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Disclaimer: Since I am not a native English speaker this will probably contain grammatically incorrect sentences, but please bare with me.
Competitive Gaming
Today when I watched the Heroes of Newerth match in NASL there were a lot of people who complained about it not being Starcraft 2. They also complained about it not being spectator friendly. This upset me in multiple ways and therefore this post.
1. Starcraft 2 is not a spectator friendly game if you haven’t watched / played a lot. If you believe you can show a Starcraft match to your mother and she would understand what’s going on without any help from you, you’re wrong. If you let her watch 10-20 matches in the same match up she will probably start getting the hang of it. Therefore, it’s comprehensible that you don’t understand what’s going on the first time you watch Heroes of Newerth. Then you have 2 options: Either you keep on watching and trying to grasp what the game is about, or you could just stop watching. NASL is an event for both Starcraft and Heroes of Newerth, stop whining when it’s not your favorite game showing. As if you were watching the Olympic games and it wasn’t showing your favorite sport, would you go to the forums and whine about it and expect them to change what they’re showing? There’s a schedule for a reason.
2. People need to realize Starcraft 2 would not have made it as far as it has if it wasn’t for other games. You think MLG would be this big if it would not have been a Halo event seasons before Starcraft 2? You think Intel Extreme Masters would’ve been this big if Quake / Counter Strike 1.6 wouldn’t have been played for seasons before Starcraft 2 even was released? Dreamhack has been around for way longer than Starcraft 2. My point is that all competitive gaming is helping each other. Without Halo there maybe would not even have been an MLG today.
“xyz is killing e-sports”
Competitive gaming has come a long way without you telling what’s killing it. There has been some sick events in the past years and competitive gaming is still growing. The Justin Wong vs Diago Umehara match in EVO 2004 is still one of the best moments in the history of e-Sports. The reason e-Sports is growing is because we love it, we’re passionate about it. It will continue growing because it’s awesome, not because we fix the “xyz is killing e-sports”. The Starcraft 2 scene has been built up by so many different gaming communities, that’s why it is as good as it as at the moment.
E.g. Recently I read a thread about Nicknames killing e-sports. It has grown a huge amount since the EVO match, and nicknames are still used. Gaming is an underground community, we’ve always been using nicknames. It’s a part of eSsport, a part of what we love. So why remove it? Let it evolve at it’s own pace rather than forcing it’s evolution. If you watch cows / chickens being force-fed food that forces them to grow in an unnaturally quick way for food, they turn out ugly ( a bad example :D but I could not think of anything else).
Respect all games by their own nature, because it’s all together which helps e-sports grow and that’s what we want. Don’t be elitists, love everything. And if you don’t enjoy some other game, just don’t watch it. NASL is a Starcraft 2 AND Heroes of Newerth event, deal with it and don’t destroy the entertainment for the Heroes of Newerth players.
Competitive gaming has been around for longer than most of you have followed it and it has evolved just fine without you saying what stuff needs to go. Fatal1ty is still one of the legends of e-sports and he didn’t even play this genre. I personally fell in love with competitive gaming when Toxic was the most dominant Quake 4 player basically winning every big event in a full year. Also following James "2GD" Harding’s carrier from a Quake 4 player to a commentator in Quake / World of Warcraft arena / Bloodline Champions and now an event host.
And I will end this post with a big shoutout to djWHEAT for being the ambassador of e-sports. Never before have so many one person to thank for so much ^__^
TL;DR : Stop hating and start loving everything~ <3
 
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The problem isn't with HoN. The problem is that SC2 was an hour delayed because of a HoN tourney and that pissed off a lot of people.
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This won't add anything to this discussion, but I feel like pointing it out. But NASL stands for North American Star League. Star League i'm guessing is short for Starcraft League. HoN I believe, isn't Starcraft.
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No, they chose Star League specifically so they are not just about starcraft and can expand.
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The hon games were pretty good imo and I dont even watch it usually.
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On December 03 2011 12:02 kenkou wrote:
This won't add anything to this discussion, but I feel like pointing it out. But NASL stands for North American Star League. Star League i'm guessing is short for Starcraft League. HoN I believe, isn't Starcraft.
Or it could be just Star League, each game is a star in it's own right... u know like it was written.
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On December 03 2011 11:51 RTB wrote:
The Justin Wong vs Diago Umehara match in EVO 2004
Thanks, I need a new pair of pants.
But your words will fall on deaf ears. The BW community has always had isolationist properties, and only now with SC2 and twitch.tv do we see people watching games they've never played before.
But the BW community still resides within the deepest dark places of TL, and they still cling to the past like an elderly woman clinging to her family because she outlived her husband.
But they will die off, just like the old lady. And when the fighting community gets their pad joysticks out of their asses and start to want what I like to call "extreme" growth (It's partly up the teams and from what I've seen col and EG have started moving towards this), then most of the bigger problems with eSports will be gone.
And Dota2 will come out and claim it's rightful throne as the king of Dota-clones, CS:GO will smash other FPS franchises and collect and combine the 1.6 and Source communities into one single PC FPS powerhouse.
Or none of it will happen, and eSports will be as sectioned off as it is now and the majority of fans will only watch the games they play.
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On December 03 2011 11:59 ig0tfish wrote:
The problem isn't with HoN. The problem is that SC2 was an hour delayed because of a HoN tourney and that pissed off a lot of people.
that was my problem too. I don't mind HoN at all, but the nasl times are (because of westcoast) pretty awful for europeans - and with 1hr delay things are just not getting better (imagine MSI would have one the second game, than it would have been 2hrs+ delay). Because of that I unfortunately could only watch 2 BO5s.
Would be nice if they put HoN after sc2 so that we could watch a bit more SC2
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I'm not fussed what games tournaments decide to have at their events, but people get annoyed when it intrudes on their game. At MLG, the games are totally separate and don't bother each other. And just personally, HoN looked boring because when one team has a massive lead it still takes an eternity to finish the game.
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I'm really NOT trying to hate on HoN or MOBA's in general but that shit is BORING as all hell to watch- Doesn't matter if you play or not.. Not as entertaining to watch in the slightest... The HoN community are terribly BM to new players trying to learn the game and then they expect everyone to love and embrace them when they are delaying good SC2 games at an SC2 tourny by hours? Sorry but I don't like spectating Hon and I never will.
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As I said in the Dota 2 success thread:
It seems more people want Starcraft 2 to be the monopoly on the E-sport market, if you will, rather than for e-sports to succeed. It's really sad, to see everyone preaching "GO ESPORSTS GOGOGOOG" and when other esports come into play at major events, people go "THIS ISN'T STARCRAFT 2 OMG THIS IS KILLING ESPORTS SO BORING"
On December 05 2011 08:15 SubvertU wrote:
I'm really NOT trying to hate on HoN or MOBA's in general but that shit is BORING as all hell to watch- Doesn't matter if you play or not.. Not as entertaining to watch in the slightest... The HoN community are terribly BM to new players trying to learn they're game and then they expect everyone to love and embrace them when they are delaying good SC2 games at an SC2 tourny by hours? Sorry but I don't like spectating Hon and I never will.
Saying you're not going to hate on a game, and then subsequently hating on it does not make your post more legitimate. I play AoS/MOBA/whateverthefuck games a lot, and I -love- watching them. I can't wait for Dota 2 to start some awesome shit. Also, NASL's representation of HoN is terrible and all of us hate it in it of itself, but love to watch it get some publicity.
And finally, it's not about us "being assholes to new players", it's about people coming into a TEAM game and playing for themselves, refusing to even attempt to learn, and generally ruining the experience for others. If you aren't willing to make the commitment to learn the game, don't play the game and ruin it for the other 9 people playing. That's our mentality with it. If you don't like it, well, then don't play the game. It's that simple. The difference between learning SC2 and HoN/DOTA 2/whatever is this: In Starcraft 2, it doesn't matter to anyone if you lose except the person who you just helped win. You only affect yourself in your losses as you progressively get better.
When you suck dick in a game with 10 people in it, you spoil the experience for the other 9 people. If you want to learn it, have fun. Take your time, read guides, practice against bots, start out simple against easy opponents. Progressively get better and move on. The same way you would any other game. It's the people who join a semi-competitive game and go 0-15-0 and then bitch that our community is so bad for telling them to stop ruining the game for us and go properly practice.
However, don't bash an entire community made up of millions of people because you personally don't like it and stop, as I stated initially, making this into "STARCRAFT SHOULD BE SUCCESSFUL" instead of "ESPORTS SHOULD BE SUCCESSFUL" It's hilariously hypocritical to, as a community, say "GO ESPORTS" and make these statements of hate when a game interrupts your precious SC2 time when it's still the same god damn thing -- Esports.
I would MUCH rather live in a world where games like Dota 2/CS:GO/Tribes/Quake Live/etc. are the only E-sports but are extremely competitive and successful than one where Starcraft 2 is the only one that ever gets any publicity ever and it's only mildly successful.
P.S. -- I try getting friends into Starcraft all the time. They say the same things you say about MOBA casts about Starcraft 2. "I don't know what's going on, this is so stupid to get what's going on, a lot is just figuring out what's going on, etc."
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EPT
