by President of the SESF, Daria Salice
Over the past years Swiss e-sport has been lacking of three things: tournaments, players, and attention.
The e-sport community in Switzerland being based largely on games like Counter-Strike and Quake struggled to adapt to a changing landscape of e-sport games around the world.
A bit more than two years ago the worldwide Release of Starcraft 2 changed this state. The swiss e-sport community embrassed the new Blizzard title more than ever. Players and even spectators came and demanded activities and tournaments. With this demand they also gave back a reason to organize those activities. One of the first activities which came for this new e-sport spirit was the Barcraft movement. Streaming foreign tournaments to make them available to a local audience was a big step for the community and in retrospective acted as the glue to get the group together.
The lack of local tournaments made it more easy to be a spectator than an e-sport athlete itself. In 2012 the Starcraft Series Switzerland (known as S3) takes place for the first time and breaks with the paradigm that only a full blown league can bind players for more than one day to an e-sports format. S3 is basically a series of online tournaments, where everybody can participate and collect points to then qualify for the Offline Final which will take place in the beginning of September in Zurich, Switzerland’s largest city. This format is appealing for two kinds of players:
– Casual players who want to play some matches and only participate on parts of the five Online Tournaments
– Ambitious players who are aiming to qualify for the offline final where 8 players will compete for the big prices
The S3 has been designed for those two types of players, which have different expectations and demands.
Casual players being the larger part of the expected participants are hard to attract, cause they know that the chance to score a good ranking against the more ambitious gamers is rather low. So the prize alone isn’t any motivation, cause not realistic to win. Each player who participates on one or more of the S3 tournaments will receive a discount coupon for each round played.
This coupon can be redeemed in the soon to be open online-store of the tournament sponsor. The prize pool is worth 2’000 swiss francs (ca. 2’200 USD) which for this year is the highest prize pot for a swiss e-sports tournament.
To attire the few but ambitious Starcraft 2 players in Switzerland it’s much clearer how to do that, but more expensive. The organizer of the S3 and the Swiss e-sports federation (SESF) can offer this with a cooperation. The top 3 players at the S3 will win hardware and gamer gear brought by the very same sponsor who gives out the oupons. The winner of the tournament qualifies for the IeSF 2012 World Championship in Korea, where he (or she) will be able to compete with e-sport athletes around the world. In addition to the hardware prizes, this offers a big exposure for the player in the international community.
Even though this is only a start, the S3 seems to manage the balance between the two groups of players. This gives us hope to see some good matches and motivated players on their way to the Finals resp. IesF 2012 World Championship in Korea.
For more information about the S3 the teamliquid-wiki offers results and rankings http://wiki.teamliquid.net/starcraft2/StarCraft_Series_Switzerland
