very desirable to employers outside the gaming industry
- having less money = less mobility/flexibility in future, like to move to SF to find a tech job or something

Unless there's a part of the equation we're not aware of, it seems like a pretty bad deal. I'd definitely be interested in you starting that TL thread Kirby.

why would you want to start a TL thread

I would guess 5-10k a year would make sense for foreigners on decent but not rich teams (not the ****ty ones that never played in a real league either), like say beastyqt in Empire who just retired after playing 3 years who by the way made less than 6k in tournaments...

I would also guess that koreans on teams like MVP and prime make absolutely nothing they can spend, at all. Apart from their tournament winnings. (hello MKP gettin flown in by Reddit charity...).

I probably wont make the thread since im banned but w/e lol. If I cared more I would, lots of people are ruining so much time and so much of their future that should be warned more from the community itself. Parents disapproval is something that is anticipated and not enough to convince people that have near no chance at it, the scene itself reinforces that you shouldnt listen to people discouraging you from following your "dream" (which is another topic, the "dream" doesnt stay one for very long once you play fulltime).

I think the whole point though is that it works out for such an insanely small number of people. Obviously Polt is one of them because he's so ****ing good at Starcraft he can ship all the foreign tournaments while attending school no problem. And people like Artosis and Tasteless and Apollo and Incontrol and Idra are success stories for managing to stand out as personalities in the SC2 scene that have built kind of a brand for themselves.

So that's like 6 people out of hundreds/thousands.

Lots of people do this! My boy FishtermerService was telling me about his favorite Terran streamer to watch on Twitch - apparently he lives in kind of a ****ty area of California with his parents, is in Masters, and streams/practices every day hoping he'll eventually make it onto a big team or something. What's this guy's income, like $200/month of Paypal donations maybe? Ugh.

Well, esports and the video games industry are two completely different things. What you said makes sense for esports - in video games, I mean, I make a little (not a ton) less money than I would at Google or whatever and work more hours, but there's a ton of life EV simply in enjoying your job, which I didn't my first year out of college working at your standard monolithic Silicon Valley tech company.