I wonder if any articles have been penned, or will be penned, in the gaming media by someone unfamiliar with EVE Online, their impressions of our game as an esport. Were they able to understand what was happening on screen? Was it exciting? Boring? Did it pique their interest in the game? Did it compel them to sign up for a trial account? Or did it turn them off?
I’d suspect that any viewer unfamiliar with EVE Online would be terribly confused. The tactics and strategy that we know are inherent in the game, those would be lost on the uninitiated. The new viewer watching brackets float around on the video stream, watching the ships that are not apparently doing much of anything, except for the occasional gunfire flash, the smoking trails of a few missiles, or some strange coloured effects streaming to and from ships, I have a feeling that would not give any viewer unfamiliar with EVE Online the gist of what was actually happening in any given match.
Watching an EVE match is like watching toasters floating about your screen, if you don’t know anything about the game. The commentators do their best to convey a sense of excitement, to explain what’s going on, but mostly what the uninitiated are hearing is a lot of techno-babble. Webs? Points? Repping? Boosting? Logistics? What?
Compare to League of Legends or DOTA. Watching either of those two, even if the viewer is unfamiliar, there’s a better sense in those games of what’s happening. Even without a commentator you can more easily pick up what’s generally going on. The action is more immediate, you’re more able to tell the ebb and flow of a match by what’s being presented on-screen. That’s unfortunately not the case with EVE.
(That’s based on my experience with League and DOTA. I’ve never played either game, yet have watched streaming tournaments and found the action relatively easy to follow. I found them enjoyable to watch, even with zero play experience under my belt.)
Unlike League and DOTA, ninety-percent of the viewers attention is drawn to the “health bars” in an EVE Online match, even for the initiated. The “health bars” are the only indication of what’s mostly going on in an EVE match, and even for the initiated, the conclusions drawn can be wrong. And even then there’s a lot of hidden information that is unknown to the viewer (exact modules being used, capacitor management, cap boosters available, etc.)
An EVE Online-only tournament will likely remain a niche product. Something only accessible to people who play the game, understand it. EVE Online lacks a visual excitement that lends itself to online viewing. The enjoyment of an EVE tournament comes from a) understanding the finer points of the game, and b) recognizing the personalities and alliances involved. EVE is a highly complex game, and it is a highly social game.
CCP’s best bet for breaking into the esports market will likely be with DUST 514.
DUST has gameplay that is immediate. It’s understandable to the average viewer. They’re able to more readily recognize what’s happening on-screen, even if they’re unfamiliar with the game at a specific level. DUST won’t be quite the visual mystery that EVE likely is.
So, once DUST is released, if CCP is serious about breaking into esports, they’d be served well on moving towards their first DUST tournament as quickly as possible. Certainly once the game becomes stable enough for tournament play.
What might break EVE into the gaming consciousness as an esport is if it is coupled with DUST. It is one universe, after all. Why not one tournament?
Imagine an Alliance Tournament that wages battle on the ground and in space, simultaneously. Each side has their capsuleers and their soldiers.
Obviously complicated tournament technology would need to be developed (watching a single match conducted on two different platforms … definitely not a simple technological hurdle to cross.) Watching interconnected battles conducted on the ground and in low-orbit overhead, both vying for a single goal, what does this do for EVE? EVE alone, not viable as an accessible esport. But with DUST? Perhaps EVE becomes more understandable to the average viewer in this context. Now that those brackets and barely animated ships are there to support the DUST players, to support a type of action that the unfamiliar viewer understands, those spaceships have new and added meaning (even if what they’re specifically doing is still lost on the viewer.) With the possibility of orbital bombardments raining down, that space battle is given urgency and excitement within the context of the raging ground battle.
At that point, the uninitiated viewer mutters “Whoa!” to themselves and EVE Online begins to pique their interest.
You can read more of Poetic Stanziel’s opinions at his Poetic Discourse Blog.
I totally agree. I had some of the same thoughts as I watched the tourney this weekend. When I first started playing EVE I watched a few PvP videos and didn't even know who was fighting what. The production quality on the tournies is much better than the average YouTube vid, but it doesn't change the fact that EvE is a hard game to watch if you don't understand it.
I've heard rumblings of a cinematic camera setting coming down the pipeline, but what I'd like to see is replays much like League of Legends / DoTA. The player/cameraman should be able to hit "record" and all of the ships on grid and their actions are logged and viewable at a later time. That way a video maker can get the money shots we all want to see, and with some skill, make a typical bracketfeset EvE battle into a sight to behold. And for tournaments, software can be made to parse the replay in semi-realtime to provide many different angles on the action, instead of the one "player perspective" we currently get.
That's an interesting perspective. Maybe CCP should try a tournament without livestreaming and go for VODs instead.
A major problem with the EvE scene compared to LoL or DOTA is the complete lack of meaning of battlefield position. Now of course there is plenty of importance to distance in EvE, but it really doesn't matter where that distance occurs. There is no base, no objective of importance, no jungle to jump out of. Just bars and distance formulas. How exciting would baseball be with no home plate? Basketball with no basket? American football with no end zone? Spreadsheeting your opponent to death isn't exciting to watch.
eve is in 3d, and yes position matters.
the dust bunnies already had there tourney. Was good fun the winners got a lot of isk in terms of dust 250m. That will give a corp a much needed boost for a long time. Zion shad was on podside talking about dust and eve as an esport which i'm sure you may have heard.
I have no idea who Zion is.
While a free-floating cinematic camera would be pretty cool for broadcasting, I think things can be made to work given slightly more active camera manipulation. For example, instead of a single observer, you could have 2-3 people working to get the EVE equivalent of "camera shots" while a switcher determines which is best and switches to whichever camera view is est at that moment. Anyone who's worked in broadcasting knows what I'm talking about. It's like switching between views of different players in fpstournaments, only there would be active "cameramen" actively manipulating their view.
As for being difficult to understand, I don't think you can have decent commentary without saying things that would make no sense to the non-player. That though is the same for all games–there's no way anyone would understand "timing pushes" or "bio balls" or "blink micro" in Starcraft if you didn't play it.
True with regards to the language … but what we see on screen, in games like Starcraft, helps to give meaning to the meaningless. There is visual context. If I hear "blink micro" enough times, I begin to understand what it means because I see something similar happen each time the phrase is invoked by a commentator.
This is not really the case in EVE. The relationship to what you're seeing to what is being said is very low indeed.
CCP has recently begun adding tools that make some things more clear. If the camera work is right, it's easy to see velocity dropping and repping is apparent on the hp screen. You obviously need to explain things like tracking disrupting or jamming, but given that guns now visually miss their targets even that is more apparent. Again this all boils down to the question of, "Is the camera in a position to display these effects?" Such a question would be more easily solved by my multiple-camera solution. You would then require more professional broadcasters to comment on these in a quick and fluid manner.
But take what you are arguing to the extreme: Every effect is explained in real time as if to complete novices every single time it happens. How boring and terrible would the broadcasting be then?
To understand the complexities of EVE combat, you must be well-versed in EVE combat. Even in Starcraft, the visual effects come down to nothing more than "armies slaughtering each other" if you don't understand the mechanics behind it. Example: You wouldn't know why Terran players produce Ghosts against Protoss players if you didn't know Ghosts could EMP and that EMP kills shields, which implies that you know Protoss units rely on shields. The EMP graphic is very hard to spot sometimes so there's often no visual cue as to what's going on and why Protoss units are suddenly dying much more quickly. There's a tradeoff between appealing to more people and making the commentary intelligent.
Props on noticing the camera work. I've also noticed the same thing watching the last 2 years tournaments. With all the detail and enhancements CCP is putting into spaceships (with more to come), we should have some spectacular looking space battles. Turret fire, projectile trails, missile trails, laser fire, impact explosions, ship explosions, engine trails, planet backgrounds, etc. (Turret sounds are weak, but didn't CCP recently say they're improving those as well?) All the components are there, but camera work is still very lacking.
Max zoomed out or following some random frig just isn't very watchable. They already have a bunch of guys monitoring the tourney so yeah they could def. do a better job at getting good shots
"Imagine an Alliance Tournament that wages battle on the ground and in space, simultaneously. Each side has their capsuleers and their soldiers."
In all honesty, just trying to accurately show the capsuleers fighting appears to be a challenge too far atm. the Whilst having a ground war kicking off at same time would be great, as a spectator sport it'd probably just add even more WTF!
I don't think the problem likes with EVE as a whole, but rather with the format chosen. Team deathmatch is just not terribly interesting without being able to see the competators fight it out.
I've never played LOL, but I did watch a tourny in that game. It involved a lot more strategy and objectives than just killing the other team. Its those things that the average dude can witness and understand right off the bat.. scoring goals, capturing objectives, ect. I don't have to have any idea about what each character's strengths and weaknesses are to understand that and find it interesting. Those things you learn over time as you watch and witness what they all are doing on screen.
An EVE tourny could be created along the same lines. Capture the flag, mine the roid, whatever. Those things would get you points. Killing other players would simply be a means to an end, not the end itself. Allow players to reship in the same ship (fittings possibly locked), and come back in after a certain delay.
Whatever the format though, I think the team deathmatch has to go. Its fine for the alliance tourney that is geared towards the PvP playerbase of EVE itself. However for these open tourneys, I think its a really poor format that pushes out casual observers and keeps it a niche viewing experience.
My friend tryed to get me to watch dota2 matches like a month or two ago, and I'v never played it, and I had no clue what was going on, and why would I? Atleast from what I saw every character had different abilitys, and traits, and the pace that it went at didn't make it any easier to understand, whats funny is my friend who does play it found it very entertaining, and even cheered when a team fought back, and I sat there clueless. Now I'm not saying eve is any easier, but implying that dota2 is much easier to understand to an outside is ridiculous.
I can't comment on LoL as I have played it many times, and I know a decent amount about that I would understand it I think if I were to watch it.
I entirely disagree with understanding LoL without having watched it before. If you've never played League, then all you see is dudes killing critters and the occasional gank or team fight. What long time LoL vets know is that most matches are won or lost based on the quality of the item builds each side goes for, and that a fight that was going entirely towards one side can immediately flip and result in a win for the other, and the average watcher has NO IDEA WHY, because they don't understand the acronyms being thrown about, or even what some of the items do. All they saw was some team dominating for 10 minutes, and then lose at the very end. It's dramatic, but entirely opaque to anyone who's not experienced in LoL play.
I think that AT10 had excellent commentary that did a great job of explaining acronyms, mechanics, and strategies, such that you could follow the fights at least to understanding that certain ships can be the linchpins of one's success or failure. What LoL has going for it is a sense of constant action, and the spectator camera system was designed to find the action. While it's not perfect, it's pretty damn good at moving to areas of the map where there are lots of people converging. CCP has to manually move the camera about, and also the scale of the arena can mean that while some ships are easily distinguished, frigates are typically so small that they are essentially a dot, and all of the frigate level action is essentially just background noise to the heavyweights.
In all, I think CCP has a viable E-sports game, except that the barrier to entry is far higher than it is for LoL; A LoL e-sports team can't simply create a character in EVE and be tournament ready. They have to have either already invested the years of time into the game that it took to build the character's skillset for the tourney, or buy a character. Either way it's a heavy investment.
After Bolton's moronic drunken presentation at the last fanfest I'm simply flabbergasted that CCP offered this immature pisshead a job…. the question is — how many dicks did he have to suck to get in???