It is no great secret that over the past year and a half Esports has grown hugely. We have several thriving community sites and forums, professional teams with rosters of salaried players and are now beginning to have well established regular LAN(if you can call it that) tournaments.

All of this is great and are great signs for the scene, but there are still problems. To continue the growth of the Esports scene, particularly that of sc2, a few changes need to be made to allow it to flourish even more. One of these is regularity in tournaments and the payouts.

Regularity

What I mean by regularity is that there are several large scale tournaments that happen at regular intervals that professional and amateur players alike can look towards and plan their schedules around. This is also needed for the sponsors and fans. Now we already have this to some degree with MLG, Dreamhack and the GSL, but this is not enough.

Take for example any professional sports league or team where they have their events planned out a year in advance. This allows for sponsors, players and fans all to prepare and mesh their own schedules around. I don’t expect us as a community to completely refit our schedules and plan out years in ahead immediately, that would be foolish and impossible but it is what we need to work towards if we want to have any sort of staying power.

Examples: ShoutCraft and IPL

Take for example the ShoutCraft invitationals. These tournaments so far have always been a huge success and have great quality, but recently they have lacked consistency. As some of you may know TotalBiscuit had a bit of a breakdown/forced hiatus from the stress of his work.

This unfortunately delayed the next ShoutCraft invitational by a good deal of time, which is exactly the irregularity that we do not want. I am not trying to rag on TotalBiscuit, I think he is a great community member and does a lot of good work, but that delay is something that we cannot allow to become a norm. If for some reason a caster or organizer can’t make it due to personal reasons, power to them they should take a break if they need it, but the organization around them has to try and pick up the slack. I would have loved to have seen TotalBiscuit hand the reigns off to his staff, tell them “get this done” and have someone else cast with Apollo. The games must be played and GG’s must be had.
Another example would be IGN with its IPL. Now I know everything these guys have done so far has been fantastic and very high quality, but they still lack regularity. So far they have done two online tournaments, one LAN and now two online team tournaments. While the variety of events is great, I think that what we need is for them to pick one thing (or hopefully all) and just keep it going on a monthly basis. We should be on IPL5 instead of TAC2.

The reason being is that the players and teams are unsure of what the next event will be and cannot plan their schedules or make any sort of financial predictions for winnings or expenses. It’s this type of instability that may discourage sponsorship deals from teams and players. Sponsors need to know that in the long term their money will pay off, or else they won’t pay up. What I would love to see is 2 or 3 major events that happen on a regular basis in each region occur every 2 months or so to allow the teams, players, sponsors and fans some room for maneuverability. Instead of looking 3 months in the future and wondering if it will be a dry month for tournaments; we should already be booking our Barcrafts and planning autograph signings.
The players too need to know when the major tournaments and minor tournaments are going on so they can book trips and plan their training schedule. Not all players are financially independent and they need to know that they will have enough to live on in the upcoming months. I know players cannot predict if they win or not, but going out to a tournament and performing well may have other benefits than any potential prize money. Exposure to fans s they gain more stream viewers, meeting with sponsors and possible new teams. All of this is facilitated by regular planned events.

Organization

Another thing we need to improve on is the way players and tournament staff/organizers conduct themselves and their tournaments. Recently there have been two big “events” where players made unpopular decisions forced on them by the tournament and the situation. I am referring to Naniwa in the blizzard cup and Stephano in the more recent ONOG tournament.

Naniwa’s situation has already been beaten to death and is history, but it shows the problems that can arise with poorly formatted tournaments and poor attitude from the players. The general consensus after all of the pitchforks had been dulled was that “the game shouldn’t have been played to begin with, but because it was being played, Naniwa should have played it out.” These situations need to be eliminated completely. I don’t remember hearing of a similar situation in any of the professional sports leagues so I see no reason why this should be tolerated here.
Tournaments need to respect their players and the players need to respect their fans and viewers of the tournament. In my opinion, once again both the tournament staff of ONOG and Stephano have joint responsibility for the fallout. Stephano should not have been expected to play at a high level for a large amount of money at 1:30 AM. It was poorly planned beforehand.

It is not possible for players to play well in a situation like that and as such I respect Stephano’s decision to not play but I do not agree with it. By outright refusing to play he disrespected both the fans and the tournament staff. He made the same mistake as Naniwa. They were both in a bad position and should have made the most of it. Yes neither player should have been expected to play, but since they were they should play the damn game. Copping out is just unprofessional and makes them look childish while tournaments that force this on players should be viewed similarly until the mistakes are rectified.

The Importance of Manner

Players must review the way they conduct themselves and pay more attention to what they say if we as a community and Esports want to be taken seriously. We need more Sheths and WhiteRas and less Lalushs and Idras.

Are one or two good to have? Of course it makes it more interesting but it can also detract from the overall feel. Most will agree that Lalush is just straight up offensive and unacceptable, while more are split on Idra. But In my opinion they both have the same effect, Idra probably a more negative effect than Lalush because of his following and the split between his supporters and naysayers. Much of what Idra does I am fine with, not leaving with a GG can be excusable if it isn’t the norm, but he often goes too far.
Many a thread on TL or elsewhere he is just plain rude to fans or critics. That is what is completely unacceptable. That is someone sitting at their computer typing out a hurtful/offensive message and making the conscious decision to send it.

No GG or another quick verbal snipe to an opponent can often be put down to a heat of the moment thing, especially if he manners up afterwards, which he often does. Fortunately the good outnumber the bad, but we need to stop the bad from dominating the main stage until they reform. We want to be taken seriously? We need to act professionally. We want to succeed financially? We need regularity. We want quality events? We better organize them with quality.

We will only get out what we put in.