Hypewatch Returns

I guess it's been a while, hopefully this one speaks for itself:

"However, rather than go through extensive fanfare we will simply announce them one at a time: Thursday, Friday and Saturday."

Thank-you Complexity, for not making extensive fanfare over the course of sev... uh, wait, what?

No crowd, no journalists, no viewers?

I went to bed late last night wondering if maybe i do want the MLG thing to succeed after all.  As much as i can't afford to pay for it, a sustainable income is something that esports has needed for many years.  If this works, might it be an important step forward - albeit with a few necessary adjustments (i.e. the price).  Then again, other leagues have done just fine without pay-per-view.  Look at ESL and IPL, for example.

Then, i started rewatching Batman Begins and went to sleep.

Then, i woke up and saw this poll:

If people follow through with this (and that 2,300 is quite a large sample by esports standards), MLG might very well regret their decision, regardless of what i think.  Are people finally wising up to the fact that MLG is nothing but spin and flashing lights?  More likely they're just put off by the high price, but sometimes the ends justify the means.

The post mentioned in the second poll can be found here.

Pay Per View: All-in

Leave it to Affentod to summarise MLG's decision to go pay-per-view so succinctly.

It's a secret that everyone with even the slightest insider knowledge knows: MLG is not what it's cracked up to be, financially speaking.  But rather than risk libel action or discuss things i don't pretend to fully understand, i'm going to run some simple numbers.

You see, MLG's pay-per-view scheme might have been inevitable, it might be controversial, but it certainly is not a reasonable investment for someone like me.  $20 for a single event works out at about £12.75 GBP.  For the same amount, i can subscribe to five Sky Sports channels for a month.  Even if i just want to watch football, that's just obviously better value for money.  If you want to claim MLG is a one-off showcase event, well, firstly, i think that's a flawed system to begin with but that's another issue.  Secondly, is it a big enough showcase event to be worth the money?  Having seen every MLG event since they started the PC Circuit with WoW, i'm insulted by own question.  It would take a significant improvement in production values and commentator quality to be worthwhile (part of me just blanches at the thought of paying $20 to listen to Tastosis yell "Ohhhhh!" a lot).

Okay, maybe comparing it to something as well established as Sky Sports isn't fair.  Lets look at something closer to home: GSL.  For $24.99 i can watch an entire season, with arguably better players and far more matches, spread across an entire month.  For $5 more than MLG is charging for a single weekend, i can watch a whole month of high level Starcraft?  There will be people who are willing and able to pay for both, sure, but that's not the point.  At least GSL lets my broke-ass watch bad quality for free, MLG won't even let me do that at their Winter Arena.

Even if i had the money to spare, MLG has placed itself a long way down my list of priorities.  If i was going to put my money into esports it would be as far from MLG as i could put it.  This is yet another gamble, and eventually MLG will surely run out of chips.  If they don't pull this off - and previous form isn't great - the backlash that is so deserved might finally begin.  The hype will be seen for what it is.  Where are the non-American events that were not quite promised, Sundance?  Where is the GotFrag revival that was not quite promised?  MLG might really be going all-in with this, and if consumer uptake isn't good enough, the cost of the event could break the bank.

A Brief History of Being Foreign

There have been quite a few articles recently discussing the in and outs of Koreans joining foreign teams.  Fine, whatever, it's a reasonably interesting phenomenon.  But the idea that it's new is, frankly, baffling.  Maybe it's just another symptom of the fact that 90% of the SC2 scene only got into esports in the past 18 months, but esports has had players on non-domestic teams for as long as I can remember and probably even before that.

Back when in 2001 when i first got interested in online gaming, 4k (or Infinity-eSports, depending on what day of the week it was) was the British team to follow.  They represented us better than any team since (excluding CS: Source because, well. who cares) and even managed some solid tournament placings.  Oh, yeah, and back then, they had a Dutch player called Kwak.  Yep, way back in 2001, before SC2 was even a hype video with a "Soon (TM)" deadline, a British team fielded a non-British player.

This carried on throughout Counter-Strike history, with Norwegians on American teams, Dutch and Austrian players on German teams and several other foreigners on the 4k team to mention but a few.  A handful of players, such as Lurppis, even made long-term moves across the globe to be with their team-mates, something that most Korean SC2 players on foreign teams have yet to do.

In my own favourite esports scene, Warcraft III, Koreans playing for European teams was even more prevelant.  It worked perfectly well for years, until MYM decided to go and fuck it all up, but that's another story.  In fact, it was probably more common for a WC3 player to be a foreign team than it was for him to be on one from his own country.  Did the great Grubby ever play for a Dutch team after he made a name for himself?  Nope.  Only a small number of countries could support a team with enough talent to make it worthwhile and so most players were attached to a 4k, an MYM or an SK.  The top Koreans were even slated as "mercernaries," especially the SK ones, because they moved to more lucrative foreign contracts when it became clear that the game hadn't really taken off in Korea.

The fact is, players being on a foreign team is nothing new.  By all means write about it and discuss its merits and its weaknesses, but please do just the tiniest bit of research and realise that the concept is as old as esports, let alone sports in general.

A Word on Independence

Something that's always amused me is the way that some people on the lower end of the esports ladder try to get up a few rungs.  Plenty have tried to criticise others in the impotent hope that someone will remove the criticised from their position (usually another writer, commentator or website) and replace them with the critic and plenty more will do it in future.  I have seen dozens of these in my time, and have probably been guilty of doing it myself.  Usually, they are around 18 years old and are the same kind of person who thinks that leaving "clever" comments on other people's articles or forums is a high calling in life.  Usually, they grow out of it and/or disappear into the ether.

And, so, by that token, we have esportsetc, a website which I had never heard of until they decided to attack ESFI World.  As targets go, ESFI is an interesting one.  We're not so big as to frighten off critics, but we're just about big enough to be seen as worth the effort.  We're definitely up-and-coming, though, and our place in the collective esports conciousness appears to be growing.

So what exactly has drawn the furore of this pair of angry young men?  ESFI's claim of independence, apparently, which is sort of vaguely mentioned on the 'about' page - hardly something we rub in people's faces.  Never the less, esportsetc took umbrage with this claim and decided it might boost their hits if they attacked us.

First up, they decided to go after the fact that we have an advert for Complexity on our home page.  Fair enough, it's pretty hard to be unbiased while advertising one of the major teams in esports.  Except, uh, wait... we don't have an advert for Complexity, we have an advert for Creative which happens to have a picture of Complexity's Jason Lake.  Independence in journalism is fairly important, but so is basic fact-checking.  On top of that, the fact that Cadred yesterday published an article with an advert to donate to a team IN THE ARTICLE was somehow overlooked by these guardians of proper journalism.

Alright, so that didn't quite work out.  How about the fact that a lot of ESFI's staff work elsewhere in esports as well?  Okay, you got us.  Well, you got us, and just about every single esports media outlet there.  Not only did esportsetc plainly ignore dozens of other such discrepancies, they didn't even get a complete list of the ones at ESFI.  I'm kinda miffed that my prior work at SK, ESL, GotFrag and Clanbase went unnoticed, for example.  And not just me, there are plenty of others on the ESFI staff who have worked for other esports entities that were strangely omitted.  That's some pretty excellent research - top notch journalism!

Also, this just in: esports writers don't suddenly appear from nowhere!  As amazing as it may seem, almost every esports writer I can name has worked for some team or league at one time or another.  On esports etc's own 'about' page, the head honcho is described as "working in e-sports," but he doesn't feel the need to disclose where exactly... meanwhile, he publishes a "news story" which decries the fact that ESFI doesn't diclose the same information.  Something about glass houses?

I could go on.  The fact is that even traditional media is not remotely objective.  Maybe we should do a bit more to make our other interests clear, but ESFI absolutely is not the only entity in this position.  Rakaka - the site that etc modelled themselves on - has staff from a variety of other places, and their big boss man is one of the main figures behind Dreamhack.  Hell, one of the heads of HLTV.org played as a standin for mTw; how can he write impartially about them ever again?  I guess that when you're so busy writing poorly thought-out attacks you probably don't have time to do any research or criticise more than one site.

And, look, even if ESFI is somewhat biased (actual evidence of this, in articles, is oddly absent from these attacks, by the way), it's surely better to have a somewhat objective news outlet than to rely on team sites and league sites, isn't it?  The way esports works, that is the only alternative.  SK did a pretty good job of being impartial, but it was never ideal - the same goes for Team Liquid.  I'm sure that esportsetc don't think that that alternative is better, so one can only assume that this is a cheap stunt to try and get hits by attacking a site which is actually relevant.  I wouldn't mind, but don't have the nerve to go harping on about standards of journalism if you're just going to attack another site with badly-researched, factually innaccurate nonsense.  Oh, and you spelt "truly" wrong on your 'about' page.

But then again, maybe we should be flattered that we're worthy of such an attack.

In Defense of Commentators

Any regular readers of my blog will automatically assume from this title that i'm about to embark on a sarcastic rant about how shitty esports casters are.  Well, sorry to disappoint you...

It's true, i do think that the vast, vast majoriy of esports commentators are overrated, talentless and noisy, but more and more i've realised that a lot of my disdain is based on things that aren't really their fault.  Watching the Casting Archon fall to pieces from exhaustion at Dreamhack made me almost feel sorry for people paid to talk about computer games for a living.  No, but seriously, 14 hours a day is as close to hard work as esports can be and I do have some sympathy.

More than that, though, I've realised that leagues just leave these guys out to dry all too often.  These guys aren't raconteurs, and they sure as hell aren't stand-up comedians, but MLG and GSL in particular just leave them to fill in the gaps between matches.  It's not really any surprise that their their pre/post-game banter is so infuriatingly tedious - as fascinating as Starcraft is, there is only so much you can say about an average game.

The opening ten minutes of the NASL finals (ignoring the HoN, because, really...) brought this home in the perfect way.  Gretorp is erm... (I'm trying to be generous to casters here, help me out) but watching him and Orb do Gollum impressions to fill the dead air was probably the nadir of esports commentary, and that's among some really stiff competition.  I couldn't believe what I was watching, and sure, you'd hope they could come up with something better, but the blame surely lies with NASL for putting them out there with no help.

NASL isn't the only league that puts its commentators in such a difficult position, it was merely the most recent and most horrific example.  These organisations have come on leaps and bounds in the past 18 months, but in terms of production value, they really need to step up their game.  Filling the between-game void is a problem that only IPL has really addressed.  GSL has tried in the past with the player bios they used to air, but more need to follow and improve upon IGN's lead.  Hearing about Catspajamas' gaming history - however highly I rate him as a caster - really only exacerbates the problem.  Still, it's better than nothing, and alongside the Top 10 countdowns, it's a decent platform for leagues to build on.

Why I Haven't Published an Article in Months

Dear ESFI,

It's not that I don't want to write articles for your site, it's just that the League of Legends desktop icon is so much prettier than the Word icon.

Sincerest apologies


Me.