This was the article I included with my handout at the SOE Live 2013 Esports panel. Please contact me with any thoughts at jeremy@esfiworld.com

Esports is a touchy subject with a bit of the playerbase. They see it as a time and money sink for SOE, when they could be doing better things with that time and money. This could be true; however, SOE staff have time and time again stated this is not the case. SOE wanted to be involved with the Esports realm. Planetside 2 was the perfect IP in their arsenal to initiate that move. So since the Esports idea isn’t going away anytime soon, I wanted to look at the positives that a Esports twist on a game can bring to the table.

Unless you follow me on twitter, you wouldn’t know that I am contributing writer for ESFIWorld on competitive fighting games. Besides everyday activities; I’ve filled the rest of my time up with fighting games for the past 5 years. I’ve met so many people; friends, acquaintances, rivals, entrepreneurs, all were new people that I would have never have met if not for fighting games. From playing them, to running local weekly tournaments, to helping organize annual majors, my life has been encompassed with fighting games. Only one game has successfully pulled me away from it all, and that is Planetside 2.

Let’s not get this twisted. I still spend hours dealing with fighting games, and if you include the friendships made into that account, hundreds of hours. The truth is though, none of that would have been possible if there was not a competitive scene for fighting games.

Special bonds are made in a competitive setting. Every single player involved has committed to bettering themselves in that game. They invest their time and resources into the game more so than an average player. When I meet another player at a tournament, I know that it isn’t just some average joe who picked up that week’s blockbuster game to give it a spin, only to trade it in a week later. This is someone else who like me, cares about the game and has pursued that higher skill plateau. That is an immediate connection right off the bat, stronger than that of “Hi, we both play the same game, want to form a squad?” We have an even greater common ground. This promotes growth and builds a stronger community.

Now someone might be saying, “but that is Esports! I don’t want anything to do with Esports” which is fine, but what they will be getting out of Esports is a even larger group of committed players. These players will raise the average level of commitment in Planetside 2, increasing the average time invested into the IP, thus increasing its value in every aspect. From user generated content to extending the life of the game, both non-competitive as well as competitive gamers will now be apart of this movement. Twitter and Facebook are both huge tools in the growth and sustainability of multiplayer games now. The more people that care about the game, the more they will converse about it, which in turn will bring more eyes to the game.

“But eSports is full of a bunch of hostile fragging meatheads. They don’t think and are simply mean!” is another argument I saw when this MLG partnership was first announced. They couldn’t be further from the truth. The truth is, your game’s eSports scene is how you make it. What’s more, we have even greater control over our community due to the involvement it takes to play. With the requirements of a platoon to get involved, there are 47 other players that will affect one another. One or two hotheads will only be a drop in the bucket to a team of 48 players instead of other game’s five players. If we don’t want hyper aggressive assholes involved, then lets not put them on a pedestal. Let’s not hype them up. They can be that marginal “badass” that each game has, but they won’t be the hard public image of our game.

On top of all that, what draws out the worst players in personality is when a game has such a large prize pool, you will find people that just playing the game for the money. They may not even like that game, they are just good at it. Which is outrageous in a lot of people’s minds, mine included. The “positive” in this case is that our teams are so large, that unless SOE pulls out LCS (League of Legends) or The Invitational (DOTA 2) kind of cash (Over one million dollars to the winning team) the payout will just be too small to the time committed for these types of players. Combining that with the fact that they have to work with 47 others? You won’t see these types of players involved in Planetside 2.

Planetside 2 is a fresh competitive community. (Tossing aside clan wars, sorry guys) This community can have any face we want it to have. We could look like a bunch of Military Simulation participants, Hotheaded color waving frats, or everyday guys and girls just looking for structured competition. We could be all three at the same time. Every team could be different. Ignore the Call of Duty and League of Legends archetypes, just go out and do your thing.

Growing up, I played sports. I didn’t call myself competitive back when, because I couldn’t be competitive. I was fat, lazy, and just played games when I wasn’t being pushed out the door by my parents. Now that I am older and a little bit more socially inclined, I have discovered that a little bit of competition is okay. Most importantly, it is simply fun.

Going back to an earlier part of the article, I would like to stress that a competitive community can be almost a brother(and sister)hood. I am pretty poor at fighting games nowadays, hell I wasn’t even great at my peak of skill. That does not matter though, because after I involved myself in the community; I found a group of people that welcomed me and my crew with open arms month in and out. I can sit down and talk shit with some of the best players in the world, while also traveling the country and finding some place or person to hang out with. Doesn’t matter who wins when we sit down and play each other, what matters is we are both passionate about the same thing. We both sit down and train our asses off. We both push ourselves to make it to events and compete in them, no matter our skill. We both know that we have to go back to work the next day, but this is what we do to have fun. It is a big world out there, and there are only few who play our games, so we take what we can get and make the most of it.

In my opinion, I want our community to be a little like the Fighting Game Community. All I ask for is the ability for us to meet up at events, sit down, share a drink, and play some games with like-minded people from around the world. If the community can do that I will stick around for years to come, and I think others will too.