MLG's Latest Title: Dead Horse Flogging

So, it seems that MLG will be bringing back GotFrag.

I have a theory about American TV (this is related, so bear with me).  Most of it is terrible, but often starts out quite well.  Take my column's inspiration, The X Files.  The first three-four series' were superb, but it took a pretty rapid downturn from series six onwards.  Basically, Americans don't know when to let something die.  Look at The Simpsons for an even better example: still going today, but basically unwatchable.  Compare this to the best British TV shows, which typically run for just two or three series and go off-air at their peak.

So, for those of you who know GotFrag's history, you can probably see where this is going.  Bringing back what used to be the best esports site in existence - it wasn't even close - will almost definitely end in failure.  Everyone that made GotFrag so great has moved onto other things: Midway is with ESL, Anomoloy is with Complexity (I think, I could be wrong) Scoots is with EG and Lee is with MLG itself.  The game that GotFrag was built on (CS) is not quite dead, but its place in the esports pantheon has massively changed.

Then there's the simple fact that we don't really need another esports site.  If you want to read a forum, you go to Team Liquid or Reddit; if you want high quality articles and coverage, you go to ESFI, and there are half a dozen other sites that fill in any gaps.  What could GotFrag do that the other sites don't already?  Advertise MLG's sponsors?  Maybe they could post exclusive replays, but it's the nature of the internet that they will stay exclusive for precisely the length of time it takes to download and upload a 200kb file.

But in case a new GotFrag is somehow more than a disaster, it is of the utmost importance that the SC2 bubble is educated about where GotFrag went in the first place.  Apparently Sundance has no sense of irony (or else he is actually a master troll) when he posts #neverforget in regards to a GotFrag logo.

For those who don't know, MLG bought GotFrag when it had pretty much reached its prime (pun intended).  GotFrag's management were semi-forced into a position where they had to choose between MLG and CGS - an awkward decision, to be sure.  They chose MLG, and almost immediately had their entire Counter-Strike budget cut.  It was around this time that I did my best rat-on-a-sinking-ship impression and left, just as GotFrag started to become a husk of its former self.  The original management started to leave soon thereafter, and the site carried on with a threadbare staff, covering MLG's WoW tournaments (ignoring ESL's), doing a worse and worse job of it.  The site was basically dead, but they gave SC2 when it first came into MLG.  If you visit the site now, the latest news is almost a year old.

With all of that in mind you'll forgive me for being less than excited about the prospect of an MLG-fueled  GotFrag making another return.  Lest we forget, Lee Chen - previously head honcho of GotFrag - still works for MLG, one guy who did pretty well out of the death of an entire community.  Together, they want to resurrect what they destroyed?  Excuse me while I choke to death on my own bitter laughter.

The E in esports Stands for ego

Who is the CEO of the Premier League?  If you're English, you may know.  If your a non-English football fan, there's a slim chance you might know.  I know, because a couple of years ago he had the stupid "39th game" idea.  He was in the news for floating a business idea which was badly received.  He then disappeared into the background, where CEO's belong, returning to the news only occassionaly to discuss important but tedious business stuff like club debt and league sponsorship.

Who is the CEO of MLG?  Yeah, that's a rhetorical question: of course you know that it's Sundance --  self-professed THAT guy.  His every tweet cries "look at me," every forum post scerams "look how similar we are; love me."  This is a guy who should be in the background making business decisions and dealing with sponsors but here he is making drunk forum posts and begging for our attention.  At the risk of sounding pretentious, it's all very undignified.

In fairness, most English men are brought up to automatically distrust authority figures like Sundance.  Maybe it's because we're used to the bungling figures that represent our sports, and our dishonest, money-grubbing politicians.  With that in mind, perhaps i'm being unkind - judging him on the basis of other people.  But on the other hand, he makes himself so easy to hate.  He would undoubtedly spin it as being a "love me or hate me, that's who I am" figure, but, realistically, he's just an irritating attention whore.   The face of a sports league should be its players, not its CEO.

This issue is much broader and deeper than just MLG, however.  My ESFI comrade keeker made a similar point about commentatorslast week.  The fact is that esports has become a huge dick-waving contest, played out via livestream by a bunch of egotistical bores.  I could quite happily live my entire without knowing what Day9's three-day stubble looks like but I will never have that opporunity, thanks to the "look at me" nature of the Day9 Daily.  Personal and intimate, sure, but that's not what I want from analysis.  I want, er, analysis.

To put it bluntly, esports should be about computer games.  I want to tune into a Starcraft stream and watch Stracraft matches, not listen to crappy jokes from a couple of guys in t-shirts and blazers.  Esports as a whole has its priorities all wrong and continues to show the real reason why the word "esport" is so inappropriate.  The focus has shifted away from any real sporting action and onto the supporting characters.

Oh, yeah, here's my inspiration for today's rant.

Independence day for you, International WTF day for me

Ever since last week's announcement by ESL that they will be swapping Quake for LoL in the upcoming IEM season, i've been struggling to put my thoughts into a word document.  It's a complicated situation from my perspective, and every time i tried to write it end up kinda schizophrenic and confused.

So after a week of frustrating confusion, I hoped for some nice simple news to try and get back into column-writing this week.  Then suddenly, the league that most intelligent people bitch about more than any other (MLG, in case you didn't catch the reference) is streaming Quake games today.  WTF IS HAPPENING?!

Next they'll be ditching the extended series and playing real games at their tournaments instead of Console shooters.  Okay, maybe not.