Most people don’t contract “PAX Plague” until after the PAX Convention, from either the concentration of people or poor life choices. I, however, succumbed to the PAX Plague even before PAX began from my long all-nighters and coffee overdoses in a desperate effort to catch up on work and clear my weekend. With that said, next week I’ll be covering PAX East in an article and in my column! While there are a lot of exciting things to be revealed, I decided that for this week it is best to review what happened recently in e-sports, and to draw some comparisons based on interesting developments and trends.
League of Legends’ Spring 2015 Season began for all regions. In North America and Europe, this translated into League Championship Series that featured 9 weeks of regular matchups and 3 weeks of playoffs. Compared to most other popular e-sports, Riot Games organized professional tournaments in a more regimented and more official way, making the matches less frequent and new teams rotate in on a slower cycle. However, that also meant their professional games tend to have higher competition values. After some major trades at the start of this year and newly qualified teams like Team Impulse for North America and Unicorn of Love and H2k for Europe, I still noticed the major shift in balance as matches became fiercer and increasingly unpredictable. With that, I am not surprised that the older teams are still dominating standings, namely Team Solomid and Cloud 9 in North America and Fnatic and SK Gaming in Europe. Who will truly emerge victorious? Only time will tell.
On the flip side, Defense of the Ancients 2 (DotA2) just finished their DotA Asian Championship back in February. Dubbed by many as “Mini-International”, many teams; easterners and westerners alike, saw this tournament second to only The International in prize pool and opportunities to shine. The Asian Championship ended with Evil Genius, an American team from a region traditionally seen as weaker than the European and Asian scenes. Understandably, this major gathering was more valuable as an opportunity for many of the participating teams to study each other and the “meta-game”. Unlike League of Legend’s LCS, DotA usually features smaller, more frequent, and more various tournaments, which potentially features more teams, prizes, games to watch, and opportunities for growth. However, this also meant an unreliable quality in the matches. Recently, this is significant, as some of the online tournaments suffered disconnections and disruptions due to the massive amount of players causing Valve’s servers to have issues. While this might be frustrating, the entertainment I got overall far outweighed it. This might also mean Half Life 3 is finally confirmed.
StarCraft tournaments have begun to warm up. Despite the World Championship still being over 7 months away, the games have already started to get competitive for Koreans and non-Koreans alike. As Blizzard’s most celebrated title in terms of impact in e-sports and cultural phenomenon, StarCraft hype re-surged as fans began to appreciate recent balance patches and look forward to the Legacy of the Void (with Coming SOON trademark, of course). Additionally, it was the unparalleled skills of each StarCraft player which made tournaments exciting to watch – regular people like us would not bother to achieve over 300 actions per minute. Besides the usual Korean dominance, StarCraft has seen more diversity in strategy, which only made up for more exhilarating games and occasionally, unexpected results. This does signify that, despite being one of the oldest e-sport games, StarCraft remained strong.
Not a fan of some of the “super mainstream” contests? There are many more competitive games out there with various levels of engagement. Just to name a few, there’s always Hearthstone, Counter Strike, World of Tanks, among many others. Rest assured, perhaps by the end of the year, we will see some more diversified e-sport competitions. Overall, it is easy to see that, despite being stereotyped as nerdy and at times counterproductive, overall, e-sports is in a healthy shape with a vibrant community and even more grandeur promises.
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