Sooo Esports

[Flibb]

Played a few rounds of Mortal Kombat last night, just before turning the Xbox off spotted a live feed from a Halo championship match, so decided what the heck lets have a look.

My god it was disappointing, reminded me of playing UT2004 12 years ago. Half the problem was the format of the cast, it felt like they were trying to use a football or America football production style, but forced to contain a computer game, even down to the presenters sitting there wearing suits and ties, all holding huge microphones. The tournament was played at an arena with live audience and over a LAN

The matches themselves were very fast paced, but there were loads of them. Because of the fast paced nature the commentators were missing half of what was going on, switching to the player audio was a waste of time as well. Maybe its limitation of the game but there was no map to help the audience see what was happening, this would have been a bonus to both the audience and the presenters. I do wonder if a medium paced, larger map format would work better, some of the smaller Project Reality or Arma battles can be intensive, but with a more perceived tactical element.

So anybody watch anything better?

[DannyM]

I watched a Starcraft 2 tournament a year or so back, but this was just a single game, I was like you, I just caught a glance of it and though 'what the heck', I enjoyed watching that though. The commentators we're decent and seemed like they were Starcraft players themselves and the information displayed on the TV was decent too.

I often find Counter Strike matches are usually quite good to watch too, but again it does depend on who is presenting and commentating.

[Disturbedguy]

I watch a lot of esports tournies / casts etc.

Used to be around Startcraft 2 - I'm fairly certain that every caster in Starcraft 2 was at one point a professional player and found every tournie enjoyable to watch.

These days it's CS:GO that I watch and the tournies / casting is getting better and better, recently a league known as ELeague partnered with TBS to show the ELeague tournament live on American T.V - find it highly enjoyable watching CS:GO tournaments, especially if its a really well put together tournament.

[Terbinator]

So anybody watch anything better?

League. Riot are at the forefront of eSports and their broadcast quality is top-tier.

Whilst I can't speak for competitive Halo - and can appreciate it's been around in various forms for longer - I think it would be hard to argue it has a more varied Meta/competitive edge over something like LoL/Dota and so maybe doesn't have that 'grab'.

OTOH, something like LoL/Dota requires you to know the game to extent to have any idea of what's going on and appreciate certain mechanics.

[wztan]

Honestly, you don't need that much Dota 2 knowledge to watch and appreciate it, the hype casters usually do enough to keep you entertained.

[Spud1]

It varies a lot depending on the game to be honest. My favourites to watch are Heathstone and Overwatch, maybe a bit of heroes if I want to watch a MOBA (can't stand Lol). I enjoy watching them because I play those games though, and I know the community..i know who the casters are and identify with them to some degree.

Some of the production quality can be amazing too - for example the Blizzard world championships at Blizzcon, or the "Fight Night" hearthstone tournaments are amazingly well produced. In the USA eSports are regularly on TV (mostly Hearthstone & HOTS), in Korea it's all SC2 & LoL...and they are on real sports channels. The time will come when there are multiple "sports" channels showing eSports tournaments. There is big money to be hand in terms of prizes (regularly 250k-1mil) and sponsorship is growing at a huge rate.

In my opinion there is going to be huge money in eSports over the next few years - it's come a long way since my days of CS 1.6 clan tournaments and if you own a "team" you can make a fortune. Definitely on my "if only I had a spare £250k" list to set one up!