For the past year or so, I’ve been living a double life. To some, I am a skilled and tenacious night elf priestess, adventuring through Azeroth at the charge of the Holy Light, healing the injured and saving the incompetent. To others, however, I am but a lowly brood mother, commanding a swarming, parasitic army with occasional success against my enemies across the Koprulu sector. Don’t follow me? Basically, I’ve just been playing a lot of StarCraft 2 whenever I’m not raiding.
Still, being heavily invested in WoW and StarCraft has really felt like living two lives at times, especially when you consider how dramatically different they both are. And I’m not talking about the gameplay; obviously one would expect an MMORPG and an RTS to be incomparable. What I mean is that that the culture and community that surrounds these two games are distinctively different, despite the fact that the games share some of their playerbase with one another. You’d think that one game community would be pretty similar to the next, but they’re not.
The whole thing has left me with a lot of questions to turn over in my mind. Is it possible that the WoW and StarCraft communities could learn from the other? Seven years in, is it even possible for the WoW community to change in any significant way at this point? And if so, is there something missing in the WoW community? To explore the idea further, I started making a list of all the things I thought the StarCraft community had that the WoW community was lacking.
A truly central community news and information hub
There are a lot of StarCraft websites out there, but TeamLiquid.net is without a doubt at the center of it all. The latest news is always available there, whether it’s written up by the site’s editorial staff or reposted in the forums by members. The forums are active with discussion on strategy, events, news, and juicy drama (if you’re into that kind of thing). Members can also post their own blogs there, a feature that many reputable players are known to use from time to time. Finally, Liquipedia (the StarCraft community’s wiki) is hosted there, as well as a comprehensive database of players who stream their gameplay.