The story of competitive Fortnite is really straightforward.
Basically, they added a patch where when you kill other players, they drop stuff. This made the game a LOT more like a competitive eSport. You could start the game and just start killing. No reason to walk around looting and building. Just kill and win. Kill more, win more.
Competitive gamers loved this patch. The vast majority of players did not. As we well know, most people donât play to win, hate competition, just want to dick around and build stuff, etc. They play Fortnite like itâs VR Chat, not like itâs Counter-Strike. So in the interest of making money, that patch was undone.
Without that patch, Fortnite is hardly an eSport at all. Thus, the players who care about shooting and winning, as opposed to dicking around and building, are just done with it. That single patch completely changes the nature of the game. Itâs basically two completely different games when dead enemies drop loot or do not.
I donât understand why they didnât just create two game modes, competitive and dick around. They surely have enough players to support both.
This will probably be the topic of one of our panels in the upcoming con season.
Look at Overwatch. Lower-tiers, Torb is way overpowered because people are bad. Consoles, Torb was so powerful they had to nerf him just for console play. Upper tiers? Nearly worthless.
You canât balance games for both kinds of players or all skill levels without making it a completely different game at all skill levels. You canât even separate people that much based on skill, or else people will smurf to winâŚ
For Overwatch, they are literally changing how the highest tier of play works so that people can only solo or duo queue because pros and other Top 500 players would just group up and curbstomp everyone on all 20 of their accounts.
Shitâs whack, yo. /fellowkids
Thereâs pickup basketball and then thereâs rec league. If itâs pickup, then the teams should be randomized. You donât get to show up with your evil team, nobody will play against you. Youâll just be playing against yourselves. If itâs a league, having a team is required. No solos.
Thereâs also a huge culture problem here. If pro basketball players show up at a pickup game in the city, they donât come to dominate some kids. They come to show goodwill and be ambassadors for the game. Everyone is super excited to see them. If more than one shows up, they are going to be on opposite teams, not playing together to dunk on the locals. Why are eAthletes huge assholes who have fun dunking on normal people?
This is one thing I love about Overwatch. Much like its precursors (TF, WF, MTF, etcâŚ), your team matters a lot⌠but if you are that good you can single-handedly tip the game.
When I get ranked in mid-silver, I can single-handedly carry the team with gold everything. (Moira is devastating heal/dps in low-to-mid silver). Upper silver, Iâm good, but not good enough relative to the other team and the weaknesses of my own team to tip the scale alone. I need a competent team (though not necessarily a good one).
Iâve found that doing PUGs makes for a much better OW experience than ranked. I like ranked and sometimes I have excellent games, but then I have games where people tilt off the face of the earth before the game even starts.
I only play Arcade or Ranked (solo rando queue). Quickplay is just too sad.
That isnât the problem usually though. Itâs that a non-pro, but good, player gets matched up in a game of mixed skill. If that player is good enough, they will completely and totally dominate if the game is truly skill-based.
The real pros tend to only play with other pros anyway. Catching them smurfing is definitely seen as a scandal at least.
This is partly what ranked play is best. Over time, if youâre that good, itâll force you into games with people closer to your skill level. But that only works if you actually try to win every time you play.
I just watched some competitive Fortnite and itâs almost unrecognizable from the videos I saw of it being played when it was getting huge two years ago or whenever. Of course back then people hadnât gotten so good at building, so there was a lot of running and shooting. But this seemed to have no relation to anything geographical or locational, and was purely about high speed three dimensional maze making. Impressive, but very abstracted away from a shooter game. Rocket League is more like soccer than Fortnite is like PUBG.
Maryland has defined what an eSport is.
http://mgaleg.maryland.gov/webmga/frmMain.aspx?pid=billpage&tab=subject3&id=hb0048&stab=01&ys=2019RS
Yassssss
âI feel like esports is almost running a Ponzi scheme at this point,â Frank Fields, Corsairâs sponsorship manager, told an audience at San Franciscoâs Game Developers Conference last March. He smirked. The crowd laughed uncomfortably. The smile dropped from Fieldsâ face as he continued. âEveryone I talk to in this industry kind of acknowledges the fact that there is value in esports, but it is not nearly the value that is getting hyped these days.â Later, Fields would clarify that this value, and future value, âas of now, is optimistic at best and fraudulent at worst.â
eSports have more data, and itâs hard to hide the ugly truth that is hidden in regular sports.
The whole business model relies on advertising. esports needs sponsors, and sports need sponsors. The NHL would die if people stopped buying naming rights to arenas and banners on the ice.
One of the major points of the article is that most of the data about eSports is either intentionally inflated or that the methods used to get the data are flawed.
The whole thing just seems like a house of cards waiting to collapse on itself.
âOn television, the NFL and the NBA arenât responsible for telling people how many people watched a given game. A third party like Nielsen is, and those third parties have built decadesâ worth of trust. Yet in esports, those numbers are reported either by the game publishers, the esports teams, or the streaming platform. Thatâs a pretty huge conflict of interest, especially since each of those organizations has something to gain from reporting attention-grabbing numbers.â
" Letâs look at this commonly-cited factoid: Last yearâs League of Legends World Championship drew in more viewers than the Super Bowl. According to one publication, 200 million people watched the LCS last year from China alone. Meanwhile, 103 million people watched the Super Bowl. âLoL World Championship draws more viewers than the Super Bowl,â went the headline Itâs a good headline, if true. But it turns out that the original numbers, which were drawn in part from Chinese streaming platforms, were unverifiable. Also, a Super Bowl viewer needs to watch for six minutes to register with Nielsenâs tracking. For esports, someone can be briefly browsing Twitchâs front page, where the livestream is playing, and count toward its viewership. League publisher Riot Games later published the real numbers: 99.6 million unique viewers."
They are less inflated and less flawed than the ones used on actual television.
Yeah, itâs true that the Twitch stream might be getting viewbotted and there are actually less people watching. But that number is still more accurate than the Nielsen number. Nielsen just has âdecades worth of trustâ but that trust is equally unfounded.
Almost all professional sports, including the college sports that pretend to not be pro, only exist because people with money believe in them and support them. They are not sustainable based on the box office figures. The only reason an esport house of cards might collapse while something like the NFL will not is because old white rich dudes donât support and believe in it as much.
Citation or source to back that statement up?
Did you even read the article or just dismiss it because you disagree with the premise and like eSports?
The examples listed in the article are pretty damning.
I donât know as much about the economics of hockey, but at least for the NBA, the majority of the entire leagueâs revenue is national TV rights.
To be fair, thatâs quite likely thing to happen.
Though Iâm not too worried. People seem to talk about eSports only as this circus of big flashy events and huge price pools and pros of international fame. But ultimately itâs about people playing and competing in videogames and that will happen as long as there are people and videogames around. Thatâs not gonna crash down in any kind of card house.
Iâve called bullshit on Nielsen ratings and advertising metrics since well before esports was a thing.