EPThttps://www.hotslogs.com/PlayerSearch?Name=CarlTheLlama
A common issue that’s brought up about the competitive scene is a chronic instability in rosters. As someone who spent 8 months there and had 4 rosters disband on him, I think I can offer an insightful perspective on the situation.
Assumptions
The first observation made by not just the community at large, but also players entering the amateur scene or going from amateur to pro is something along the lines of: “the scene in general lacks skill, because it lacks stability. Tempo Storm has stayed together for eons and eons, and they’re the best because of it. Other teams could be better if the players just stayed in one place.” Which isn’t completely terrible as observations go, but then laziness sets in and the simplest explanation is chosen to explain that observation.
“The players in the scene must be really immature and shortsighted. They really shouldn’t be choosing to bounce around in search of a perfect roster, thinking it will just magically happen.”
There are a lot of problems with this line of thinking. First of all, it’s been said many times, in places where those players would hear it. If it was that simple, don’t you think the players dealing with those situations would have come to that realization? Maybe not all of them, the scene has a diverse set of personalities, but certainly many of them. Enough to fill out rosters to the degree people couldn’t use roster changes as the excuse- there will always be some fluctuation in any scene.
And in my opinion, there is enough understanding of this fact amongst the players in the scene. It’s their career, and they take it as seriously as you would if it was yours. The simple stuff that everybody understands is stuff that goes without saying for them.
So what’s the problem then?
Premise
The assumption that chronic personality conflicts and jumping ship at the first sign of a better opportunity are bad traits is not incorrect. However, the players that really do work that way (and I could name a few real examples) have more or less been selected out of the pool at this stage. Also keep in mind that all adults are imperfect,
http://i.imgur.com/4Xlbi5g.png
and eSport young adults are no exception. The standard they are held to is not to make perfect decisions, but rather ones that are equitably rational at the time (no hindsight bias).
It takes a lot to make a good pro gamer, particularly in this game where teamwork is so crucial. Being able to (1) not just get along with teammates’ personalities, but to synergize is an essential skill, as is (2) being able to understand the game at a deep level so that you can contribute to your team’s knowledge, even when all of them are experts as well, plus (3) being able to execute that knowledge to the pace of 200+ actions per minute, not to mention overhauling those skills each patch, and much more. With each skill that is required to succeed in this game, fewer and fewer people meet the criteria.
Those skills take time to develop and maintain, and the more talent there is to compete against, the more time must be invested to stay at the top. The amount of time and energy that amounts to means that money needs to be coming back to the people investing their lives in the game in order to sustain that level of play, not to mention improving upon it.
And where does that money come from? Sponsors. The names the players wear- Tempo Storm, Cloud9, etc. What causes sponsors to spend that money on their players? The ability of those players to generate viewership for the sponsors- from streams and social media largely. However if you look at Twitter followings, it’s rare for a HotS player to have more than 1k followers, and HotS streamers don’t get more than a couple thousand viewers at the most. Thus, sponsors don’t invest in their players as much.
The LoL facebook and subreddit are roughly 8x the size of HotS their HotS counterparts, but their Twitch viewership and Twitter followings balloon up to 200+ times the size of the their HotS counterparts. Is that comparing apples to oranges to make stats seem to favor my point? Perhaps a little, I just grabbed offhand numbers that came to mind, then compared them in the ways that were easiest to math. Regardless of the specific applications of the math, the principle it conveys is one that nothing resembling a rational argument can defy.
I don’t want to focus on how this should be addressed from an organizational standpoint, there are others much better suited to those discussions (Tempo Zoia comes to mind, who has talked about this on Town Hall Heroes). And, while I don’t mean for this post to be a call to action, I’d be remiss not to mention that following a pro on social media costs you nothing, but can help support the livelihood for someone that creates free entertainment for you. The League community catches a lot of flak (and rightfully so) for their behavior in game and out of it, but this is one area where they’re KR to our NA. Keeping up with a stream is more of a time commitment, but sharing the stream to your friends doesn’t take any skin off your back, and can help grow the community. Small things, but they can help a struggling player out, and thereby inject the stability everyone says they want.
Perspective
So let’s recap- there are people with severe personality issues, but there are ways of making that a minimal issue (especially compared to other eSports), and far less ways to keep players from dropping out of the scene/not wanting to seriously enter it due to funding issues that make it physically impossible to do so. Both of these factors are important to creating strong players and a stable scene, but one is being dealt with much better than the other. There’s also a third important factor to consider.
One thing I remember from watching GuardsmanBob’s stream during my League days, was when he talked about the skill progression in a game- how the skill level in the game will increase across the board as time goes on. The phrase that sticks with me today is “The skill level of players that were in the top 100 During Beta is probably about what Silver is now [season 3]” (paraphrased, probably, I didn’t write it down). In a recent interview Scarra, a premier midlaner from Season 2 LoL, stated that none of the pro players knew how to play the game in Season 2, and the odd guy that tried to understand and teach what later became common high-level practices was ignored. My point is, it took time, practice, and failure to ultimately reach what is now reckoned as success.
That same level of play from long-running games with well-funded scenes and now more support staff for teams (more coaches, psychologists, physical therapists, etc.) is now applied as the level of comparison to HotS, causing people to say “Oh the players aren’t that good, I could be one if I tried hard and got the right breaks,” sort of like the common mentality was in the old days of LoL (and still is to some extent of course, it will always be around).
Tempo Storm’s HotS team had a long record of domination before they got picked up by their sponsor. And nothing against them, but it’s much easier to have a stable team when you’re winning than when you’re losing. Because it’s a team game, time spent together directly correlates to success. Therefore, their early success lends itself to stability, which leads to more success, which leads to funding, which leads to stability, making for a wonderfully synergistic trifecta. But that formula works for one team, while any teams entering the scene has to find a completely path, and old teams that didn’t get first place all the time eventually have to wonder if it’s time to fix old problems now that there’s more talent in the scene. There are a lot less certainties when you work with those decisions full time every day and not just look at results occasionally with the advantage of hindsight.
And the stress of making those decisions, which are sometimes going to be wrong and you don’t know if or how until it’s too late (and likely everyone else knows, and 4 people remind you of the obvious like it’s something new but you have to stay professional with them) does build up. Perhaps I’m just a special kind of toxic, but only 4 out of my last 14 teammates are still even playing this game, scattered across teams and free agency at the moment. The SC2VN said that 49/50 who attempt a pro gaming career do not succeed, and while I’m not sure where those numbers came from and their validity, I don’t think it matters entirely, the principle that many, many more fail than make it is one that I can attest to. Just as the peace of mind that comes with success brings stability in a synergistic fashion, so too does the stress of failure compound with a million other factors so that there’s more friction between players’ personalities, less focus and therefore less perfect execution of the skill they have, and less energy to meet a demanding schedule.
And then someone leaves, and the roster is unstable, making it more likely for everyone else to as well.
Conclusions
While it is popular to refer to pro players as gods, I really dislike that terminology. It kind of reinforces this idea that pros are fundamentally different than everyone else, and superior, unable to understand the struggle and inherent weaknesses that normal men endure. They aren’t, they’re mortal men that have a skillset suited for gaining the attention of many people in this day and age. All men were not created equal, some are going to have more talent than others, but none were created gods.
Managers are constantly painfully reminded of this human fallibility. When putting together a team, it often feels like the old joke about finding a girlfriend that’s attractive, emotionally stable, and intelligent- pick 2. With players it’s personality, skill, and schedule- pick 2. Those are all multi-factor categories by the way, there’s a lot that can soil someone’s personality (remember these are humans we’re talking about, average people with average vices and average virtues), some are going to assert themselves too much, and some not enough. There’s a lot of individual skills that get rolled into the “skill” assessment of a player: positioning, objective timings, skillshot hitting, etc. Likewise, team schedule demands sacrificing social life, missing important events, and having a lot more stress in your life with less time and fewer avenues to relieve it- with no guarantee of any return- so players are only willing to make sacrifices up to a point.
And that’s a rational reaction, risking more on such an uncertain investment is not in the interest of self-preservation. The people at McDonald’s at 3AM have no sympathy for the kid that was *almost* a pro gamer, and neither does anyone else.
Pro players have the same infirmities that you do, and the type of support that you want and appreciate, they do too. I hope you can keep that in mind the next time you’re tempted to speculate on the decisions they make, or forget that you don’t have the same information to work with that they do.
TL;DR Roster instability in the scene stems from many sources, least of which is currently a culture of immaturity/personality conflicts, despite popular opinion. Money is scarce, and that makes it impossible for most to commit the hours to meet expectations set by better funded, longer running games. This lack of funding makes the stress of losing, uncertainty, and other progamer ordeals compound into many premature retirements, and general instability amongst rosters. The assumption that personalities, and not logistics are to blame is dangerously misinformed.
Thanks for your time, I know you could have been pwning noobs with it instead
I’ve been streaming a bit more regularly, though still not on anything resembling a schedule, if you’re interested you can stop by at the link below. Whenever I stream or make content I post it on my facebook and twitter.http://www.twitch.tv/carlthellamahots
https://www.facebook.com/bluenreindeer?ref=hl
https://twitter.com/EnochWarnke
But, if you’re not about that life, I keep a list of content (that is kept up to date) in this doc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xMVWGzmv-bAEJYf6noFfmZfioIAnO3pRkRfAJzpTbwM/edit?usp=sharing
