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'Overwatch' has its first match-fixing scandal
In a month's time, Blizzard's popular multiplayer first-person shooter Overwatch will officially be a year old (not counting the beta). In that time, the game has accumulated over 25 million players, welcomed multiple new characters and maps, and established a very credible esports scene. Global prize money has amounted to hundreds of thousands of dollars in 2017 alone, bringing with the unfortunate threat of match fixing. In one of the first reported cases of Overwatch match-fixing, Korean police confirmed this weekend that the player manager and coach of local esports team Luminous Solar were charged without detention for attempting to fix a qualifying match for the second season of the APEX Overwatch league.
The Summoner's Guidebook: LoL's World Championship fiasco alienates fans
I'm a big fan of e-sports, but League of Legends is currently one of the worst e-sports to garner a major scene. This isn't because the game is bad, though some aspects of LoL's Classic gameplay are bad for e-sports. It is universally because most LoL tournaments are poorly run and organized. A badly run tournament can ruin everything, regardless of how good (or bad) the game being played is. I would expect more from Riot Games, which creates and publishes League of Legends and which has a vested interest in fostering competition for the game. However, the studio seems to have learned absolutely nothing from very successful e-sports tournaments such as the Evolution Fighting Championships, the GOMTV Star League, and OGN's The Champions. All of these tournaments have better seeding structure and better venues, which contribute to a better overall event. Why can't Riot learn from these very successful events?
