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Created 12th June 2008 16:05
(Updated: 12th June 2008 16:08)
Lately I have been rather upset with the current state of eSports. I follow many games, from wc3 to quake 3/4 to CS. In all of these games, other than a select few players it seems like noone even cares about eSports. And its not just the players to be honest. When I look at the many organizations I work with/for I see a lot of staff members whether it be CEO's or just a forum moderator. That don't give a damn about eSports, where its headed and why it sucks. It seems now that there is an abundance of money floating around in eSports (sure not everyone can make a living off of it, but a surprising amount of people do; myself included) that the people involved (or starting to get involved) just want money and don't really care about eSports. I understand this to a certain extent. I mean, when I went through highschool the teachers would ask the kids "what do you want to do when you grow up?" To which most kids replied something along the lines of "who cares; as long as it makes me a lot of money" I never understood that, and still don't. Why bother work at something if you don't like it? It makes no sense to me. I pursued a career in eSports for one reason; my passion for it. Sure I have other hobbies, for instance I do aggressive inline and bouldering. But I don't have the same passion for them as I do eSports. They are 'for fun'. But with eSports its something different. I just love doing it, whether its playing professionally or just other projects. I understand this sounds like I am pushing my 'beliefs' system on everyone when it comes to eSports and that I am trying to force everyone to feel the same way about it. However I would like to steer clear of that. I understand that a lot of people play games competitively for the same reason I boulder or skate, its FUN. And so it should be. These people that play in leagues and go to events simply because its fun and don't necessarily want a career are the people I love in eSports. They make it worth while. Its the people I meet online or at events that only play to get 'easy money' and just make a quick paycheck doing something they deem as 'not a real job'. These people, sadly enough, are the people that are now guiding eSports. And in the wrong direction I may add. My point in all of this is, why are the people that don't even care about eSports the ones leading it? And why are the casual 'fun' players and the 'passion' players left in the dust to deal with it? | ||||||||||||||||||
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Created 3rd June 2008 19:15
(Updated: 3rd June 2008 19:23)
Every once in a while a new event comes along. The event looks rather promising and players and fans alike become jubilated at the thought of being able to participate in the event. When an event comes along, with a rather large prize pot and a rather large political backing from a country, its hard to not to have the highest expectations one can get when an event of this magnitude is announced. However, since one particular events inception; e-Stars, it has been dropping the ball...repeatedly. It all started with a sloppy press release, the sloppiest this writer has ever seen. Seeing as how I find it my own personally given task to correct wrongs I see in e-sports, I corrected the press release (all 27 mistakes) and sent it back to them with a polite note attached questioning them on how the press release was released in this form. It has been 57 days since then, and still I have yet to receive a reply back. The sloppy handling of the press release does not end here, oh no. I finally finish editing the monstrosity and begin to search for any contact information. I am relieved to see not one, but two e-mail address’ at the bottom of the press release. I send the e-mail to both, moments later receiving a ‘failure to send’ notice from one of the address’. I find this rather odd seeing as how they should have ensured it was working to have put it at the bottom. Still, the other e-mail went through, and am happily waiting a response, of any kind. It has been 57 days and I am still waiting for a response. Then comes the website, I love it. I watch the intro and I am hooked. I then begin to navigate the site and that is where my love affair ends. There are spelling mistakes, grammar mistakes, faulty links that send you to HTML error pages. They even went so far as to add an American section, and then not even put content into it. Why bother? I mean, there isn’t even going to be American participation at the event, why bother adding it at all? I continue on through the website to see that there are even more of the aforementioned examples of sloppy work. I then reach the media section, I am genuinely excited to see this but then am let down as I click the link and am directed to a page with zero content. I wonder what this is all about and press the “back” button on my Internet Explorer, I then click the next media link (there were two) and I find a page with a 16 photos. I find this to be a rather poor media section, they do not even have a video explaining the premiss of the event, no not even a paragraph or two explaining it or anything else for that matter. I guess pictures truly are worth a thousand words. I am rather let down and navigate away from the site. In later weeks I am drawn back to it to vote. Now I already expected this to happen, I do in every single voting system set up on a website. People using proxies to vote more than once and sway the votes. However what happened this time was a little bit different. The voting, is apparently missing votes. Yes that is correct, missing votes. How may you ask? Well that is a good question. I believe it is because of the poor coding and work being done on the site. Half of the site isn’t even finished and the voting system itself was rather odd to begin with, you get 3 votes. However you only get three votes for your region. So I suppose I could have clicked on Asia and that would have been my region. Considering I am from Canada and we do not have a region on their website, I just figured that I was able to vote for both Europe and Asia and clicked the first one (which happened to be Europe). I voted for the teams I felt would be the best suited for the job, and continued to the Warcraft 3 section. I was baffled by the player selection, however I continued to vote regardless of the selection. Now, a few days after I have voted my attention is drawn to the fact that 6000+ votes are now missing. And like before, I said I believe it is the coding on the site, and that your second or third vote does not even count in the actual voting process but is rather, logged and cited for future use. Now, seeing as how the event is run by “several of e-Sports top leaders” I am surprised that they failed to even think that a proper press release and website might matter. I am also curious as to whom these ‘leaders’ are. Seeing as how a lot of the leaders of the e-Sports industry are in America (not all, not even a majority, yet very important ones are) and there isn’t even an American section or participant in the entire event. You would think one would stay away from having self proclaimed titles in a press release, but I guess not. My attention is once again drawn back to the press release, certain things do not add up. How do such poorly managed pieces of work even make it to the final stage in this condition, who is in charge here? Well, I will draw your attention to the neat little table they set up in the press release. Photo As you can see, the Korean government is running this, or at least said to. I for one am skeptical of this, I mean come on people. Look at Korea, it is fantastic. The Korean e-Sports scene is like no other. The way things are done in Korea might as well be a hand book for the rest of the world. How would they, the pioneers of e-Sports make such trivial mistakes? And why not even bother fixing them after they have been pointed out? It seems like making detrimental mistakes is this events goal. Oh wait, hold the phone. At the end of the press release it lists a group of people (I am inclined to believe these are the ‘leaders’ they spoke of in the beginning) I direct your attention towards the press release one more time. Photo Why is it that such renowned business leaders would allow such mistakes? Again I am skeptical that these individuals even have anything to do with the event. Sure they may have given some insight on how to run certain aspects, but seriously why would some of these people even go that far. The voting is now complete, the faulty statistics still stand. Not surprising really, look at the rest of the event. It is however strange that they have not even made a press release about the voting, or even mention which of the players are attending the event. Other respectable news sites made the announcements of the attendees. Yet on the eStars site there isn’t a single update since the last time I was there (roughly 30 days). It seems to me that this event, with all of these problems just in the first few weeks will fail miserably. I am interested to see how they will handle all of these problems and if they will be able to reclaim any sort of image from the fans. I sincerely hope so, for their sake. Because if they don’t there will be a lot of angry fans out there, not to mention players. The following are both Press Release'. .02 is the edited version, the red text shows what I added to make it correct. Original .02 | ||||||||||||||||||
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i like sheeps :D
Hell yeah man Im excited to see you at Blizzcon Ima get you drunk.
You no longer hold power over my life if you go and leave the crew.:(
I should stop doing drugs, I thought, that I´ve read such an article from you! o.O Sorry for bothering...
THe feature about ´how to watch streams for the various games in the internet...
kk, no worries, can you give me the link instead please? :D
Hi! ;D Can you please arrange that your Feature (?) about how to watch the different streams gets somehow sticky in the public general forum? Ppl don´t stop asking how can i watch, where can I watch... ^^ ...would be a hell of a help. :D
naice :D
nice :Dso you"moderate" the blog section?