Competitive Esports Talk with JL [Volume 1 - 08/15/2015]

Fizzeq_

Hello community, [MOD]Fizzeq here with "Competitive Esports Talk - Volume One." Esports Talk is a series that will feature the latest Crossfire, North American and Global eSports news; ranging from topics involving Crossfire leagues, Crossfire teams and players, match results, analysis, controversy breakdown, player features and interviews. From time to time we will be exploring externally linked news outside of Crossfire; topics ranging from appropriately relevant/applicable sources, and data involving revenue/advertising schemes.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article do not reflect the view of Z8Games-Smilegate West. Article content is not meant to offend, harass, or express hatred toward anyone, or anything. Constructive, commentative feedback is welcomed.

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The first volume of "Esports Talk" will feature something that has been on our minds for awhile now: the current state of competitive Crossfire. Let's take a look at what the deal is, and how behind we really are in many aspects. Because of these problems, I strongly believe that Crossfire has been leading down the wrong path since 2013. Let's take a closer look at why (points not ranked in level of importance):

1) Player-base: To start off, the current competitive scene lack new blood. New competitors are rare and that makes Crossfire competitions particularly uninteresting. Without a strong player-base, what ends up happening is decline in the mood of our current players. From my viewpoint; this can be turned around by efforts in maintaining active presence in enthusiastic involvement with competing players and dedicated management crews that are committed and knowledgeable. Also, advertising needs to come into play via efforts for Crossfire's re-engage to the gaming scene to be possible.

2) Involvement: A competitive community does not succeed without the support of the company, from the staff and higher-ups. By involvement, I stress the need of staff presence, event participation in terms of management, and prize funding. The important goal is to create a strong bond between the player community and the company backing it up.

To further add on, players will likely appreciate the involvement because there has always been a direct link between players and staff in competitions. Involvement is power, influence, and aspect-control. I have talked to some players past and present, and the answer I received upon involvement is that they want to see staff members taking time to express interest in competitive play and provide support/feedback in tournament events, and even in hosting their own tournaments.

3) Funding/Provide: In theory funding should not be the greatest concern in the steps of 'reviving' competitive Crossfire. Possible options of funding source currently originate from a variety of Crossfire ingame items, Z8Point currency, and cash money from SG-West/ESL. I personally believe that we lack consistency and frequency in tournaments and events. A single competitive league with practically the same players competing every week/month is not what a successful community should show. Again I stress that advertising requires attention and priority.

4) LANs: A successful competitive eSports scene allows for the available option and flexibility of hosting live playing events at stadiums/arenas/LAN centers. With the exception of the annual Crossfire Stars tournament and its qualifiers in local regions, Crossfire NA is not represented at some of the biggest LAN-expo events across the globe: the Intel Extreme Masters, ESL, Dreamhack, etc. Crossfire NA is currently incapable of hosting its own LAN events. This means the game lose out on a great deal of live event feature and advertisement. CFNA, more or less and in my opinion, need to be at the forefront of bringing the competition to the big stages. My sincerest recommendation: setup and make an event happen at Dreamhack Austin announced for 2016.

To backup what has been mentioned about support and LAN-feature, fellow player for ALPHAFIVE, Michael 'Logic' Walter had this to say about how online and LAN-hosting support and feature from Smilegate will positively affect his team:

Quote edited for better phrasing: "When there is the possibility of open LANs/tournaments more people will try playing competitive. The more recognition we get, the more SG and teams can benefit from game content and team-based feature content, such as customized weapons and namecards."

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Now let's take a look at a recent eSports event, featuring Valve and Dota2's TheInternational 5.

A live LAN event located at the Key Arena in Seattle, Washington, TI5 featured some of the best Dota2 plays that fans had ever seen and highlighted the very definitions that the term "eSports" have to offer to the gaming world. With a prize pool of over $18 million dollars (USD), TI5 was organized into a double elimination tournament with sixteen teams invited through regional rankings and qualifiers from across the globe. The event ran from July 27th to August 8th; beginning with group play and bracket seeding, then into continued bracket play, elimination, and the eventual crowning of the champions.

According to online source, Dota2 brought in $136 million dollars in revenue in 2014. Comparing that to Smilegate's $897 million (in 2014) with all Crossfire regions combined, Dota2 is making $18 million dollars a month in 2015. Even League of Legends brought in more revenue, and will only have $2+ million for its Season 5 World Championship. Going back to Dota2, portions of the Compendium sale went directly to TI5's prize pool. The original pool base was $1.6 million, in which the community pooled in an extra $16.8 million to ensure that it was the biggest gaming tournament the world had ever seen. In comparison, TI5's prize pool totaled over $18 million, more than TI3 and TI4's total prize pools combined.

https://www.dota2.com/international/compendium/
http://wiki.teamliquid.net/dota2/The_International/2015

And to reference a tweet I spotted out shortly after TI5 concluded, professional gaming organization Evil Geniuses, became the richest eSports brand at over $11 million dollars in terms of tournament winning (with TI5's 1st-place prize pool of $6.6 million).

Reference tweet: https://twitter.com/EvilGeniuses/status/630517876043059200


Comparison analysis and personal opinion:

*This clearly shows the lack of support that Crossfire NA in particular is receiving.

In theory some top-tier Crossfire teams could be enjoying the success of organizations like Evil Geniuses, Fnatic, Vici Gaming, etc. Yet according to calculation, it would take over one hundred straight CFStars first place victories for a Chinese team to earn $6 million dollars, with the current prize pool that is. But the main point that I would like to make about Crossfire, Smilegate, and revenue is that a large portion is shared by Tencent. Tencent is a huge name in the Asian scene, with no ties to North America. Not only is it realistically unlikely that Tencent will aid out NA in funding support, it is the Chinese publisher. The actual probability of Tencent reaching out to support CFNA eSports is next to none.

But funding overall in Crossfire remain a problem. In my most honest opinion, there should be no excuse that Tencent/Smilegate is unable to provide bigger prize pools for global premier events. According to research, CFS2014 featured a $221,000 total, and the upcoming CFS2015 to have a total of $220,000. CFS 2015 is expected to be hosted in China, yet even Tencent is appearing empty handed after pooling $220,000.

Sources obtained from: CFS 2014, CFS 2015 announcement

Also to highlight the recent event that sparked anger and disapproval, WCA-ESL announced that CFS National Finals will not be happening at Pax Prime 2015 in Seattle, Washington. Following this repelling move, event organizers at WCA also announced that playoffs would be played out online at appropriate time. For more details please visit:
http://forum.z8games.com/showthread.php?t=305654 (unofficial WCA announcement, community discussion)

Long term effect: Continued decline in competitive support will allow for newer FPS games to greatly surpass Crossfire in popularity and affect Crossfire's ability in its eSports presence-maintain (if any presence has been remaining). Counterstrike Global Offensive is part of the latest 'generation' in the FPS genre that currently provide clear competing fields on Valve's clients and partnered titles such as ESEA and ESL-Counterstrike. It is also expected with the marketing skills of Blizzard Entertainment that it's new, approaching game Overwatch will quickly celebrate in the so called winner's circle. A race with time is a difficult race to win, but I believe Crossfire and co needs to step to the pedal with clear goals. From what I am aware, these are currently being planned out as you are reading.

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What is currently being worked on? (According to [GM]Juicebox and based on information I have gathered via recent discussion and conversation)

Without narrowing down or disclosing sensitive information and internal plans still in progressive/confirmation stage: [GM]Juicebox has mentioned that there are projects and other procedures to be panned out as an initiative. Things are to be integrated over time. I believe that attempting to build up from the currently struggling competitive community is seemingly an arduous task. But this is possible, regardless of the difficulty of the task. As this article is being published, I acknowledge and confirm that competitive Crossfire have been a major topic in what we have been talking about.

Thank you for reading. Good discussion and till next time.

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Author: [MOD]Fizzeq // JL - JunYun Lee-seoik
Moderator, Z8Games-Smilegate West
Esports enthusiast, gamer since 2005
Contact me via Twitter @joonlee91
Contact me via Skype: lifeofateardrop
Business concerns, email me via: joonlee941@gmail.com

ThePurv

Oh I forgot the message you back about this article you sent me.

Baecan

Good Read

Crossfire NA has definitely suffered some permanent damage.

Fixing them might prove futile.

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My opinion - The perspective from an average SnD pubber.

I honestly don't see a point in competitive, for several reasons

Besides the fact that i don't think im good enough, going into competitive takes ALOT of time and there are no rewards. There just isn't an incentive, for any pubber for the matter of fact, to go into competitive.

You are not rewarded with fame, zp, items, not ANYTHING.

Which i think is a VERY big problem.

I know competitive might be alot of fun, but with no rewards even for serious matches between amazing team, i just do not see a point for anyone to join.

==============================================================

As always when I criticize i try to come up with solutions. So here is a simple idea.

-Host small tournaments with some nice rewards. These should be bi-weekly or monthly. Should gain alot of attention and teams should instantly form. Gms would definitely need to organize this well if they wanted to do this.

Maybe even do something with the tournament mode they implemented in one of their patches. I mean, what even happened to that? Z8 has tools at their fingertips and they don't use them.

Fizzeq_

I understand how you feel.

Appealing game -> player attraction -> management and fundamental setup -> competitive engage

There are steps that we are currently taking to bring back what we've lost. It's a process that will take time and support from both the organization party and the community.

As we speak, we're currently coming up with a massive plan for approval by our developers. We brainstormed and discussed the possibility of crowd funding and frequent involvement by staff members. We discussed heavy game promotion and external advertisement beyond the Z8Games website. I believe we have a Twitter, a Facebook page, and a Youtube. There can be more done to mass-promote Crossfire.

It is possible to setup tournaments. I feel like there aren't enough consistent competitions for this game whereas you look at CSGO and LoL there are daily/weekly cups held across every region by various community groups and Riot-partnered orgs. So once we settle with an approved plan and management staff, we will look to provide more for players that want to compete.

I've never used the tournament mode ever, so I'm not familiar with it at all. It may end up working out for us but I doubt it. I do agree with the idea that there should be more consistency with there being competitive tournaments.

"You are not rewarded with fame, zp, items, not ANYTHING. Which i think is a VERY big problem."

Like I mentioned, funding isn't necessary a problem. Codes and ZP can be used. The main goal to achieve by running tournaments IS to provide for enthusiastic competitors that are more skilled and dedicated than say the casual pubber. We want to see more players taking part, and we will ensure that there are "parts" to be taken once we get settled with things.

And well when it comes to dedication and mindset, I always stand by the fact that "if you aren't the best (or one of the best), people will beat down on you." That's the nature of competition. We always mention of time and effort; but the most important thing is the mentality of going into whatever you want to do and make happen. There might be some players that disagree with things we have to say at times. But that's okay; it's for the greater good of discussion. Now that we've opened up for discussion, we welcome everyone to pitch in and let us know specifically what you think [of the article, of other unmentioned potential issues, etc].

FlameMonki

Hello.

After reading this post, I think i'm now able to share my opinion with other intectual people.

If we look to the competitive scene on crossfire, I can say it is probably one of the worst, atleast in Europe and North America. We have good teams, specially USA teams but they can't do big stuff outside of their country, same with Europe.

Now the situation is, why they can't ? They can't, because the levels of competitive scene is very diferent in the diferent global locations.

Asia - Professional Level , tournaments everyday, high prizepool.

Brazil - Semi-Professional Level, tournament monthly, medium prizepool + internal qualification for only 1 country.

Europe, North America - Amateur level mostly, 1 important tournament per year - CFS qualification - Low prizepool ( Because we only have 1 tournament.)

The diference between CS:GO and Crossfire , is that CS:GO has a lot of information going on. There is a website ( don't know if I have permission to say it on forums ), Where they are constantly posting new videos, information about players and tournaments , etc.

I'm from Portugal, Europe, so that I can't talk about Z8Games, but only about CFEU's company( I will not pronounce the name also ).

We made everything to make Crossfire grow in Portugal. We had an online cup every weekend with ZP ( RP in Europe ) Prizes, featuring 32 teams. We had sometimes 80 teams on internal European tournaments. We had LAN tournaments in Portugal in better prize pools than european tournaments ( LOL ). But since then, portuguese players lost the motivation and stopped playing, because CFEU's company didn't make anything to get the players conditions. Other FPS games like S.K.I.L.L, that have lower community , are having lans at ESL studios. In Crossfire Europe, we don't have nothing. After portuguese community died, germany community ( the biggest ) also started to die, people started to wake-up, because the game was " diying " . They made CFEULounge , where you could make bets, Highlight videos ( Bottom of the post), but nothing worked.

Well, if Z8Games could invite some European teams to play on North American lans, MAYBE crossfire still had a chance

THIS IS JUST MY OPINION AND MY VISION OF THE SITUATION RIGHT NOW, I FELT LIKE I SHOULD TALK ABOUT EU SITUATION, SO THAT YOU COULD DO SOMETHING IN NORTH AMERICA. PEACE.


HighLights channel : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVNdeibpGPU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wtq9Dwybfmg

JoshBritish

**** the UK players!

firecookieX

I don't usually post in the forum, but this topic looks interesting.

I think the reason why Cross Fire won't be able to acquire new blood is because of the level gap and the overpowered weapons. The more skilled players and pay to win players are playing with the new players causing the new players to feel like they don't have a chance. To fix this, I think Cross Fire has to implement a system where a more skilled player can play with players with their same skill level. Something like CS:GO Match making. It will also make it more competitive as it causes people to try to reach a rank and allow them to brag about it. This can also help spread word as people will invite friends to create teams.

To sum it up, I think there should be options where you can turn VIP off in a room and Cross fire has to find a way to make the skill gap between players more fair. Offline games will be nice for the players too. They can train on bots and get a feel of the game. I usually see a new player just running at an enemy having no idea what he or she is doing. It is pretty sad and it also makes the more skilled player somewhat toxic.

Also what Cross Fire feels like right now is a big casual game. Just pubbing away without learning really anything. For example, I think just recently people started really using their grenades. Smoke grenade can be used to smoke off connectors which should help the people pushing onto site or stop the enemies from entering onto the site. (Just saying the grenades in the game needs to be more powerful. The flash grenade barely does anything and the regular smoke is a bit flimsy. It would be nice if smoke doesn't show enemies name.)

Tell me what you guys thing

Synchronise

JoshBritish wrote: »

**** the UK players!

Maybe I mis-read the post above but not even a mention of the UK players, so as Josh said "**** the UK players."
Im one of the two current casters for ESL EU casting the GO4 Crossfire cups. Me (RunOnFlat) and my casting partner (xeNNNNN) are both from the UK and we have been kicked into the rubble. As said we both cast for ESL CF EU but im suprised why we haven't been banned yet, it remains a mystery to me. From the amount of British players who used to play CF, most of them either play CS, LoL or any other game and the ones that remain generally just pub or scrim against "Egy's, Arabians etc" and finish the day with a headache and a hole through their monitor due to the interp, no-reg and tank from the ridiculously high ping. The only slight enjoyment we both get is perhaps just casting and even then we don't get paid for that and we have been doing this for roughly 2 years+.


Moving on though Strong player base will always be difficult to obtain. If you look at the CF EU scene for example I have witnessed countless amount of "Chinese" teams who are very capable of reaching top 3 in the competitive scene and when I ask them why they do not wish to participate they have 1 simple answer; "The community is toxic af" and it is true. Also to add on this strong player base will never come when there is only 1 tournament going on a week and there is always the same 3/4 teams always winning them. Teams will always have the mentality that "we don't stand a chance." You can't have a strong player base when the company doesn't do anything to even advertise their "product" and attempt to bring more availability in tournaments to players. Like someone mentioned there used to be 60+ teams signing up for GO4 CF EU now suddenly teams lose motivation, interest and also there is not enough tournaments/events.

Now I don't know much about how sponsers work but anyway aswell as this if you take a look at the BR scene for example they have sponsers such as Razer etc. The closest to such high sponsers for teams in CF EU is perhaps FlipSide and PENTA. Now if CF decided to advertise etc and actually invest in their competitive scene teams would perhaps have more chance of playing under Fnatic, CLG etc as teams would have better "rep" under their belt aswell as sponsers will think they are worth investing in aswell as looking at how hugely popular the game is but like I said it is impossible when there is always the lack of players due to various reasons and barely even 3 tournaments going on per week.

Lastly on the note of advertisement, the only advertisement that is really going on is within the community, players making Montages, Guides also Competitive players with their FB fan pages and also streamers who stream the game (Such as my self.)

On another note involving LANS, in CF EU we did decide to allow BP in cups and this comes in very handy for the "Devs" because as more teams sign up more ZP will be bought in order to buy BP, now even if SmileGate took atleast 25% off each player who buys BP and place in into a pool for a LAN im presuming a LAN within the first 6-7 months would be possible given the current competitive player base. I do remember we did the math on this and how much money would be earned in terms of CF EU but it is 5am here in England and I don't wish to spend 1 hour finding the forum topic on ESL EU but I presume you get my gist.

But anyway that is all I can think of atm but yea "**** the UK players" not like we will remotely get noticed. #noticeussenpaii
Also CF NA please rename the UK servers to DE Servers please as well you don't really give a crap about us. I presume this would only be a two second job for your developers and the coding script or w/e you use.

Fizzeq_

I took some time to re-evaluate and thoroughly read through the most recent comments of feedback and additional contribution of UK servers/competitors.

I want to begin responding by saying that I have mixed thoughts about what has been mentioned in response to my article. Up to now, most of our efforts have been put into: the rebuilding of North America's competitive community. Now I understand that our localization licensing also include the UK, and that CFEU in particular have restricted specifically UK players. I'm not saying that I'm against European players competing. I love competition and want to see more enthusiasts within our game. But it's not up to me, or Zzxq, or Z8Games to decide these things. None of us have the power of influence needed to quickly push for things to happen. It doesn't mean we wouldn't like to see them happen. There's a process involved with relaying and proposing ideas/potential solutions. There needs to be reliability and great, convincing result from what you want to happen. Mere talk and words don't give us anything; although it is a starting point. This process I'm talking about is the communication difficulty as a result of there being a "middleman" between the community and the developers. So when it comes to actually trying to get things going, it's a lot more difficult than what most people think. For example, letting UK teams compete in WCA and CFStars qualifiers. There are many aspects with that; the ping, the actual location problem, logistics, overseas legal contracts, and more. And unfortunately it's not up to us to decide those things. I want you to understand I'm not really trying to make any excuses. I myself do realize how repetitive I'm sounding right now because these are the same things you've heard these years. But this is the plain truth that I want everyone to understand. I'm not sitting here to make promises and give false hope. I don't want to promise things that I can't confirm and provide for. But I don't want to discourage and let down people that have been positively working toward a better community, a better competitive community that is. I appreciate all the work that UK and EU players put into and those are my most honest words.

I refuse to address the Middle East 'conflict'/attitude because it violates our terms. But I believe something like that could probably be solved with a competitive server or client. If there were to be a competitive server/client, there would need to be enough players for it to continue existing. That's also something we've discussed; there's many parts to be though certainly debatable and in reality... possible.

Again, we have talked about crowd funding for online and even LAN tournaments. It's a lot more helpful to ask the community to fund portions of a prize pool. Doable, and naturally your funds are partly in the revenue brought in. It's really a matter of whether or not Smilegate wants to pool to support our version of the game. I want to see more online tournaments happen, more leagues being built, external CF communities existing, and certainly want to attend LANs.

So when I pointed out mentality of competitors, the motivation and interest is what I mean. There's not enough from company and the community, which is a big problem for sure. We can approach it in multiple ways. There are definitely doable solutions to first bring together our current community, and attempt to rebuild with the help of everyone. Then that also needs to come with advertisement, heavy advertisement across big gaming forums and sponsor links. Sponsors do make a huge difference in eSports. It's where part of the funding and support come from. CF has had sponsored teams before, and I believe some currently do as well. But it's definitely not every team, and even those that have sponsor tags are not backed up by many. So advertisement and approach from Smilegate need to take place. Otherwise we would never see players associated with other big eSports organization. Every party together will make a bigger difference in terms of mutual support.

JoshBritish

(EDIT)

Just watched the stream with [GM]Juicebox and Purvis. Great job guys, thanks a lot for the effort and for keeping in mind all the issues (especially the UK problem) Waited a long time for this.

I'm hosting a cup to help build a competitive scene for the UK servers at the moment - http://forum.z8games.com/showthread.php?t=306763
Hopefully this increases peoples interest in competition (no prizes yet though)
If you could sticky the thread that would help a lot. Hopefully us players, mods and GMS can all communicate efficiently as I know I can input positively and help fix/improve some of these issues.

Thanks again.

Fizzeq_

UK competitions are in our eyes as well. And as always, we're always open to feedback as we work on providing and improving. So bump!

Article #2 should be coming out within the next week or so. Stay tuned!

JoshBritish

[MOD]Fizzeq wrote: »

UK competitions are in our eyes as well. And as always, we're always open to feedback as we work on providing and improving. So bump!

Article #2 should be coming out within the next week or so. Stay tuned!

That's good man, hope to see ESG host something for UK soon. BGL has had over 8 teams sign up this week for BGL Cup #3 (without the advertisement other competitions have) It was the same last week as well. Everyone's showing the activity and demand for competition at the moment. It's going well so far, hope things keep improving.

In terms of improving things in general, I guess you could add sprays and banners in-game to advertise competition like famous suggested.

michealdrkk

Has there even been a discussion about personal sprays/namecards for teams and players?

pls add