Yeah, these are good questions. I wish Chad mf'ing Jones or that dude who was a manager in some capacity at Quantic posted here for more than 5 minutes at a time as they would undoubtedly have some very good perspective on things like this.

catz is way above average in how much money he could pull through tho, or show credibly that he managed a team and everything with a website, etc. Weird but would work.

I doubt MVP.Tible could do the same.

I didn't mean that you had to have direct success that way, right, like it's worked out for those guys but very few people are going to be able to do that. I'm just saying, find a way to get SOME side experience doing SOMETHING, anything, whatever you can. Meeting/working with/collaborating with whoever you can. Anything that might be a skill you can use to get into a school or put on a future resume. Not necessarily becoming a highly visible and important on-screen personality in the esports scene - just any experience that might help you out once you leave esports altogether. But yes you're right making a career in esports other than winning tournaments, it's basically impossible to get to that point

god i hate getting caught unseiged by 1000 banelings

such aids

what i hated more was when you clean up the first 1000 banelings fairly well, moments later there are 2000 lings everywhere

ahead in every conceivable way and then POOF you have no army. a minute later ultras pop and gg. yeah yeah, map vision, blah blah.

I don't think innovation v nadal is the relevant comparison here. There are way more people playing really serious tennis and not making any money than there are sc2 pros. And serious tennis is a lot bigger commitment than playing sc2 for a year.

tennis pros all have salaries tho, kind of important.

even if you arent a ranked tennis pro you can make good money with little work. coaching, being a club pro, camps. probably that alone will make you more than 95% of pro gamers

thats why i first cite the 100th ranked players of each sport. the nadal vs innovation shows that the discrepancy in salary is consistent all the way from #1 to #100.

also its much easier to get a job doing something tennis related than it is to get a job doing something esports related. if the tennis guy who's ranked like 500th in the world doesn't ever make it, he can always teach tennis at a club or coach a high school team or something. hell my dad is a 4.5 rated USTA player and gives tennis lessons on the side/for fun and gets paid $20/hour.

SC2 is basically a bunch of Double Bagel girls, amirite?

This.

lol we are going NOWHERE with Mark Pelini, if you think otherwise you are in denial. Guy has had SIX YEARS to get his **** together and has not won a single meaningful football game. Nine wins means jack **** any more, sure it was something back in the days of 11-game schedules, but nowadays that means you went 9-4. Considering you get about 4-5 wins by just showing up in uniform at Nebraska, well, I'll let you do the math from there.

The whole "you can't fire guys who are semi-successful or you can't bring in another good coach!" thing is complete BS, it's a fallacy. I've yet to see one example of this. These guys are egomaniacs, if you offer them enough money, they ALWAYS think they can turn things around.

Pelini can't recruit, he does terrible ATS (strong indicator of coaching failure, as the spread is a good estimator of a team's true talent level), and his record in big games is downright hideous. His best teams were built on talent recruited by his predecessor, who actually was able to land some decent players. Things are gonna get ugly when all these 3 stars he populated the team with completely fill out the roster. Sad thing is he might put together another halfway respectable year with this pathetic schedule, but mark my words, we will never go anywhere without a coaching change.

Erm, Fruitland.

We already reached "terrible 3 star saturation" last year. His recruiting was obviously good with the offense and his defense has a ton of young talent. Legit talent. You Bo haters are the absolute worst, lol.

You fire him now, program is dead.

false, false, false, false. A point spread reflects every single piece of information available to bettors, including coaching.

I'm confident there are plenty of people putting as much effort into tennis as some no-name NA "pro" and making negative dollars off of it. The main difference is that serious amateur gamers call themselves professionals when they are really amateurs.

"Good money"? You can probably make a living, but I doubt it's any kind of reasonable compensation for the amount of time you've invested in tennis.

Any kind of serious competitive sport or activity is going to spawn lots of people who spend all their time doing it but don't make any meaningful amount of money from it. I'm not saying it's a solid career plan to be an SC2 pro, but I doubt the scene is any less forgiving than a real sport, except that the investment of time and money required to make a go of it is a lot less.

If we are really making the comparison of Tennis to SC2 then you also have to include opportunities to make money. Tennis has a minor league with plenty of events called Challenger. SC2 on the other hand had a ATP 1000 event(Which is Tennis' biggest tournaments that aren't majors) cancel SC2(MLG). Then there is small stuff like World Team Tennis, and this other thing in which you can potentially get a scholarship for called College.

A lot of pokerplayers/gamers are comparing their lives with the lives of other sameaged friends/people. Obviously you got it really well if you compare how you live as a 22yo professional pokerplayer compared to a 22yo student, as you obviously got a lot more money.

But the problem is once you reach a certain age, the money you make unless you are really Top-Tier just isn`t that much. What`s like 60k/year for a 27yo? Not much, at least by the standards I have set for my life. That`s the point where there degrees kick in and they start making money, while you are stagnant on your 60k income which most likely gets worse over time and your chances on the jobmarket are getting lower too.

And people who bring the argument "living the dream", well if in your dream you got a ****ty life as a 30+ year old then go for it!

And in SC2 it`s even worse.

i wouldnt be surprised if a non-pro level tennis player could make at least 25k/yr with minimal work, part time. the higher you got past that, the more you can expect to make afterwards too.

i think there are a lot less people trying it than you think. im pretty sure tennis is one of the better sports to go pro in, less people than golf, but more money for the lower levels than basically any others. its not like more popular sports either, not as many kids will have grown up playing it, making it their dream, so those who do have a higher chance of some level of success.

a couple years ago i read an article that said if you have a daughter, teach her tennis growing up and you can almost guarantee a full scholarship because of how behind the womans tennis scene is.

Tell that to Ohio St. They had an awful year, hired a coach who is, you know, actually good, and all of a sudden they are 12-0.

Six years under Pelini, no results, and you don't believe there should be accountability? How long can he bat .500 against reasonable competition before you think he should be out? Five more years? I mean most coaches who are actually good have things up to speed within 4 years at the very least. 9-4 at Nebraska isn't good enough, period.

haven't posted here in a long time, but randomly thought to read up on sc2 as i haven't played in a few months. anyway.

the issue you're all avoiding is that the game is inherently just not that great. it's stale, and there are some oohs and aahs afforded by having better graphics and more intelligent algorithms and pathing, but ultimately (to me, and to a very large portion of the defected population of rts'ers) sc2 just doesn't have the appeal broodwar once did -- and it certainly won't compete with the likes of league, dota, etc (i don't think hearthstone will be a big game, but i also find it to be a more fun game than sc2, which sort of bums me out a little.)

i'm not a broodwar apologist, and in fact i don't play either game anymore so i can't say "and i still follow the broodwar scene emphatically!," but i can give my experience with starcraft2 as empirical evidence. after having learned the game after it initially came out, as a complete bronze/silver ****** to plat, and eventually to masters as terran, the game was cool to devote time to in spite of the stress artificially pumped into the game by ESPORTS and that whole ridiculous movement. i got bored w/ sc2 eventually, like many, and was gone even before the huge terran nerfs that ended WoL, so i experienced probably the golden age of terran, along with some of the decline.

during that time i started playing on iccup, mainly as terran but also as zerg. and it was just indescribably different. to say stuff like "sc2 is a faster more technical version of broodwar" is just a complete injustice to both games. they're completely different and i don't think can even be compared apart from the fact that their holding company is the same (albeit with almost entirely different development.)

it took me like 3 months to learn a single map (fighting spirit), and even that never got boring because there was everything was SO MUCH slower. every click mattered because accerlative mechanisms like injections, mules, chrono boosting, warp gates, reactors, creep spread, speed boosts, didn't exist in broodwar. the game just doesn't flow the same, and as a result in my opinion was always destined to be a blaze that rose rapidly but went out just as soon.

there was a hiccup when heart of the swarm came out, but none of the real issues were addressed (in my opinion.)

tl;dr sc2 engaged it's community just like it's games were played: with growth that was too fast and unsustainable.

anyway, i guess the difference in the two games i see is. the casters, community, players of broodwar that still play seem truly passionate and completely in love with the game. whereas with sc2, it's kind of just some sort of feigned professionalism that probably bandages over alot of the loss in interest some of the pros in the sport suffer from but know they lack an alternative for.

Could you clarify what you mean when you say "none of the real issues were addressed"? What issues do you believe need to be addressed? All I got from your post was you think the game is too fast paced.

I wish we had a game that was as easy to play as SC2 (like, with hotkeyable buildings and control groups that aren't limited to 8 units or w/e) but balanced more like BW so that I could at least understand where the BW people are coming from or why it was so engaging.

But then again, it seems that SC2 has, outside of Korea, far and away surpassed the popularity of BW? Were there MLGs and Dreamhacks featuring Brood War?

This is Nebraska. Urban Meyer and Nick Saban ain't walkin' through that door.

Also, IIRC, Nebraska and Ohio State finished right next to each other in Sagarin Predictor. Ohio State luckboxed several wins and didn't really beat anyone of note unless you count Nebraska and Michigan

Fire Pelini...then what? Who?

I always thought Wc3 was really exciting to watch but it just didn`t take off.