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Subtitle: Or Why Oversaturation is a Real Issue
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/2ExwKEC.png)
Typical day of meaningless
Let me clarify; I'm a huge Dota2 fan. I play an unhealthy amount. It has probably hurt some of my personal relationships. I don't get enough sleep because of it. I watch Dota 2 every day at work. I love the International (this article doesn't pertain to TI).
And I don't give a single fuck about any Dota tournaments.
At the peak of popularity of every sport, every competitive event, every good TV show even, narrative is one of the most important elements and is drawn upon. Often called hype, narrative makes everything mean something. It makes you care about who wins and who loses. It makes you root for the underdogs, and hate the dominating teams (unless you are one of those New York Yankee fans or something.) It makes you track those amazing runs those teams make to get to the finals that legends are made of.
+ Show Spoiler [clarification] +More or less, this mainly pertains to Western Dota. For the most part, China has their shit figured out
We have SO many fucking tournaments its impossible to give a single fuck about anything but the International. For about 12 hours every day, there's about 3-4 "MAJOR" tournaments going on. There's about 5+ tournaments that are "MAJOR" (meaning, that pretty much every large team plays in them and the prize pool is significant (over 10-15k USD). Each of them have their own unique brackets, unique rules, unique match ups. Hell, even most of the broadcasters have no idea who's doing what, who's eliminated, what each game means (though, admittedly Ayesee does this pretty well). How the hell am I supposed to care about it when the casters hardly even know? Hell, most of the big casters cover 2-4 tournaments each, and you can't even basically tell when they switch from tournament to tournament.
As a consequence, how do you even select which tournament to watch? Let's be honest, we aren't following the tournament to see if so and so team can beat so and so team so team C can have a better place in the standings and a likely chance to advance. Nah fuck that - we are watching Fnatic play Na'Vi. We are watching the daily Alliance vs EG. This shit happens every day now.
I guess that's okay though - the real issue isn't the amount of GAMES. The problem is the amount of TOURNAMENTS.
I mean, I get it, I've heard the arguments. Competition. The market and the consumers choose the best organizations to succeed.
Except, in many ways, that's bullshit. We choose the biggest teams playing one another. That's it. Most of us will mute the casters if we don't like them, and we only kind of care about the production value (Dreamleague?). And the competition is hurting the growth of the game in many ways - it splits the viewer pools into all of these tournaments we don't care about. Instead of having 1 or 2 tournaments with 30,000-50,0000 viewers, we have 4 with 10,000. When a tournament or team goes to a company looking for a sponsorship and tries to pitch this game to them, they say "Hey look at the growth of Dota! Look at all these viewers we have now!". The sponsor will look at the given situation, and won't see the 50,000 total viewers, but they will see the 10,000 that will typically watch a game. Obviously, this is a much weaker pitch.
![[image loading]](http://blog.dota2.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/panorama.jpg)
The only thing I give a fuck about in this game
+ Show Spoiler +Dota 2 has one really nice thing that Valve did that helps differentiate itself from Starcraft in the International. The International, more or less the Superbowl of ESPORTS, helps us care about all this shit. Its the one thing to look forward to, the one area of narrative Dota has going for it. Otherwise, the only narrative we get is the stupid drama that happens ever once in awhile when someone flames someone, or someone gets cut from some team
What's the problem with ESPORTS right now? Money is more or less number one (unless you play a superior MOBA of course.) And where does the money more or less come from in most sports and competition? Outside companies, sponsors, TV deals, commercials, etc. Yeah, tickets are nice and will make a lot of money; but especially in ESPORTS, that's not enough to push us over the edge right now. Right now, we need to work with companies to help the scene grow financially to help teams and tournaments.
And what is the number one way to help secure this money?
Number of viewers.
And its really fucking hard to be a fan right now.
  
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(though, admittedly Ayesee does this pretty well)
Disregard this blog, not real Comeh.
I'm investigating what happened to real comeh
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On May 06 2014 23:41 Qbek wrote:Disregard this blog, not real Comeh. I'm investigating what happened to real comeh
That's about all I have to say about Ayesee.
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i dont care about any tournament other than lan tournaments really, but im still glad i get to watch dota2 at any given time i want :D
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Yeah, I've found that unless its the LAN finals of something (Starladder :D) i just watch the games at face value because its a game and pretty much ignore any broader narrative.
Ur screenshot isn't even a "busy day" in the dota world thats the issue lol.
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United Kingdom14103 Posts
Since I started playing Dota 2 I haven't cared about any tournament but TI, I agree.
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On May 06 2014 23:50 Sn0_Man wrote:
Ur screenshot isn't even a "busy day" in the dota world thats the issue lol.
Yeah, I mean, when 5 tournaments isn't even "busy"...
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On May 06 2014 23:51 Comeh wrote:Show nested quote +On May 06 2014 23:50 Sn0_Man wrote:
Ur screenshot isn't even a "busy day" in the dota world thats the issue lol. Yeah, I mean, when 5 tournaments isn't even "busy"...
well only 4 tournaments in ur SS are dota and the reason I even say that is cuz jDL and the smalltime "cups" aren't terribly important to most people. When there's 3 tournaments with 2 10K+ viewer streams each then we are talking viewer splitting lol.
But yes when I can call all that "not busy" it says a lot.
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Northern Ireland22208 Posts
It just seems to be these few months, don't forget about the dead periods in the months after TI. I wouldn't mind events being spread out a little more too.
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On May 06 2014 23:55 ahswtini wrote:
It just seems to be these few months, don't forget about the dead periods in the months after TI. I wouldn't mind events being spread out a little more too.
Well, I believe there were 2 tournaments a few weeks after TI3 (starladder and....something else), but about 1.5 months after TI 3 it was basically in full gear.
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On May 06 2014 23:55 ahswtini wrote:
It just seems to be these few months, don't forget about the dead periods in the months after TI. I wouldn't mind events being spread out a little more too.
Hmmm yes that too. Although trying to hold a tournament shortly after TI obviously doesn't work but I feel like the dead period was super-mega long this year 
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On May 06 2014 23:58 Sn0_Man wrote:Show nested quote +On May 06 2014 23:55 ahswtini wrote:
It just seems to be these few months, don't forget about the dead periods in the months after TI. I wouldn't mind events being spread out a little more too. Hmmm yes that too. Although trying to hold a tournament shortly after TI obviously doesn't work but I feel like the dead period was super-mega long this year
Well, it hurts when every team disbands, but that's a whole different issue.
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spot on blog, I even feel the same in sc2 lol.
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PS the blog title as seen when perusing blogs is hilarious. I think u should have omitted the "2" 
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It's weird that a lot of people are complaining now about TOO MUCH dota.
Personally, I don't mind having a bunch of tourneys going on at once. My dota viewing schedule is pretty inconsistent and I enjoy constantly running into high quality games. It's nice to be able to catch a game between t1 teams almost every day. You can still CHOOSE to follow one tournament and prioritize it over others but for others it's just more choice.
Also for me, the final LAN weekend is where like 85% of the tournament story comes to life. There just isn't much to follow during season play, except to try to catch great games between your favorite teams. Like, I don't think anyone is going to watch all 100+ starladder games just for the "story" of it. :/
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You're not wrong. I don't completely agree with the idea that there's too many major tournaments though, I think it's more that they're all scheduling for the exact same times. When Starladder had their big LAN finals, it was a huge hit. I think a big reason for that is there was a clear champion that was going to emerge from that event, and you had the emotion of the live audience and seeing the players in front of you. Whereas all these other cups having nothing but group stages after group stages after group stages doesn't give them anything worth watching.
Looking at this summer's major LAN events, there's ESL One, Dreamhack (I think?), The Summit (I think?) and TI, correctly called the Holy Grail of eSports in this article, all in the span of a few weeks. That's not good. Viewers are going to be burned out. I already know I'm not watching Dreamhack or The Summit because I don't want to spend that much time watching these events.
Imagine if The Summit's LAN was happening right now. There would be no question as to what to watch. Or imagine if ESL happened in August or September after the TI hype had cooled off. The focus would be entirely on that event, instead of it being a really well organized proving ground for TI.
I think JoinDota, ESL, BTS, Valve, Dreamhack, and MLG should be working together to share time throughout the year for events instead of cramming them all together and fighting for viewers by offering nothing but group stages with some textural differences between them, followed by super hyped LAN finals all coming one after the other. Valve is still handling their event like bosses (Valve is smart like that), but all these other event organizers are not working to create any kind of cohesion in the scene
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Too much ESPORTS is hurting ESPORTS.
wait wut
I would like to state that I also do not care about Dota2 tournaments, but not because there are too many of them, but just because I think the game is stupid.
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United Kingdom14103 Posts
gz nina, you win the edgy award
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On May 07 2014 00:41 DavoS wrote:
You're not wrong. I don't completely agree with the idea that there's too many major tournaments though, I think it's more that they're all scheduling for the exact same times. When Starladder had their big LAN finals, it was a huge hit. I think a big reason for that is there was a clear champion that was going to emerge from that event, and you had the emotion of the live audience and seeing the players in front of you. Whereas all these other cups having nothing but group stages after group stages after group stages doesn't give them anything worth watching.
Looking at this summer's major LAN events, there's ESL One, Dreamhack (I think?), The Summit (I think?) and TI, correctly called the Holy Grail of eSports in this article, all in the span of a few weeks. That's not good. Viewers are going to be burned out. I already know I'm not watching Dreamhack or The Summit because I don't want to spend that much time watching these events.
Imagine if The Summit's LAN was happening right now. There would be no question as to what to watch. Or imagine if ESL happened in August or September after the TI hype had cooled off. The focus would be entirely on that event, instead of it being a really well organized proving ground for TI.
I think JoinDota, ESL, BTS, Valve, Dreamhack, and MLG should be working together to share time throughout the year for events instead of cramming them all together and fighting for viewers by offering nothing but group stages with some textural differences between them, followed by super hyped LAN finals all coming one after the other. Valve is still handling their event like bosses (Valve is smart like that), but all these other event organizers are not working to create any kind of cohesion in the scene
You make a strong point - though its worthwhile for online tournaments, there is VERY rarely a "dead time", as soon as one tournament ends, another begins or is still going on.
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EPT
