Topic: eSports

[Kashinoda]

Valve's Dota 2 tournament (The International) has the biggest prize pool, with the winners getting $1mil (prize pool over $1.5mil, this summer will be the third one.

$200k/player for the winning team, for a few days of work it's not too shabby 

Pretty mental, FIFA is right up there as well. $1 million prize pool with the individual winner getting $140k.

[DanFromMars]

Starcraft is the unofficial national sport of S.Korea

[B0151?]

As physical as darts or chess?

People call chess a sport? 

[iSmiff]

L A N

S A R C A S M

[High_Cotton]

S A R C A S M

O H, O K .

[cim-pim-param]

Raidcall EMS ONE FINALS CS:GO
QUARTERFINALS
http://www.twitch.tv/esltv_cs/old

[cim-pim-param]

Raidcall EMS ONE FINALS CS:GO
Grand Final BO3  Ninjas in Pyjamas vs fnatic    Starts at 4pm

http://www.twitch.tv/esltv_cs/old

[Hoenheim]

Raidcall EMS ONE FINALS CS:GO
Grand Final BO3  Ninjas in Pyjamas vs fnatic    Starts at 4pm

http://www.twitch.tv/esltv_cs/old

The name brings back memories; Heaton, Walle, Zet, Potti and Ins used to be a formidable team

[AdY]

[cim-pim-param]

The name brings back memories; Heaton, Walle, Zet, Potti and Ins used to be a formidable team

Yep, loong loooong time ago

[Foster]

Was playing competitively on a stream last night, gonna be attending the next LAN for cod, EGL 10.

http://www.twitch.tv/oivg/b/395616175 < few games on there.

[zabadoh]

Watching the NorCal Regionals live (fighting games):  http://www.twitch.tv/teamsp00ky

[Slick_Beef]

League of Legends All Stars Tournament this weekend in Shanghai. Great atmosphere and they've really organized it well.
Europe got stomped by Korea this morning, and North America lost to China, so they those two have a playoff tomorrow morning and the loser is out.

http://euw.lolesports.com/

[dalarr]

http://m.bbc.com/sport/39119995
Since this topic was created, Esports has grown considerably. According to the BBC, Esports are predicted to make a £1bn revenue by 2020. It had a total audience of 400 million people in 2016. Professional clubs like PSG already have their own professional clans.
I love Esports, especially Starcraft. Will it ever be accepted as a "real" sport?

[Haemoglobin]

I appreciate the sheer level of coordinative skill and quick adaptive thinking involved, and have loved boss videogames all throughout my life, but I don't honestly think it could ever hold my interest as a spectator sport in the way the 'proper' sports I've been into since childhood have done. I can imagine always coming back to footy for example as a spectacle, even if I was a true neutral (sneaky AD&D reference in there for anyone paying attention), but I don't reckon I'd ever pay to watch any esport. However, seeing the genuine highlights and amazing plays is certainly interesting and entertaining, in small doses.

Rocket League is one of the most accessible up & coming ones, I'd say - everyone, from all walks of life, can understand what's going on pretty much at all times, and most would be able to appreciate the level of smart anticipation and delicate control being displayed. It's more 'sporty' than most of them, while still being distinctly arcade-videogamey, as opposed to a sophisticated sports sim.


I think I'd be more interested in less frenetic, more cerebral skillful gameplay as a spectator. Waching FPS stuff frankly just bores me rigid, however high-tempo the action - in fact, the more frantic, the less it actually holds my attention. I'd be more into a slower-paced, more crafty & imaginative game, the drama being built up from seeing perfect stealthy execution and novel outside-the-box trickery unfold, rather than some annoying twat shouting play-by-play commentary as a way of directly telling everyone when you're supposed to be excited.

Videogames are to be played, experienced subjectively, so as a spectator sport it needs to be some real special shit you'd not normally get a chance to see in your own playing instances. I can dig watching fighting games when every single split-second move and counter is clearly utterly deliberate and calculated, honed to an instinctive fine art, rather than the mad intuitive button-mashing rush of doing it yourself against others of a similiar skill level. Any RTS or MOBA bollocks just gets old fast for me.

[Redman0151]

http://m.bbc.com/sport/39119995
Since this topic was created, Esports has grown considerably. According to the BBC, Esports are predicted to make a £1bn revenue by 2020. It had a total audience of 400 million people in 2016. Professional clubs like PSG already have their own professional clans.
I love Esports, especially Starcraft. Will it ever be accepted as a "real" sport?

Not by the mainstream no, also many of them aren't really interesting to watch or they require you to play the game to really understand what's going on

It'll always have the stigma of nerds and people in their mums basement dominating it

[Chakan]

I watch a lot of Hearthstone because I play it a lot. It has a lot of skill based turns in creating certain decks and then deciding on which course of action is the best possible route to victory. It also has a fair amount of RNG involved which makes it interesting.

The prizes have been increasing in amount year over year and it's great to see people rewarded for the hours and hours people dedicate to it.

I don't know if I consider it a sport per say, but there's definitely skill involved though.

[tubby]

All Work No Play is on Netflix for anyone interested, a documentary following the League of Legends tournament.  Interesting stuff and was surprised to hear there's transfers of players between teams sometimes.

[Kashinoda]

I appreciate the sheer level of coordinative skill and quick adaptive thinking involved, and have loved boss videogames all throughout my life, but I don't honestly think it could ever hold my interest as a spectator sport in the way the 'proper' sports I've been into since childhood have done. I can imagine always coming back to footy for example as a spectacle, even if I was a true neutral (sneaky AD&D reference in there for anyone paying attention), but I don't reckon I'd ever pay to watch any esport. However, seeing the genuine highlights and amazing plays is certainly interesting and entertaining, in small doses.

Rocket League is one of the most accessible up & coming ones, I'd say - everyone, from all walks of life, can understand what's going on pretty much at all times, and most would be able to appreciate the level of smart anticipation and delicate control being displayed. It's more 'sporty' than most of them, while still being distinctly arcade-videogamey, as opposed to a sophisticated sports sim.


I think I'd be more interested in less frenetic, more cerebral skillful gameplay as a spectator. Waching FPS stuff frankly just bores me rigid, however high-tempo the action - in fact, the more frantic, the less it actually holds my attention. I'd be more into a slower-paced, more crafty & imaginative game, the drama being built up from seeing perfect stealthy execution and novel outside-the-box trickery unfold, rather than some annoying twat shouting play-by-play commentary as a way of directly telling everyone when you're supposed to be excited.

Videogames are to be played, experienced subjectively, so as a spectator sport it needs to be some real special shit you'd not normally get a chance to see in your own playing instances. I can dig watching fighting games when every single split-second move and counter is clearly utterly deliberate and calculated, honed to an instinctive fine art, rather than the mad intuitive button-mashing rush of doing it yourself against others of a similiar skill level. Any RTS or MOBA bollocks just gets old fast for me.

Isn't a lot of that down to mainstream perception though? If we look at FPS games which you (rightfully) admit are a bit tedius... When people think FPS they think Call of Duty or Battlefield... games that are relatively boring to watch and filled with players who peak at 20 years old when their reaction time dies down. The publishers inject so much money to try and make these eSports but it's all very surface level. I mean how can you expect to make something a sport when you release a new one every year?

If you actually look at the biggest FPS eSports in CSGO you'll see it's a relatively slow tactical shooter with a crazy skill ceiling when it comes to both team play and individual skill. It also has a very strong grass roots presence and is approaching 20 years old now, so we have old pros as managers and analysts - it has the most parallels with real sport than any other eSport out there. It's also extremely easy to understand the basics despite it's deep tactical roots, you'll never be able to appreciate how difficult some of the things are but it's much like never having kicked a ball before.

I honestly choose to watch CSGO over football 9 times out of 10, though unlike other eSports it helps to have many teams that are 10+ years old so you're able to form attachments to them. It also helps it's a game I played when I was 15 and now I'm 31, so it's something I nabbed from my childhood much like Football. The viewing numbers reflect it, breaking records last major when millions tuned into the last major - the crowds too are awesome. The best thing is it's almost entirely made from the community, obviously there's more to it now but the roots are there - it wouldn't last as long as it has otherwise

Food for thought anyway, there are many games designed to be played and enjoyed and I agree that they shouldn't be shoe horned into being some competitive sport. But there are a selection that transcend that.

Some recent highlights to enjoy 

<a href="https://www.youtube.com/v/dmrIfz1TN00" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" class="bbc_link bbc_flash_disabled new_win">https://www.youtube.com/v/dmrIfz1TN00</a>
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/v/dg6TQy6pGfs" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" class="bbc_link bbc_flash_disabled new_win">https://www.youtube.com/v/dg6TQy6pGfs</a>
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/v/NKqjp-9JJBc" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" class="bbc_link bbc_flash_disabled new_win">https://www.youtube.com/v/NKqjp-9JJBc</a>
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/v/1vXgm5z52dU" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" class="bbc_link bbc_flash_disabled new_win">https://www.youtube.com/v/1vXgm5z52dU</a>

[Haemoglobin]

Isn't a lot of that down to mainstream perception though? If we look at FPS games which you (rightfully) admit are a bit tedius... When people think FPS they think Call of Duty or Battlefield... games that are relatively boring to watch and filled with players who peak at 20 years old when their reaction time dies down. The publishers inject so much money to try and make these eSports but it's all very surface level. I mean how can you expect to make something a sport when you release a new one every year?

If you actually look at the biggest FPS eSports in CSGO you'll see it's a relatively slow tactical shooter with a crazy skill ceiling when it comes to both team play and individual skill. It also has a very strong grass roots presence and is approaching 20 years old now, so we have old pros as managers and analysts - it has the most parallels with real sport than any other eSport out there. It's also extremely easy to understand the basics despite it's deep tactical roots, you'll never be able to appreciate how difficult some of the things are but it's much like never having kicked a ball before.

I honestly choose to watch CSGO over football 9 times out of 10, though unlike other eSports it helps to have many teams that are 10+ years old so you're able to form attachments to them. It also helps it's a game I played when I was 15 and now I'm 31, so it's something I nabbed from my childhood much like Football. The viewing numbers reflect it, breaking records last major when millions tuned into the last major - the crowds too are awesome. The best thing is it's almost entirely made from the community, obviously there's more to it now but the roots are there - it wouldn't last as long as it has otherwise

Food for thought anyway, there are many games designed to be played and enjoyed and I agree that they shouldn't be shoe horned into being some competitive sport. But there are a selection that transcend that.

Some recent highlights to enjoy 

I can certainly appreciate the precision, awareness, inventiveness of those highlights... but I dunno Kash. For one, I find the commentators exceptionally irritating and pretty cringy actually, all that seems too forced for me. The cheering crowds too, fuck off.

Those vids show more of a tense, patient hunter/hunted vibe that I can dig, defo. I know exactly what's happening at every moment, fully understand the risks of some of those moves and exact skills required in the heat of the moment to pull them off, so major props given for those clever plays. I still don't think I'd watch full matches of it though, because I feel you have to really be into it yourself for it not to all get a bit samey, and for those highlights to be "OMFG!!!!!1111" rather than "that was pretty cool *munch munch*".

Not judging anyone who likes it (apart from those commentators and the jumping fans holding inflatable 'club colours' things - motherfuck them), but it's just not... organic enough? I don't know how best to describe it, the sense that anything could happen just not quite being there. You have your maps that the teams'll probably have memorised, very familiar weapons and perks and so on. Throw some mad random shit in there for them all to deal with, and maybe we're talking.


That slow, tense hunt thing, where the player is very vulnerable, just appeals to something in me with the games I play and how I like to play them. If that was ramped up right to the maximum, without daft shouty tryhard sports comms, and instead being actually a quite a stressful watch, your stomach in knots seeing this guy/gal who's come so far and done such smart things to keep themselves alive this far now in surely-inescapable peril, all the baddies closing in, you can hear them all through the walls and scrambling around on the upper floors and stuff, the player you're rooting for is just hiding in a bad spot... and then they go and do something utterly amazing and ingenious to get themselves to safety - that would interest me, I reckon.

[Kashinoda]

I can certainly appreciate the precision, awareness, inventiveness of those highlights... but I dunno Kash. For one, I find the commentators exceptionally irritating and pretty cringy actually, all that seems too forced for me. The cheering crowds too, fuck off.

Those vids show more of a tense, patient hunter/hunted vibe that I can dig, defo. I know exactly what's happening at every moment, fully understand the risks of some of those moves and exact skills required in the heat of the moment to pull them off, so major props given for those clever plays. I still don't think I'd watch full matches of it though, because I feel you have to really be into it yourself for it not to all get a bit samey, and for those highlights to be "OMFG!!!!!1111" rather than "that was pretty cool *munch munch*".

Not judging anyone who likes it (apart from those commentators and the jumping fans holding inflatable 'club colours' things - motherfuck them), but it's just not... organic enough? I don't know how best to describe it, the sense that anything could happen just not quite being there. You have your maps that the teams'll probably have memorised, very familiar weapons and perks and so on. Throw some mad random shit in there for them all to deal with, and maybe we're talking.



That slow, tense hunt thing, where the player is very vulnerable, just appeals to something in me with the games I play and how I like to play them. If that was ramped up right to the maximum, without daft shouty tryhard sports comms, and instead being actually a quite a stressful watch, your stomach in knots seeing this guy/gal who's come so far and done such smart things to keep themselves alive this far now in surely-inescapable peril, all the baddies closing in, you can hear them all through the walls and scrambling around on the upper floors and stuff, the player you're rooting for is just hiding in a bad spot... and then they go and do something utterly amazing and ingenious to get themselves to safety - that would interest me, I reckon.

If there's one thing I hate it's things that are forced for the sake of it... so while you may look at those clips and think they're not organic - I'd say it's actually they represent the polar opposite. Though I'm 100% with you on the hate for stupid inflatable clapping things, a byproduct of American and Asian crowds for many sports. Even if we differ on our opinion on that I don't see what's wrong with a cheering crowd? They're essentially cheering a great play the same as you do in any sport, and it's genuine excitement - the same with the commentators. A good video here to demonstrate that (European crowd) https://youtu.be/3uRku0CVVjc?t=282

It's not too different from people failing to grasp why you scream the house down when the little man kicks the thing into the net, it's 'cringe-worthy' if it isn't normalised.

You're right in regards to having to be into it to fully appreciate and watch a full game, though if we're talking eSports vs Sports here there's no difference in that regard. You don't need to play a lot of CS to appreciate the complexity and skill ceiling, but exposure of course is good. And whilst you point out it's the same maps and guns etc. which makes it all 'samey' - that's actually the thing that makes it interesting - because the tactics and play involved constantly evolves (it's called game meta). There's always plenty of crazy plays that you'll appreciate, always some new way of thinking or exceptional piece of skill. Throwing randomness in would kill that, imagine having 5 minutes in football where the ball was suddenly square

Nice little example I guess:
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/v/tuPE4l9_Es4" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" class="bbc_link bbc_flash_disabled new_win">https://www.youtube.com/v/tuPE4l9_Es4</a>

I look at that last paragraph you wrote and I think "oh he's describing CS plays I see fairly often", the last clip of the original four I linked you seems to be exactly that. But yeah there needs to be a level of exposure to be able to appreciate it, and that's what it'll always come down to. Much like Rocket League, you play that for 10 hours and you can appreciate it as a spectacle.

 

[Haemoglobin]

If there's one thing I hate it's things that are forced for the sake of it... so while you may look at those clips and think they're not organic - I'd say it's actually they represent the polar opposite. Though I'm 100% with you on the hate for stupid inflatable clapping things, a byproduct of American and Asian crowds for many sports. Even if we differ on our opinion on that I don't see what's wrong with a cheering crowd? They're essentially cheering a great play the same as you do in any sport, and it's genuine excitement - the same with the commentators. A good video here to demonstrate that (European crowd) https://youtu.be/3uRku0CVVjc?t=282

It's not too different from people failing to grasp why you scream the house down when the little man kicks the thing into the net, it's 'cringe-worthy' if it isn't normalised.

It's just the vibe I get from it, that it's artificially amped up. I've no issue with the crowd getting genuinely excited, it's thay "yay I'm here too" thing with the clappy balloon bollocks and all that. I personally take a similarly dim view with footy fans like that. When I see pure passion, it's different, but that's rarely the vibe I get whenever I watch things like that.

I don't think I'm ever not gona hate that commentary style, though. Ray Hudson has come to do my head in, and that's even wose than him to me. Nails down a blackboard. Dial it back a fair bit with some real insightful points, and I could better stomach it.

And whilst you point out it's the same maps and guns etc. which makes it all 'samey' - that's actually the thing that makes it interesting - because the tactics and play involved constantly evolves (it's called game meta). There's always plenty of crazy plays that you'll appreciate, always some new way of thinking or exceptional piece of skill. Throwing randomness in would kill that, imagine having 5 minutes in football where the ball was suddenly square

I didn't mean that random! 

More the introduction of certain distinct abilities, maybe environment and weather changes, some volatility. I appreciate how the deep tactical side evolves out of all the firmly established unchanging elements, but it starts getting tedious for the likes of me, crave some more direct variety.

That video is really good, but is made so much better to me with the slow breakdown of the play and the subdued commentary - add all the stuff I hate to it, and suddenly I go right off it! 


There probably is a game a lot like CS that would work for me with just a few little things I'm into added in, and all the crap that irks me removed... but if the fans who pay their money to watch it like all that stuff, then that's the way most of these things are gona get made, so I wouldn't get that alternative product. I just happen to 'click' with an intense roaring footy crowd watching an unpredictable match full of unbelievable athletic artistry, commentated on by knowledgable, respectable fellow or two who keep their shirts on most of the time and only erupt when the moment truly transports them. Bear in mind I can't stand that pseudo-passionate mannered pre-written ROOOOONEEEEYYYY shouty twattery even during a great football game.

[G1 Jockey 4(betfair)]

Pretty mental, FIFA is right up there as well. $1 million prize pool with the individual winner getting $140k.

But fifa wouldnt be online though ?
Players would go nuts with the one sided delay lol

[tubby]

Been watching the Apex Legends LAN over the past couple of days, and the surprise package is a team called Jlingz.  Had no idea Lingard had an eSports organisation, surprised Dele Alli isn't involved.  Or actually playing for one of the teams at a LAN.