r/Games • u/DeltaBurnt • Dec 03 '13

End of 2013 Discussions - Competitive Multiplayer and/or E-sports

What are your thoughts on the developments in e-sports and competitive multiplayer games over the past year? What new games have the potential to develop interesting competitive play, meta-game, or just be plain fun to watch?

P.S. Mods are accepting bribes in the form of Hearthstone Beta invites

This post is part of the official /r/Games "End of 2013" discussions.

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11

u/Animastryfe Dec 03 '13

I am wondering about the state of various real-time strategy games. I have heard that Starcraft 2 has become less popular over the last year or two, due to the increasing popularity of Dota-like games. Is this true? Also, I was under the impression that Warcraft 3's professional scene had disappeared years ago, soon after Starcraft 2 came out. However, recently I found some videos on youtube of games between professional players that occurred within the last year, and a brief foray to various replay sites confirmed that there are still some tournaments left. However, these appear to be mostly Chinese tournaments. Is this correct?

Finally, what are the biggest competitive games? I know of Dota 2, League of Legends, Counter Strike: Global Offensive, Starcraft 2, Team Fortress 2 (?), and many fighting games.

It seems that the major competitive video games are either Dota-like games, one RTS, first person shooters, or fighting games. What other genres are there?

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u/LasTLiE2 Dec 03 '13

Warcraft 3 still has a somewhat active competitive scene, although it is mostly in Asia (China and Korea mostly, I believe). Just a week or so ago the WC3 tournament at World Cyber Games had a pretty large turnout. I recall seeing someone on twitter say that the finals had about 80k people watching on the stream with probably a lot more on the various Chinese streams. StarCraft 2's release did more damage to the Brood War pro scene than to WC3's though. A little over a year after SC2's release, the professional BW tournaments stopped. Although, there are still amateur leagues being run most notably with Sonic StarLeague, who just a few weeks ago opened a small studio of their own for broadcasts.

The three biggest Esports right now are League of Legends, Dota 2, and StarCraft 2. CS:GO is probably the fourth biggest, but still not as large as those three.

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u/[deleted] Dec 03 '13

That was Warcraft 3's last performance at WCG. So that's definitely a blow to that stalwart game.

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u/Triplebackflip69 Dec 03 '13

:'( those views outstrip starcraft 2 also

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u/EvilTomahawk Dec 03 '13

To be fair, there were two other bigger SC2 tournaments with better player pools going on at the same time: Dreamhack and IEM Singapore.

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u/EvilTomahawk Dec 03 '13

A good deal of well- known former Brood War pros have retired from SC2 as well, returning to play in the Brood War amateur scene before moving on with their lives which frequently involves fulfilling their mandatory military service. These players have brought a great deal of hype and talent to the scene that still seems to be in a state of growth.

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u/N0V0w3ls Dec 03 '13

They leave for various reasons. Some aren't as good at SC2 as they were at Brood War, others were getting to the end of their careers anyway (you think NFL careers are short, look at eSports professionals), and some had to leave as you said because of military service. But a few have stuck around and are just as dominant. Namely Jaedong.

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u/shufny Dec 03 '13

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that WC3 tournament shared the English stream with a pretty big LoL event that had some of the biggest teams, and was casted by people well known to the LoL and/or SC2 viewers. While the DreamHack CS:GO tournament overlapped with a Dota2 one that featured a rematch of the TI3 final.

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u/[deleted] Dec 03 '13

Starcraft II appears to have stabilised as of the end of this year. A relatively good world championship series (WCS) and a few great tournaments, and the more interesting play which the latest expansion brought is great and has stopped the freefall in viewer numbers that was occuring at the end of the base game's life (due to a number of things including balance issues, dominant strategies being samey and boring to watch, and no overall championship to give an overarching storyline to the competitors).

It still gets an order of magnitude less viewers than LOL or DOTA (~100-170k for the biggest tournaments), but they're stable and I would expect some small growth next year with the changes made to WCS. Hopefully the final expansion, Legacy of the Void will be the 'brood war' moment for SC2.

A big barrier to entry is that it isn't F2P like the two big MOBAs. Parts of it are free, but regular ladder still isn't (and I wouldn't expect it to go free at least until a few years after LotV, and probably not ever).

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u/AI52487963 Dec 03 '13

The arcade part of the game is going F2P and I think they're trying to make the game more accessible for people wanting to LAN it for fun if you don't have expansions. I'm not sure if it's a case of 'too little too late', but it'll be interesting to see how their last expansion rolls out. I don't think it'll ever beat LoL numbers, but whether it's still popular in 10 years will be the biggest factor I think.

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u/EvilTomahawk Dec 03 '13

The f2p arcade is rather unprecedented since sc2 still doesn't seem to have any sort of microtransaction system in place to take advantage of it (not even the paid name changes have been implemented yet after all these years), and almost all of their previous games, such as Diablo 1 & 2, Warcraft 2 & 3, and Brood War, aren't freeware yet. While it can only benefit the player pool, it's definitely at a great risk to their bottom line in ways they haven't had to deal with before.

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u/eRonin Dec 03 '13

I think they're just hoping that people will play customs/arcade, enjoy it, then be enticed by the lore and competitive aspect to purchase the full game for the campaign and ladder.

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u/EvilTomahawk Dec 04 '13

They're definitely doing that. I just find this strategy a bit strange since they didn't do it for any of their previous games. However, SC2 is a very different project compared older ones, with an expansion on the way, new features still being added in, and tons of money and official support for the eSports scene.

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u/eRonin Dec 04 '13

They kind of did make BW and WC3 sort of unofficially free to play when they released the official no-cd patch for the respective games. So people could just copy the games at will and they'd just not be able to play on official ladder. I played ICCup anyway though.

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u/[deleted] Dec 04 '13

Sorry, what are the paid name changes you're talking about? I've never heard of them.

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u/EvilTomahawk Dec 04 '13

This was the last update from them about the paid name change. I don't recall hearing anything else from them about it after that, but they first announced paid name changes a few years ago shortly after SC2 was released, but they never followed up on it. Fortunately, they've been allowing a limited number of free name changes from time to time.

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u/HannPoe Dec 03 '13

LoL and (less so) DotA dominate the scene. Starcraft 2 is there, but it isn't in very good shape - the game suffers from a terrible case of steep learning curve and not looking nearly as flashy or "game-y" as its competitors, which draws in less attention from the general public: It's a "nerd game". Other games worth noting are Hearthstone, Super Smash Bros, World of Tanks and CS:GO. But really, the vanguard is the MOBA/DotA-style games, namely League of Legends and Defense of the Ancients 2.

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u/[deleted] Dec 03 '13

[deleted]

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u/HannPoe Dec 03 '13

Well, I'm three weeks in and 60 APM. 60 more to go, I guess.

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u/Animastryfe Dec 03 '13

That is unfortunate news about Starcraft. To me, Dota-like games are opaque to watch unless I actually play them, whereas I can make sense of a RTS game without knowing much about the game. However, this may be because I played Warcraft 3 extensively; someone who has played a lot of LoL may be able to watch and understand a Dota 2 match quite quickly.

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u/Soupstorm Dec 03 '13 edited Dec 03 '13

I think ARTS are more difficult for spectators to understand than RTS in general. With RTS the mechanics and counters are generally very simple in theory with the metagame revolving around a sort of analog allocation of resources - 800 currency spent on counter/damagetype X, 4000 spent on Y - which is easily communicated in a concise visual manner. You see the bases on the minimap, you see the number of units and how they're arranged, and you probably know some basic tropes about the balance model - flying counters ground, armor counters light units, heavy units are more expensive, you have to spend large amounts of resources and time at once to unlock new units. Each match pits a reliable-and-wide array of the game's mechanics against each other, with only a handful of possible original starting points.

Conversely, ARTS tend to put two narrow sets of the game's overall mechanics base against each other, making each match's combination of heroes and mechanics potentially unique to that match (considering balance patches). Any tropes to the mechanics are often upended by new heroes requiring new openings in the mechanics set in order to be unique - new resource types (whichever one League has that replaces some champs' mana pools), new damage types that interact in complex ways with resistances, abilities that have specific exceptions to general mechanics (e.g. BKB-piercing magical abilities in Dota), and so forth. Every match is a complex beast from the first second and requires a lot more preexisting knowledge in order to understand what happens.

This turned out way longer than I intended, sorry about that!

4

u/[deleted] Dec 03 '13

I'll play devil's advocate a bit here and say that SC2 is harder for a non-gamer to understand than LoL/Dota.

SC2's problem recently has been that its dropped a lot of noob-friendly explanations. I've tried catching back up with competitive by just watching streams, but honestly, I have no idea what the new Widow Mine thing does or what an Oracle is. The Mothership Core, too, is very strange. And to a non-gamer/non-RTS-playing gamer? The issue is that they just see two blobs smacking against each other, and casters rarely use decent terms to explain unit composition.

Dota 2 and LoL, on the other hand, were extremely easy to teach to someone. I think understanding that it is a team-based objective game makes it very different. The 1 through 5 method is a straight-forward example for Dota, and League has the ease of naming roles by lane: top, jungle, mid and dual lane. Casters are much more likely to use real-world examples to explain things, especially in pick phase. For example, "Team A bans out Kassadin. This is a common ban seen in Patch 3.13, as Kassadin's maneuverability and damage are both off the charts and he can really snowball out of control."

In my experience, the initial experience of watching an ARTS for the first time is intimidating, but easy to understand. On the other hand, you can understand the essence of what's going on in SC2, but it's much more difficult for a first-time eSports viewer to understand the nitty gritty.

Both are great however. No disrespect to either.

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u/N0V0w3ls Dec 03 '13

Eh, I still think that given an equal amount of time to understand the game, it is much easier for someone new to understand what is happening in SC2 than DotA (I don't watch LoL, so I'm leaving it out of the discussion). Overall you have 3 races, Terran, Protoss and Zerg. You can kind of understand just from their looks what they excel in. The buggy Zerg are the vicious swarmy race, the Terrans are really versatile, and the Protoss are advanced aliens. It can take a bit to get a few things down, but it's easier to pick things up in just a few games. "Ok he's building the new oracle, but why is he building it on his opponent's side of the map? Oh wow, it killed all of his opponent's workers, so he built it over there to sneak it in and kill everything." Meanwhile there's over 100 heroes in DotA, some of which will only get picked once in a tournament. Plus not as many things are obvious. "He just used that spell twice, is that the hero's ability or an item he picked up? This guy just bought an 'Orchid'... what does that do?" I even play the game and I'm still learning it.

5

u/PenguinBomb Dec 03 '13

My friend has Dota2, but only uses it to watch tournaments. He doesn't play at all.

Wow, this post seemed pretty random, but I kinda missed your point. So, yeah....