10 ms·

In esports media, layoff season is in full swing

56 points by cheinyeanlim 4y ago

bob1029 4y ago
I am happy to see this trend potentially ending. In my estimation, esports ultimately resulted in barbaric desecration of formerly-enjoyable multiplayer experiences, all for the sake of the all-mighty meta. Many titles were built for the express purpose of being a PPV event. I believe Starcraft 2 and LoL evolved into some of the top offenders in this arena. Overwatch also had a scary phase with mandatory meta queues. These days, SC2 feels like you are playing an organ with 1 hand tied behind your back. LoL lost all of the wacky energy when you couldn't stack items anymore. Competitive multiplayer gaming is effectively dead for me, and not because I don't like to get sweaty anymore. I will still periodically fire up something like TF2, just so I can remember how good it all could have been. I can play [insert role] all day on 1 server with other humans and no one will give me shit about it. Try playing off-meta in LoL and see how long your account stays active.
- atdrummond 4y ago
  This reply deserves to be responded to if you disagree rather than simply downvoted. I have been a fairly competitive gamer for about two decades and I too have seen the degradation in behaviour and the increasing requirements in time to enjoy many multiplayer games. Gone are the days of easily popping into a lobby a few days a week for an hour and finding an enjoyable match.
  - JetAlone 4y ago
    Agreed. Organizing a fun multiplayer experience now often takes some amount of work either to get good enough to catch up to the aspirants and those approaching their level, or to organize an insulated community of moderates/casuals. And if you have time to devote to playing a game just in organizing such a community, you have to ask yourself if you'd rather not spend that time just playing the game itself and catching up? I think these kinds of middling communities are groups of friends who enjoy a variety of games together at which point, you need to make sure you have the right equipment to play 80% of what the rest of the group is playing online or you'll be left behind. I am in a position where I can only play about 30% or less of the games my online friends choose to play with my current setup.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- panick21_ 4y ago
  I don't really understand your complaint. I don't play lol. You can just go into SC2 and play matches no problem. And the game is far easier to play SC1 was, and part of the game is that it is challenging, its not the meta that made it so. I also never felt that way with dota, you can play any hero you want for fun. And you offered no explanation how these experiences could be much better.
  - dehrmann 4y ago
    My take was that GP was essentially complaining that now you have to pay attention to strategy to be good and you can't just wing it. This has been the case forever, though. SC1 is that way, chess is that way.
    - accountofme 4y ago
      No, the GGP is making the point that games designed for competitive multiplayer are not fun. Skill was always required. But fun is something the industry has forgotten how to do.
      - orwin 4y ago
        I think he is wrong about Sc2 though. The game is way easier to play than what is has been, and sure some decisions (12 workers at the start instead of 6) were for competitive gaming/watchability, but most of them were just help for casual players like me. I like being able to execute a build order easily, to gather my units with one press, to not have to learn to recognize if i have too much worker on a base and have it told to me, all of that did not help the competitive scene. I'd argue that they focused on 2 things: casual player experience and watchability. The only thing pro gamer gets to get is balance at high level.
- rightbyte 4y ago
  > I will still periodically fire up something like TF2 When did you do that last time? TF2 got destroyed due to matchmaking killing of community servers and is a void of hat farming bots by now. Valve did too little too late for TF2.
  - weberer 4y ago
    Like 2 days ago. >TF2 got destroyed due to matchmaking killing of community servers Community servers are still there. I can still pretty much always find a full server on whatever map I feel like playing on at the time.
    - bob1029 4y ago
      This has been my experience as well. I don’t even mind their matchmaking thing if I’m feeling lazy and want to wind up in a particular vanilla map set without thinking too hard. The custom maps and community servers are as strong as ever, IMO. Check out the player statistics on steam.
      - gs17 4y ago
        > Check out the player statistics on steam. Those are very misleading. The teamwork.tf stats show a lot fewer players (still a decent number) actually playing on servers, and you can verify those by adding up the player counts on servers manually.
    - rightbyte 4y ago
      Hmm ... maybe I were unlucky when I checked. After some master server crash or something.
- fxtentacle 4y ago
  Fully agree. Back in the day, I could just join a game of Dota 2 with my friends. Last time I re-installed, they first forced me to play through a tutorial so that I won't inconvenience other players. Then me and my mate got thrown into a public match with some really talented Koreans who promptly reported us for "intentional feeding" when we lost. I guess in the morning on a weekday, there just wasn't any other amateurs online. But that put a special flag on my account so then I needed to wait for a bad behavior countdown until we could try playing again. All of that just because my Dota skills are hobbyist level. And apparently, that's not acceptable to the online community anymore.
  - tomcam 4y ago
    Wtf? Does intentional feeding mean you’re pretending to be an amateur when you’re not an amateur, or what?
    - cfcf14 4y ago
      Essentially means to play poorly on purpose, with the intent on making the opposing team stronger, or to give them a strategic advantage against your team. People do this to ruin games for whatever reason, it's a phenomena which persists throughout many multiplayer games online.
    - baisq 4y ago
      >A term in team-based video games used to describe someone who is not playing with the team and/or is playing selfishly. This person will usually stray away from the team/objective in a match. The enemy team will be able to take advantage of this situation by either being able to kill the "feeder", or pushing towards the objective while the "feeder" is unable to help. The word originates from games where special abilities can be obtained through dealing damage. If a person is getting damage dealt to them constantly, they are "feeding" the enemies ultimate. https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Feeding https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Feeding
    - thaumasiotes 4y ago
      > Does intentional feeding mean you’re pretending to be an amateur when you’re not an amateur, or what? No, but there is a term for that too, "smurfing".
- throwaway_4ever 4y ago
  I don’t see this issue at all in Valorant. In unranked, no one cares what role you play and people routinely joke around with weird combos. Playing a few games a month makes no difference because your ELO will assign you similar skill levels.
- ssl232 4y ago
  Forgive my ignorance, but what does "meta" mean in this context?
  - nhinck2 4y ago
    The best/most advantageous way to play a game
    - ssl232 4y ago
      Thanks. And what does OP mean by "meta queues"? Clearly I'm completely out of the loop here!
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - RockRobotRock 4y ago
        Overwatch is a 6 vs 6 player competitive shooter. What they are describing, I believe, is forcing each team to comprise of 2 DPS, 2 tanks, and 2 healers. They do that so that each team will be reasonably balanced, and won't consist of only players who want to play DPS, for example, but it takes away some of the creativity and fun involved in finding a good synergy with your team.
        Ekaros 4y ago
        I never played or properly followed Overwatch, but didn't it start with some type of on the fly changing team composition? And then from there it went to what I can understand a very rigid meta? Or am I thinking of some other Blizzard game was it HoTS?
        Gamemaster1379 4y ago
        Overwatch evolved with the most libertarian mindset that slowly got more and more rigid. Mad respect for the team for experimenting, but its been wild to see. Overwatch 1 os a team of 6. At launch, there were no restrictions. You could be and switch to any hero or role at anytime. That includes duplicates. Want to have 6 of the same tank? Go for it. Eventually duplicate heroes was decided too hard to balance. They stopped duplicate heroes. Now you could switch to any hero or role at any time, but it must not be a hero already on your team. As they added more shield tanks, it became harder to balance around. "GOATS" (I have no idea what the acronym means) became "meta" which was 3 tanks, 3 supports. Eventually Blizzard gave up on balancing GOATS and forced role queue. 2 tanks, 2 dps, 2 supports. The role you start with is the role you had to stay in. You could switch to any hero in that role at any time so long as it wasn't what the other person was on. Games were still sluggish, and Blizzard, with Overwatch 2 is making a lot of changes to speed the game up. Particularly, they're reducing a lot of CC abilities and eliminating 1 tank role. Games are now 5v5 with 1 tank, 2 dps, and 2 support
- rytill 4y ago
  SC2 has only gotten easier to play. Selecting multiple buildings, selecting more than 12 units, auto-mining, idle workers, select all army. So you must be referring to how other players got better at winning, or the aggressive strategies players employ to win. Or maybe you don’t like some specific units that were added that you consider anti-fun. Whatever the case, unranked, co-op, custom games didn’t solve these problems for you as a player. I’m curious what specific evolution you think SC2 went through that was undesirable.
- 2pEXgD0fZ5cF 4y ago
  > esports ultimately resulted in barbaric desecration of formerly-enjoyable multiplayer experiences This I agree with > Starcraft 2 and LoL evolved into some of the top offenders in this This I couldn't disagree more. Especially Starcraft 2 is the worst example you could have picked. The game has such a high skill ceiling that you can get away many playstyles until you hit the uppermost ranks. As a master player myself (the rank, I'm far from being a "master" at Starcraft 2) I can comfortably hold myself in Diamond league without microing or even looking at my units or even with only building/using a single unit type and crazy compositions. I got pretty low apm, and my playing looks nothing like that of a pro player (which does resemble your description of one handed organ/piano playing [1]). "Meta" in a game like that only applies to people in upper Grandmaster and Pro territory, and in a Game like Starcraft 2, a low Grandmaster player and a pro player are very far apart from each other. It's not something the devs force upon you, it's what you have to familiarize yourself with to reach a certain level of gameplay. Now where that level lies is something the devs can influence. What I just described applies to many 1v1 competitive games, take a look at fighting games too. You basically imply that Starcraft 2 went wrong somewhere to please e-sports, but are you familiar with high level Starcraft 1? It's way more ridiculous in every aspect of the game and on top of the high skill ceiling you have to familiarize yourself with many quirks of the game to become a decent player, which makes it harder and less accessible in general, but the skill ceiling was just as high or even higher than that of Starcraft 2. > League of Legends This is a more appropriate example, because here you are getting forced into certain meta compositions and picks very early on. However this is as much a community problem as it is a dev problem. At no point is there any need for mid level LoL players to follow "the meta", but the community is very obsessed with following what "the pros" do, whether or not that makes sense. > I can play [insert role] all day on 1 server with other humans and no one will give me shit about it. Honestly I believe one of the main problems you are describing is matchmaking rather than game balancing. With modern style MMR/Elo ratings in team based multiplayer games, playing online is in general way less relaxed than the "good old" joining a server and chilling there with players of vastly different skill levels, which is part of what enables many unconventional playstyles. The development of meta in general is inevitable if you match players based on their skill and give them access to forums and the ability to share knowledge. However as I said initially, I generally agree that quite a few multiplayer games were ruined by devs chasing "e-sport" status. And I absolutely agree that multiplayer games that allow for many different playstyles are more fun, but they are also way harder to create and balance, and the community will find optimal strategies and overpowered characters even if you as the dev do not. [1]: https://youtu.be/SAo3QwnPruc?t=281 https://youtu.be/SAo3QwnPruc?t=281
- danr4 4y ago
  This is off the mark IMO, depending on your definition of esports. As a founder of a competitive gaming startup, I can tell you that every single game publisher lives and dies on the casual players. Most of these players have never seen a single pro match in their life, so the notion that popular games were built for PPV is misguided. What these publishers realized is that giving people a rank makes them more dedicated to playing more and beating others, as well as a sense of progress. sprinkle some repetitiveness, awards, vanity stuff and the hook is even stronger. It’s probably some intrinsic human behavior (monkey brain stuff), but it works well for their bottom line. Do I miss the good ol’ Warcraft 3 dota days? Hell yeah. But I remember one times I set up a “community” match against several of my countrymen. My friends and I were demolished. It was obvious they knew something we didn’t. We only discovered it when we moved to HoN - the meta. The real fun was always custom maps - we kept playing those into our 30s. But I do agree that wacky is fun. There’s still competitive mini games in Dota 2 that are super fun and wacky. Missed opportunity if you ask me.
- me_me_me 4y ago
  Try TF2 Classic, its a mod of TF2 from leaked source that is very close to original tf2 without all the crap weapons and cosmetics. I find it 10x better then current tf2 also community is more chill
- Bombthecat 4y ago
  And lol is now full of bots...
- f0e4c2f7 4y ago
  Come to VR, where we're basically doing 90s style first person shooters again. Complete with TF2 maps ported right in!
  - white_dragon88 4y ago
    What game are you referring to exactly?
    - f0e4c2f7 4y ago
      PavlovVR has TF2 maps https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2125184766 https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=21251...
- aleksiy123 4y ago
  Playing Ranked/Competitive game modes comes with the implicit contract to your teammates that you try your best and play in good faith. I don't think necessarily you have to follow the meta. But it's like best practices. Better stay within them when you are playing with a completely new team. There's other game modes in all those games to try wacky stuff and/or play just for fun it's unranked/casual and custom game modes. You wouldn't sign up for a ranked league in real life to just mess around. It would be disrespectful to your teammates and you would rightly get kicked.
  - pdimitar 4y ago
    That's fine but the problem is that more and more people want to force you into playing as if you're on a grand final... in a random multiplayer queue with only a hint of a hidden rating. People want to win every match and disallow experimentation to not endanger their record. Natural result: a certain kind of people leave and find alternatives and never come back. Like yours truly here.
- oneoff786 4y ago
  I don’t think esports is to blame for competitive metas. That’s just the natural outcome if a large number of people want to get really good at the game. Meta’s aren’t artificial. Good luck trying to play chess at a competitive level without understanding the “meta”
  - sorkin78 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
Ekaros 4y ago
So the overspending and unmet expectations have finally hit? Not that some don't continue on, but it probably was too much money for too little return. And enough VC to spend for growth and esports being main-stream(like regularly on TV) that just didn't materialise.
- throwaway51211 4y ago
  Esports fans hardly fill stadiums, so there is no revenue on that side. On the other though, you have the full spectrum of online marketing to a very specific audience. I think, esports is mainly driven by advertisement or behemoth companies that push their own games. I am not supprised that expenses got cut.
  - hammyhavoc 4y ago
    The LoL world title event has filled NBA arenas and Beijing’s Olympic Stadium, so can you explain the "hardly fill stadiums" comment? Not an eSports enthusiast BTW, I don't watch it or take an interest in it.
    - throwaway51211 4y ago
      You are right, esport fans can fill stadiums but there is a subtle difference to regular sports. Riot Games (LoL) and Valve (Dota2) reliably compete with each other over the most price pool contributions in these large tournaments. I wanted to say, "this is $Corp pushing their product" but i have to correct it a little to " fostering their market". Compare this with traditional soccer leagues and fan clubs and you wont find a big company hunting short term profits with short lifed products that threatens the whole scene.
      - Ekaros 4y ago
        It is pretty clear that the biggest most hyped tournaments have the draw. But some models might not be able to live just on those. So it becomes question can they draw people week by week in sufficient numbers. The traditional sports are build on this. Even smaller sports can pull some crowd in.
marban 4y ago
I stopped playing video games after the Super Famicom & Neo Geo so I'm not even remotely informed about the industry but whenever I see kids showing off their gaming gear and rooms on TikTok I feel like parents these days have to spend their entire paycheque on these kinds of setups — And I'm not sure youngsters are having the same fun that we used to have with a bag of chips and Bomberman & a Super Multitap. Not even mentioning In-App purchases.
- pavlov 4y ago
  The Neo Geo originally cost $650, over $1,400 in 2022 dollars…
  - marban 4y ago
    Sounds like the cost of a GPU and some fancy LED lights.
    - dendriti 4y ago
      Right but it's not though, nearly all of the big-ticket esports games are easily playable on a GTX-1060... You could build an entire esports machine, with monitor (and RGB!) for less than 1000USD. I have done it many times.
      - baisq 4y ago
        And most of those gaming chairs, fancy mousepads, etc. are cheap Chinese crap. The entire room may cost less than what a Neo Geo costed.
    - goosedragons 4y ago
      A decent mid-range GPU is $400. That's TWO Neo-Geo games even before you adjust for inflation. Fancy LED lights are cheapish because they're just LED lights... I'm sure the kids posting their setups on Tiktok are probably the most spoilt and if 90s rich kids could do the same you'd see kids showing off their entire AES and SNES collection and their brand new pentium.
omega3 4y ago
I think there is a lot of effort involved in staying up to date when you try to be a semi competitive player. When I played LOL a while ago I remember pretty much every 2 weeks there would be a new character with unique skills, changes to the characters skillset, new skins, new/removed items, meta changes etc, etc which you would have to learn to remain in a decent shape. After not playing for a year I've had a couple of games and quickly lost interest as it was just not fun to learn this adjacent stuff. It's even worse when they have a complete rework of a character you enjoy playing. Since then I'm unwilling to invest any time into playing these quick changing games.
MafellUser 4y ago
Could someone explain what the article means by "Endemic esports media outlets" and "Endemic news site"? I'm thoroughly confused.
- d0mine 4y ago
  My guess "endemic esports media" is the media that covers only video game events.
oneoff786 4y ago
Esports has never been big or successful. People like to say “look! They filled a stadium!” But the revenue was never there. It’s a small non growing industry.
bigtex 4y ago
Note that Slasher who is quoted in the article spread false information regarding DrDisrespects ban from Twitch and insinuated he had been involved in a heinous crime. Last time I checked he hasn’t tweeted since last summer.
antiverse 4y ago
Artosis, a well known SC2 commentator recently departed from South Korea to move to PEI, Canada. What's in PEI, you ask? I have no idea. Probably the real estate price is still somewhat reasonable (but even that is a big question mark right now). My guess is, he saw the writing on the wall and got out of there before it all comes crashing down. If anything, the people situated over there are far more "in tune" with what is happening, and by the time we find out in the Western hemisphere, it has already occurred. https://twitter.com/Artosis/status/1539757584600952833 https://twitter.com/Artosis/status/1539757584600952833
- ThatPlayer 4y ago
  His YouTube vlog goes into more detail about him having 4 kids (and a dog) and he wants to raise them in bigger house. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0p4b251VPw4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0p4b251VPw4

56 points by cheinyeanlim 4y ago

I am happy to see this trend potentially ending. In my estimation, esports ultimately resulted in barbaric desecration of formerly-enjoyable multiplayer experiences, all for the sake of the all-mighty meta. Many titles were built for the express purpose of being a PPV event. I believe Starcraft 2 and LoL evolved into some of the top offenders in this arena. Overwatch also had a scary phase with mandatory meta queues. These days, SC2 feels like you are playing an organ with 1 hand tied behind your back. LoL lost all of the wacky energy when you couldn't stack items anymore. Competitive multiplayer gaming is effectively dead for me, and not because I don't like to get sweaty anymore. I will still periodically fire up something like TF2, just so I can remember how good it all could have been. I can play [insert role] all day on 1 server with other humans and no one will give me shit about it. Try playing off-meta in LoL and see how long your account stays active.

atdrummond 4y ago
This reply deserves to be responded to if you disagree rather than simply downvoted. I have been a fairly competitive gamer for about two decades and I too have seen the degradation in behaviour and the increasing requirements in time to enjoy many multiplayer games. Gone are the days of easily popping into a lobby a few days a week for an hour and finding an enjoyable match.
- JetAlone 4y ago
  Agreed. Organizing a fun multiplayer experience now often takes some amount of work either to get good enough to catch up to the aspirants and those approaching their level, or to organize an insulated community of moderates/casuals. And if you have time to devote to playing a game just in organizing such a community, you have to ask yourself if you'd rather not spend that time just playing the game itself and catching up? I think these kinds of middling communities are groups of friends who enjoy a variety of games together at which point, you need to make sure you have the right equipment to play 80% of what the rest of the group is playing online or you'll be left behind. I am in a position where I can only play about 30% or less of the games my online friends choose to play with my current setup.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
panick21_ 4y ago
I don't really understand your complaint. I don't play lol. You can just go into SC2 and play matches no problem. And the game is far easier to play SC1 was, and part of the game is that it is challenging, its not the meta that made it so. I also never felt that way with dota, you can play any hero you want for fun. And you offered no explanation how these experiences could be much better.
- dehrmann 4y ago
  My take was that GP was essentially complaining that now you have to pay attention to strategy to be good and you can't just wing it. This has been the case forever, though. SC1 is that way, chess is that way.
  - accountofme 4y ago
    No, the GGP is making the point that games designed for competitive multiplayer are not fun. Skill was always required. But fun is something the industry has forgotten how to do.
    - orwin 4y ago
      I think he is wrong about Sc2 though. The game is way easier to play than what is has been, and sure some decisions (12 workers at the start instead of 6) were for competitive gaming/watchability, but most of them were just help for casual players like me. I like being able to execute a build order easily, to gather my units with one press, to not have to learn to recognize if i have too much worker on a base and have it told to me, all of that did not help the competitive scene. I'd argue that they focused on 2 things: casual player experience and watchability. The only thing pro gamer gets to get is balance at high level.
rightbyte 4y ago
> I will still periodically fire up something like TF2 When did you do that last time? TF2 got destroyed due to matchmaking killing of community servers and is a void of hat farming bots by now. Valve did too little too late for TF2.
- weberer 4y ago
  Like 2 days ago. >TF2 got destroyed due to matchmaking killing of community servers Community servers are still there. I can still pretty much always find a full server on whatever map I feel like playing on at the time.
  - bob1029 4y ago
    This has been my experience as well. I don’t even mind their matchmaking thing if I’m feeling lazy and want to wind up in a particular vanilla map set without thinking too hard. The custom maps and community servers are as strong as ever, IMO. Check out the player statistics on steam.
    - gs17 4y ago
      > Check out the player statistics on steam. Those are very misleading. The teamwork.tf stats show a lot fewer players (still a decent number) actually playing on servers, and you can verify those by adding up the player counts on servers manually.
  - rightbyte 4y ago
    Hmm ... maybe I were unlucky when I checked. After some master server crash or something.
fxtentacle 4y ago
Fully agree. Back in the day, I could just join a game of Dota 2 with my friends. Last time I re-installed, they first forced me to play through a tutorial so that I won't inconvenience other players. Then me and my mate got thrown into a public match with some really talented Koreans who promptly reported us for "intentional feeding" when we lost. I guess in the morning on a weekday, there just wasn't any other amateurs online. But that put a special flag on my account so then I needed to wait for a bad behavior countdown until we could try playing again. All of that just because my Dota skills are hobbyist level. And apparently, that's not acceptable to the online community anymore.
- tomcam 4y ago
  Wtf? Does intentional feeding mean you’re pretending to be an amateur when you’re not an amateur, or what?
  - cfcf14 4y ago
    Essentially means to play poorly on purpose, with the intent on making the opposing team stronger, or to give them a strategic advantage against your team. People do this to ruin games for whatever reason, it's a phenomena which persists throughout many multiplayer games online.
  - baisq 4y ago
    >A term in team-based video games used to describe someone who is not playing with the team and/or is playing selfishly. This person will usually stray away from the team/objective in a match. The enemy team will be able to take advantage of this situation by either being able to kill the "feeder", or pushing towards the objective while the "feeder" is unable to help. The word originates from games where special abilities can be obtained through dealing damage. If a person is getting damage dealt to them constantly, they are "feeding" the enemies ultimate. https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Feeding https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Feeding
  - thaumasiotes 4y ago
    > Does intentional feeding mean you’re pretending to be an amateur when you’re not an amateur, or what? No, but there is a term for that too, "smurfing".
throwaway_4ever 4y ago
I don’t see this issue at all in Valorant. In unranked, no one cares what role you play and people routinely joke around with weird combos. Playing a few games a month makes no difference because your ELO will assign you similar skill levels.
ssl232 4y ago
Forgive my ignorance, but what does "meta" mean in this context?
- nhinck2 4y ago
  The best/most advantageous way to play a game
  - ssl232 4y ago
    Thanks. And what does OP mean by "meta queues"? Clearly I'm completely out of the loop here!
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - RockRobotRock 4y ago
      Overwatch is a 6 vs 6 player competitive shooter. What they are describing, I believe, is forcing each team to comprise of 2 DPS, 2 tanks, and 2 healers. They do that so that each team will be reasonably balanced, and won't consist of only players who want to play DPS, for example, but it takes away some of the creativity and fun involved in finding a good synergy with your team.
      - Ekaros 4y ago
        I never played or properly followed Overwatch, but didn't it start with some type of on the fly changing team composition? And then from there it went to what I can understand a very rigid meta? Or am I thinking of some other Blizzard game was it HoTS?
        Gamemaster1379 4y ago
        Overwatch evolved with the most libertarian mindset that slowly got more and more rigid. Mad respect for the team for experimenting, but its been wild to see. Overwatch 1 os a team of 6. At launch, there were no restrictions. You could be and switch to any hero or role at anytime. That includes duplicates. Want to have 6 of the same tank? Go for it. Eventually duplicate heroes was decided too hard to balance. They stopped duplicate heroes. Now you could switch to any hero or role at any time, but it must not be a hero already on your team. As they added more shield tanks, it became harder to balance around. "GOATS" (I have no idea what the acronym means) became "meta" which was 3 tanks, 3 supports. Eventually Blizzard gave up on balancing GOATS and forced role queue. 2 tanks, 2 dps, 2 supports. The role you start with is the role you had to stay in. You could switch to any hero in that role at any time so long as it wasn't what the other person was on. Games were still sluggish, and Blizzard, with Overwatch 2 is making a lot of changes to speed the game up. Particularly, they're reducing a lot of CC abilities and eliminating 1 tank role. Games are now 5v5 with 1 tank, 2 dps, and 2 support
rytill 4y ago
SC2 has only gotten easier to play. Selecting multiple buildings, selecting more than 12 units, auto-mining, idle workers, select all army. So you must be referring to how other players got better at winning, or the aggressive strategies players employ to win. Or maybe you don’t like some specific units that were added that you consider anti-fun. Whatever the case, unranked, co-op, custom games didn’t solve these problems for you as a player. I’m curious what specific evolution you think SC2 went through that was undesirable.
2pEXgD0fZ5cF 4y ago
> esports ultimately resulted in barbaric desecration of formerly-enjoyable multiplayer experiences This I agree with > Starcraft 2 and LoL evolved into some of the top offenders in this This I couldn't disagree more. Especially Starcraft 2 is the worst example you could have picked. The game has such a high skill ceiling that you can get away many playstyles until you hit the uppermost ranks. As a master player myself (the rank, I'm far from being a "master" at Starcraft 2) I can comfortably hold myself in Diamond league without microing or even looking at my units or even with only building/using a single unit type and crazy compositions. I got pretty low apm, and my playing looks nothing like that of a pro player (which does resemble your description of one handed organ/piano playing [1]). "Meta" in a game like that only applies to people in upper Grandmaster and Pro territory, and in a Game like Starcraft 2, a low Grandmaster player and a pro player are very far apart from each other. It's not something the devs force upon you, it's what you have to familiarize yourself with to reach a certain level of gameplay. Now where that level lies is something the devs can influence. What I just described applies to many 1v1 competitive games, take a look at fighting games too. You basically imply that Starcraft 2 went wrong somewhere to please e-sports, but are you familiar with high level Starcraft 1? It's way more ridiculous in every aspect of the game and on top of the high skill ceiling you have to familiarize yourself with many quirks of the game to become a decent player, which makes it harder and less accessible in general, but the skill ceiling was just as high or even higher than that of Starcraft 2. > League of Legends This is a more appropriate example, because here you are getting forced into certain meta compositions and picks very early on. However this is as much a community problem as it is a dev problem. At no point is there any need for mid level LoL players to follow "the meta", but the community is very obsessed with following what "the pros" do, whether or not that makes sense. > I can play [insert role] all day on 1 server with other humans and no one will give me shit about it. Honestly I believe one of the main problems you are describing is matchmaking rather than game balancing. With modern style MMR/Elo ratings in team based multiplayer games, playing online is in general way less relaxed than the "good old" joining a server and chilling there with players of vastly different skill levels, which is part of what enables many unconventional playstyles. The development of meta in general is inevitable if you match players based on their skill and give them access to forums and the ability to share knowledge. However as I said initially, I generally agree that quite a few multiplayer games were ruined by devs chasing "e-sport" status. And I absolutely agree that multiplayer games that allow for many different playstyles are more fun, but they are also way harder to create and balance, and the community will find optimal strategies and overpowered characters even if you as the dev do not. [1]: https://youtu.be/SAo3QwnPruc?t=281 https://youtu.be/SAo3QwnPruc?t=281
danr4 4y ago
This is off the mark IMO, depending on your definition of esports. As a founder of a competitive gaming startup, I can tell you that every single game publisher lives and dies on the casual players. Most of these players have never seen a single pro match in their life, so the notion that popular games were built for PPV is misguided. What these publishers realized is that giving people a rank makes them more dedicated to playing more and beating others, as well as a sense of progress. sprinkle some repetitiveness, awards, vanity stuff and the hook is even stronger. It’s probably some intrinsic human behavior (monkey brain stuff), but it works well for their bottom line. Do I miss the good ol’ Warcraft 3 dota days? Hell yeah. But I remember one times I set up a “community” match against several of my countrymen. My friends and I were demolished. It was obvious they knew something we didn’t. We only discovered it when we moved to HoN - the meta. The real fun was always custom maps - we kept playing those into our 30s. But I do agree that wacky is fun. There’s still competitive mini games in Dota 2 that are super fun and wacky. Missed opportunity if you ask me.
me_me_me 4y ago
Try TF2 Classic, its a mod of TF2 from leaked source that is very close to original tf2 without all the crap weapons and cosmetics. I find it 10x better then current tf2 also community is more chill
Bombthecat 4y ago
And lol is now full of bots...
f0e4c2f7 4y ago
Come to VR, where we're basically doing 90s style first person shooters again. Complete with TF2 maps ported right in!
- white_dragon88 4y ago
  What game are you referring to exactly?
  - f0e4c2f7 4y ago
    PavlovVR has TF2 maps https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2125184766 https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=21251...
aleksiy123 4y ago
Playing Ranked/Competitive game modes comes with the implicit contract to your teammates that you try your best and play in good faith. I don't think necessarily you have to follow the meta. But it's like best practices. Better stay within them when you are playing with a completely new team. There's other game modes in all those games to try wacky stuff and/or play just for fun it's unranked/casual and custom game modes. You wouldn't sign up for a ranked league in real life to just mess around. It would be disrespectful to your teammates and you would rightly get kicked.
- pdimitar 4y ago
  That's fine but the problem is that more and more people want to force you into playing as if you're on a grand final... in a random multiplayer queue with only a hint of a hidden rating. People want to win every match and disallow experimentation to not endanger their record. Natural result: a certain kind of people leave and find alternatives and never come back. Like yours truly here.
oneoff786 4y ago
I don’t think esports is to blame for competitive metas. That’s just the natural outcome if a large number of people want to get really good at the game. Meta’s aren’t artificial. Good luck trying to play chess at a competitive level without understanding the “meta”
- sorkin78 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

Ekaros 4y ago

So the overspending and unmet expectations have finally hit? Not that some don't continue on, but it probably was too much money for too little return. And enough VC to spend for growth and esports being main-stream(like regularly on TV) that just didn't materialise.

throwaway51211 4y ago
Esports fans hardly fill stadiums, so there is no revenue on that side. On the other though, you have the full spectrum of online marketing to a very specific audience. I think, esports is mainly driven by advertisement or behemoth companies that push their own games. I am not supprised that expenses got cut.
- hammyhavoc 4y ago
  The LoL world title event has filled NBA arenas and Beijing’s Olympic Stadium, so can you explain the "hardly fill stadiums" comment? Not an eSports enthusiast BTW, I don't watch it or take an interest in it.
  - throwaway51211 4y ago
    You are right, esport fans can fill stadiums but there is a subtle difference to regular sports. Riot Games (LoL) and Valve (Dota2) reliably compete with each other over the most price pool contributions in these large tournaments. I wanted to say, "this is $Corp pushing their product" but i have to correct it a little to " fostering their market". Compare this with traditional soccer leagues and fan clubs and you wont find a big company hunting short term profits with short lifed products that threatens the whole scene.
    - Ekaros 4y ago
      It is pretty clear that the biggest most hyped tournaments have the draw. But some models might not be able to live just on those. So it becomes question can they draw people week by week in sufficient numbers. The traditional sports are build on this. Even smaller sports can pull some crowd in.

marban 4y ago

I stopped playing video games after the Super Famicom & Neo Geo so I'm not even remotely informed about the industry but whenever I see kids showing off their gaming gear and rooms on TikTok I feel like parents these days have to spend their entire paycheque on these kinds of setups — And I'm not sure youngsters are having the same fun that we used to have with a bag of chips and Bomberman & a Super Multitap. Not even mentioning In-App purchases.

pavlov 4y ago
The Neo Geo originally cost $650, over $1,400 in 2022 dollars…
- marban 4y ago
  Sounds like the cost of a GPU and some fancy LED lights.
  - dendriti 4y ago
    Right but it's not though, nearly all of the big-ticket esports games are easily playable on a GTX-1060... You could build an entire esports machine, with monitor (and RGB!) for less than 1000USD. I have done it many times.
    - baisq 4y ago
      And most of those gaming chairs, fancy mousepads, etc. are cheap Chinese crap. The entire room may cost less than what a Neo Geo costed.
  - goosedragons 4y ago
    A decent mid-range GPU is $400. That's TWO Neo-Geo games even before you adjust for inflation. Fancy LED lights are cheapish because they're just LED lights... I'm sure the kids posting their setups on Tiktok are probably the most spoilt and if 90s rich kids could do the same you'd see kids showing off their entire AES and SNES collection and their brand new pentium.

omega3 4y ago

I think there is a lot of effort involved in staying up to date when you try to be a semi competitive player. When I played LOL a while ago I remember pretty much every 2 weeks there would be a new character with unique skills, changes to the characters skillset, new skins, new/removed items, meta changes etc, etc which you would have to learn to remain in a decent shape. After not playing for a year I've had a couple of games and quickly lost interest as it was just not fun to learn this adjacent stuff. It's even worse when they have a complete rework of a character you enjoy playing. Since then I'm unwilling to invest any time into playing these quick changing games.

MafellUser 4y ago

Could someone explain what the article means by "Endemic esports media outlets" and "Endemic news site"? I'm thoroughly confused.

d0mine 4y ago
My guess "endemic esports media" is the media that covers only video game events.

oneoff786 4y ago

Esports has never been big or successful. People like to say “look! They filled a stadium!” But the revenue was never there. It’s a small non growing industry.

bigtex 4y ago

Note that Slasher who is quoted in the article spread false information regarding DrDisrespects ban from Twitch and insinuated he had been involved in a heinous crime. Last time I checked he hasn’t tweeted since last summer.

antiverse 4y ago

Artosis, a well known SC2 commentator recently departed from South Korea to move to PEI, Canada. What's in PEI, you ask? I have no idea. Probably the real estate price is still somewhat reasonable (but even that is a big question mark right now). My guess is, he saw the writing on the wall and got out of there before it all comes crashing down. If anything, the people situated over there are far more "in tune" with what is happening, and by the time we find out in the Western hemisphere, it has already occurred. https://twitter.com/Artosis/status/1539757584600952833 https://twitter.com/Artosis/status/1539757584600952833

ThatPlayer 4y ago
His YouTube vlog goes into more detail about him having 4 kids (and a dog) and he wants to raise them in bigger house. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0p4b251VPw4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0p4b251VPw4