ESports leagues only work when they come from the community. No amount of money will make people care about a random assortment of franchised teams
this post was submitted on 09 Nov 2023
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Reminds me of when Wargaming tried to push a World of Tanks e-sports league.
Turns out, if your players aren't making competitive tournaments for your game on their own, it's probably not suitable for e-sports.
Yep just give the community a good base and let them self organize. Maybe throw in a sponsorship here or there. But don't make that shit yourself.
The problem with self-organizing is you get things like the Smash community, where the worst people imaginable take over the competitive level and then you've got a huge reputational problem on your hands. It's a delicate balance between supporting what the community develops on its own and going top-down and forcing it.
Good. It ruined the game.
It was always weird for me, because they seemed to be playing an entirely different game.
Miss you Jeff Kaplan
I mean I like Jeff but the OW1 eras of pretty bad gameplay and pretty long time waiting fixes happened on his watch. He designed a crazy fun game, but I think his stewardship in making it stay balanced and various and fun once you get good at it was a bit more lacking.
The PvE pipe dream was also a result of Kaplan's direction.
Yup. And Overwatch PVE has never been good... I know a lot of players were pumped for it, but we've never seen any evidence they had a good plan for how to make it fun. They had lots of zany ideas for powers and RPG elements and whatnot, but all the PVE content for Overwatch released so far has been mediocre-to-bad.
Imho telling the story through PVE has never been a good idea for OW. It's not a PVE game. Finding some way to tell the story in PVP, even with massive ludonarrative disconnect, would have been better.
From the comments here, apparently I was the only one who really enjoyed watching OWL.
Yeah, it wasn't perfect, yeah it always had a meta, but it was fun to watch.
I watched them live at gamescom once. Was a lot of fun!
Looking back, they literally never had a good clean season. Season 1 was Mercy meta, and only branched out near the end. Season 2 was all goats until the finals where the meta did a 180. Season 3 was COVID, and after COVID they penny pinched on everything and nothing was impressive again. It was the source of so many bad decisions that only affected the actual game negatively. That's all I remember it for being now.
Sad about this. I know it's fun to hate on overwatch, but the idea of an esports league being city based was really novel at the time. Ive always enjoyed overwatch, and despite overwatch 2s monetization being absolutely atrocious, the gameplay changes I have enjoyed for the most part
I feel the opposite. The idea felt antiquated and corporate. I dont want nationalism in my exports thanks.
I understand your point but I don't think city based teams have to be a toxic thing. Fandom for any team can be taken to the extreme, and I feel city based teams give fun ways to entice more people to care and have fun with it. Also, I mean pretty much every sport entity is corporate. Can't think of any esport team that isn't extremely corporate, city based or not.
Nah most export teams are owned by people who are passionate about it. It's a digital medium so why limit it by some small region? Overwatch league was opposite if everything good about eaports - the international connection of a global game people are passionate about. Team Liquid (in any game) has more character than all overwatch city teams combined.
Maybe I'm wrong. And it does seem like the manager is probably passionate about it. But please correct me if I'm wrong since I don't know much about team liquid. I read the ownership section here and it just screams corporate to me.
Nah man you're confusing semantics with the vibe. Obviously it e-sport teams have to be businesses but theres more passion and history in one team than whole overwatch league combined. That could never happen with city teams, well we've never seen it.
Fair enough, but also team liquid has seemingly been around wayyyy longer than any of the city based teams. Of course there isn't as much passion and history. They've barely been given a chance. I mean I'm not that invested in esports in general, and I'm totally willing to believe city based teams aren't the way. But it's something I was more familiar with and got me, someone with 0 interest in reports to care a little when I saw my city had a team. Also, not a man btw
A bit sad, but not surprising. It was always something that felt forced and only propped up by companies trying to create a new market in order to monopolize it.
If the NFL didn't exist, then suddenly just sprung on the public as it exists now, I think it would have also suffered a similar fate.
On the player and even team level, I'm sure it felt different, but as a spectator, it was hard to ignore the top down, corporate, ad filled, "fellow kids" feel of the thing.
Oh no!...
Anyway...