The Escapist Presents: Turning Black Ops 2 Into an E-sport

[Frostbite3789]

Snip.

Combine this with the fact that they shove players into buying a new $60 iteration every year, with different balance, you lose all continuity. A good esport this does not make. That's like if the NHL decided that every year they shuffled the teams and did a fantasy draft.

 

[FragRaptor]

If they start thinking about skill required to play the game MAYBE CoD could be an esport. But as it is it may get numbers like LoL but LoL at least has some difficulty to it albeit a small amount compared to the difficulty of something like starcraft2(Which is often spoken as dumbed down original starcraft)

 

[Elurindel]

I love how they're putting so much effort into trying to convince us that Black Ops 2 is in fact a legitimate game, let alone a potential e-sport.

 

[DjinnFor]

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.

High levels of randomness doesn't really make the game more or less balanced or more or less skillful. The fundamentals of good Poker play is to acknowledge the randomness inherent in the system and make plays where the odds are in your favor. Call of Duty multiplayer is virtually the same, but in this case instead of calculating explicit odds of hands and draws you're estimating implicit odds of what you think your opponents are most likely to do based on how most players play the game.

The sheer amount of options your opponent has makes guessing what your opponent will do harder, which means it requires a higher level of skill and more experience to make reliable and accurate estimates that consistently pay off and allow you to rack up large killcounts. There's basically no other way to rationally explain how some people can consistently get ridiculously high scores, unless you make the claim that it's 100% luck which is a pretty big stretch.

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.

So the team that gets more kills tends to have a higher likelihood of winning. Not sure what that has to do with balance. Positive feedback loops don't really affect balance at all, they just change the optimal play-style slightly; the fact that small advantages can snowball into bigger advantages makes mistakes more punishing and conversely good play more rewarding.

For example, League of Legends has a killstreak-esque system; it rewards champion kills with gold, giving the killer an even greater advantage than before. That just makes mistakes more punishing than they would normally be.

Granted everything after CoD4 had some terrible balancing problems, but that was because they chose to leave the game as is and when they did balance stuff (read: code the subsequent games in the series) they didn't think anything through... and the fact that Activision keep changing who's actually making the games.

They had to ban half the stuff in different rules for CoD 4 just for normal scrims. Killstreaks banned was standard.

They didn't have to, they just chose to in order to make it more like every other shooter, i.e. ONLY about just shooting people better. Basically instead of playing Call of Duty 4 they played a counterstrike knock-off, which is why nearly nobody in the Call of Duty community gave it any notice and it never got big.

Pretty much this.
I thought that e-sports were supposed to be all about the individual's skill, and COD is innately devoid of any skill.

Let me guess. You aren't any good at it and therefore rationalize it by claiming it takes no skill.

Or you could be one of those walking contradictions who is actually so ridiculously good at the game that you win with KDR's of 10.0+ but somehow at the same time conclude that it "takes no skill", which is to say your consistently high performance was apparently 100% luck.

 

[King of Asgaard]

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.

High levels of randomness doesn't really make the game more or less balanced or more or less skillful. The fundamentals of good Poker play is to acknowledge the randomness inherent in the system and make plays where the odds are in your favor. Call of Duty multiplayer is virtually the same, but in this case instead of calculating explicit odds of hands and draws you're estimating implicit odds of what you think your opponents are most likely to do based on how most players play the game.

The sheer amount of options your opponent has makes guessing what your opponent will do harder, which means it requires a higher level of skill and more experience to make reliable and accurate estimates that consistently pay off and allow you to rack up large killcounts. There's basically no other way to rationally explain how some people can consistently get ridiculously high scores, unless you make the claim that it's 100% luck which is a pretty big stretch.

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.

So the team that gets more kills tends to have a higher likelihood of winning. Not sure what that has to do with balance. Positive feedback loops don't really affect balance at all, they just change the optimal play-style slightly; the fact that small advantages can snowball into bigger advantages makes mistakes more punishing and conversely good play more rewarding.

For example, League of Legends has a killstreak-esque system; it rewards champion kills with gold, giving the killer an even greater advantage than before. That just makes mistakes more punishing than they would normally be.

Granted everything after CoD4 had some terrible balancing problems, but that was because they chose to leave the game as is and when they did balance stuff they didn't think anything through.

They had to ban half the stuff in different rules for CoD 4 just for normal scrims. Killstreaks banned was standard.

They didn't have to, they just chose to in order to make it more like every other shooter, i.e. ONLY about just shooting people better. Basically instead of playing Call of Duty 4 they played a counterstrike knock-off, which is why nearly nobody in the Call of Duty community gave it any notice.

Pretty much this.
I thought that e-sports were supposed to be all about the individual's skill, and COD is innately devoid of any skill.

Let me guess. You aren't any good at it and therefore rationalize it by claiming it takes no skill.

Or you could be one of those walking contradictions who is actually so ridiculously good at the game that you win with KDR's of 10.0+ but somehow at the same time conclude that it "takes no skill", which is to say your consistently high performance was apparently 100% luck.

Actually, I've never played it, but I attempted to watch some competitive matches, and it was all no-scoping, and similar things, which doesn't really take much skill to do.
And before you condemn my OPINION because I don't play COD, bare in mind that one doesn't need to have played something to understand where its potential lies, and COD does not have the potential to be an e-sport.
I believe there's a reason games like Quake Live are, or were, e-sports and that's because each individual player had to rely upon their reflexes and manipulation of their environment (jumping to avoid shots, finding shortcuts and hidden weapons etc), not just their capability to get ten head shots in a row.