[Part 3] The Good, Bad, and Ridiculous of Proleague

The Surprising Second Best* Individual Season in Proleague HistoryWhen discussing the greatest individual seasons in Proleague history, 2016 should be the year that comes immediately to mind. Jin Air’s Maru went 22-4 for a 85% win-rate, the highest of any player in SC2 Proleague history (among players who played in at least 25% of their team’s matches). Stats trailed him with a 27-9 record and 75% win-rate, which is the third highest of all time under such criteria.

In that case, who’s second place? It’s not Flash or Rain—both of whom won a ton of games for their teams in the first two years of StarCraft II Proleague. It’s not INnoVation, who, despite being regarded as one of the greatest team league players of all time, never managed to get above the 70% seasonal win-rate threshold in Proleague.

I imagine nearly every reader will be surprised to find out that 2013 Classic is the player with the second highest single-season win-rate in Proleague history at 80%*. Even if you’re familiar with Classic for his 2014-2015 peak, his anti-Zerg heroics in 2019, or his present-day resurgence after military service, you may have forgotten about how he first ‘arrived’ on the scene in 2013.

For the first half of 2013 season (technically 2012/13 since the season started in December of 2012, but let’s not make things too complicated), Classic was a largely irrelevant Terran player on STX-Soul, putting up a mere 2-7 record in the first half of the Proleague season. Then, as Proleague took a break at the halfway mark and prepared for the transition to Heart of the Swarm, Classic did something that seemed insane at the time: he switched to Protoss.

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Classic was so good in 2013 that the broadcast kept breaking as it tried to keep up with his might

As it turned out, this turned out to be a career-making decision. In the second half of the season, playing HotS Protoss, Classic earned a hugely impressive 16-4 record for a 80% win-rate. One of those wins actually came in the last game of the entire Proleague season, with the new-look, elite-Protoss version of Classic taking the championship clinching victory over Woongjin’s Flying in the grand finals. All with just a half a year of Protoss experience!

Of course, you can see why all those asterisks were required. Protoss-Classic played in barely 25% of STX Soul’s total matches that season, and was thus more of an elite utility-player than a super-ace like 2016 Maru and Stats. However, when you consider that Classic basically became a high-level Protoss immediately after picking the race up, his achievements during the second half of the 2013 Proleague season definitely deserve special recognition. It’s almost certain we’re never going to see such a successful race change again, unless the balance council overcorrects wildly in favor of Protoss and Reynor decides to adapt.

Burrowing Into Our Hearts: The Never Realized Promise of Departure

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You’re going to want to watch this one

One of the defining quirks of Proleague, perhaps even going back to the Brood War days, was the presence of the Zerg specialist. While players like GoRush, ZerO, Soulkey, and soO left their mark on their scene with their solid all-around play and adaptability, there were also an oddly high number of Zergs who got by on wit and guile. While most of them simply lacked the mechanics to compete with top players, others seemed to just enjoy weirdness for its own sake.

Some, like Dark, Rogue, and Ragnarok, would grow into being more than just Proleague snipers over time. Alas, others never really made a lasting impact on pro-StarCraft II. Despite playing professional StarCraft for years, names like Check, Sleep and Horror have become lost in the annals of history.

If there’s one Zerg I want to rescue from this abyss—if just for a single TL.net article—it would be Team MVP’s Departure. For a brief period in 2015, he was a hipster favorite in live report threads, one of the dark horse picks to eventually have a break-out season. His record in Proleague was less-than-enviable (he went 0-7 in 2014 and 5-9 in 2015), but he showed just enough verve and potential for fans to hold out hope.

No better example exists of DeParture’s unique brand of creativity than his game against herO in Round 3 of the 2015 Proleague campaign. After a standard start, DeParture rushed his Burrow upgrade, a move which the casters suspected was to block herO’s expansion. They were correct, but a tad short-sighted—DeParture had something far more interesting in mind as a follow-up. Just as herO realized he was unable to take his third, Departure started a Roach Warren, a bunch of Drones and A SECOND ROACH WARREN???

With Burrow already acquired, Departure used his double Roach Warrens to research both Glial Reconstitution AND Tunneling Claws. As was often the case at this pre-Ravager time, Sentries made up a huge portion of herO’s early/mid-game army. Normally this would prevent all but the most committed Zerg attacks, but with both Roach upgrades done early, DeParture casually sharked under each Force Field wall herO hastily put up. herO did an admirable job at stalling given that he was down 35 to 115 in army supply, but ultimately he was just setting himself up for a FanTaSy GG-timing. No, it wasn’t the first or last double-Roach Warren strategy we’d see in pro StarCraft II, but it was still a hell of a stylish way for an underdog to take down the opposing ace.

When herO finally conceded the match, it was heartwarming to see the sheer joy on Departure’s face from having picked up such a valuable point. Settling back down on the bench, he tried to hide that his eyes were welling up, but we knew what he was feeling at that moment.

Unfortunately, for a player who had toiled in obscurity from day one, this was the highlight of DeParture’s Proleague career. In many respects, this is the perfect distillation of the dark side of progaming. For each Maru, who has earned over a million dollars and routinely appears on the grandest stages, there are dozens of DePartures whose names have been mostly forgotten (not to mention the trainees who we never learned about to begin with). I don’t know what happened to Departure afterward, and I don’t dare to claim that his victory against herO made all of his effort worth it. At the very least, I hope that when he looks back on this match, the tears in his eyes aren’t those of regret.

Sonic Saves StarCraft Until He Doesn’t

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If this doesn’t make you buy shoes, I don’t know what will

I’ve waxed poetic time and again about how great 2015 was when it came to StarCraft II. The combination of SSL, Code S, and Proleague made for non-stop StarCraft II—all of it played at the highest level seen up to that point. The thing is, for better or worse, the notorious businessman Sonic played a big part in all of it. Now, the entire Sonic saga is too sordid to summarize in its entirety here (a TL.net thread for reference), so we’ll give you the short version.

Sonic was a caster, tournament organizer, and StarCraft super-fan who happened to spend quite a bit of money on a variety of StarCraft-related ventures. At the time, we didn’t really question where the money was coming from—we just assumed that AfreecaTV streaming was lucrative and that Sonic’s new sneaker business SBENU must be doing really well. Initially Sonic focused his efforts on post-KeSPA Brood War, but eventually got involved in the SC2 scene.

In the spring of 2015, as the once great team StarTale was on its deathbed (we previously touched upon StarTale’s sponsor woes), Sonic swooped in to make SBENU the new title sponsor. Not only that, but Sonic and SBENU replaced Korean search-giant Naver as the primary sponsor of the SSL heading into Season 2 (which was known for the rest of the year as the SBENU StarCraft II StarLeague).

I don’t want to say Korean StarCraft II was ‘dying’ at the time, but it sure wasn’t growing. Any influx of new money was welcomed by the scene, which was too used to seeing SK Telecom and Hot6ix sponsor the vast majority of events.

In hindsight, we probably should have been a bit more suspicious of Sonic’s financial situation. As seen in the video above, K-Pop band AOA featured prominently in promos for SBENU, and even top-tier acts like IU got involved in promotion of the shoe brand. SBENU’s aggressive marketing was paired with even more aggressive expansion, as the brand opened over 100 stores in Korea.

But, all wasn’t well behind the scenes at SBENU. Sonic had hugely overextended his finances, and the birds would soon come home to roost.

It all started with an allegation from a shoe factory in Busan that claimed they were owed over $2 million from SBENU. From there, the situation rapidly got worse, from reports emerging that barely anyone was buying the shoes, store owners claiming they weren’t receiving goods on time, and that SBENU was dumping their inventory at over 90% discount at clearance stores. Lawsuits were filed, accusations of embezzlement were made, the alleged unpaid debts grew to $6m+, and eventually the story got so big that the police got involved.

Oh, it didn’t help that the shoes were apparently of very poor quality. In fact, one can find Korean articles and blogs about laundry store owners complaining that the dye in the shoes was leaching out while washing and messing with the machines. And, for everyday users, they had to deal with the fact that if they got caught in a rainstorm their socks were going to end up the same colors as their shoes.

This screams quality

While SBENU wouldn’t officially be dissolved until October of 2016, it was effectively ruined as a business by the end of 2015 and lost its ability to be a patron of esports. Courts eventually cleared Sonic of any legal wrongdoing (he ‘merely’ racked up a ton of debt from unsound business practices and screwed over his suppliers and store operators), his name was permanently disgraced both in and outside of StarCraft.

StarTale, the team of a thousand lives, was rescued for the final time by AfreecaTV in 2016, becoming absorbed into the Afreeca Freecs. SSL would operate for two more years, sponsorless in 2016 (except for Blizzard), and supported by Jin Air in 2017.

CJ Entus and herO Maintain a Teamleague Tradition

Unsurprisingly, herO’s greatest moments came in individual leagues

One thing that makes team competition so interesting is the diversity of team compositions. Some teams opt for a line-up of well-rounded players without any clear weaknesses, like today’s Shopify Rebellion. Some are straight up superteams like various iterations of SKT throughout the ages.

Yet, of these various team types, there’s one that tends to really stick in our memories: the one man army. Whether it’s Team TaeJa or Jaedong Oz, we tend to be most impressed when individual brilliance negates the ‘team’ in teamleague. While there are a number of examples to choose from in Proleague, I think CJ Entus and herO’s 2016 campaign typify this trope the best.

For a while, CJ Entus were actually one of the deeper teams in Proleague. They started with a legitimate one-two punch in herO and Hydra, and once Hydra left for the WCS Circuit, BByong and ByuL stepped up to take his place. 2015 was the season where it all came together, with Mutalisk-maestro ByuL becoming arguably the best Zerg in Korea, while Bbyong continued to chug along as a reliable second/third banana. This led to an incredible campaign in which CJ finished the regular season in second place, their best result in StarCraft II (not counting the hybrid BW/SC2 season, because c’mon). Sadly for CJ, they were eliminated by Jin Air in the semifinals of the playoffs, with only herO, BByong and Sora winning games during the back to back Best of 7 series.

While 2015 ended in playoff heartbreak, it seemed like CJ Entus had a fantastic foundation to build upon. Alas, 2016 was an utterly catastrophe.

First off, Bbyong got a life-time ban for match-fixing. We could probably stop right there, but there’s some comedy in describing how much worse it gets. Not only did BByong get deleted from the roster after playing a single game, but ByuL’s level of play took a nose-dive after Mutalisks fell out of the meta, going from a 21-16 player in 2015 to a 9-11 player in 2016. CJ desperately tried to fill the BByong-sized gap in their line-up, but to no avail. Bunny got the most chances but performed dismally with a 5-12 record. RagnaroK didn’t do much better, going 3-7. Hush was the worst of the options CJ tried, as he put up a donut with a 0-9 record.

It’s telling that CJ’s best support player ended up being none other than a thoroughly washed-up MC, who came out of retirement and went 4-3 for the beleaguered CJ Entus squad.

Meanwhile, herO recorded a spectacular 20-9 map score during the 2016 campaign, with his 69% win percentage being the third best during the season (#1 and #2 being the aforementioned Maru and Stats). On the other hand, the rest of CJ Entus went 21-43, resulting in the team finishing third from last. Only the existence of truly dire teams, Samsung and MVP, ensured they didn’t suffer any deeper embarrassment.

The end of Proleague in 2016 was a huge blow to the scene, yanking away the salaries and teamhouses that made professional StarCraft II at least a somewhat secure career option in Korea. Yet, somehow, you have to imagine that herO was at least a little bit relieved, freed from the burden of dragging around one of the heaviest collections of teammates in Proleague history.

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