Apr 29, 2026
I've played a lot of Starcraft II in my life and was a top 50 player on the North American ladder. I would steal a game occasionally from top 5 NA players and it was an incredibly rewarding experience to compete.
Recently, SC2's popularity has faded and its place in the world of competitive esports has been replaced by team games like League and CS. Why? I figured it's because 5v5 games are more interesting to watch than 1v1 games — there are 5 times as many players creating content, and the commentary can always pan to what's most interesting.
If viewership comes from people who like playing the game, perhaps Starcraft is too stressful and difficult to enjoy. It's a brutally taxing game known for its high actions-per-minute requirements. There's no downtime; in other games you can take a breather while waiting to respawn or while moving somewhere.
The game being 1v1 forces you to accept accountability for losses. In team games, you can blame your teammates. Blaming your team stops you from feeling discouraged with yourself, and also applies a kind of randomized Skinner box effect where you hope for better teammates the next game.
One thing I love about Starcraft is that the complexity and the breadth of options allow you to employ your own strategies and style. I'd spend hours tinkering with build orders, refining them over and over to be more optimal. I would look at the timing of my push, analyze the replay to identify any inefficiencies, note I mined more gas than necessary here, could cut a worker here, all to improve the timing by a few seconds. After creating a build order, executing it to defeat a GM player is very satisfying.
I recently tried playing Dota 2. It turns out being good at SC2 carries over to being good at Meepo, a hero that requires you to control multiple units simultaneously. It was fun — I was winning a lot, and sometimes was accused of being a smurf. I particularly enjoyed the in-game guide builder — picking items, customizing talents, choosing levelling orders, and this felt a lot like optimizing build orders in Starcraft.
However in a 5v5 game like Dota, it's hard to say if your play was what made you win. After all, the outcome is influenced by 9 other players. I could make a change to my items that makes me twice as strong, but that wouldn't make me win twice as much. Combined with the fact that games can be over an hour long, continuously iterating like I was in Starcraft seems impossible. Finally any experiments you run are affecting your teammates' games. Your strategy could be unique and powerful, but if it's not standard, or meta, it forces your teammates to adapt, and people don't like to be forced to adapt.
I prefer 1v1 games and would like to see a resurgence in esports. The most recent Esports World Cup actually included chess! It's a bit naive, but I love the idea that any person, from any background can become the world champion in chess. In a team sport, you would need coaches to give you a chance, there would need to be an opening for the type of player you are, and the team would already have to be a championship contender. With chess, you play whatever moves you deem best, and if you win you'll be the champion.