Gheed Profile Blog Joined September 2010 United States 962 Posts Last Edited: 2012-05-02 03:03:12 #1



Originally an innocuous buzzword used to describe professional competitive video game playing, it has since morphed into an abomination that saps the life out of everyone in the community. Rather than a group of nerds who like playing Starcraft, we are now slaves beholden to the whims of a small minority of zealots who seek to proselytize SC2 like it's the second coming of chess.



Everything has to be done "for esports," as if we were supplicants to some otherworldly esports deity who looks down scornfully upon our every action. The idea of fun doesn't even cross anyone's mind. Everything has to be bigger, better, with a larger prize pool than the other guys. The casters have to be clean cut, wearing nice clothes, and trying as hard as humanly possible not to offend anyone. We're like the fucking Mormons! It's only a matter of time before we're forced to go door-to-door advertising for barcrafts, lest we be accused of "hurting esports" and excommunicated for our heresies.



Well I, for one, can't fucking stand it anymore. I don't care about Esports. In fact, I hope SC2 dies a swift death. I hope HotS gets delayed another year so WoL gets even more stale and even more players become disinterested. I hope we never get LAN. I hope all the sponsors pull out when they realize that marketing $200 dollar video cards to 16 year-olds too cheap to even pay for GomTV subscriptions is actually not a very good business plan. I hope Blizzard realizes they could make more money reskinning a WoW mount and selling it for 20 bucks in the virtual store than they could by making an RTS game and shunts all the funds away from SC2 and into the research and development of more sparkle ponies.



And then, when everything is gone, when all the pathetic aspirations and all the illusions that esports will ever be big or important are stripped away, we can finally get back to why we came to this website in the first place: because we like playing video games. Maybe, in the future, that video game won't be Starcraft, maybe it won't even be a Blizzard game—I'm not sure they even deserve our support anymore—but maybe, for our sake, it'll be a good game. A game people will like to play where a community will form around it filled with people who just want to have fun with others. It would be supported by fans, not by moronic devotees who feel obligated to support some vague, idealistic notion of their hobby being elevated to the status of "sport."



We wouldn't have to worry about what other people thought of us. We would just enjoy ourselves. We could have a few tournaments, but nothing too serious. Maybe some Koreans would start playing our game, and we could watch them on a stream. It might not be in English, but everything sounds better with Korean commentary, anyway. And then when someone sees the Korean scene, gets wide-eyed and has some stupid pipe dream about western players being as good as the Koreans, or having a gaming scene as developed as theirs, we could promptly tell them to shut the fuck up, never speak of it again, and continue with our fun.



Fuck esports.



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The dumbest criticism my blogs have received is not that they were poorly written, or that they were mean, or that they were boring, but that I was "killing esports" by dicking around in the bronze league. Well, guess what? If the success of esports hinges on me keeping everything g-rated on the ladder, then esports already has one foot in the grave.



As I said in my post in that thread, which I assume was buried in less than a second, if Quantic does the reasonable thing and does not do shit, then I'm buying a shirt or a hoodie from them.



I'm just going to go play a single player game and forget all this exists for awhile. Diablo III is in a few weeks. I haven't watched anyone stream it or read any information about it in months. I'm simply going to buy it and play it and hope it's good. I only want a game where I can be alone, kill monsters, collect loot, and occasionally team up with a friend or two. Sorry if you expected something with a little more grandeur out of a Gheed blog, but I am too annoyed to write anything else at the moment. I was going to work on either a LoL blog or another bronze blog, but this stupid thread came to my attention and epitomized everything I feel is wrong with the community. It's a thread filled with people uselessly arguing about shit that doesn't matter not because they feel it's worth arguing about, but because they worry about what other people, people not even in the community, would think about it.The dumbest criticism my blogs have received is not that they were poorly written, or that they were mean, or that they were boring, but that I was "killing esports" by dicking around in the bronze league. Well, guess what? If the success of esports hinges on me keeping everything g-rated on the ladder, then esports already has one foot in the grave.As I said in my post in that thread, which I assume was buried in less than a second, if Quantic does the reasonable thing and does not do shit, then I'm buying a shirt or a hoodie from them.I'm just going to go play a single player game and forget all this exists for awhile. Diablo III is in a few weeks. I haven't watched anyone stream it or read any information about it in months. I'm simply going to buy it and play it and hope it's good. I only want a game where I can be alone, kill monsters, collect loot, and occasionally team up with a friend or two.





Don't get me wrong; I love competitive gaming. I love playing video games and watching people who are better than me stream video games. But I hate esports.Originally an innocuous buzzword used to describe professional competitive video game playing, it has since morphed into an abomination that saps the life out of everyone in the community. Rather than a group of nerds who like playing Starcraft, we are now slaves beholden to the whims of a small minority of zealots who seek to proselytize SC2 like it's the second coming of chess.Everything has to be done "for esports," as if we were supplicants to some otherworldly esports deity who looks down scornfully upon our every action. The idea of fun doesn't even cross anyone's mind. Everything has to be bigger, better, with a larger prize pool than the other guys. The casters have to be clean cut, wearing nice clothes, and trying as hard as humanly possible not to offend anyone. We're like the fucking Mormons! It's only a matter of time before we're forced to go door-to-door advertising for barcrafts, lest we be accused of "hurting esports" and excommunicated for our heresies.Well I, for one, can't fucking stand it anymore. I don't care about Esports. In fact, I hope SC2 dies a swift death. I hope HotS gets delayed another year so WoL gets even more stale and even more players become disinterested. I hope we never get LAN. I hope all the sponsors pull out when they realize that marketing $200 dollar video cards to 16 year-olds too cheap to even pay for GomTV subscriptions is actually not a very good business plan. I hope Blizzard realizes they could make more money reskinning a WoW mount and selling it for 20 bucks in the virtual store than they could by making an RTS game and shunts all the funds away from SC2 and into the research and development of more sparkle ponies.And then, when everything is gone, when all the pathetic aspirations and all the illusions that esports will ever be big or important are stripped away, we can finally get back to why we came to this website in the first place: because we like playing video games. Maybe, in the future, that video game won't be Starcraft, maybe it won't even be a Blizzard game—I'm not sure they even deserve our support anymore—but maybe, for our sake, it'll be a good game. A game people will like to play where a community will form around it filled with people who just want to have fun with others. It would be supported by fans, not by moronic devotees who feel obligated to support some vague, idealistic notion of their hobby being elevated to the status of "sport."We wouldn't have to worry about what other people thought of us. We would just enjoy ourselves. We could have a few tournaments, but nothing too serious. Maybe some Koreans would start playing our game, and we could watch them on a stream. It might not be in English, but everything sounds better with Korean commentary, anyway. And then when someone sees the Korean scene, gets wide-eyed and has some stupid pipe dream about western players being as good as the Koreans, or having a gaming scene as developed as theirs, we could promptly tell them to shut the fuck up, never speak of it again, and continue with our fun.Fuck esports.