So, about this Idra IEM thing

It's very, very difficult to have sympathy for Idra.  Despite being a middling professional gamer, his stream earns him more money that pretty much anyone else in the business.  He acts like an asshole and people love him for it - one of the quirks of being in an industry targetted at 14-25 year olds.  So, when he complains about the hotel in Hannover not being very good you'll forgive me if i don't shed too many tears.

But whether he's a pampered individual or the start of something more worrisome, he does kind of have a point.  It's difficult for me to criticise ESL, i must admit, but their umbilical attachment to CeBIT has been an issue for many years.  The celebrity culture attached to SC2 has simply brought it into sharper focus, and a lot of the new esports crowd obviously weren't aware of it until now.  Well, at least Idra has brought it to their attention, i suppose.

The problem is that ESL's model pretty much dictates that they have to be at CeBIT.  Why is being attached to one of the biggest computer expos a problem?  Well, Hannover is a pretty unassuming town, as anyone who has been there will tell you.  When something like CeBIT rolls into town they don't really have room for the thousands of extra people.  It's traditional that people rent out their spare bedrooms and hostels do a roaring trade.  The two times i attended, i stayed in what was surely a former brothel and some kind of ex-Hitler Youth camp, both of which were upwards of 30 minutes from the event.

I didn't mind overmuch, but it's obviously far from ideal.  What makes it worse is that IEM isn't the only show in town any more.  For a couple of years they only had to compete with MLG and nobody really complained too much because there already wasn't much money to go round and WoW players sure as hell didn't have the presence that SC2's stars do.  Much as i dislike MLG, they seem to have stepped up their game on this front (too much, in Boxer's case).  ESL hasn't, and, while they remain attached to CeBIT, can't.

The danger of pampering players is a real one - just look at other sports.  But there is a middle ground to be found, and it's in everyone's best interests if players look forward to a tournament, rather than dreading it.

What is The Point of Esports Journalism?

The perceived purpose of general journalism is to inform and educate people about the news.  For sports coverage, the goal is largely the same but with obviously different subject matter.  You might assume that esports journalism should be the same, and it should.

So why do we so often receive evangelical pieces about how awesome esports is, aimed at an apathetic or straight-up antagonistic audience?  In the past ten years i have seen dozens of such pieces - i even read some of them - and they all seem to serve the same purpose: look how awesome competitive gaming is.  The latest attempt from Slasher (a serial offender) is no different and has so far been met with the same level of "meh" that all the rest have been.

Lets be clear: Slasher is generally a good guy, and his heart is in the right place.  Getting a "real job" with a mainstream gaming website is something he should be rightfully proud of.  But he of all people should know that preaching to the mainstream audience is waste of time and effort on several levels.  Firstly, they don't care.  Look at the comments:

"No. Sorry. I've tried watching people play videogames on TV before and it is lame"

"I don't know anyone, anywhere, who watches the matches, the ones I have watched are boring..."

Secondly, trying to spread the good news about esports might seem like a venerable goal, but when do we get to the point where we say fuck it: they don't want us and we don't need them?  For me, that came a long time ago.  We absolutely don't need them.  Why not concentrate on improving what we have?  Instead of looking out to a hostile world, why not try looking inwards and fixing the problems we already have?  That makes a lot more sense to me.

Slasher has been around as long as i can remember; he should know all of this.   If i didn't know better i might even think he was just doing it for the paycheck (they are highly sought after in esports journalism, that wasn't a dig).  If he genuinely thinks he can convert people to some kind of esports crusade, well, more fool him.  I just hope his next article for Gamespot isn't so horrendously fluffy.

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.