Do like me and get into eSports because that's how American gridiron football dies

Was doing my head in watching the Chinese stream in the parts where they'd be showing the Dutch interviewer talking to a Korean player via a translator, and the Chinese casters translating over the top of that.

re: transferable skills, have there been any high-level code-switches? With how short people's careers seem to be (though early days yet) ... IDK, strange watching people in their early-mid 20s "retiring" into becoming coaches/managers/commentators/etc.

IDK, I'm not too familiar with American sports but AFAIK there's just one major game in each category, compared with, IDK, Australia where you've got league, union & AFL as three "running with a ball" sports where players can switch codes pretty easily compared to basketball/baseball/grid iron (DotA/LoL/HotS vs, IDK, DotA/CounterStrike/Street Fighter or w/e).

Interesting watching the changed landscape of global competition after the great Korean talent exodus in search of NA/EU/CN $$$.

the whole reason I came back to ILX to holler about this has been completely explained to me and the world by your link to the Barassi Line article

Like I said, I have a lot more thinking to do about this and why I decided "fuck NFL, I'm going to become a LoL geek" this year

An agent friend of mine who I've known since my William Morris Agency days was in South Korea a couple years back and could not get his head around 1) eGame leagues and 2) that spectators were watching tournaments in movie theaters. I recommended that he start following this closer but it was just too alien (and admittedly ridiculous) for him to even comprehend what was going on.

Haven't been following LoL too much because I'm up to my neck in EVE Online. That's my own shameful fault. OTOH, the NFL can die in a fire but I'll always laugh hard at the next billionaire development group that tries to bring the NFL back to Los Angeles and fails utterly. Welcome back Tomboto!

A huge factor in professional sports is "I can't do that!" whether it's being 265 pounds of muscle running a 4.4 40 or hitting Clayton Kershaw's curve or trying to stop Lebron from driving to the rim. There's a sense of superhuman-ness to sports that drives their popularity. There's enough familiarity to parse the amazing qualities of what's happening along with the familiarity to recognize that everyone involved is in the 1% of the 1% athletically (or at least skillwise, in baseball).

Old people don't get that with video games. Show my dad a LoL match and it's going to look like people spamming buttons to do vaguely incomprehensible stuff. He's not going to grasp the way e-sports pros are the difference in high school QBs and Aaron Rodgers. Will e-sports, as teenagers today age, fit into that role - recognizing that reaction times and certain sorts of intelligence involved are as amazing as that incredibly athletic linebacker? Part of me doubts it - human beings having always privileged physical prowess and all that. Likewise, can e-sports build that sense of awe and interest for non-lower level gamers (as if the NFL only appealed to people who'd played high school ball) - I never played organized baseball but I can be bowled over by masterful pitching or an insane Andrelton Simmons play.

yeah it's certainly not obvious to people who haven't played MOBAs just how freaking difficult they are. i've played LoL on and off for 2 years and have improved a lot in that time and i'm still in the 2nd lowest skill bracket. it just takes an absurd amount of mental and hand-eye acuity to be good at these games.

i agree that this is a pretty huge barrier to esports becoming 'mainstream' but i don't think that's really anyone's goal who's smart about this stuff. A niche global audience can be equal to / bigger than a mainstream national audience.

and now i'm awake at 8am on a saturday to watch SKT vs EDG, this is extremely good shit

I love that nobody can believe that two north american teams are at the top of their groups. And I really love that AHQ beat Fnatic with an overweight catfish wearing a toque. Also was really impressed by the crowd's reaction to AHQ's win - they were obviously deflated, Fnatic seems like it's the closest thing to a French national team in LoL, but they stood and clapped (those that didn't immediately evacuate the arena, anyway). The announcers were also talking about how awesome French live crowds are for live LoL matches. Fascinating.

Not terribly sad that China's no.1 and no.3 seeds are both 0-2, either.

Seems like LGD and IG having their marquee players get listed as four of the top 5 individual players in the tournament (http://worlds.lolesports.com/en_US/featured/top20/) was a bit of a Madden / SI curse. Should have seen that coming.

Here's where I'm following stuff

http://worlds.lolesports.com/en_US/worlds durr

http://www.youtube.com/user/LoLChampSeries/ hurr

http://www.sbnation.com/league-of-legends-lol-esports simple enough

Not really:
http://www.thescoreesports.com/news
http://www.gamespot.com/league-of-legends/

Also disappointed that ilxor balls is not C9 balls

on the strength of a tombot recommendation I spent about eight minutes exploring if this was a thing I should consider or not and in fairly short order decided that this is one of many things (see also: tumblr, denim geekery, Game of Thrones) I've gotta sit out.

which is sad because I have such fond memories of tombot NFL sundays :(

c9's storyline through the summer and now at worlds is just nuts

C9's Heroes of the Storm team also won the North America championship, feel like the teamfight-heavy HotS games may have some advantages for casual spectatorship because it's more often legible what teams are trying to do, maybe.

i've never watched or played HotS, but from what i've heard it sounds like a much more streamlined MOBA (i.e. for noobz and casuals only,) so that may be true

it's certainly more streamlined, the way I felt about it as a player is that when playing Dota 2 even after dozens of games I wasn't totally clear on what the right thing to do was and the game wasn't trying to teach me, whereas in HotS the right thing to do was often obvious and the feedback loop of shorter games made it easier to learn from the game what to do.

Which is to say people who have spent hundreds of hours getting baseline competent in Dota 2 and LoL could reasonably find HotS shallow but, like fighting games, the execution barrier that's meaningless to experienced players is massive to people who have never played before. None of which is necessarily relevant for spectatorship, but it might feed into which of these games (if any) has the most robust viewership in 10 years or whatever.

It's in no way clever of me to point out that the Twitch Era has pretty much opened the door for this stuff in the US, and I think it's more than just the big mobas that are going to seep into the wider consciousness. The street fighter finals at EVO apparently peaked at 250,000 viewers on the Twitch stream this year, fighting games are pretty spectation-friendly (single screen, familiar metaphor (punching), quick matches).

i like the idea of a MOBA where the complexity of the game is folded more elegantly into the physics of it, in the manner of like smash bros, but i also love all the layers of nerdy details you have to think about to figure out the best way to play LoL in any given situation

HotS basically condenses league/dota down to the neutral objective fights (dragon/baron/roshan) which tend to be the most exciting parts of the game anyway. the downside is that theres very little expression of individual skill since all team resources are shared - feels like it's impossible for there to be an equivalent of Faker, i.e. a 'best player in the world' in HotS.

quincie don't forget we had to coach you up to get into NFL games too.
I seriously am considering getting a chromecast just for watching LoL on TV though

c9's storyline through the summer and now at worlds is just nuts

― karl...arlk...rlka...lkar..., Sunday, October 4, 2015

Imagining the prop bet odds on the first pentakill of the tournament coming from C9 Balls

the big dota tournament this weekend had two hilarious sponsors - tostinos pizza rolls and soylent

hilarious AND apt

*makes "one the nose" gesture*

That reminds me did I tell everybody that this exists?

https://twitter.com/CokeEsports

"hey teen do you like eating but find it too difficult?"

too time consuming, my APM suffers

i'll be honest all the totinos pizza rolls ads on twitch right now have made me want to eat pizza rolls for the first time since college. but i have resisted so far

the ads are not good ads though, they just serve as constant reminders that pizza rolls are a food that exists

i was disappointed that i didn't see any players drinking those soylent 2.0 drinks on stage

I have to admit my interest in the group stage has waned considerably for this second round, the "one group per day" agenda is frankly lame as all hell. If you don't catch the first two or three matches in the AM then who gives a shit? I went from watching almost every match on the rebroadcasts last week to watching basically nothing this week.

If C9 go home tomorrow I'll be SO PISSED.

Also some of the novelty of patch 5.18 pick/bans wore off - darius, boring, morde bans everywhere, a couple teams picked up veigar this week, that's like the big news.

yeah, i didn't watch much of it either, one group a day is a terrible idea. i was interested to see dyrus' last game, though, i learned to play from watching him

rip north america

I like Origen but I wish they hadn't been put up against Flash Wolves to advance. No more Steak! There is always a reason to be sad.

KT not banning smeb's Fiora at all during this round seems profoundly stupid. On one hand, I don't mean to turn this into a subreddit. Still though this seems like a "pound the ball! top lane carry is for pussies!" type of approach to the game; as above, it's fun to watch the strategies evolve, but that also entails watching coaches show how ignorant they are. And I don't even play.

http://www.sbnation.com/2015/10/18/9563119/league-of-legends-2015-world-championships-results-scores-kt-rolster-koo

Lots of roster shakeups in the offseason. Also this:

...Instead of single-game matchups between opponents, weekly matches will take place over a best-of-3 series. The European LCS will be switching to a best-of-2 format...

The NA LCS and EU LCS will have different formats due to cultural reasons, Riot explained in the release. Best-of-2 series in European soccer tournaments are not uncommon, while American sports are quite averse to ties.

That's not going into effect until the summer season though, spring will still be single games

also my team got bought out so I have to pick a new one to support now

were you team 8 for life?

gravity

this is kind of reductive but LCS tends to just turn into a bunch of teams running rock into rock week after week and i'd rather root for the team that's trying to find paper even if they're not always successful

it does look like the raw talent is going to be better distributed in NA this year though so hopefully teams will have to step up their strategy

i think c9 has the most notable history of deviating from the strategic norm and finding success, in their original incarnation, anyway

It's interesting to watch the stables try to settle.

The Doublelift to TSM drama didn't get near enough coverage, or I guess I just don't spend enough time on Reddit? Star QB switches to a rival team, shortly after pantsing said team in the playoffs, and not because they offered more money - but because his original team cut him! This is scripted TV level craziness.

I was sad to hear LemonNation retired from C9. He always seemed to me like the most relatable guy in LCS to me. Is he coaching now? For C9 or who?

yeah he's C9 coach now

i'm interested to see how C9's season goes with Rush as their jungler, he's probably the most exciting player to watch in NA at the moment

Did TSM just decide to go the full Steinbrenner for this season?

TSM has always been pretty analogous to the yankees