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Bottom Liner posted:I think blizzard really cracked the code on esports monetization: rich assholes and mega corps that will invest tens of millions each into your league. The viewers were always secondary to that insane influx of cash they got for franchising, broadcast rights, etc. Viewer #s are 100% the thing that drives every other aspect of esports being profitable and blizzard being able to demand x for franchises and y for broadcast rights. If OWL pans out than yeah they cracked it, but that still very much remains to be seen and twitch deciding not to renew the deal was a big blow
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Feb 9, 2020 11:37
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Have we heard what the deal was worth? Because that statement depends a lot on how much they ended up getting. E: reading up on it, it appears that a big part of it was likely an exchange of services in return for the broadcasting rights? Herstory Begins Now fucked around with this message at 13:46 on Feb 9, 2020 |
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Feb 9, 2020 13:40
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blizz has 250m a year of hosting/server costs so there's a lot of reason for them to consider that kind of exchange, it just wouldn't look great if you're trying to prove to people that your esports league is worth cash money. Who knows though, I'm sure we'll get more details at some point.
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Feb 9, 2020 14:23
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No Russian cast for OWL apparently  https://twitter.com/andygmb1/status/1226531902066188290?s=20
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Feb 9, 2020 19:11
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lol nice cleanup kills compilation
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Feb 19, 2020 10:56
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Oasx posted:As much as it sucks for the players, I can understand not wanting to throw more money into the bottomless pit that is OWL, by flying them on business class. if you can afford a 60m buyin you can afford to buy some business class for pennies on the dollar at enterprise wholesale cost
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Feb 21, 2020 12:32
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Oasx posted:If OWL is like any other sport then it has both star players and the ones who are not quite as important. I assume that for every star player who can demand business class seats, there are two or three who would find themselves without a job if they started demanding anything when offered a contract. at most it's 1:1 given team size is so limited and there's no way that someone with a contract worth 200k/yr + 6-7 figure buyout isn't worth enough to an org to negotiate absolutely basic travel details like not flying bargain bin coach on lovely carriers with 3 connects or solo hotel rooms vs cramming 5 nerds into a two queen bed room. Like none of this poo poo is advanced negotiating and a lot of it is both ethical team management as well as just intelligently managing a bunch of extremely change-averse burnout-prone shutins who you need to consistently show up 100% on. Oasx posted:It's not a question on whether they can afford to but whether it is worth the money, especially if these companies aren't seeing the returns they were expecting. No one has thought to start a league that actually flies shutins around the globe on a regular basis because it's a structurally idiotic way of setting up an esports league. As to the rest of esports, travel expenses are quite literally the most basic and most common compensation that people making over like 5000/yr in esports receive. Traditionally most esports orgs offer basically travel accomodations worth X/yr and sometimes with the option to get like .6X/yr in cash if they don't want the travel compensation. This has been a popular thing for a long time for obvious reasons: it builds profile for esports orgs who always have their pros turn up to tournaments and it's a win for players because they basically get comped to play tournaments. Hell, almost every substantial esports org (which absolutely includes 100% of orgs that can afford to pay 60 million for a league spot) already has an enterprise level relationship with airlines. Hell, the travel stuff is even one of the most basic negotiating points for hiring casters and production people. Like this is in no way at all an issue that came out of left field. Bottom Liner posted:Which is why they desperately need a players union as does every esports league this times a million, basically Herstory Begins Now fucked around with this message at 18:49 on Feb 21, 2020 |
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Feb 21, 2020 18:40
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For how much of a fan favorite hitscan heroes are, both playing and spectating, it's nice that the last two years of the game have just hard shat on them at every possible turn
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Mar 5, 2020 12:03
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dogstile posted:I'm not that active competitively anymore (not even ringing, as of this season) and all I heard is that all the EU coaches I know are complaining because they find out what they can play roughly the same week they get banned, so currently I assume they don't. I don't suppose that potentially invalidating weeks (or more?) of preparation time and forcing people to start new preparations week-of is going to wildly increase burnout. Especially when combined with the stress of traveling so much. Tommu posted:Aggressive patching was enough to provide a more flowing meta. Hero bans in owl as a pre game choice are dumb and the blizzard system is somehow worse. Blizzard's weird insistance on extremely infrequent but almost exclusively large changes or just an outright refusal to change obviously broken heroes has done so much weird poo poo to the game. Idk if it's crippling perfectionism, some weird hubris, or just a desire to win awards for originality or something that leads to it, but it's infuriating watching them spend literally years not-solving problems that as a genre have had known solutions 5-10 years ago, or more. It sucks because ow is a game with enough depth that with the right stewardship absolutely could be huge as an esport, but blizz has been doing everything in their power to undermine literally all of their esports and a lot of their recent decisions (after the latest round of gutting their esports divisions) demonstrate even less of an understanding of how esport scenes organically work than normal. Herstory Begins Now fucked around with this message at 11:08 on Mar 6, 2020 |
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Mar 6, 2020 10:52
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Yeah I don't think that it's automatically bad to have different things going on, but I do think that completely making it impossible to grind out practice on heroes you're forced to play by hero bans is really bad because where tf else are you meant to get 60 hours of non-scrim practice last minute once you learn you're playing heroes that you're rusty on? Ladder play in p much any game is never perfect practice, but as a way of getting your baseline mechanics up and keeping rust away, it's a part of how people prepare in literally every esport.
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Mar 6, 2020 11:13
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Manatee Cannon posted:lotta people are tired of/frustrated with the problems ow has, but I don't think valorant's gonna drain the casual playerbase of ow at all. it's basically cs Ow barely has a casual playerbase to drain. Most of the twitch presence OW still has is there entirely because streamers know that they'll lose 3/4 of their viewers fi they switch games and pretty much the entirety of the ow pro scene is just a big sunk cost fallacy at this point and Tommunist can call me an idiot if I'm wrong about that. As to pulling from CSGO, that's an interesting question and that's hard to predict. CS is strangely going through a continued burst of growth and has been setting active player records continuously for like 6 months now. Team-based mechanics-heavy shooters are very much in right now and there are a toooooooon of people who are profoundly burned out and exhausted of csgo but still want to play shooters so that's a pretty big and deep pool to draw upon. Plus they've got some just common sense qol additions that valve, in the near total abandonment of csgo, have never implemented. So if they do enough qol stuff they yeah they can absolutely steal tons of active players from csgo. Herstory Begins Now fucked around with this message at 15:19 on Apr 4, 2020 |
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Apr 4, 2020 15:13
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Bottom Liner posted:
they normally keep it hidden and iirc actually had to make rules about mid-match chatting because sinatraa or danteh or someone was typing up so much mid game banter that people were finding it distracting Fauxtool posted:Not that its surprising, but Soe is clearly the only one who can apply their own makeup. Everyone else looks 15 years older and sickly It's funny cuz the hair and makeup (at least until they fired the people they had doing it) was exceptionally well done pretty much top to bottom. Tommu posted:I mean I can't really definitively say that that its a sunk cost fallacy for alot of people, i know I personally sticked about for like 3 months this year because of that tho. Yeah I'm definitely not speaking authoritatively about that, I'm just going off of how burnt out and unenthusiastic pretty much everyone in owl and t2 seems towards the game. I can't even really remember the last time I saw someone having fun with the game outside of memeing around not taking it seriously, which usually is a sign that it's winding down. I always wonder what would've happened if they'd started the blizz-affiliated stuff as a separate, supplementary premier league and let all the super active original t2/weekly tournament scene continue. Herstory Begins Now fucked around with this message at 08:14 on Apr 5, 2020 |
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Apr 5, 2020 08:03
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why do these leagues even have chat turned on for players to do these things?
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At least the dps players transition out of top tier overwatch into other mechanically demanding shooters just fine. Probably better, if anything, because there's vastly more room for personal impact and a lot of the grenade/utility stuff you can actually grind out in a few afternoons, even though, yeah, it does take a long time to really master and have it become second nature. Related, Apex's pro scene basically is 3/4 ow t2 people, it's crazy how many people got their start in ow
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Apr 7, 2020 03:52
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? Both support and tank require as much mechanical ability as anything else, they just ostensibly have a different primary purpose in fights. From what I've seen, they all switch over with no problems and tank players if anything have a bit of an advantage because most of the top level ones have a sixth sense for keeping track of their team mates. Also as a general thing in esports, probably 95+ percent of all people at the top level of any competitive game were at that level in another game previously. Half of it is mindset and having the skill of forcing self-improvement out of yourself, but half of it is also just playing 4-6 hours a day for years straight until you hit the point where new games are more a matter of learning game knowledge rather than relearning movement, fundamentals, aim, etc. former ow pros will be in the top tier of valorant literally from day one. Plus a ton of them played cs previously or do now, so it's not like there's no way for them to learn how nades work.
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Apr 7, 2020 05:51
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also i'm sorry, i don't meant o come across so argumentative about something this small, i'm just stressed out
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Apr 7, 2020 05:54
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Yall acting like the actual top tiers of CS are going to leave an extremely established scene with serious money and inertia and a lot of nerd prestige to go to a new unproven game. They won't. You'll get the CS people who were perpetually a few tiers below being $$ competitive. I think former OW players will be well represented because they've been bleeding their top tier players for like a year now and most of them have just been slumming it around in the other big FPS in the mean time. Notably, CS is currently going through a huge boom of popularity and even before all the stay at home corona stuff CS had doubled it's previous record player counts in the last few months. Before a game is figured out, the early success in tournaments comes down to team synergy, who is really adaptive, and who managed to grind out 500 hours in the first 6 weeks. dogstile posted:E: Also, in my personal experience, I hit t500 on all three overwatch roles (lol cree flashbangs, i owe you a lot) and against consistent t500 dps players, i'd get absolutely poo poo on, but i'd hold my own well enough that if I started calling, i'd be able to maintain mid gm-low t500 on that account. Even just through keeping them busy and just not feeding. That will also have value. Who knows, i'll install CS and immediately get placed in silver, lets go. this actually explains a lot, from playing with you I'd wondered where you learned movement and just that raw ~staying alive~ skill and now it all adds up lol. Herstory Begins Now fucked around with this message at 12:05 on Apr 7, 2020 |
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Apr 7, 2020 11:59
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It just occurred to me that the reason I've seen some ow streamers playing cs the last few months was that they were prepping for valorant.
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Apr 7, 2020 16:14
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Tommu posted:Out of curiosity to people who like hero pools - how do you feel about traditional sports or say CS. All games with a much slower pace of change then what people demand of overwatch. I think the issue is that people demand change in OW as a game they want to play to make it more fun, not as much because they want to see the pro meta change. Then the pros get dragged along for the ride. Goats was probably the exception to that That said, I think hero pools as they implemented them are dumb as hell. Hero bans might be interesting, but someone just saying 'no hitscan this week' is dumb af Herstory Begins Now fucked around with this message at 00:06 on Apr 10, 2020 |
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Apr 10, 2020 00:03
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Maybe not in the sense of them properly executing it, but it's 100% a huge toxicity-laden expectation that people will only pick the meta heroes in their roles. If they wanted the views, they'd do hero protects/bans. Tbh i think that for the last 6 months they've just been throwing poo poo at the wall and hoping something sticks.
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Apr 10, 2020 00:15
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Most sports have an entirely different ruleset that people play for fun vs in high-level competitive/professional play because one is about fun and one is about eliminating the completely anti-fun and/or fundamentally unfair poo poo that teams that care about winning will do, eg look at how the shot clock became a thing in basketball. For example I got to a very high percentile of pool players and even then probably 98% of the games i played were with an exceptionally casual ruleset because literally no one wants to play turbo strict rulesets all the time. imo forcing both owl and comp to be on 99% the same ruleset and game mode really hamstrung their ability to purely develop for one or the other.
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Apr 10, 2020 01:56
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Tommu posted:I think this is the intrinsic problem. You have this dilemma with all sports and esports in particular and generally it comes down to getting casters who can tease out the story-lines and the layers of complexity for people to understand. If you get people really good at this, you can branch out beyond people who are intimately experienced with the game. Now this is not to say that the casters were bad, I think a lot of them did an alright job, but jfc ow is a complex, opaque, and often extremely obtuse game. Many of it's systems and the way teams at the top level played were deeply counter-intuitive to someone unfamiliar with the mechanics. I have no proof, but I very strongly suspect that the OWL viewer base was almost 100% people who have played the game, which is notably not the case for many (most?) sports and esports. I think blizz also neglected to appreciate how important casters were in general and then on top of that specifically neglected to appreciate how important viewer's feelings towards specific casters were as that's one of the main things that actually drove people to watch. The whole parasocial relationship poo poo is big in every sport/esport (and it's why every one of them has people cast the games). This is also a lot of what leads people to putting games on as background noise. When blizz let a bunch of their on air personalities go, idk it seemed like the beginning of the end. There's a reason why if you watch cs majors it's the same handful of people casting everything. If you watch starcraft it's tasteless and artosis and the same 5-10 people. If you watch dota/lol/pubg etc. the pattern repeats.
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Apr 10, 2020 03:50
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Ironically for all the criticisms of OWL I have, the thing they nailed was getting some really amazingly high level game play out of a lot of teams on a consistent basis. It was reminiscent of the old KESPA days of BW/SC2 where having tons of team houses with dozens of players each led to extremely rapid and substantial innovation and refinement of how the game was played.
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Apr 10, 2020 03:55
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Just had dreamkazper on my team in a valorant game so clearly ow pros are jumping ship  lih posted:Isn't this the case with MOBAs too though? They're even more inscrutable for a casual viewer than Overwatch I'd think. tbh I have no idea, I can't stand watching mobas. Ad by Khad posted:This really isn't my experience at all. When they started putting OWL on disney channels and it was shown in every bar in my city last year I encountered a lot of people who watched the game but had never played it. They'd recognize my gladiators or shanghai shirt and yeah some of them had played enough to get into silver or gold but lots just straight up didn't own the game. My brother only plays phone games but at one point he was watching Defiant games regularly about on par with the leafs or raptors or toronto FC, all four of which could be found on tv in the bar. I'd wonder how many of them sought owl games out to watch, as opposed to just saw them when they were on, but man that tv deal really was the highpoint of getting owl out there in the public eye and specifically for branching out beyond the ow players. For how chaotic the game is, they had a very tv-broadcast-ready package. Bottom Liner posted:Yeah I should word that better. The team work and hero knowledge and usage is definitely it’s own skill set, but I meant gunplay skill ceiling and ability to impact the game as a single player. Because OW's movement system was designed by a bunch of hyperactive monkeys who thought they were making an mmo, it has a completely insane inertia system for an fps (eg the instant accel that lets you AD strafe super quickly) that takes an inordinate amount of skill to track people moving super erratically. The skill ceiling just looks low on the gunplay because the ttk is so drat high. Herstory Begins Now fucked around with this message at 07:06 on Apr 10, 2020 |
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Apr 10, 2020 06:54
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There's an incentive in esports to have longer contracts because a ton of their revenue comes from contract buyouts traditionally, which tend to be 6/7 figures. They hoped someone would really want him. Turns out they were wrong.
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Apr 13, 2020 06:07
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Tommu posted:I feel like you're misunderstanding ow esports for the teams, not blizz. Do explain? CuwiKhons posted:This seems like a grave misunderstanding of the situation Houston was in after Season 1. They'd had a perfectly mediocre season but they only just barely missed out on playoffs and it seemed like their biggest problems were their DPS line lacking a good Tracer when Tracer was a vital part of the meta. Muma didn't stand out as a bad tank in S1 and in fact I'd say he was better than average when tank lines in S1 included people like Roshan, Nomy, and iRemiix. Between season 1 and 2, the Outlaws owners were probably starting to realize they had severe money problems. They shell out to hire Danteh but they probably don't have the money for upgrades anywhere else. Muma seems fine at this point. He had a pretty good season 1 and he's probably not going to ask for a poo poo ton of money for a new contract. I really doubt there was any intention of selling Muma to a higher bidder, just that he was available, relatively cheap, and didn't seem like a problem. ah that makes more sense, ty
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Apr 13, 2020 07:24
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ah you're right, I forgot about the 12 man roster cap.
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Apr 13, 2020 08:53
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Ad by Khad posted:OWL was heckin great last year and was the first real example of an esport becoming mainstream in canada where I live, but I don't know if it survives all these blunders and if it's just gonna be Boston vs Houston a hundred times I don't care OWL and in particular blizzard's approach to OW esports has literally been a textbook case study in how not to manage an esport. And it's insane because they did the exact same thing to SC2 in Korea where it was regularly on TV, had huge T2 through like t10 semi pro scene, had a billion cool tournaments being run and then blizzard stepped in and said that all sc2 esports had to be run through them specifically and overnight like 90% of the teams collapsed, all but one or two of the team houses shut down, and public interest just cratered. Anyways that doom and gloom aside, esports are very marketable right now and are borderline mainstream cumulatively. A lot of games' tournaments could be televised easily right now and they'd do well.
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Apr 14, 2020 22:16
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In retrospect, valorant's thing where abilities are opaque really makes the game clearer visually compared to looking through 9 different glowing barriers and particle effects and projectiles and poo poo all at once. I didn't like the look at first, but it's grown on me as a way of making the game read better and of making abilities have more uses, too.
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Apr 17, 2020 02:33
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I have bad news for you about chinese stream view counts
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Apr 18, 2020 11:57
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Ad by Khad posted:Yeah that number seems totally unbelievable and I'm probably just reading the data wrong Nah it's a common thing that chinese streaming sites report insane viewer numbers. IIirc, basically there's no regulation keeping them honest and they're all competing for the perception of the biggest streaming site and there's a lot of secondary and tertiary incentives to inflating the number so you end up with some extraordinary numbers. People used to try to guess what percent of them were real but tbh they're too opaque and no one knows. E: wasn't facebook doing this, too? Herstory Begins Now fucked around with this message at 15:45 on Apr 18, 2020 |
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Apr 18, 2020 15:42
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unironically if I owned an owl team, I'd be considering if i could convert the players into valorant pros. Like sinatraa is probably worth more as a potential valorant player than an owl player at this point I'm partly memeing, but not entirely. Also I'm really curious what dirt Jeff has on blizz-act execs (beyond the obvious on kotick) that he is apparently chained to OW until the day it finally dies. E: also we found at least one of the wayward ow teams: https://twitter.com/ESPN_Esports/status/1251616493743362048?s=20 Herstory Begins Now fucked around with this message at 14:47 on Apr 19, 2020 |
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Apr 19, 2020 14:29
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Unironically, they're all just playing valorant. Hell most of the coaching staff is probably doing the same thing. It's pretty clear that valorant is going to be the #1 source of new esports paychecks for the foreseeable future
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Apr 19, 2020 22:24
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Manatee Cannon posted:nah they should absolutely strive to keep the game we play and the game the pros play as close as possible. anything else is extremely bad for the pro scene. if you want an example, look at tf2. hell part of the problem with hero bans before was that pros couldn't practice heroes they were going to play in owl because they were banned in comp Clearly this didn't work as they can't even get the contractually obligated to play the game pro players to play the game even for 6 figure salaries Deathy McDeath posted:LOL Echo banned after its first week of competitive play when that guy who does the super good 'Dead game postmortems' videos gets around to OW, this is going to be the cherry on top Herstory Begins Now fucked around with this message at 10:57 on Apr 20, 2020 |
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Apr 20, 2020 10:52
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I still think that the patch they introduced ashe they should've just deleted widow from the game.
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Apr 20, 2020 16:55
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This is a weird effort to shift blame from them getting told for years, 'have a pick/ban system' and then for whatever reason forcing their own weird take on the system upon the game. I don't know why Jeff Kaplan's job is apparently a life-appointment, but jfc that dude has no business making decisions about an FPS. It's funny that this is like the fifteenth iteration of them getting a bunch of 'we want x' feedback, ignoring it, implementing something loosely influenced by x years later, and then seeming surprised that people are not satisfied with getting something they never asked for or so much later that everyone who asked for it already quite years ago. Herstory Begins Now fucked around with this message at 23:33 on Apr 20, 2020 |
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Apr 20, 2020 23:30
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calling cloud 9 cs tier one is very generous. Even when they won their major it was more of a 'lucky t2 moment' than them establishing themselves.
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Apr 21, 2020 18:18
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Saya's a good example because even as far as flick aiming goes his is truly otherworldly. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5Ok3X2Gp4w&t=221s Herstory Begins Now fucked around with this message at 17:19 on Apr 22, 2020 |
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Apr 22, 2020 17:16
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It's a big deal symbolically if he chooses an unproven valorant team over having made it in OW. He's gonna choose Valorant, btw
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Apr 25, 2020 20:37
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Related, lol https://www.twitch.tv/videos/602077687?t=00h02m43s Yeah that sounds like someone excited to keep playing OW
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Apr 25, 2020 20:44
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Oasx posted:Wasn’t there some OWL produced video about how Sinatraa used to be super toxic but was now reformed? That clip doesn’t exactly make it seem true. they would sign zero people to their league if one of the conditions was that you can only stream one game for the duration of your contract. As it stands, the blanket no streaming during any owl matches is already more restrictive than you'll find in any other esport, especially now that they've got games in all kinds of time zones The way streaming works in general completely disincentivizes game switching since it's almost always a guaranteed loss of 3/4 of your viewers. It's why streamers are always playing the same game months after you can tell that they've badly burned out on a game. Herstory Begins Now fucked around with this message at 22:25 on Apr 25, 2020 |
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Apr 25, 2020 22:23
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