It’s time for us to end the Esport equivalent of Title IX, and stop discriminating against against talented, hard-working and equally deserving players. A player’s success in Starcraft 2 should be dependent on one thing; their performance, not the country they grew up in, the language they speak or any other trivial matter.
All races should come together and recognize that the region lock is essentially another form of discrimination (and arguably welfare) that inherently punishes people from South Korean (especially ones that aren’t Maru, Trap or Dark) by unfairly stacking their (limited) tournaments.
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The reason for it is lag. At least that is my understanding.
If you play in NA it can be very laggy to play in other servers. Starcraft can be very micro intensive and trying to stutter step marines or control a disruptor can be the difference between winning and losing a game. I’ve had many games (on the NA server btw where I live) where a lag spike occurs and after my colossus is magically dead.
Anyone can play against any player on any region. I’m setup on NA and EU.
I think he is talking about tournaments that takes place live on stage.
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Yeah sure. Except we did that before and Koreans dominated everything. To be fair, at this point, EU and to lesser extent the rest of the world has caught up so there is no need for it anymore.
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No, because it didn’t work out well before. It ended up being like 14 koreans in the top 16 and then like 2 foreigners at every single tournament. So it discourages new talent for coming up and you don’t get to see your favorite players. It’s not as much fun to see, basically, GSL part 2, 3, 4, and 5 every time a weekend tournament happens. The better approach is to try and foster new tournaments in korea. The game is such much better now that we can tune in to a WCS and root for our favorite players and everyone can come out isntead of what we had which was like 7 koreans and maybe like a scarlett or a Nerchio who would then get eliminated the next round. It has to do with the longevity of the game and giving incentive for people to play. If you stifle all that out and say, “Welcome to the game. If you want to make the top 32 you have to make it though the GSL all starts. Good luck” It’s not good. The system is fine and more exciting. So when there are things like GSL vs the world the story lines are cooler.
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That’s a case where region lock should end. Online, keep the same system. Same for official online tournaments (can’t control the private tourneys, they can do whatever as long as they don’t get points for Blizzcon via those events) though.
KR players aren’t so crazy dominant now that more private teams exist and provide training for up comers which I believe was the initial reason for why region lock was enabled; to prevent the game from being dominated by KR and thus allowed for the foreign scene to grow into what it is today; an equally competitive pro player base.
xD
Serral is the best foreigner and even he doesn’t have a positive win-rate vs Innovation, who isn’t even the best korean. Serral’s generally 6.7-6.8k mmr on KR. Dark, Dear, Zest, Rogue, Armani, Cure, Maru, Innovation bounce around between 6.7 and 7k mmr. Hopefully you saw the finals of HSC where Taeja (about 6.4k on KR) took serral to a the final game in a best of 7.
There’s no way even serral would win tournaments anymore if the gates were open and floods of koreans entered foreign events. The region lock exists for a good reason. There is an enormous skill difference between the two and every single tournament would be dominated by koreans like the HotS and WoL days.
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If they made is so like a few Koreans could qualify and compete in the foreigner tournaments I would be all for it. I.E. Dont let every tournament be dominated by all Korean players.
The problem is that they are such formidable players that they are pretty much guaranteed to win the tournament just by letting them in. The only person who stands a chance vs them is serral.
IEM was won by soo. WESG was won by Innovation. GPL was won by Innovation, too. ROG was won by Stats. GSL vs World was won by Serral. Blizzcon won by Dark. Homestory cup won by Serral.
These are all the non-locked premier tournaments in 2019. Koreans won 5 of the 7. Serral won the other two. There are loads of koreans just as good as these guys and even better. Cure, Armani, Dear, Zest, Taeja, Bomber, Dream, the list goes on and on. Assuming Serral can go toe-to-toe vs the Koreans (unlikely) he’d still only win maybe one in every 15 tournaments if the region lock were removed.
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Ehh Dude, this is not talking about servers, its about offline tournaments lmao
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This is about tournaments lmao
Because they happened to be harder working and better players, not because they have an unfair advantage
Region lock is the dumbest sht ever
No region lock creates more competition, more competition is better for the scene
If blizz wanted to help the régional scenes they could have done it plenty of ways, instead they fckd it up for the korrans
Source? Over what time period?
Did you see GSL vs the world where Korea got mudstomped?
they have pretty even winrate,since 2018,you can look it up,and inno isnt even the best terrans atm,he still can beat serral
if you put serral to code s,he would probably be a regular ro 8 player,but he wouldnt dominate so much as he does
cant link it,this knowledge comes from following the pro scene,iem katowice last year,hsc 20 now,and other tournaments batz probably also watched
if you so curious go to liquipedia,i just know their winrate is pretty even since i watched all of them over the period
I don’t think it’s time to end region lock
You absolutely can link it and research it. You are lazy and more importantly wrong.
From a quick search on Aigulac since Jan 1st 2018:
Serral - Innovation format
8/4/2018
3-0
11/25/2018
4-3
3/1/2019
1-2
3/17/2019
3-4
8/1/2019
2-0
11/24/2019 (HCS XX)
1-3
3-0
12/8/2019 (Nation wars)
2-0
For a grand total of
19 - 12
Win rate of 61.3%
Much higher than 50% and nearly the same as his overall win rate vs Korean terrans over the same period (41–24, 63.08% win rate). Slightly lower probably because his overall includes matches against lesser terrans like bunny, Taeja, etc.
How else will foreigners get their blizzard funded welfare? If the best Terrans aren’t banned from tournaments anymore, how will the Terran Cry Force vilify Zerg?