>Even in "regular sports", ratings rise when narratives like rivalries or dynasties are in play. We saw the decline of viewership in Starcraft:Broodwar in Korea when such narratives fizzled and when the old stars faded from relevance, despite the considerable increase in overall skill level.
There were new stars and new rivalries. This totally leaves out the Savior scandal, competing games, and how unique and what fluke BW actually was. A game never meant to be played competitively, pushed to it's limits for years and years and years by the players and map makers, broken mechanics that turned out to balance the game near flawlessly. The list goes on and on. BW was an anomoly in the esports world, a game being played competitively 10 years after it's made is not normal. Melee is the only game that comes to mind that is similar. Counter Strike is still being played of course, but not the original game, no patches, like BW or Melee.
>Starcraft 2 has arguably suffered from the relative lack of such a narrative, due in part to the fragmentation of its competitive scene.
I disagree 1000%! SC2 suffered from horrible balance decisions, a battle.net system that was objectively worse than BW and WC3, no LAN, and an over-zealous Blizzards-Activision that wanted to extract as much money as possible as quickly as possible. Things like putting limits on how much a prize pool can be before Blizzard takes a cut actually encouraged tournaments to stay smaller the first year or two of SC2. No LAN meant games would crap out and couldn't be restarted with tens of thousands of dollars on the line. No automated tournaments, no clans, no nothing. Battle.net 2.0 was so bad, such a monumental fuck up, it shows that Blizzard literally had no idea what they were doing and did not care what the community thought. We begged for years for things that were not that hard to implement for a gigantic company like Blizzard. Finally, the balance. When you balance a game for the lowest level player, it may bring a short spike in players but the reward of a high skilled play is gone. There is no reason to work hard and figure things out. The competitive scene suffered due to these decisions. Finally, the worst choice of them all, to let Wings of Liberty (vanilla SC2) fester and die while they developed Heart of the Swarm (the first expansion). Broodlord/Infester became so boring and dull to watch for months and months while Blizzard didn't do anything. They waited for HotS. And guess what? Want HotS? You have to buy the original as well! Good call! Not greedy at all. So many truly terrible decisions killed SC2 and it's a damn shame. As you can tell, I'm bitter. SC2 had great narratives. Huk vs Korea, Boxer coming back, Nada coming back, Idra (love him or hate him), the EG/TL stuff then Huk going to EG!, so many great runs through GSL or MLG, White-Ra beating MC at that worlds game!, MMA the prodigy of Boxer, MMA vs MVP at Blizzcon, so many great stories. The scene died because Blizzard fucking killed it. My beautiful Starcraft destroyed out of greed and shortsightedness.