Cutter wrote on Aug 9, 2015, 15:07:
For a video game? That's beyond retarded. Fucking pro athletes are overpaid but at least they have to put real effort in. Our species is doomed.
I hope you're being sarcastic or you're just ignorant about pro-gaming. Your attitude isn't unique, but hopefully one that is slowly changing, so let me give it a shot.
These competitors aren't just casual gamers that play on the weekends with their friends. These are people who live and breathe the game. They spent 8-10 hours of each waking day playing this game and improving their skills. They love doing this, and they are rewarded for doing the thing that they love because people like me enjoy watching people compete at the highest levels of the game. They are fundamentally entertainers just like "real" athletes are. They provides a service that many find entertaining enough to spend their time with and thus are financially rewarded for the time they invest in being the best. They train incredibly hard to be able to play at the level they play at.
If you're angry about why they're getting paid for doing what they love, you should try to understand the viewer. Without the viewers, the players would not be receiving nearly as much money. For most tournaments there are corporate sponsors who subsidize the prize pool. However, in DOTA 2 there is almost always a community factor that increases the prize pool. For example for this tournament $1.6 million was fronted by Valve where the remaining $16.4 million was contributed to by the community for digital items that Valve produces for this tournament. The International is basically an entire season of NFL in 2 weeks of games. This is the one tournament out of the year hosted by Valve (the makers of the game, with interest in promoting the game to more and more people).
To me, watching teams play within the confines of an imaginary battlefield is much more engaging. As a video gamer, who I imagine finds games interesting because of the escapism that it provides, I figured you would understand that. To me are a number of reasons why profession DOTA 2 is more interesting than "real" sports.
- I like playing the game!
- The caster and player personalities are gamers like me, whom I can relate to better than say sports jocks
- The game field/environment is unique and visually interesting. Not a stadium with a bunch of lines on it.
- There are no ties. One person will win, eventually. Also, while you gain leads, the game isn't over until it is over (no arbitrary time limits).
- There is a lot of strategy involved with pick/ban drafting. Heroes each have strengths and weakness and picking a combination of those ahead of time vs another team's is very interesting.
- There is a lot of decisions that must be made by the players instead of being fed instructions (say by an offensive coordinator).
- There are no human referees the games usually run from beginning to end on LANs. There are no human influenced over-reaction fouls or the like. The biggest issues are technical issues like network connections and DDOS attacks.
- There is only simulated carnage and death instead of inflicting that on actual people or animals.
Your viewpoint is the type of stigma that pro-gaming has to fight to be accepted. For some reason it's ok to watch humans physically interact with each other, to determine who is the best but not ok when it's though the confines of a simulation. Luckily, younger people are much more open to this type of entertainment. If you can't accept it, you can just live in your log cabin stroking your shotgun while the world changes around you or you can try to learn to accept new things.
This comment was edited on Aug 9, 2015, 17:27.