Blizzard is rolling out in game rewards for watching OWL that you can buy League skins with. They haven’t officially done it yet, but that won’t stop people from starting a spam.
Uh yes hello I tried watching some of the new neat overwatch league last evening and I felt like I was watching the Spanish channel without the big boobs and without the random words that I recognize every once in awhile.
Awesome. I have some questions for you. 1. What about it was so difficult to follow? 2. Did the team colors seem effective at differentiating the teams? 3. Overall, was it so unpleasant you wont watch again?
First, I only watched a couple minutes, I think it was Brooklyn against some foreign team. With that said: 1. The speed...and I didn't really understand what they were trying to do. 2. No. At least not in the couple minutes I watched. 3. I'd watch it again. It wasn't hideous. I'm just uneducated. Now where's my free iPad?
Really interested to see if your answer to 2 changes once you get a better grasp on whats happening. Its tough though. How do you get people who dont play to understand picking one main tank over another? What about support and dps? And why they are doing what theyre doing. I hate to make this comparison but did it feel a bit like watching a sport you dont know anything about or a bit worse? Overwatch is chaotic as hell but i remember how confused i was when i first started watching aussie rules football.
Actually I think that's an excellent comparison. Someone who's never seen a minute of American football is going to be wildly confused while watching their first 2 minutes. (well, those two minutes will probably only contain 15 seconds on real gameplay, but you get the idea) You gotta remember, I'm just getting back into 'gaming' in the past month or so after taking about a decade off. And I almost bought Overwatch prior to Christmas when they had 50% off, but Microsoft's store was being wacko and it didn't go through. I don't doubt that Overwatch is a great game and makes perfect sense, but yeah, to a newb it looks like a Jerry Springer show out of control.
I think, in general, overwatch is just difficult to follow and that will be blizzard's biggest issue here. The OWL business model is great and I have all the faith in the world that bliz will figure out all the problems, but theres a reason they werent able to get anything on tv for the first two seasons at least.
I was in a similar boat with LoL. No idea what was happening on screen. I had played Smite probably 10 days playing time, so I grasped general MOBA elements. But knowing the heroes and what they can do/are supposed to do is the bare minimum. Until you have knowledge of what certain heroes do, it's just chaos. OW has 1/4 the roster of league, and shares MOBA elements, so I think for a brand new player, it should be easier to learn by comparison imo edit: Blizzard needs to add a permanent perspective option to let players view whoever they want. Would give the game more structure as the perspective shifts can be jarring when going from role to role or one team to the other. It sucks that big plays might be missed in real time if you're not watching the right player, but I think the structure would be worth it. They have the replay system now, so I hope they experiment with it at least.
Definitely easier than a moba. But far more difficult than something like cs or smash. Also, you mentioned once that the camera work could be better. Do you think more of the static/slowly moving overhead shots would help at all? I like those more than constantly watching dps.
Yeah, you caught me before my edit. I don't mind first-person perspective at all. It's a FPS game, and it's viewed better that way imo. I think the overhead shots are cool for pre-fight positioning to see where teams will eventually collide, but I prefer the FPS view the majority of the time. One glaring example: A temple of anubis match yesterday: A widow got a 4 or a 5kill on point two. The camera caught the first kill, then switched to another player. Seeing the FPS view of the widow player, you could tell he was about to take a lot shots without being contested. Camera switched to a tracer and missed 3-4 straight kills by the widow. The point was captured 15 or so seconds later after the team was wiped. The round winning play was missed because of the camera crew. I know it's split second and human operated with 12 perspectives to choose from, but after seeing the widow positioning, you just had to know he was going to do something. And even if he missed all of his shots, he was still at an angle watching ALL of the action on the point (similar to an overhead). Aside from little issues like that, I thought the production was awesome, and I'm sure the camera guys will get better over time. It probably takes a lot of game knowledge to have the camera on the right player at the right time.
Being able to choose perspectives would be great but i dont think thats something that would come soon. Maybe not even this season. But i could see it for the world cup or possibly for the playoffs or a later stage.
But i would probably continue watching the main broadcast. And like you said, those guys will get better with practice.
Apparently there’s like 40 streamers leaving twitch for facebook’s game streaming service. Not sure the popularity of all of them. Darkness429 is one that I know of and he has 166K followers on Twitch. Gonna be interesting to see how this plays out.
Dota just had a tournament streamed exclusively on Facebook the quality was good terrible and there was a huge community uproarabout. The viewership was down a bunch
Watched tournament on both FB and Twitch. I’ll summarize my thoughts and community thoughts as well: Pros of FB streaming: -Video quality was better for people in third world countries. -Huge theoretical potential for streaming esport growth -Made a shit load of money for ESL selling rights since fb trying to get in the market -didn’t have annoying twitch chat spam/memes/emotes DansGame Cons: -Day 1 player went down, not prepared for an event. -Video quality not as high for top end computers. -No one watched it on FB. Random streamers on twitch (who didn’t get illegally DMCA’d by ESL ) had 3-4 times the viewers as the actual professional cast and productions. Twitch numbers for a minor Dota tournament unchanged but official stream was ~20% of normal official stream views, the other ~80% stayed on twitch. -no good way to clip highlights.this was actually a fairly big deal. -VoDs didn’t exist. This was a big deal. - No twitch memes/emotes PepeHands - Community completely shit on everything ESL and overreacted, called for boycotts, etc. a lot of the drama was due to the illegal DMCAs though, as only Valve has said no one can control non-monetized dota streams.
Quick maths, ninja the fortnite streamer makes $780K a year in subs alone at his current pace, assuming he keeps that number for 12 months obviously. Wow. But still $60K from subs alone in a month, plus ad revenue, sponsorships,’etc.
Shroud iirc has had 30k subs or better for months now. 90k+ right there a month. It's wild how much the big guys make.
I imagine he's in that same ballpark in subs. imaqtpie does lots of sponsored stuff/runs lots of ads/etc so I imagine his non sub $$$ is huge on top of all that.
I know he said on stream he would have to be offered over 1 million per year and be on a championship caliber team to take that pay cut to go back to being a professional.
OWL is terrible to watch in my opinion. It’s far and away the worst FPS that is professionally played on a regular basis. It’s like team fortress 2 with multiple game modes. I’ve played it and it’s definitely more fun to play than to watch. But I just struggle watching a stream more than 5-10 minutes. It’s extremely disjointed, difficult for the actual observers to capture game changing moments and no downtime to show high impact replays from multiple perspectives at their relevant time...which leads me to the game that does that the best: CS:GO. CS:GO is without a doubt the best esport to watch for all types of viewers. It’s fast paced, mechanically easy to understand, appeasing to spectate, and an absolute adrenaline rush. It’s also logical in terms of scoring and you can’t tie. Once you peel back the initial layers of the game, then you begin to understand economy and tactics, specifically gun and eco rounds, saving, and how vital movement is. My wife who is absolutely disinterested in anything that’s not Mario kart or Mario party watched CS:GO Eleague on TBS last year and found it somewhat exciting. She also will look over my shoulder on my iPad. Dota 2 is close behind simply because of the game mechanics, statistics driven discussion, and grandiose nature is The International. Dota 2 is a hard game to quit playing because of the dopamine rush you get from those highest highs. It’s also got TI which is an amazing spectacle and unlike any esport event out there. It is also a far superior viewing experience than League or HotS. I’ve played all three and find it the most compelling, especially with draft mechanics and the ability to deny. HotS and League in my opinion have boring monotonous gameplay that’s lacking in diversity and skill compared to Dota. Moving to RTS and essentially the vast majority of my childhood career Starcraft 2 is probably the best to watch. It’s been designed over time to induce fast gameplay and fast games to retain interest. My first love is Age of Empires which still has a strong following and is streamed regularly on twitch. Feel free to disagree.
prior to amazon prime completely annihilating the old model on twitch where 8k subs was a ton most streamers said they made more money off donations than subs so likely any $ value from subs double it based on donations then sponsors are on top of that who knows how much the big $ sponsors are though, Summit/timthetatman having really up front Monster subs I imagine is a huge amount of money
1. OWL is not a good viewing experience. 2. CS:GO definitely superior. 3. Rocket League is the easiest esport to watch and I’ve never played the game and actively dislike soccer. 4. DotA is superior to LoL/Smite/HotS in everything except playerbase and management. League has an incredible infrastructure and support staff/team and Dota literally has 20 dudes and IceFrog, yet somehow it’s completely balanced and has insane prize pools.
Can’t imagine they’ll keep free prime subs forever. I use mine every month but would never sub or donate without it.
i am so triggered rn 1. overwatch is great, fuck you all. 2. counter strike is boring as fuck. anything with an in match economy is lame. 3. all mobas suck 4. rocket league is definitely the best esport 5. no battle royale game will ever be a good esport
I agree with 5. As RonBurgundy said earlier RL is probably the easiest to learn and watch. I just don’t find it compelling. I watched the championships or whatever and it didn’t hype me that much. I don’t love those type of games though so to each their own. Overwatch is still pretty infantile in its run, but it has a ways to go. I don’t love all the different game types and I don’t like FPS games with an active respawn. It cheapens it for me. If CS was boring, it wouldn’t have survived 18 years of worldwide competitive play across 4 iterations of almost identical games with iterations of identical maps. The economy is brilliant also. It drives gameplay in a way which no other game does.
And LoL is superior to Dota in all metrics except the one that matters... the RonBurgundy matrix. Rip Riot
OW is boring to watch and got boring to play. (This opinion stopped being updated 6 months ago when I stopped playing.) CS is fun in small amounts at the highest levels. They kneecapped themselves by having a tournament every 4 days but seem to have reeled it back in to where events seem meaningful. LoL is easier to get into than DotA. Both have high learning curves for fan bases that keep mainstream appeal down (this is why tons of money has been funneled into OW, its simple).
over 1 million viewers on sunday have something to say about that also you can't say something dumb and then cap it with 'no debate'
If you're dumb you can do whatever you want. Still, I've tried and tried to enjoy CS but it's objectively horrible. Would 100% much rather watch CoD