Right now the most discussed topic in e-sports is the League of Legends season 2 finals, although not for any of the reasons that RIOT had hoped for. Just when it seemed that they had this e-sports thing licked, just when it looked like they might start to foster some of the respect they deserved, all that good work came unstitched at the seams in a series of cataclysmic errors that saw the event postponed after a day mostly comprised of delays.
It got to that terrible end via a cheating scandal, a commentator faux pas that ranks up their with almost anything uttered by the serial buffoon Mitt Romney and ended with the scene of mouth-for-hire Marcus “DJWheat” Graham giving an ashen faced apology to a bewildered crowd as opposed to someone actually running the show. It was a PR nightmare…
Of course it will always seem worse when you have hundreds of thousands of people willing you to fail, all of them eagerly waiting to take a break from endlessly typing about how bad your game is, to instead typing about how bad your tournament for your game is. Indeed, they have a broad repertoire those DotA enthusiasts. And let’s be clear, even those professing to belong to the League of Legends community lined up to kick the shit out of the company that created the game they invest so much time in, vocalising their “disappointment” at it all and looking for a compensatory hand out for a night of stream watching cut short, or long as it happened, because they are so loyal.
So yeah, the finals descended into farce in a way that only a very few ever do and certainly there’s no avoiding the sheer scale of this reality. It was a tournament with $2 million invested in it, a precursor to a third season that promised to be the biggest thing to happen to e-sports to date. Instead it petered out like it was a Croatian LAN. However, the prize budget doesn’t really alter the fact that an event of any size and stature could have been blighted by the same problems – and that includes The International DotA fanatics – because e-sports is at the tender mercies of a lot of factors that can all come into play without any warning.
Several people will scoff at this and say “it doesn’t happen in real sports”. If you’ve said that, hate to break it to you, but you’re either someone who enjoys sports and just so happens to be a moron, or you’re a stick thin, bespectacled fan of Games Workshop, in which case you’re forgiven for your ignorance as you have enough problems. I can direct your attention to games in the recent European Championships where a game was postponed five minutes into play due to a storm, the first time a game had been temporarily suspended since 1974. “Oh but that’s the weather” probably seems a good counter. Well, if you applied the same logic that critics of RIOT are so quick to leap to then “Oh but there’s weather forecasts” would be the natural counter-argument. The same for the French vs Ireland home match in the most recent rugby world cup which wasn’t called off until the stadium was at capacity, thousands of fans making improbable trips in the freezing cold only to be take their seats and be told “we are zorry but ze game is cancel”. Don’t even get me started on the NFL stand-in referee debacle.
There were some delays on day two and of course that fateful third day. All e-sports events are of course marred by delays. In all my years covering them I can think of one that actually stuck to schedule from start to finish and that was simply because the schedule was so padded with time either side it was impossible not to. There are a number of reasons for this that are never really openly discussed. The most obvious, which is true in a lot of cases, are that the organisers either don’t really know what they are doing or their structure, comprised as it often is of volunteers, means that the frontline workers are rarely proactive when it comes to tackling potential problems. Players are a usual source of delays. If you’ve ever gone to an event you won’t believe your eyes when a player, who at home has a foot long config and a specific bunch of settings for optimal play, can suddenly no longer figure out how to plug in a mouse and keyboard. After the event they can sure as hell tell you everything that was wrong in minute detail. During, they are led around like sheep and expect everything to be done for them.
Such treatment takes time and when you combine the invariable technical problems that will arise on PCs that are in constant use, having constant changes made to them, equipment plugged in and out of it like it was bottom of the pile at an e-orgy. No-one will ever blame the players because they want them to come to future events. They just grit their teeth and plough through the shit because that is the nature of the business. Anyone who organises tournaments would tell you this if you got them drunk enough, which is easy. And I know because I’ve ran more than a few myself.
And while we’re on the topic of players not helping a situation, I don’t really follow the line of thought that if players take advantage of their set-up it’s somehow all RIOT’s fault. The stage set up was optimised for the spectator experience and you can only take precautions and hope that people aren’t going to try and take advantage of that. If players do, and I understand the temptation, obviously action of some sort has to be taken. For me though I can’t help but feel that everyone overreacted JUST A LITTLE BIT. Clearly there were a lot of “supporters” with an anti-Asian team stance and the main incident that everyone was talking about was inconsequential anyway. People then speculated wildly that there must have been others that we had missed, which is kind of like conservatives trying to point to the murky world of unreported crime statistics to generate widespread panic and outrage. It is mostly speculatory.
What I do know is this isn’t the first tournament where players have been accused of “ghosting” or “screen watching”. I’ve lost track of the number where players have had it levelled at them. Even when people are captured on video doing it the conclusion is often that no definite conclusion can be made. It doesn’t make the tournament a farce. What would make a tournament a farce would be if a team was punished or disqualified without complete and unequivocal evidence that such an incident had occurred. Even so, if there is an acknowledgement on the part of the organisers that their set-up is partly to blame, they are right not to sanction the teams. Even with this said I’m confident that RIOT will take action and when they do it’ll be widely applauded by the same goons who were calling them spineless for not doing something KNEE JERK.
Those same people will likely utter “why not simply use soundproof booths like they do at The International… What a fail” the anti-League people proclaimed. Well, I don’t care what people think about this but for me, they are not the answer to something we want to grow as a spectator sport. They look faintly ridiculous on the stage, reminding me of the Spinal Tap scene where the band play “Rock and Roll Creation” emerging from translucent pods. At events I want to see players emotions – not on big screens, or piped through webcams, but there in front of me, etched on their monitor-tanned faces. I want to see their eyes well up when they know they’ve cost their team big money or I want to see them spit everywhere while they cheer victorious. A combination of sound cancelling headsets and slightly better screen positioning is all that’s needed. Booths are a barrier between the players and the live audience.
The other thing that has been washed over is the fact that there was more than a suspicion of the crashes on the last day actually being the result of some sort of attack. The timing of it always seemed to be too perfect, that it would cause the maximum disruption to the game in progress. Naturally if you were RIOT you wouldn’t come out and say this, even if it was intimated in the initial statements that were coming forward, only to be retracted afterwards. What exactly went on? Well, a handful of people will know that but I would go so far as to say that RIOT aren’t going to benefit from saying it was the result of an attack. Firstly it makes them look naive and vulnerable and may encourage further action considering how badly it was dealt with. Secondly, the follow on question of “who did it” also poses problems. If you’re in a position to do an elaborate ddos or attack of that nature, then you’re also in a position to hide your tracks. In the absence of being able to answer the question of who, you don’t only look weak, you look paranoid too, maybe even like a collection of liars. The fact that in their most recent statement they left it with the phrase “we are continuing to investigate” the incidents speaks volumes.
Of course they were accused of being liars anyway, even when they issued a more than reasonable statement, issued by on their forums that covered most of the issues. The second half of it read:
[quote] Those are the primary incidents that have been reported, but we are also investigating other alleged instances. More importantly, we are taking steps to completely ensure the screens are not visible to players at the conclusion of the Playoffs and Finals.
Hardware and connection issues are harder to prepare for. Video cards can explode. Network cables can short out. Headsets can die. While we can pause and restore games, if any of those things happen in the middle of a teamfight, it will impact the course of the game dramatically. Long-term, we know we need better solutions for this and it is a priority.
Regarding yesterday’s connection failures, we had a string of issues including a power failure, and two internet connectivity incidents we are continuing to investigate. It sucks that this happened, but we’re going to dive deep into the root cause to see if there are any other redundancies that could safeguard against this in the future.
We’re trying to deliver an extraordinary experience for viewers, and yesterday didn’t live up to our goals. We’re going to take everything we’ve learned from the Playoffs and strive to make the remainder of the Quarter- and Semifinals, as well as the Finals, as great as we can make them.
In the long run, looking to season 3 and beyond, we’re always learning and we’re reading all your feedback and taking it to heart. We believe the most important concern here is about fairness, and we’re going to do everything we can to preserve that moving forward.
League of Legends as an eSport is young, and we’re learning a lot with each event. This is the run-up to our Super Bowl, and we’ve really been pouring our blood, sweat and tears into it. We’re as disappointed as you are that yesterday had so many issues, but we’re committed to improving, so that’s what we’re going to try to do.
Right now we’re focused on setting up the conclusion of the Playoffs, and we’ll have more details on that shortly.[/quote]
It’s not often I’ll feel sorry for people “fucking up” but the reality is that for every person who sat there enjoying the spectacle of one of the biggest events in e-sports, there was another one, maybe even two, who sat there with their finger crossed hoping for it to fail. These ranged from people who simply felt LoL was a kids game, not deep enough to be a genuine e-sport (a completely stupid argument that overlooks the inherent simplicity of a lot of the biggest titles that made e-sports what it is today), to people who felt RIOT had bought the success of the game (if it was that simple then everyone would be doing it… It isn’t), to think the e-sports plate is a little too crowded as it is. However, when anything of this size fails to succeed it hurts all of us in the industry, especially when people fail to see the clear and obvious positives.
Indeed these were plentiful and obvious to anyone who could take a backwards step, back out of the room where the gibbering hysteria was infectious. Firstly, it’s the second season finals and the first time RIOT have done anything on this scale… Now they know plenty of key areas to watch out for and (I suspect) they are better forewarned about just how spiteful the e-sports community can be when it really puts its mind to it. It’s a learning curve for them as much as it is for anyone who plays their game. And I threw that line in solely just so you could internally scoff and think “what learning curve” because there’s a good chance you’re another one of those e-sports purists who don’t understand why your game isn’t getting the same treatment and doesn’t have the same following.
What I’ll take from the first three days of the finals aren’t the fails, aren’t the cheating accusations, nor being told by someone desperately wishing to be a paid official voice of League of Legends that if I’m watching on a stream I don’t matter. It’s the way players came from across the globe to compete, desperate to win a massive, life-changing prize. It’s the way the crowd reacted to those amazing moments that turned games on their heads, or gasped at new alterations to an ever developing meta-game that stays just the right side of understandable to the layman. I’ll remember the slick production value and the commentary duos that, in flashes, made you forget you were watching something that was meant to be the preserve of the bedroom and was in fact mainstream – comparable to any sport.
And if anything the extra drama just gave you something extra to talk about before the next set of games where the stakes would be even higher. I know no matter how much the gallery bitches RIOT will get it right. They’ve done everything right so far and it’s that, more than anything else, that has boiled people’s blood so very much. Enjoy kicking RIOT while they’re done naysayers – they won’t stay down for long.