17 replies to this topic

[JC Daxion]

I know some are not interested in this aspect of games. I personally have not gotten to that level in any game i've ever played, but i can say i've enjoyed watching games over the years. Going all the way back to my first introduction watching Starcraft Replays back around 98-99 of ladder matches. I Fondly recall watching the first ever ladder match finals and being in awe of the skill. I guess those stomps weren't people cheating, just being awesome!

Fast forward almost 20 years and it's grown to crazy levels i would not have imagined. It just so happened that earlier today with starcraft Remastered, they had an event that had players from the history of SC playing and it was incredible to watch these masters play the game at a level i could never even think of playing. Fast forward to 1.5 hours in and the real matches start, with some filler stuff you might wanna skip https://www.pcgamesn...astered-esports


But the reason why i post this, it got me thinking about MWO finals which i watched last year and again i enjoyed it fully. But yet again those folks were playing at a level i just could not compete at. That doesn't mean i don't greatly enjoy watching, but i'm just to slow

Then i thought about BT, and how that game is much more chess than the fast paced clickfest of a strat game, and the twitch skills of this game. With the idea of e-sports growing, and championships having higher viewership than the last world series, it makes me wonder what directions of games they might go. We have Professional poker, and even chess and it made me wonder about BT the chess of games so to speak.

Do you think this could ever be a thing? Or is the random generator enough to make it not possible? After all Poker is partly luck as well right, so why not luck in a video game?


But keeping on topic with MWO and E-sports watching this vid made me happy. It made me think about how a little company made a little game called warcraft, then diablo, and then SC, years of blancing, and nearly 8-10 years before that really took off from the time warcraft was first out. MWO is barely hitting SC launch in those terms and already the game has come a long way IMO. Now almost 20 years later the game with the same exact gameplay is still going strong.

With BT coming, and mech con in dec with the first single player and MWO to me finally hitting it's stride it makes me have hope that the game can keep growing and in many directions and i really hope E-sports is one of them. Just for the simple fact i really enjoy watching them. while i probably won't make mech con this year, watching this little fun tourney got my juices flowing and ready to watch the event live again this year.

I dunno about you guys, but with the new tech and maps around the corner, and seeing numbers on steam higher than i've seen in over a year. Then add in all the excitement around BT and single player, and just improving on a fun game in MWO it gives me hope that maybe this game is actually going to be in it for the long haul. If e-sports help that, i am all for it.

So i ask you, the folks that don't play at a level that can compete at the top, do you enjoy watching as much as i do? Do you have hope that BT can also join the ranks of other fun e-sports competitions?

Edited by JC Daxion, 30 July 2017 - 05:03 PM.

[El Bandito]

I enjoy the matches.

[ocular tb]

I don't really follow the tournaments but will occasionally watch some replays of them if I'm in the mood and it's easy enough for me to find. I think in the earlier days of playing MWO I was more interested in seeing how the best players played the game so I paid more attention to them. But nowadays I'm more likely to just watch an individual player's stream than any organized league/tournament. Both can be fun, just not something I do often.

As for E-Sports and MWO, It doesn't mean much to me but I'm okay with PGI helping the players and teams on the competitive side. However, I don't want the game to just be all about that. I'm an average casual player so for me solo-QP is where I live. That's why I play the game. As long as that part of the game keeps getting attention I'm okay with PGI helping out the competitive side.

[MadRover]

Honestly I don't know why E-Sports is a thing (but then again I say that about any other game) but Battle tech and E-Sports never meshed well in my opinion. Not saying I'm not against competition but I'm one of those "don't let it be only about E-Sports because reasons" kind of person.

[Davegt27]

my last match I did like 60 dmg in a TW
so I logged off
I love watching good players and bought a tournament supporters pack yesterday

I watch this stuff for hours

Edited by Davegt27, 30 July 2017 - 09:23 PM.

[Aim64C]

The thing is that these games have several things going for them.

1 ) The game is fun and enjoyable; not the only digital figurine set legally allowed.

2 ) The game's interface is designed to promote the spectating of and participation in ranked tournaments. Media streams are an integral part of the launcher or in-game interface, in many cases - or at least given 'push notifications' about ongoing or upcoming events. To put this into perspective, all of the phone mobile games I play have a menu that clearly displays the day's events - missions/challenges/etc. The damned things even make my phone beep at me to remind me that my real life is less important than the evolution of those old facebook games. MWO, on my computer, links to an external browser on the forums to let me know ... kinda-sorta/not-really why I just got a 200K c-bill injection.

3 ) These games allow spectating on the match. Many even have recording features in the engine that allow the game to be rewound and re-played in the engine, itself. This allows performances to be reviewed from different perspectives.

4 ) These games have broad and established player bases. C&C 4 followed the same model as Star Craft 2 and failed. Miserably. Granted, they seemed to take it much farther away from an RTS than prior installments - but the C&C community had gotten smaller and was not interested in the e-sports arena.

Which brings me to the problems with E-sports models, in general.

1 ) Marketability. Advertising, ticket sales, and merchandising are how the major sports leagues make their money... along with dodging taxes by somehow claiming non-profit status and lobbying local governments to have tax-payers foot the bill for stadiums (under the false argument that it will bring tourism and retail sales boosts - numerous economic studies have shown the burden of such outweighs any increases in sales or revenue). While the costs of e-sports can be argued to be lower than those of real sports, the current decision by Proctor Gamble to cut its internet advertising budget (and summary report that they lost almost no sales as a result) is a sign of the times for internet advertising as companies are going to slash their spending on various ads.

2 ) Popularity. Korea is about the only place where E-sports are a major phenomenon - and this stems from the fact that the population is much more compact and has computers set up and managed like an arcade where local area games were common and popular (as was spectating while waiting for a spot to come available). The lack of this in western and global cultures limits the interest in e-sports from the perspective of spectators.

3 ) Competition. There are only a few physical sports that see major spectator interest. Baseball, Soccer/Football, Football(American), and you'll occasionally see some Golf or Tennis. The more minor physical sports see much lower amounts of monetization and usually only see major interest during Olympic matches.

By contrast, how many Call of Duty games are there? Halo? Unreal Tournament? E-sports face the challenge of not only having many different competitors within the same genre, but also many different revisions of the same title within a genre. The idea that more than a handful of these genres is going to fall into major spectator interest is pure fantasy. The idea that you're going to make your title among one of the front-runners for such a thing when you're a niche title ... is delusional.

For MWO to have any chance of being a viable E-sport, the game must first be overhauled into something that is going to be popular. That doesn't mean a complete abandoning of the mechanics - but that the focus must be on what makes MechWarrior/Battletech interesting... the lore and story. The fact that it's a world with more depth and drama than StarWars should make it a good platform for accelerating itself into the spotlight... if someone could capitalize on that.

Then we have to talk about things like engine choice, capability, etc... game modes... the fact that the people spectating an E-sport are usually players of the game's other game modes.... interface design, etc.

You know... the stuff you do when you're actually interested in building something that works... rather than a suave investment 'manager' who has skirted the edges of contract and laws to deliver minimal product at maximum cost (usually to the Canadian tax payer... the politicians of which seem to think the path to higher society is subsidizing video game development).

Not to be said that there's absolutely no future for E-sports... but I think the expectations of it as a source of corporate revenue are vastly over-estimated and inconsistent with reality.

[Mechwarrior1441491]

Last year they didn't have a clause making it mandatory for PGI to cast matches. What teams last year refused to have their matches streamed because they didn't want their tactics to get out? EMP?

Lets hope more thought is being put into it this year.

[Spr1ggan]

This game will never be a successful E-Sport. It's old now and has a small user base. And lacks the infrastructure to support anything like that. Just look at the gamemodes and how matches play out, it isn't exciting to watch compared to say CS:GO, R6 Siege, or Quake.

[mogs01gt]

MadRover, on 30 July 2017 - 09:07 PM, said:

Honestly I don't know why E-Sports is a thing (but then again I say that about any other game) but Battle tech and E-Sports never meshed well in my opinion. Not saying I'm not against competition but I'm one of those "don't let it be only about E-Sports because reasons" kind of person.

E-sports ruins games. Too much focus put on making it a business instead of making the game good. Sort of like how LoL went down the wrong path over the last few years.

[Spr1ggan]

mogs01gt, on 01 August 2017 - 05:08 AM, said:

E-sports ruins games. Too much focus put on making it a business instead of making the game good. Sort of like how LoL went down the wrong path over the last few years.

The big problem with E-Sports and LoL is Riot. Not E-Sports itself. Look at CS:GO, Valve take a very hands off approach and E-Sports have done wonders for that game.

[Roadbuster]

I don't really care about streams (except compilations of funny or "wth!" moments), but I welcome everything promoting Battletech and Mechwarrior that makes it more popular.
Maybe we could get more than 1-2 battletech games every 10 years then.

Aim64C, on 31 July 2017 - 04:18 PM, said:

3 ) These games allow spectating on the match. Many even have recording features in the engine that allow the game to be rewound and re-played in the engine, itself. This allows performances to be reviewed from different perspectives.

^ THIS! SO MUCH!

I have no idea why this isn't in the game.
I know it might be a bit more complicated to get such a spectating/review mode in MWO, compared to your standard 0815 shooter. But since such a feature isn't anything new (Unreal Tournament already had this in '99), it can't be impossible to do.

Would be great to be able to watch other players without having to die first, or find out why and from where you got killed to learn something from it.

Edited by Roadbuster, 01 August 2017 - 05:52 AM.

[JC Daxion]

mogs01gt, on 01 August 2017 - 05:08 AM, said:

E-sports ruins games. Too much focus put on making it a business instead of making the game good. Sort of like how LoL went down the wrong path over the last few years.

I don't think this is the case.. IMO starcraft and Dota are popular because of E-sports. It's what pushed starcraft into the realm of the greatest RTS ever made. I never played LoL though so no clue about that one. But SC for sure was made better because of it, and SCII is another great game that took all they learned from the first and made it better. Dota 2, is basically the same way, though i don't play it, but i got friends that are so into to it. It has a ravenous fanbase that can't get enough. Despite people hating every patch

Roadbuster, on 01 August 2017 - 05:51 AM, said:

Would be great to be able to watch other players without having to die first, or find out why and from where you got killed to learn something from it.

You can, but it has to be in private matches. Not sure how it all works though, but i see people streaming games with it, so it does exist

[mogs01gt]

Spr1ggan, on 01 August 2017 - 05:37 AM, said:

The big problem with E-Sports and LoL is Riot. Not E-Sports itself. Look at CS:GO, Valve take a very hands off approach and E-Sports have done wonders for that game.

Yeah, Riot changed LoL to fit their ideology of how the game should be played in an Esports environment.

[Spr1ggan]

mogs01gt, on 01 August 2017 - 06:02 AM, said:

Yeah, Riot changed LoL to fit their ideology of how the game should be played in an Esports environment.

It's more that Riot try to control everything with an iron fist. They decide everything, they choose who gets to play at events etc etc. And they start causing embarrassing drama if things don't go their way. Like the beef they have with Richard Lewis. Riot threatened to pull an entire event from an org just because Richard Lewis was gonna be in the building.

Edited by Spr1ggan, 01 August 2017 - 06:35 AM.

[MW Waldorf Statler]

for Mech E-Sport its give in Future Heavy Gear Arena..Solaris is the only Arena Aspect for Esport in the BT universe , in Mind BT is more a Tacical wargame like ARMA , as the MWO Arenashooter now, and ...for Esport you must have a good overview over a Handfull weapons and Mechanics , not Dozens of mixed systems and two very different Weaponmechanics (IS/CLans)

Quote

^ THIS! SO MUCH!

I have no idea why this isn't in the game.
I know it might be a bit more complicated to get such a spectating/review mode in MWO, compared to your standard 0815 shooter. But since such a feature isn't anything new (Unreal Tournament already had this in '99), it can't be impossible to do.

Would be great to be able to watch other players without having to die first, or find out why and from where you got killed to learn something from it.

Edited by Roadbuster, Today, 02:52 PM.

in each other Games (Battlefield,WoT,WThunder ,CS) all calculations clientbased and the models not to many Hitzones ...by MWO each Model has many Hitzones ,and each Hit ,Moving of Parts is calculated by Server (good against the most cheats) thats the problem , we have only 24 mechs and massive Performance Lags

Edited by Old MW4 Ranger, 01 August 2017 - 07:26 AM.

[davoodoo]

Old MW4 Ranger, on 01 August 2017 - 07:18 AM, said:

for Mech E-Sport its give in Future Heavy Gear Arena..Solaris is the only Arena Aspect for Esport in the BT universe , in Mind BT is more a Tacical wargame like ARMA , as the MWO Arenashooter now, and ...for Esport you must have a good overview over a Handfull weapons and Mechanics , not Dozens of mixed systems and two very different Weaponmechanics (IS/CLans)



in each other Games (Battlefield,WoT,WThunder ,CS) all calculations clientbased and the models not to many Hitzones ...by MWO each Model has many Hitzones ,and each Hit ,Moving of Parts is calculated by Server (good against the most cheats) thats the problem , we have only 24 mechs and massive Performance Lags

Battlefield yes, cs yes, wot yes, warthunder though?? sure you still have homing shrapnel but tanks there have more precise model than mwo with crew, ammo and tank parts.

On the other hand i laugh everytime i put shot directly into head hitbox and it still registers as ct.

Edited by davoodoo, 01 August 2017 - 07:35 AM.

[BrotherEJ]

I wouldn't count MWO out of the esports world just yet.

[Dread Render]

Even though I am one of the older players now (56) and have no real chance of winning I am so hoping and looking forward to an ongoing 1vs1 tournament thing. Frankly its the only version of the game i don't need to "Try" and get excited about.
I was in two of the last Player run tournaments and even though i was knocked out in the first round of matches it was the most fun i ever had in this game.
I don't know why but 12 vs 12 just does not get me "up"... I have to psych myself up to really play well.
that's not an issue in a duel. in a duel my fierce competitive nature jumps out n/p
So yeah... Lets Get Into MWO Competition!!!