Thoughts on Improving eSports

Passionate Progamers

I have a number of topics lined up, but I decided to go with this one as it really fits into my next few topics. I’m going with this one and if you thought self-promoting yourself as a content-creator was difficult, imagine trying to stand-out as a top foreign player amongst a sea of other great foreign players with all the same capabilities as you, but maybe better and with near identical quality of work offered to their viewers. That’s a really rough scene to break into!

When I was managing for Team Dynamic, my biggest pain was my inability to motivate my players. I always told myself: “You can’t force them to play, you can only give reasons to play” and even then; it’s almost impossible to get someone to want to practice at a game that emotionally beats and breaks them down.

Couple that with the lack of recognition for their achievements and you get a very emotionally-exhausted player. I hope my friend Attero doesn’t mind if I use him as an example.

Meet my friend Andrew ‘Attero’ Golec, this progamer was a prime example of a passionate player who gave it his all, remained almost consistent (both neither really exceeding his skill level nor ever dropping it since 2010 to early 2012) and never got any real opportunities minus a few mentions. Attero started with VT Gaming and was the guy who found HuK (at least that’s the story I’ve been told thousands of times). Attero is definitely one of the best players in Quebec, ranging in skill just a bit below Kiwikaki and SLush (also great players here in Quebec).

Attero is a player who streamed constantly, consistently in North-America’s/SEA’s and sometimes Europe’s Grandmaster league. He beat some of the best of the most popular players in both North-America and Europe. Qualified for HomeStory Cup IV by beating out MajOr and KawaiiRice and Adelscott in the group stages. His greatest achievement? Reaching MLG Anaheim’s Championship bracket, beating out Complexity’s RSVP, LastShadow and Jinro. Those names sound old to you, but this was in 2011 man, let’s include also Drewbie, Killer, MoMan, Minigun, Moonan, Kas (March 2011). All these great players and he is a mere whisper in the wind with a featured stream (which netted maybe 250 viewers if there wasn’t anyone else important streaming).

He’s been on a couple of shows, DJwheat’s Kings of Tin, ChanManV’s Pro Corner, some interviews here or there. But yeah, nothing more and it looks like no one really offered him to be on a real team besides possessing the traits some current North-American’s lack: Motivation, consistency in results, a good head for public relations and publicity as well as the ability to work with others and the willingness to prioritize team-leagues and individual tournaments. That’s just something I like when I meet a player: someone willing to do at least the basics to ensure he has a good future and mindset for the game. After managing more than 50 players in my time, Attero is amongst my top 10 favourite players.

But Attero’s story is not uncommon, in fact, it’s too common and too unfortunate. With the constant rise of big-league teams stepping up their ammunition from foreigner semi-automatics to Korean automatics, you leave a huge gap of aspiring players with no room to excel or really shine at all.

Consider this predicament: You have North-American/European players ripping it up in the brackets, they play and play and beats the hell out of a lot of players. A Korean also does the same and essentially beats him out of the tournament. Now consider that there’s always a Korean in nearly all the tournaments (which is true - Koreans are found even in weekly smaller tournaments like Zotac NA/EU as well as Antec when that was still running). How are foreign players meant to win or gain any monetary winnings to support themselves? The quick answer would be to tell them to practice harder. But without any exposure, media streams covering them or recognition for who they have overcome, it becomes a little less motivating: You’re not winning tournaments, you’re not getting any exposure or recognition and you’re not getting many opportunities (maybe a showmatch on occasion). With the loss of motivation, lack of achievements and thus no opportunities for more supportive teams (and thus less chances to attend major tournaments), the foreign player starts running out of finances to support his dream to become a progamer and eventually gets a part-time job to support himself, diminishing his amount of practice time, lessening his abilities to play and eventually falls off the curve of competition.

It’s definitely not the Koreans’ fault that they just play better and practice more diligently, you can’t blame someone for doing something better than you, it should be a force of motivation. But at the same time, there is definitely a lack of outlets for foreign players to shine and rank themselves amongst one another with a monetary prize-finish at the end. What would be the upsides to having regional prized tournaments?

Viewers and prosperous team owners (who cannot necessarily afford a Korean or are looking for more fan-favourite/relatable players) can easily determine who is the best of the best within their region/country/continent and offer them a suitable contract.

Players who are the best in their region have something to put on their list of achievements. This also widens the amount of “valuable” free agents for showmatch organizers and smaller tournaments to invite as well as create more pride in more local/country talent than international (something I think Europeans are quite closer at than the Americas).

The downside to all of this is that, well: no one will watch and its true. The common perceived assessment of talent is that North-America sucks [I disagree] and Europeans are just below the Koreans. With that common notion in most people’s minds, who would watch tournaments of only regional players when we wouldn’t be necessarily watching “the cream of talent and build-execution”?

Thankfully, we have Blizzard’s World Championship Series to give some evidence of how this is wrong and as we saw with WCS Europe, a lot of people would watch it. Sadly, we didn’t get to gauge this potential interest for WCS USA/Canada/NA as they were coupled with NASL and MLG. Nonetheless, if Europe can do it successfully, I think it’s worth looking at the idea of a region-based league for each Battle.net region (including South-East Asia which lacks the most exposure and general interest).

With region-based leagues, this could incite national companies to be more interested in sponsoring local teams as well as regional tournaments (some companies only make sales within their nation and thus this could be both more financially supportive of them to sponsor and more worthwhile as their core consumer group is directly involved and centered towards). Let’s not forget about helping improve the circumstances of the vicious circle outlined above.

Blizzard’s World Championship Series helped create names like JonnyREcco and put even more promise and emphasis on Scarlett’s ability to play. It helped put ViBe back on the map (who has been pretty quiet and undistinguished since joining It’s Gosu) and give promise once more to the American scene [and Terran] with MajOr. But I don’t think it’s enough and if spectator numbers weren’t such a viewed risk of potential failure (as well as cost) for tournament organizers, I’m sure we’d see a lot more.

I’ll add this as my final argument: With more regional tournaments, the amount of cycling through current foreign professionals would occur more often. Players who were renowned back in 2010 and 2011 do not have as strong as an impact on the scene as they did before. However, their perceived importance remains both due to by the namesake of their team and/or the fact that they remain relevant through other means of content (I covered a bit of this in my last piece). If the scene is able to show who is currently at the peak of competitiveness (like WCS for example), then established pros can be re-ignited with the desire to improve and retake their position. Of course, upcoming professionals will also have a more immediate and comfortable goal beating out those who they recognize as within reach of overcoming instead of a Korean.

A good mix of region-based leagues and international tournaments creates a balanced and constant cycling of both aspiring professional players as well as levels of champions from local to national to international.

On October 12 2012 05:31 xHerodotusx wrote:


Hopefully that means our ideas are the right ones!

On October 12 2012 05:36 xHerodotusx wrote:


Definitely; the entertainment organizations that I'm working with now want to hold regional tournaments and local leagues but are unsure of what kind of response they'd get from, say, the Los Angeles eSports community since there is no real way of gauging that, currently.