An update for the SC2 community from Winbar

Hey Everyone,

We’ve been supporting Starcraft 2 now at epic.LAN since epic11 in 2013, making this our 8^th year of welcoming the community to our events. During that time, the SC2 community has had its ups and downs and unlike others, we’ve consistently kept SC2 in the lineup whether there has been a handful of players at the event, through to the record-breaking numbers we saw last year.

So personally I have to say it does sting a little bit when a small number of the UK SC2 community members suggest that we don’t care about SC2 at epic.LAN, hence me wanting to clear a few things up so you hear it direct from me, particularly after the last few online events.

Importantly, let’s all remember, none of us really want to be doing online events, it’s not our thing. We all want to be back in the LAN hall as soon as possible, we miss it and we miss all of you. What we’re doing online is our best effort to keep things going until we can all meet again in Kettering hopefully later in the year.

We could quite easily have closed everything down and done nothing since last February and let all of the communities we support drift away and our business fold, but we don’t give up that easily. As a group, we’ve been putting on LANs since CLUK1 back in 2003, so don’t think I give up without a fight. That effort has already seen our efforts recognised with new partners for all of 2021 as well as winning Tournament of the Year at the UK Esports Awards last year.

On to SC2 in particular to pick up on a few questions/issues raised with us recently to at least explain our decisions so you understand why we’ve made them even if the outcome isn’t necessarily what you hoped for:

• Charging for Tickets and 100% not going in to the prize pool – Look, we’re still a business, and businesses have overheads, just because we don't have a conference centre to rent out doesn't mean everything disappears.
  
  Our model is running events with a ticket price, we’re not a traditional online league with the whole business structure created around that. If we don’t cover those overheads then there’s no epic.LAN to come back to in the future and we’ve been so close to that line getting through this pandemic, there were times I thought we’d have to fold.
  Like so many other businesses during COVID, we’ve had to take something that was previously physical and move it online quickly.
  
  After prize pools and taxes (everyone forgets the tax part) there’s about £1.50 per person left that goes in to covering all of
  our other business costs, I wrote out a much longer explanation in October last year that you’re welcome to go and read (https://www.epiclan.co.uk/articles/online-tickets).
  
  If people don’t feel that’s good value, then fair enough, but for those that do and have supported us throughout this whole thing (and in many cases even voluntarily donated more to help us) then my appreciation goes out to you and you are the ones that can give yourselves a huge pat on the back for making sure we’re still going.
• SC2 Brings in Lots of Viewers – It does, our SC2 stream has been on Twitch Front Page for around 3 of our recent events, bringing in thousands of peak viewers, but it's been on front page because we’ve requested it! As part of our Twitch Partnership, we work closely with the Twitch team in the build up to our events to submit a schedule of things that we think would make for good coverage and we’ve highlighted SC2 on a number of occasions, especially when we hit the huge numbers last February at LAN.
• Sponsorship – I have to be realistic with everyone that SC2 is a really tough sell alone for sponsorship in 2021. It’s not the most current game, it doesn’t have big hardware partnerships behind it and it’s not up there in the top few games that every partner wants to back. It’s very easy to say “you should get the tournament sponsored” but the reality is really really tough. That’s why this year we’ve changed our approach and looked to create partnerships based on our event success as a whole and that’s already paid off with our new Overclockers UK and Logitech G 2021 partnerships which have seen all of the prize pools increased (remember, that’s divided up across 12 tournaments throughout the year) and we’ll be continuing this approach in the future with more partners so that everybody at our events benefits.
• Region Locking – We’re never going to please everyone with this. We looked through both our survey results and your own community survey last event and there was a real mixed bag of replies for and against. Some people want it UK only, some people feel it should stay open to raise the profile of UK SC2 and help it to grow, then there’s the practicalities of managing that when it’s an online event. However, what isn’t OK for me is UK players having to play on NA servers last event as the best compromise, giving them a worse playing experience, that’s surely not what a region lock aimed to achieve? We don’t lock down our physical events and we often have people travelling to the event from outside of the UK, in fact SC2 has seen that too with friends making the trip over to see people they would have only played against online before. So we’ve simplified and applied the region rules consistently across all of our tournaments while they’re online, you must be physically playing from the UK or Europe at the time of the tournament.
• Why doesn’t SC2 have stage finals? – I wish we had any sort of stage finals right now… But that aside, simply at the moment, we have 1 stage and 3 tournaments all finishing around the same time on a Sunday at LAN, something has to give and where there has been previous sponsor/publisher obligations we’ve had to make those calls.
  So there must be a compromise somewhere around the scheduling to make it all fit, we’d love to see all 4 esports titles have a stage final somehow. We’ve set a challenge to the league ops team to create a new structure as an experiment at the next online event that can then be applied to LAN to finish the main tournament earlier on the Saturday evening to then run something different and a bit less serious for the community on the final day, like a duos or FFA fun tournament.

To those who have continued to support epic.LAN through all of this, and especially those of you who have been attending since the start, a massive thank you from the whole team. Please stick with us, bear in mind that we all want the same you want, which is simply to be back at LAN as soon as possible and seeing you all there!

Stay Safe, 

Jon