I'm trying to think of the big competitive games that come to mind, and I get:
- CS:S/1.6
- LoL
- DotA 2
- StarCraft II
- Halo
I've omitted CoD and BF3 because no one watches the competitions or gives a damn about how they resolve for whatever reason (even though they are incredibly popular to watch on youtube), but I can't think of any big prize money competitive games I'm missing.
None of these have notable player run leagues. Everything is done from the top down, or by enormous third party organizations, and it works really, really well. The third party organizations correspond closely with these guys, and balance is a deadly serious affair that ultimately leads to a better play experience for dudes who are competitive in the strictly casual sense like me(i.e. I am not interested in having scheduled tourneys or whatever; I want to log on and get a ladder game or I want to go have some fun in unranked games, like StarCraft).
In the wake of these guys, player run leagues seem like a lot of effort to potentially fracture and damage the community. I scoff at the notion that people would actually spend MC on them also.
What PGI should do is rip off every good idea Riot has and then make the appropriate modifications to keep things brisk (doesn't make sense to have 5 minutes of setup for a 5 minute game, but I can think of several obvious workarounds for this). No player run leagues. Everything centralized. It's better for PGI, it's better for us, and I think it would save the guys who run those leagues a whole lot of work.
Up until the point where PGI finally gets a proper game client scraped together, player run leagues are a nice stopgap, but they should never be allowed to become a solution.
Edited by Noobzorz, 09 March 2013 - 09:20 PM.