Hacker News Reader

Comment by panic | Hacker News Reader

Companies like Riot and Blizzard also spend lots of money to support today's e-sports scene. While Starcraft: Brood War was always a "very artificial" e-sport in the West, it was a real e-sport in Korea, where broadcasting companies were willing to spend money promoting it.

View on HN

It's the short-term nature of them I don't get. Football would suck if the top athletes were playing entirely different games in five years and leagues around existing sports were gone after twenty. The market need (perceived or real) for major publishers to replace their games every few years diminishes how seriously I can take them as competitive endeavors. It's fun watching greats like Brady and comparing them to other greats, and if I couldn't recall the greatness of the Cowboys from 20 or 40 years ago and use them as a measuring stick, it would be much less interesting as a fan.

Overwatch will probably be dead in ten years as a "sport". It's even more jarring with games that come out every year. There's really no reason for players to get professionally good at Battlefield 3 (Madden 14) if Battlefield 4 (Madden 17) is the same game but not. It's also less interesting as a fan.

Games like league rely on micro transactions and merchandising to make money, additionally a new patch roles out every 14 days keeping the game fresh. Riot has 0 incentive to make LoL2: electric bugaloo.

Imagine if the NFL changed rules every two weeks to keep things fresh. People get pissed off at good (or bad) tweaks to CS:GO and those tweaks can make for very different games. Riot still has an incentive to make money short term over building something that will be around in twenty years. Unsolvable? Maybe. But whatever Riot is working on now won't be what they are in five years.

I guess what drove that statement was the StarCraft -> StarCraft 2 transition, both of which are shadows of their former selves because the business model of a game publisher is not that of a sports league. They have conflicting needs.

Can confirm the rule changes are a pain. Ex dota 2 player and I tried to watch some games recently after a few years break. I couldn't really follow what was happening. The map was different, new items, heroes. Existing items and heroes all different in assorted ways.

I felt like Grandpa Simpson: "I used to be with it but then they changed what it was."

Frequent tweaking might be great for active players but I think it will be a pretty big block to ever allowing esports to compete as a casual viewing event alongside regular sports.

You can look at Super Smash Bros Melee for a game that has a competitive scene that has lasted a long time. It's more popular than ever at the moment with no updates or patches.

Even there the meta game is constantly evolving, look at the rise in popularity of shield dropping, I haven't been in that scene in a while but I was around it long enough to realize that there was an ever evolving meta-game. There's that entire joke in the community about the post-apocalyptic universe of 20xx [0] where the game has devolved into a rock paper scissors meta game for port priority. Additionally new rules do emerge in the scene, is chain grabbing ICs okay? what about Onett? etc. These serve to keep the game fresh by introducing a variance of popular strategy. This is what the semi weekly patches do in LoL. They keep the meta ever changing and even if you get out of the game the meta game is nominally important for spectators because the casters will pretty much explain it to you as the game goes on.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/smashbros/comments/1qixpa/the_year_...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com