e-sports
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Overwatch League gains new teams from Atlanta and Guangzhou
When The Overwatch League's 2019 season starts, you'll see two new teams compete for the chance to be crowned as the tournament's second champion. Blizzard has officially welcomed the cities of Atlanta, Georgia and Guangzhou, China to the league, expanding its reach and bringing it to more fans across the globe. They've yet to reveal their team names, rosters and emblems, but Blizzard has revealed the companies paying for their entry. Communications and automotive services conglomerate Cox Enterprises owns the Atlanta team, while the Nenking Group, which also owns the Guangzhou Long Lions basketball team, is behind the Guangzhou team.
Shanghai may sign Overwatch League's first female player
Shanghai Dragons is reportedly fixing a problem with Overwatch League: the lack of female players for a game with an impressively diverse cast of characters. According to ESPN, the team has signed South Korean player Kim "Geguri" Se-yeon, who's so good at playing Zarya (pictured above), she was once accused of using cheats. After Geguri livestreamed a game to prove her critics wrong, she played in the Overwatch Apex tournament in her home country last year. Now, she might be bringing her skills to an even bigger platform.
Google is helping a Chinese game streaming platform go global
Google's search engine might be banned in China, but it's been finding more and more ways to establish its presence in the country. Its latest effort is leading a $120 million investment in Chushou, a Chinese online e-sports platform that specializes in mobile game livestreams. The website is already pretty big, with 8 million users and as many as 250,000 livestreams a day, and it's unclear what percentage of total funding came from Google. According to CNBC, though, the big G will help the platform grow even bigger, more international, in order to make it look more inviting to potential users outside China.
Live eSports! In VR! On your face!
ESL and Sliver.tv are teaming up for the first ever eSports VR livestream of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO) and League of Legends during Intel's Extreme Masters Oakland tournament next week (November 19th and 20th). The coverage will be available on nearly every mobile and PC platform, including Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, Gear VR and others. It'll drop you into the middle of the action with a 360-degree birds-eye view and first-person player perspectives, in the case of Counter-Strike.
Fox Sports will broadcast FIFA's Interactive World Cup finale
Fox Sports announced on Thursday that it will televise the FIFA Interactive World Cup 2016. The E-sport tournament pits 32 "Grand Finalists" against one another in a three-day contest that will eventually crown the official FIWC 2016 world champion. Fox has made significant efforts lately to integrate modern technology into its sports coverage. The company announced earlier this year that it will record the Big East Men's Basketball Tournament -- as well as the Daytona 500 -- in virtual reality.
You can finally watch Twitch streams on Android TV
Twitch has been on Google's Chromecast for over a year, so it's hard to believe it wasn't on Android TV before. But the streaming company has just revealed an official app for the Google's big-screen service, letting you watch live or pre-recorded games, personalities and e-sports tournaments on supported TVs or devices like NVIDIA's Shield. As usual, you'll be able to chat with fellow players, follow channels and games, and view broadcaster profiles and streaming schedules, all at up to 1080p/60fps quality.
Another university is adding League of Legends scholarships
Robert Morris University made waves last summer when it announced its intention to add e-sports -- and more specifically, League of Legends scholarships -- to its athletic department. This week Kentucky's University of Pikeville followed suit when it publicized its offering of "at least 20 scholarships" to LoL players who will be treated like the school's other student-athletes. "There will be practice time and video time when they have to study other teams for upcoming competitions," said the university's new media director Bruce Parsons.
Should Warcraft be an Olympic sport?
Professional e-sports exist and can draw in significant interest - people watch streams on Twitch, top players can earn significant money, and we've seen people come out to watch them at places like BlizzCon and the Worldwide Invitational. But is it really a sport, and should we be seeing it in the Olympics? Rob Pardo, former chief creative officer at Blizzard, argues yes in this interview with the BBC. In the interview, Pardo discusses the physical and mental ability of some of the best players in the world, how many decisions they made in a short period of time, as well as the draw of the games as a spectator sport. To be fair, he's mostly talking about games like Starcraft, but his other point about games and cultural definition as to what is and isn't a sport seems more likely to hamper gaming at an Olympic level than anything else. It's just not very common for an activity that takes place in front of a computer to be seen as a sport. For the complete interview, head over to the BBC.
CBS looks at the rise of spectator e-sports
In a "Game On" segment, CBS Sunday Morning featured an in-depth look at e-sports and the spectator community that has grown up around them. It showed how games like StarCraft II and League of Legends have packed stadiums full of people who watch and cheer on their favorite teams of gamers. "I think I'm too old to understand what's going on in online gaming now," the reporter comments at one point. Our dear friend Research Analyst Michael Pachter replies, "You probably are." You can watch the entire eight-minute segment after the jump. [Thanks to Sorenthaz for the tip!]
27 million people watched League of Legends' world finals
Riot has posted the viewership numbers from League of Legends' 2014 world championship, and they're pretty impressive. That said, the total unique viewer count for the finals (27 million) dipped by five million from the 2013. Riot says that this year's viewers tended to watch for longer periods of time for an average of 67 minutes as opposed to 42 minutes the previous year. You can soak up the rest of the numbers at Riot's official website.
Ask Massively: Ridiculing e-sports is bad for MMOs
I don't love e-sports. I've never really been a fan. I used to enjoy spectating Guild Wars matches, but only in short bursts. Truth is, I prefer playing in PvP to watching it. I feel that way about real sports too; the ones I like, I'd rather play than watch. (Except tennis. I have no idea why, but I could watch that all day.) And if the MMORPG community's comments are any judge, I am not alone in my indifference to e-sports. Actually, "indifference" is probably too tame a word; some MMO gamers are outright hostile to e-sports, be those e-sports jammed into proper MMORPGs or waaaaay out on the fringes of the online gamosphere. That hostile ridicule of e-sports, however, degrades online gaming, our corner of it as much as anyone's.
EVE Evolved: Fixing EVE's player activity
It's been a sort of running gag in EVE Online throughout the years that players spend inordinate amounts of time docked in stations and spinning their ships around in the hangar, but this is oddly close to the truth. Those of us who have been hooked to EVE for years know just how intense the game can get at its most frantic and how incredible it is to be present for historic events and important PvP battles, but those moments are rare, and there's typically a lot of downtime between periods of activity. For every PvP battle fought, incursion fleet formed or wormhole op organised, players often have to spend hours in stations or in space amusing themselves or doing busywork. With gamers now spreading their increasingly limited free time across a growing catalogue of online games, some EVE players log in for only a few minutes per day to queue skills, chat with corpmates, and see if anything interesting is happening. The recent announcement that the upcoming Phoebe release will contain infinite length skill queues has some players concerned that people will lose the motivation to pop their heads into New Eden each day and see what's going on. Since the best sandbox gameplay is emergent in nature, just getting players to log in so they're available to take part in something awesome when it happens is extremely important. In this edition of EVE Evolved, I ask whether EVE is in trouble due to its recent decline in player activity, look at the impact of people with just a few hours per week to play, and suggest a new app idea that could help solve all of those problems.
How Blizzard is improving World of Warcraft's e-sports appeal
World of Warcraft is no stranger to e-sports, though its cousins deeper in the Blizzard family tree have fared far better. During the Hearthstone qualifiers at last weekend's DreamHack Stockholm, Blizzard Senior Manager of eSports Kim Phan spoke to PCGamesN about the challenges faced by World of Warcraft in the e-sports subgenre. "I can definitely say that WoW 3v3 Arena right now is kind of hard to watch, in the form that it is, and so there are things that we want to evaluate," she explained. "World of Warcraft was obviously created well before e-sports blew up to the way it is now. We knew there was a competitive element to World of Warcraft, and then it just kind of blew up from there. Warlords of Draenor's upcoming spectator mode is intended to address the difficulty of following arena matches, but Blizzard isn't stopping there. Even raids might be worth watching, Phan says. "Ideas have been brought up like Battlegrounds. People enjoy watching live raids at BlizzCon. What makes something an e-sport really depends on what people want to see. We are taking a close look into how we can better support e-sports."
EGX London 2014: Guild Wars 2 promotes e-sports
ArenaNet was in London this past weekend promoting its Guild Wars 2 e-sports angle to show-goers, including some who might never have played or even heard of the MMO. A pair of videos serve to explain how Guild Wars 2 works; the first covers PvE from character creation to skills to armor, and the second, hosted by Competitive Community Manager Joshua "Grouch" Davis, covers all things PvP. We think having a Competitive Community Manager is a pretty serious declaration of your e-sports intent. Enjoy the vids below.
ESPN boss: E-sports aren't sports
Sports journalism Death Star ESPN has weighed in on the argument about whether or not e-sports are sports. ESPN president John Skipper, speaking at the recent Code/Media Series: New York conference, was asked to comment on Amazon's $1 billion Twitch deal and associated e-sports programming. "It's not a sport, it's a competition," Skipper said. "Chess is a competition. Checkers is a competition. Mostly I'm interested in doing real sports." Which is probably why ESPN covers real sports like poker.
Gamescom 2014: Guild Wars 2 preps $150k prize pool tourney, feature pack
If you were wondering what ArenaNet has planned for the fall break in Guild Wars 2's living world story content, wonder no more: The studio has just announced the September feature pack, which brings both PvE and PvP upgrades to the game. "Living World Season 2 will be going on break for a while as we count down to the arrival of the [feature pack]," says lead developer Colin Johanson. "You can look forward to the return of Season 2 in autumn, and we'll announce the start date for episode 5 after the feature pack has been released." ArenaNet's attention at Gamescom, however, has been focused on competitive play. In keeping with its e-sports goals, the studio unveiled the World Tournament Series, a Guild Wars 2 competitive championship co-sponsored by Chinese publisher KongZhong. With its $150,000 prize pool, the series will draw qualifying players from the upcoming Tournament of Glory and debut in Beijing this fall. [Source: ArenaNet press release]
Twitch for Android now puts the biggest game streams front and center
If you regularly catch up on eSports or "let's play" sessions while on the move, today's your lucky day. Twitch has revamped its Android app with a fresh interface that lets you get to the biggest game streams as quickly as possible, with impossible-to-miss links to the hottest titles. It's also much better suited to tablets, and you can now check out both user profiles and offline channels; that's handy if you missed a big event or want to follow someone with similar tastes. It's much easier to sift through search results, too. The remake isn't well-timed -- it's arriving right as Valve's The International tournament is winding to a close -- but it's still a big deal if you like to spectate games as often as you play them.
Hearthstone tournament now open to all
Yesterday we reported about the oddity of a Hearthstone tournament that didn't allow women to compete. The reason? The International e-Sports Federation wanted gaming to be recognized as a "true sport," and was following the professional sports model of gender division. With fewer women competitors than men, this led to tournaments with a large selection of gaming events for men, but few for women -- in the case of this tournament, Hearthstone, Dota 2, and Ultra Street Fighter IV were all men-only events. While e-Sports are often gender-divided (competitive StarCraft is notable in this regard), the idea of a men-only Hearthstone tournament was apparently the straw that broke the camel's back. Among many others, Blizzard spoke out against IeSF policy, telling VentureBeat, "One of our goals with e-sports is to ensure that there's a vibrant and also inclusive community around our games. We do not allow the use of our games in tournaments that do not support this, and are working with our partners to ensure they share the same goal." The end result is that the IeSF has reversed the policy, and offers events open to all genders as well as women-only events to encourage the participation of women in the male-dominated field of pro gaming. It's a setup that's similar to the competitive chess scene, which has both a World Chess Championship in which anyone can compete and a Women's World Chess Championship. Now, at the 6th e-Sports World Championship BAKU 2014, men and women will be able to compete together in StarCraft 2 and Hearthstone tournaments, while there's also a women's only StarCraft 2 tournament. Time to get your game on!
IeSF changes its mind, opens all tournaments to women
Following the enormous outcry of gamers angry that International eSports Federation had forbidden women from some of its tournaments, including Hearthstone, the organization decided to open up the playing field to both genders. "Upon hearing these concerns, the IeSF convoked an emergency session of the IeSF Board to respond," the Federation posted on the official site. "As a result, IeSF shall have two event categories: 'Open for All' events and events that are reserved for women. The events which were initially set aside as the male division will now be open to all genders, and the events which were initially set as the female division will remain as they were." The IeSF defended its former rationale for segregating men and women in the event, saying that it did so to encourage female players to engage in the tournaments: "The IeSF's female-only competitions aim to bring more diversity to competitive play by improving the representation of women at these events. Without efforts to improve representation, e-sports can't achieve true gender equality." [To clarify since there's some confusion in the comments: Men can now participate in all five games. Women can now participate in all five games on the same teams as the men. Women can additionally play in women-only brackets for SC2 and Tekken Tag. Those two games are included in the games men can play in the mixed gender lineup (Tekken Tag wasn't available to men originally, just as Hearthstone was blocked from women, but this has been rectified). Neither men nor women are now barred from any game in the tourney.]
Hearthstone tournament bans female competitors
No girls are allowed to compete in Finland's Assembly Summer 2014 Dota 2, Ultra Street Fighter IV, and Hearthstone tournaments, which are open to men only. According to the International e-Sports Federation's rules, the genders of competitors in e-sports are separated to help the competition be recognized as a "true sport." In response to complaints, the IeSF posted the following on their Facebook page: "The decision to divide male and female competitions was made in accordance with international sports authorities, as part of our effort to promote e-Sports as a legitimate sports." And while this means separate but equal style treatment for some events, for others -- like Hearthstone -- it means women simply can't compete at all. At Assembly Summer 2014, women aren't allowed into these tournaments because if they won, they wouldn't be allowed into the IeSF men-only world finals. Markus Koskivirta, head admin of the Assembly Summer 2014 Hearthstone IeSF Qualifier, speaking to PC Gamer, said that the Finnish eSports Federation is lobbying for equal rights for male and female gamers... but with the long and strange tradition of segregated e-sports (StarCraft competition often has such divisions), that could be a long time coming. Though the IeSF says it wants to promote female gamers by hosting women's only events, the end result of this is to keep women on the outskirts of pro gaming by relegating their participation to smaller events and smaller stages. All this goes towards suggesting that women aren't good enough to compete with the men -- something that in an all-digital "sport" is difficult, at best, to justify. We all love the same games, so why can't we play them together?
