So, Dawngate, one of the newer pretenders to the League of Legends throne, has finally rolled out its version of Runes and Masteries. I’m going to move right past the fact that other games in the genre have proven that this feature is just another time and money sink (and even a trap) and get right down to the problem it presents for those who are just playing the game.
The strangest thing about these meta-game stat systems is that they seem to be designed for a game that was released 20 years ago, in a vacuum, and without the internet. Except that Dawngate, like every other game in the genre, is only played online. So the developers have to know that anyone who is able to play their game is also able to do something as simple as type “Dawngate loadout guide” into a search engine. Right now that wouldn’t get them much outside of some basic tutorials, but that feature has only been in a game for a couple of weeks.
And that’s the best time for this type of system. A week or two in and everyone is still discovering the system and its components. The features are fresh and new and interesting. But what about 6 or a year from now, when many players have had access to most of the available combinations for long enough to have done the min/maxing legwork? It’s about that time that these customization options start to look like one of the Kardashians without the benefit of makeup or Photoshop.
I have already made my case about the current fixation with guide-based gaming, and I think this type of system is one of the reasons it’s such a problem.
I’m willing to give these games the benefit of the doubt and go with the idea that there isn’t one or two optimum setups for a given hero or role, that with enough ingenuity and forward thinking it’s possible for any player to actually customize their selected character or role in a way that will make them both unique and viable at all play levels. Even then, in that scenario that is, frankly, a fantasy, these systems fall apart under their own weight.
Too many choices can be just as much of a problem as no choices at all. This isn’t even unique to games and stats, The Economist has written about how modern consumers are often overwhelmed by available choices, and how that has a become a problem for all involved. As far as I’m concerned, the same basic ideas apply to anyone playing one of these League of Legends clones–and since they have to pay for customization with time or money they’re not much different from someone trying to buy a traditional product.
In this ideal world where anyone could succeed with any number of combinations of gems or sparks or runes or whatever they’re being called, how many are actually willing and able to follow through? Even if they had it in their minds to experiment, how many would be willing to spend their hard earned in-game currency on a setup that may end up being a complete waste? A simple and very generalized Rune page in League of Legends starts at the low, low price of 5 digits worth of IP, which is more than enough to purchase multiple champions, and is likely to be all (or more) of the IP a player has earned at the point where they can fill it out. How much of that would they be willing to gamble? I’d be surprised if Dawngate didn’t end up with the same general numbers.
If only to save time and headaches most players will opt to follow a guide even if those guides weren’t already considered to be the optimal min/maxing available. They would do that for the same reason people don’t comparison shop in 5 different grocery stores when they just want a box of crackers. It’s easier to pick a brand in the shop they’re already in than to spend all of that extra time trying to grind out potential advantages. There is only so much time in a day, and only so much attention a player can realistically dedicate to learning these systems. If 9 out of 10 pro players use a setup for their role or character, why risk trying to break the mould?
Which leads into the next problem with these systems. Say a player finally has their ideal min/maxed setup for their character and role of choice, what happens when they want to try something new? Can they properly support without a proper support setup? Can they be relied on to play a carry role without the Rune page to back it up? Would they want to try?
Of course, many of the benefits given by these expensive and time consuming customization systems are measured in fractions of a percent. How much of an impact do they really have? In an era of pro gaming any amount of min/maxing will be disseminated rapidly, and anyone who cares to know what the “best” setups are will. Then there are the dual problems of how much they matter: If the overall impact of a complicated meta-game system, one that requires dozens of hours of grinding for a player to achieve, is actually negligible while playing the game, then what’s the point of the system if not to suck extra time and money out of the players. On the other hand, if having the most optimal meta-game setup does have a noticeable impact to player’s performance, then giving them so many extra ways to do it wrong–which would be a waste of their time and money on top of hurting their impact in-game–is just as questionable.
It’s even more suspect if, like in League of Legends, the developers also tell the players what setups they should be using. We’re approaching the point of these guys becoming used car salesmen, trying to sell a new character, but also making very sure the customer won’t be able to play it properly if they don’t but all these extras as well.
In the end, as long as players can min/max, they certainly will min/max.It’s more than likely that within 9 months any deviation from standard, established setups will just be an invitation for flames.
Tropes–or at least the modern idea of them–have been getting a bad rap lately. They are written off as crutches and cliches, when really it’s only overused tropes that end being cliches. Which is what makes a cliche in the first place. A trope is simply a tool, a sort of shorthand or symbolism between authors and audiences, and like any tool, it’s how it is used that gives it meaning.
I like the idea of tropes for more than fiction, because it’s more direct than pointing vaguely at some sort of cultural osmosis, but it works the same either way. It’s relevant for eSports because we are reaching a point where there are people interested in watching games that they have less (or even no) interest in playing. Ten or fifteen years ago that was not really the case. Then people who watched the games were the same people who were playing the games, partly because there was way less streaming going on, but also because they generally had to have played the games to be interested in watching them, or even know that there were competitions to be watched.
These days games that want to have competitive communities try much harder to integrate spectators, either directly through the game’s clients, or with replays, or by advertising, sponsoring, and even running leagues and tournaments. For now that’s mostly because they still think of the audience as being the same group as their general player population, but that’s not always the case, and it certainly wont stay that way.
Ease of Access
When I first started watching competitive gaming there were few methods that were both viable and easy. The barrier for entry was quite high. To watch a Quake game I needed to download a replay, same with Warcraft 3 and DotA games later on. That meant I needed to have the games installed, and those replays were completely self-serve: the viewer had to control the camera, when they could (Quake replays were limited to the viewpoint of the player who recorded them.), and if I wanted shoutcast commentary–if that was even available–I would have to download and run that concurrently with a different program and sync it up with the action. Of course, if a new version of the game was released that would often invalidate or cause errors in older replays, so a separate install or version switcher was also a necessity. And all of that was dependant on knowing which 3rd party sites had replays and commentary to begin with, and they were also all after the fact. It was possible to watch live Quake through QTV, but that was a whole different set of problems. For a game like Warcraft 3 (and DotA), the only way to spectate live was to be in the game as a spectator.
Fighting games were even worse, with very little video unless someone dragged a camera to a tournament, and pretty much no commentary at all. Viewers were expected to know what was going on, both mechanically, and in the player’s heads, and to this day many competitive players don’t think watching fighting game videos is very instructive or helpful (past learning what combos and setups people are using)–though that’s also mostly because it can be difficult to get into the player’s heads, and the actual game should be going on there.
The one exception, of course, was Brood War, where the games were being broadcast on Korean TV. Certain enterprising individuals (RIP Jon747) would upload recordings of the Korean broadcasts, but that often meant blurry video and Korean commentary. Which was always entertaining, but not very informative to non-speakers. Even the English commentaries depended on just muting the Korean language track and speaking over it. Yes, some of my fondest competitive gaming memories, as a viewer, were a result of that, but it was all more effort than most people were willing to put into watching or broadcasting.
All that started to change with YouTube and other video sites, which made it easier to post long VODs, and then HD videos, and then streaming sites came along, and everyone started to get faster connections with better bandwidth, but even a couple of years ago the only way to get replays of smaller fighting game tournaments and gatherings was if someone showed up with a laptop or camera to record and then upload them, and that was still a task that required hours of editing, transcoding, and uploading. And still none of it was live.
Nowadays it’s as easy as tuning into a Twitch stream to watch high-definition video and commentary of any live tournament. Being a viewer has never required less effort, and it’s only going to get easier.
How to Spectate
Concurrent with the easing of requirements for being a spectator has been the general increase in people watching games, which should be obvious. But it has also changed how some games, mostly the competitive ones, are marketed, and how they’re broadcast.
Used to be that people doing commentary for a game were just as much part of the community as their viewers. They were doing niche work, and they knew it, so they spoke directly to each other. There was very little effort made to be transparent or welcoming, or even polite most of the time. They weren’t looking to attract a wider audience, only to retain the viewers that already existed. That changed drastically when streams became the go-to source for gameplay and sponsors started to become more involved. When money was on the line there was finally incentive to clean things up and start looking to attract new viewers. Flaming and swearing started to die down as there was always pressure to keep a stream friendly for all ages, and any instance of off-colour speech was spread rapidly by the so-called stream monsters. Suddenly there was a difference between what someone could or would say on a stream and what they would say live at an event, because the stream audience and the players were no longer the same.
Commentary then started to lean more toward being informative, because they weren’t speaking to the people who were part of the tournaments anymore, they were aiming for a much wider audience, and most of them were new to competitive games. They had to tell players what they were watching in order to keep them watching, because even though it was easier to find video of competitive games, viewers still needed to know what was going on if they hoped to get anything out of it.
Soon enough these YouTube VODs and streams became a secondary source of advertisement for new games. Starcraft 2’s beta was widely streamed, and before that there were VODs of test matches to show off current builds, a tradition Blizzard has kept up, and other developers have emulated.
What’s most interesting about these is the way commentary has evolved even further. Where it was originally only speaking to players who already knew what they were watching, and then changed to speak to players who wanted to know what they were watching, with each new year and each new game it becomes more about speaking to viewers who really only needed to know how what they were watching was different from what they already know. Notice in that Heroes of the Storm video how very little time is spent on explaining the game’s objectives, it’s genre, or specific mechanics, unless they needed to be differentiated from the norm. Because a level of knowledge is now expected. Because the game is built around tropes that viewers are now expected to know. They can make a 20 minute video about a game that nobody watching has played and not have to spend 18 of those minutes describing what a hero is, why there are creeps spawning and rushing down lanes, and that the game is lost when a team loses its home structure.
Each new game lays down more groundwork, establishes more tropes, and makes it easier for the next game to find an audience.
But that also means that each new game has an audience for whom owning and playing that game is less of a requirement for watching it.
How to Broadcast
I suspect this is one of the prime reasons for most developers taking a more hands-on approach to their competitive communities. As far back as Brood War it was proved that an audience of non-players was possible–and probably even required–for a game to become successful as an eSport. The problem, of course, was that the developers still want to make money. I watched Brood War games for years, and though I did own a copy of the game, I felt no desire to start playing again. And KeSPA didn’t care, because they were making their money from viewers, not players (they also didn’t care because I wasn’t watching on Korean TV, but that’s besides the point). It was basically the same situation with Starcraft 2, though it didn’t hold my attention nearly as long.
As the tropes become more well known, as the games become easier and easier for non-player to become viewers while remaining non-players, there will need to be ways of making money from them. That starts the same way sports already do it, with rating and advertisement revenue, but it should eventually extend the same way sports do, with merchandise, both physical and virtual. Valve has gotten a jump start there, by selling team pennants that players can equip to show support during tournament matches, the same way someone might show up to a football game wearing a jersey. The next step in eSports development, at least for the developers, will probably be a bigger emphasis on all sorts of out-of-game purchases and tie-ins. It makes sense for them to want to make money as directly as possible from each fan, and it should be natural enough for fans to want to support their favourite players and teams.
In a much broader perspective, this positions video games, and eSports, to eventually take a cultural foothold that can put them on the map permanently. I had to play Brood War in order to understand competitive Brood War, and I played Warcraft 3 and DotA before I watched either. I played Quake and many different fighting games for years, even competitively. At the time that was the requirement needed to be a spectator. A decade or so later I can watch Starcraft 2 without ever having played more than its singleplayer campaign, as can many others. Most spectators don’t need to be told the reason for basic fireball-uppercut spacing games in Street Fighter 4 anymore, and that will hold true for the next Street Fighter game, and every other fighting game released in that mould. A new League of Legends clone only needs to tell viewers how it’s different from League before they can be expected to understand it. As time goes by each genre’s norms become more firmly established, their tropes become more well known, and eventually we may reach a point where the rules to fighting games or a resource management RTS games will be as well known as the rules to many sports, because–just like sports–everyone will have played or watched them in the past.
There are apparently 70 million people who have registered accounts with Riot, and millions more with registered DotA 2 accounts. Even considering all the smurfs in there, that’s way more people who know some basic rules to the genre than 10 years ago, and that number is only going to grow. Each one of those is a potential viewer.
The problem of other minds is not just an abstract notion for pot smokers and old guys in cardigans to ponder while they smoke their pipes. It’s something that people who play competitive games have to tackle every time they plug in their sticks or click their launch icons. It’s impossible to know what an opponent is thinking, and that’s the draw, but it’s also impossible to play a game where one never knows what their opponent is going to do, so players establish routines and respond to patterns. A particular build order is chosen, based on past experience, arbitrary whim, or a perceived meta-game, but then information is gathered, because it’s still impossible to know. A probe scout finds the enemy base and now attempts can be made to understand their build order and game plan, but this is based on even more assumptions, the most basic of which is that the opponent actually knows what they’re doing–or what they should be doing–but it’s still impossible to know what they’re thinking.
What happens when that probe finds their base and sees something that shouldn’t be? It’s not a recognized build order, there are too many workers, or too few, or any number of other abnormal phenomena. Suddenly this opponent is more than Terran Player #327, running Terran Build #5. But is it because they don’t know what they’re doing, or because they really know what they’re doing? Is this just a really late barracks, or is there a bunker being built in the fog next to the Protoss player’s ramp?
Mechanical knowledge and proficiency are important for every player in every game, but just as important is how they make decisions. One thing that has traditionally set fighting games apart from other competitive games is the extremely localized nature of play. Until fairly recently it wasn’t even possible to play most fighting games online (and where it was, as on GGPO, the online communities were just as self-contained as the local ones). With smaller local scenes it was common for players to each focus on playing 1 or 2 characters so that the entire roster wasn’t even accounted for. When players travelled to larger tournaments (Majors) they would not only have to deal with characters they’d never played against, but also players they’d never played against. This is the stuff that upsets are made of. I remember a Soulcalibur regionals tournament years in which one of the best local players, who was also playing Amy (universally considered to be at least in the top 5 characters in the game), was knocked out early on by a Yun (generally considered to be around the bottom of the tier lists) player who came in from out of town. This miraculous defeat was put down to lack of character knowledge and a little too much arrogance, both terrible assumptions for anyone to be making in a tournament setting.
The word respect gets tossed around a fair bit, especially in fighting games. It’s a loose concept, but it boils down to how much one player is willing to let another player get away with. This is especially relevant in tournaments as there’s an implied standard in place for most people, so things they might do in a random casual match with no stakes they wouldn’t do during a tournament game when something is on the line. Well, usually: sometimes trolling is in order, as when good players go to anime conventions and win all their matches by using only 1 button.
There’s this idea that if someone is in a non-casual setting they must know what they’re doing, so they aren’t going to fall for simple scrub tactics or gimmicks. This is the same sort of attitude that keeps many people from entering tournaments to begin with, even though it’s often the case that many entrants are just average players who could be bothered to show up and are not inherently better or worse than the average player who couldn’t be bothered to show up (at least at first, because going to tournaments is an amazing way to make connections and improve as a player).
The video above demonstrates the absurd lengths that expectations can lead people to. The Sagat player is giving his opponents no respect, doing the same move over and over again just because, while his first two opponents are paralyzed by their conceptions of what a tournament match is supposed to be: two players trying to out think each other in a battle of wits and skill. There is no way he’s going to Tiger Uppercut again. That’s not how you play in tournaments. Yet I guarantee you that if they were playing in some random online lobby and ran into a Sagat that did nothing but Tiger Uppercuts they would know exactly how to block and punish and probably wouldn’t lose more than half their life bar, let alone a round (I’d also be willing to bet that they had already run into a dozen online Sagats that did nothing but Tiger Uppercuts.).
One of the things that separates a great player from a merely good player is the ability to make decisions and adjust how they play. While it may take an average player a weekend of hard work and research to figure out what went wrong during a match and how to counter it, there are some people who can make that adjustment by their next match, or sometimes even the next round. That’s why they don’t lose to gimmicks, and that’s how they earn respect. People can watch that happen on a stream or a VOD and get wildly inflated ideas what players are capable of. Just because Flash figured out how to counter that rush while it was happening doesn’t mean that anyone who isn’t Flash will. Just because Daigo only fell for that frame trap once doesn’t mean that everyone else won’t fall for it 20 times in a row.
When I played Soulcalibur 4 I used Rock, who is one of the worst characters in the game. When I travelled and played against people from other areas, ones who had very little experience against Rock, I mainly got two reactions. The first was that Rock meant they were about to get an easy win, the second was that a Rock player at a big tournament must mean I had something up my sleeve. Rock himself is the very definition of a gimmick character, and I was able to take some easy wins from players who didn’t know how to deal with him, mostly because of experiences I’d had playing in arcades. There was a time when it was quite common to give other players so-called mercy rounds, beating them to near death in the 2nd round and then allowing them to have the win so that both players could get an extra round of play (after all, the only one profiting from faster games was the arcade’s owner). Sometimes, though, I would get tired of having to play against some people, especially when there was a line of better players behind them. So when there were others around who I actually wanted to play against I wouldn’t give mercy rounds, and instead I would try to win as quickly and easily as possible, which usually involved hitting an opponent with the most obvious gimmicks in my arsenal (may as well be a little flashy, since nobody else will let me do that stuff). All assumptions are thrown out. This guy is going to get hit by everything I do because he doesn’t know how not to get hit by everything I do. There’s no need for complicated “yomi,” nothing harder than simple mid-low mixups. That same sort of swagger was required to steal wins with Rock.
Of course, the good players either knew what Rock could do, or learned quickly enough so that I couldn’t hit them with the same gimmicky setup more than twice. When my options had been exhausted I usually lost, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t steal games from much better players on occasion. On the other hand, I didn’t practice very much and was just as susceptible to being beaten by obvious stuff. It was only that implied level of respect that kept most players from trying to beat me by using the same moves over and over again. And even that didn’t always follow: two of the most brutal defeats I ever suffered in a tournament setting came from players who granted my characters no respect. The first came from another player who couldn’t be bothered to practice and just picked a better character and beat me down with a couple of moves that I couldn’t get around, and the second came from a player who’d come all the way from France, and who also played Rock. He told me that he considered the Rock vs Ivy matchup to be at least 1:9 in Ivy’s favour, and then showed me why. I’m pretty sure I didn’t even hit him during that match. The funny thing about it was that there were other Ivy players watching, yet none of them ever tried to do the same thing to me when I played Rock against them.
As in real life, respect should be earned. There will always be expectations and assumptions, but they need to be measured. There is no point in jumping at every shadow, but there’s also no point in running headlong into the darkness hoping that there isn’t a brick wall in the way. One of the few things that I like about modern matchmaking systems is that they help players with making some basic assumptions about each other before a game starts. A Bronze League Terran with the wrong build order has a much higher chance of simply having done things wrong than a Diamond League Terran, who probably does have something up their sleeve. But most of the time it’s still important to know what they will let you get away with, and also to not make assumptions about their knowledge, especially knowledge of a perceived meta game. I see that happen all the time in DotA, where one player assumes that their opponent is following the standard competitive build order (Gyrocopter only takes 1 point in homing missile, so it won’t kill me!), only to get a rude awakening (He actually has 4 points in homing missile, and now I’m dead!).
The Real Burden of Knowledge
Large matchmaking systems also have that problem of further disconnecting players from each other, making the ability to think and make good decisions less valuable, or at least more difficult. Players are always trying to optimize, to min/max, to create flowcharts and counter-flowcharts. That is how metagames are established, and how entire swaths of mediocre players become interchangeable cogs. Players who rely on getting all their tactics from whatever GameFAQS equivalent or message board or alt+tab guide can get by for a fairly long time with not having to think very much about what they are doing, and every encounter becomes a pass/fail proposition where their guide and knowledge of a metagame tells them how to win and they do (unless their mechanical skill isn’t up to the task), or it doesn’t and they have to make a decision for themselves or lose.
I have to assume this kind of gameplay is attractive to a lot of people, and part of that must have come from MMOs like World of Warcraft. This past summer I played an MMO for the first time, and the situation was made crystal clear: in an ideal MMO setting every character of a given class is exactly the same, and the only thing that sets one player apart from another is their ability to learn and defeat dungeon mechanics and boss patterns, and the quality of their gear–and with the internet around they don’t even have to learn the dungeon for themselves when there are guides available. Once someone solves a boss fight, or establishes the ideal DPS skill rotation, every player will be measured by how well they can conform. And why not? Tackling a dungeon in an MMO means tackling a bunch of dumb AI routines that should perform the same way every time, so there has to be a way of beating them that is better, or at least easier, than all the others, and when players are entering the endless loot treadmill of end-game MMO grinding you can be sure that they will want to know the easiest ways to do it.
The problem is that in competitive games players are not taking on dumb AIs that perform the same way every time, they only start to think they are because of how most of them play the game in the first place. Being able to make decisions, to adapt, and to know when to and when not to respect an opponent is more important than how many guides a player has memorized, and always should be, but the even the way many modern games are designed and played removes the emphasis from what was the real reason for competition in the first place. Games like League of Legends or Smite go as far as trying to remove all decision making problems for the player by just telling them how a new champion should be played, from skill builds to item builds. Granted, they have a vested interest in making their new characters as transparent as possible, so that the only decision their customers have to make is whether they will buy the alternate skins as well. But it’s another way that developers are keeping gameplay decisions out of the hands of the community. (Whether such methods are successful or not is another matter.)
This is the biggest problem with DotA and all of its descendants: layers upon layers of memorization and metagame that further remove players from each other, on top of anonymous matchmaking systems. At their core, every competitive game is nothing more than a set of rules that allow people to compete against each other. Overly complex systems prevent players from actually doing that, as each of them is required to know all the rules (or at least as many as their opponents) before they can stop just playing the game. When a player can win on a technicality–and knowing something that their opponent doesn’t, whether it’s a skill build, item build, hero matchup, lane combination, or any number of different metegame ideas that give them an inherent advantage, is the gaming equivalent of a technicality–then they have one less reason to think about what they’re doing, let alone what their opponents are doing.
It’s both a disadvantage for the genre, and a draw for many players. In a fighting game a player can’t win because someone else carried them (unless it’s a team tournament, obviously), and while they can still lose because they don’t know a matchup, or they get counter-picked, actually learning those matchups and counterpicks is both easier and a personal process. There are guides in fighting games the same way there are guides in DotA or LoL, but the content and intent of them are quite different. Each player is still required to make their own decisions and depend on their own training and reactions, because there is no real alt+tab equivalent, just a series of suggestions and practical input from experienced players. And in fighting games even average players can get by in most situation by being mechanically sound and being able to actually out think their opponent. In fact, things like tier lists and character matchups are considered to only really apply to the highest level of players, where they already know all the rules and are mechanically competent enough that having an inherent character advantage causes a player who makes more correct decisions to lose anyway.
There are some games for which an alt+tab guide isn’t even practical, like Quake, where there are a few basic rules and ideas that every player should know (what powerups are for, how to time them, which guns are generally more important and should be protected or sought out), but once in a game everything comes down to mechanical skill, reactions, and the ability to make better decisions.
All of that still exists in very high level DotA, because the players know enough, and are good enough at mechanics, that being able to make better decisions once again becomes the prime factor for who wins and who loses. They also get to play more regularly against specific opponents, allowing them to learn their quirks, and to get into their heads. In a large, anonymous matchmaking system most players will never play the same opponents often enough to learn anything about them, making it even harder to get into their heads. Tournament matches and pro scrims will have respect bans, but when was the last time a random pub game had one? In a pro match one player can know enough about another to predict their positioning in fights, or how they like to juke, or even just what their most optimal options are in a situation, which lets them adjust, lets them make decisions, lets them try and out think them.
It’s not that any other player can’t do the same thing in a pub, but more that they don’t because they don’t have to and may not even want to. If they have the agreed-upon best guide on hand, or have a supposedly game-breaking lane combo, or know the flavour of month metagame gimmicks and are just playing against another pair of random pubs, then no decisions are required. Do A, then do B, and then do C, because that’s how wins are done. Even if they lose, if they are out played, that’s a statistical anomaly, and the next 3 games they win with that same build order will prove it. This is also the attitude that has players declaring a loss as soon as they see the hero picks or lanes.
By means of pointless self-aggrandizement (Honestly, this game that came to mind and I’m too lazy to look up another example.), take a look at this scoreboard, these picks, and decide which team is the winner.
Maybe a little too obvious.
What are the lanes? What are the item builds? What does the alt+tab guide to DotA say is the result?
What happened? Someone picked a lane that is supposed to just win and then they got out played. Even when they started losing they didn’t change anything they were doing, because the guides say they should win. That Keeper of the Light walked into the exact same setup twice, because why not?
Even easier than it looks.
There is no reason to live only by guides. They are a great place to start, but every player has it in them to make their own decisions, and where matchmaking fails there are plenty of in-house leagues and amateur tournaments where they can get to know each other well enough to finally get the chance to out think opponents instead of going through the motions. Every player who aspires to play a competitive game should know what it’s like when the layers are finally peeled away and behind those rules is another human mind, with its own thoughts and peculiarities. The feeling of having won not because a better guide was followed, but because an opponent was encountered, evaluated, and conquered on their own terms.
The motto of any competitive community should always be, “Play better,” and never, “Read more.”
I want to make it very clear, if it wasn’t already, that this blog is not a news source. I do cite facts whenever I’m able to, and the original purpose was to report on the progress of a developing game, but all that is done now. This article, like all the others I write, is an opinion piece. And I want to mostly stick to opinions that I think might actually be interesting or unique, not my list of the Top 10 Worst Special Move Names In Fighting Games.
With that out of the way, let’s talk about Riot and their attitude toward eSports, their competitive players, and how their actions may be setting precedence for everyone else to follow.
Recently there were reports that the contracts Riot issued to their players for the upcoming League of Legends Championship Series (LCS) has clauses that restrict players from streaming many games that could be seen as rivals to League of Legends. onGamers.com later reported a comment by Whalen ‘RiotMagus’ Rozellemade, head of eSports for Riot, made in a Reddit thread about the contracts:
We say this all the time: we want League of Legends to be a legitimate sport. There are some cool things that come from that (salaried professional athletes, legitimate revenue streams, visas, Staples Center), but there’s also a lot of structural work that needs to be done to ensure a true professional setting.
We recognize there may be some differences of opinion in the perception of pro players’ streams. In the past, pro gamers only had to worry about their personal brands when streaming and, at most, may have had to worry about not using the wrong brand of keyboard to keep their sponsor happy. Now, however, these guys are professionals contracted to a professional sports league. When they’re streaming to 50,000 fans, they’re also representing the sport itself.
I can’t stress enough how these guys in the LCS are on the road to being real, legitimate athletes. This is new territory for a lot of teams (especially in esports), because the transition goes from being a group of talented individuals to being real icons of a sport and a league. Similarly, you probably wouldn’t see an NFL player promoting Arena Football or a Nike-sponsored player wearing Reebok on camera. Pro players are free to play whatever games they want – we’re simply asking them to keep in mind that, on-stream, they’re the face of competitive League of Legends.
I’m sure everyone who cares has already formed an opinion about whether this is right or ethical by now, and I don’t have anything significant to add to that discussion. I’m much more interested in what Riot’s big picture is. They already managed to get League of Legends recognized as a sport in the USA, which I’m sure will eventually turn out to be a big deal for other games, but that, along with these contracts, and the way Riot runs their tournaments in general, shows a fundamentally different approach to eSports compared to other developers. It also shows a different approach to sports in general.
What really sets League of Legends apart from other sports, besides the whole eSports thing, is that it’s the first sport where a company own and controls not only the league, but the game itself. Regular sports are not like that: the NBA is a professional basketball league, but anyone is free to play basketball whenever and wherever they like, and even create rival leagues. Not so with League of Legends, where Riot runs all the major leagues, and also owns the game they play. It wouldn’t even be possible for League of Legends to have a KeSPA situation on their hands, like Blizzard did with Brood War, where another company is using the game to run their own leagues, or any number of professional sports leagues that have popped up over the years as alternatives to the established organizations. (Remember the WHA? Or XFL?) If Riot doesn’t want someone playing their game they can stop them from playing. This puts Riot in a much stronger position if and when players ever try to form a union, as pro athletes have in every major sport. There would be no alternate option for a League of Legends player who didn’t like their contract, except to switch games entirely.
Blizzard learned from Brood War, and so has Riot, and I doubt anyone will let that happen again. In fact, it was probably KeSPA’s overwhelming success at turning another company’s product into their own profit that prompted every developer to create their own eSports department.
I’ll admit that my views on eSports are still informed by years spent with fighting games, where eSports itself is still a bad word, and watching professional Brood War, which was unique. I have always thought that one of the primary reasons for how the fighting game community plays their games, aside from it mostly forming in a time when developers didn’t really care about competitive gaming, was that the games they play were completely static. They were given a game and had to make of it what they could, where, say, an FPS player would at least have the option of mods to fix things they didn’t like. In the time before time (aka the 90s and early 2000s) there weren’t even patches. So fighting game communities had to form their own sets of rules, which were usually as simple as round limits (a 3/5 standard where arcades might be using 2/3 to make the games faster), but could be as extreme as the Smash Bros. community banning all items and special power-ups.
But at least Smash players had that option, because Smash wasn’t supposed to be a competitive game in the first place. The biggest difference now is that every developer knows that players will be streaming their games, that videos will be all over youtube. They usually encourage, or at least tolerate that, because it’s free advertising for them. But what happens when what the developers want and what the competitive community wants start to clash in this new era of social networked gaming?
The Smash example is a little played out, so here’s something more recent: Dead or Alive 5. Compare these two videos, one the grind finals from a recent tournament, the other a promotional gameplay video.
Clearly the promotional video is a better advertisement for the game, but why, exactly? For a start, the tournament players pick flat stages and disable the Danger Zones (the big explodey things that change a stage’s architecture mid-fight), and also never use Power Blows (the slow-motion special moves that allow players to knock each other into Danger Zones), which are the two biggest gameplay additions in Dead or Alive 5 (the 3rd being a special critical state that also seems to be rarely seen in the tournament footage I’ve watched). You could watch 45 minutes of tournament videos and not even realize Danger Zones or Power Blows existed. The players don’t use them because they don’t want to, and the players set the rules for tournaments. Now imagine if they were in the same situation as the League of Legends players. If Tecmo was running all the tournaments and making the rules would they disable some of the game’s core features to appease competitive players?
How long till these options become a thing of the past? Probably a while, but think about how the new consoles have decided to integrate video streaming, which catches them up to PCs, where video game streams are big business for major personalities–which is one of the reasons Riot created those contracts. There has already been at least one major incident of a developer censoring a video game stream for giving their game a bad review (that developer, after public humiliation, removed the copyright block). And that was a youtube dispute between a small indie developer and a well known personality. Imagine a major developer dropping a blanket censor on certain types of content being streamed. Before now a person who wanted to see competitive or critical gameplay of a game had to at least type the request into a search engine and click on a link, but with the new consoles the option to watch other people playing is much more immediate. Which is more likely: that these streaming options will be used to lovingly show off a game’s core features in a way that usually only happens in the wet dreams of an advertiser, or that the streams disseminate game-breaking glitches and multiplayer exploits like a plague.
Many people still watch Street Fighter tournaments and think, “Why won’t these scrubs ever stop spamming fireballs?” And they had to find those videos on youtube before making that judgment. What if someone who is thinking about maybe buying Dead or Alive 5 decides to watch the most recent media available, and only sees a mirror match replay of a tournament game on the smallest, least interesting stage in the game, labelled by the community as, “Excellent! Best game of DOA5 I’ve ever seen!” Somewhere, a Team Ninja employee wakes up in a cold sweat.
At the same time, Riot really is doing something different. Even Valve, who puts down a lot of money for their annual International DotA 2 tournament, still leaves it to 3rd parties and the community to organize and perpetuate the competitive scene. Which is why there are still problems and outrage. Unlike the Fighting Game Community™ and the DotA community, which have been around for long enough to have set ways that frequently clash with public perception, Riot got to start competitive League of Legends with new stock (Most DotA 2 pros were DotA 1 players, while many League of Legends players had never played another game competitively before.), which allows them to influence their players and their public image, and that’s not even counting the contracts. Not to say there aren’t incidents–these are a bunch of kids, for the most part, and stupid things will happen–but they don’t have to deal with well known players and organizers saying that they tolerate things like sexism and racism because that’s how it’s always been. (And to be fair to the older communities, it’s not easy when a bunch of people who have known each other long enough to accept each other and become friends suddenly have their conversations broadcast to the public. I mean, I’ve personally said many things at tournaments and gatherings that would probably get me lynched. I was even told that I had to change how I spoke if I wanted to do stream commentary, because sponsors were starting to get involved.) The NBA controls how their players dress when off the court, and would have no problem fining them for saying things they didn’t like. Don’t expect Riot to do any less, because apparently the NBA is what Riot wants to be.
I don’t play or watch League of Legends, and probably never will–and I doubt I’ll be buying either of the new consoles until they actually get a game worth playing between them–but I recognize that Riot, hand in hand with the gamification of social media and free-to-play systems on modern consoles, is going to completely change how many people think about and experience video games in the years to come. It will be interesting to see how this all plays out, for everyone involved.
I am struck once again by how different players are today. Maybe it’s just the circles I moved in, but growing up there were never huge outcries for better matchmaking systems. A pub was a pub, and better players were better players, and everyone took their lumps and moved on. Players who actually wanted to improve took the necessary steps: they joined a team, they got on mIRC pickup channels, they went to local gatherings, and they entered tournaments. They did all this because they knew they would lose to better players, and that losing to better players was the surest way of improving.
Some of this must be a symptom of the dissolution of 3rd party public servers, banlists, and the general trend toward quick match online play over any sort of face-to-face interaction. I realize now that there are people who never had a server they called their own, have never been to a local gathering or LAN, or even a net cafe. Their entire concept of online play is hinged on nebulous matchmaking systems, friends lists, and down voting people on XBOX Live. Even with ranked and unranked ladders in some games the waters must be muddy as hell.
I suppose when a players has never done anything organized it can be hard to gain perspective. Their only reference points are watching pro players in tournaments, and their personal random pubbing experiences. That the two are so different has got to rankle. But that difference exists, and it’s not the responsibility of a matchmaking system to emulate the grand finals of (insert the name of a large tournament) for every player who clicks the find a match button. It only exists to get approximate results, and can’t account for either teamwork or trolling, and it never will. Go watch your average pro player doing their high level matchmaking on a stream and ask yourself if you really want every pub to play like that (The exception to this rule would be some 1v1 ladders in which the top tier players would mostly be tournament players being matched against each other, and even then.). When they’re pubbing they play pubs. It’s not serious. They’re playing for fun. That is what pubs are for.
Expected Matchmaking Result
When 3rd party servers were still common that is how they were used. They formed communities, people got to know each other. Usually the same players were there because they had similar schedules and that server had the lowest ping. It was nice to go there and hang out with the same group of people, get to know them, make connection, set up tryouts and scrims, and generally play for fun. In such a setting it was easy to learn how one stood against everyone else, which made power struggles at least sensible, and it was possible to know who could be approached for advice. The same goes for offline gatherings, which may be about intense training, but are also often a group of players hanging out for an afternoon, talking about anything. That sort of environment is conducive to learning because players know who they are, and they know who everyone else is. If one of them needs advice on how to play against characters X they can go to the best X player there and talk about it, then get on a system and work it out. That is how progress is made, and why most who have been to a local gathering or tournament will say that they learned more in those few hours than they did in a week training alone.
These communities become tight-knit. There is a reason that major tournaments try to separate them out in brackets when they travel together. These were the teams before there were sponsors, because the local players trained with each other, improved each other, and progress for one of them was progress for all of them. There is a great sense of being in it together.
It’s a lot like this, only with less Ted Danson and more anime discussions.
All of that is lost in the anonymity of online matchmaking. There is no perspective, and no sense of self or others. I think that’s one of the reasons there is so much resistance to both giving and receiving advice or instructions: it’s not as simple as not wanting to be told what to do by “some newb,” it’s that without perspective every other player is “some newb.” They have never been seen before, and they will probably never be seen again, making them no different from any of the other hundred players encountered that week. There is no connection, they have no identity. It is the difference between getting advice from Lebron James and getting advice from some random asshole who just hit a lucky 3 point shot in a public court in some schoolyard half way across town. If it was Dendi giving out advice on Pudge play to their opponent in a pub game that Pudge would inclined to listen, never mind that he may be giving the exact same advice that the last 5 pub opponents gave, except that he is Dendi and they were just 5 random pubs.
This is more than simply bowing to authority figures, though that may be the larger part of it. The anonymous and random nature of matchmaking will always create a disconnect between a players and the rest of the community, especially in team games where they have a dozen other excuses to fall back on every time something goes wrong. Complaining about matchmaking is not the solution. The solution is to get involved.
Most players will quickly plateau in pubs because they need challenges to keep them from forming bad habits, and they need positive examples to emulate. A matchmaking system designed to place them against players of equal skill would not give them either of those often enough to make a difference. Fortunately for all, what worked before matchmaking still works today, and most anyone should be able to find an organized league, pick-up group, offline community, or even small tournaments to join. Any or all of those would be much better at helping them learn and get contacts than randomly tooling about in pubs until they stumble upon the secret to their success.
Good players don’t magically coalesce from the ether. Even those with natural talent have to be tempered before they can compete, and does anyone really think pub matchmaking is where that happens? Even the so-called pub stars that pop up in pro tournaments now and then realize their full potential when they take their game to a setting that will allow it.
So why don’t people do it? Why are so many leagues dead on their feet for lack of interest? Simply because blaming other people or blaming matchmaking is easier than getting involved and possibly finding out where they really stand. There isn’t even anything wrong with being a pub player. By all means, pub it up and enjoy it, but don’t turn around and blame anyone other than yourself for where you are and the games you get, not when you have the options to get real competition any time you want.
vaguespeculations 