mindlesspuppet said:
The only thing you need to do to turn a game into an e-sport is give away a ton of money into tournament prizes... look at League of Legends for example.
Well, there is a bit more to it than that, to make a good e-sport anyway. Personally, I don't believe CoD would make a good e-sport, but I think that it becoming one is inevitable at this point.
Let's look at a few of the big e-sports nowadays...
- Starcraft 2
- Counter Strike
- Halo 3
- Smash Bros
- Street Fighter
- King of Fighters
and now the MLG is picking up League of Legends.
These are games that are well-balanced, that have massive fan-bases and developer support, and are more about skill and knowledge of game mechanics and the meta-game, than about gimmicks.
That's the inherent problem with CoD. It is a multiplayer shooter built around gimmicks. I could talk about stuff like the knives and hatchets, but individual weapons aren't so much of an issue since most e-sports groups outright ban a lot of the cheesy weapons to begin with. But then there's the killstreaks which are also a huge gimmick. They inherently unbalance the game. They look cool and can be satisfying to use, but they add a very large element of randomness and imbalance. I don't know about the statistics, but from my experiences, whichever team gets the most killstreaks, or gets to the really good ones (like gunships and such) first, tends to win.
However, I do think that CoD is going to become an e-sport whether we like it or not. There's no denying that the CoD fan-base is absolutely massive and that there are more than enough high-skill players to make pro CoD teams possible. There's also the fact that Activision has literal fuck-tons of cash to throw at tournaments. Even if the MLG never picks up CoD, Activision could just start its own tournament league if it really wants to get an e-sports brand going.
