SmedBlog: eSports Support

[brighthand]

Originally Posted by super pretendo

The problem is that if it has support it will crowd out the scope and perception of the game. The fun, emergent and dynamic aspects of the unplanned war (read: the entire game of planetside) will not get the public perception that the run-of-the-mill FPS crap will get. So players will not come for the main planetside game, but for the CoD of Battlefield cut.

EVE online is known for people watching the amazing videos of its battles, and even non players reading about the politics, wars and changes in territory. That's how I came to that game. If I saw EVE videos that were all generic arena battles with wannabe announcers talking over it, I would just close the video and never think about the game again.

It's disenchanting to see such people in this thread that lack this kind of basic scrutiny.

And for anyone thinking that PS2 needs to clone CoD to compete with it, you're silly. PS2 doesn't need to compete with CoD, it just needs to innovate out of the stale CoD formula.

I agree with you fully; that is what killed bf3: the need to compete with COD and other games that are NOTHING like it.

To supporters of this idea I say: Esports should be kept far away from this game. You have to look further down the road and see what decisions can lead to. Imagine this hypothetical situation:

You play HA and you appreciate the heft of your rocket launcher and its usfulness running into huge battles. You fire and it has a nice AoE that at least reduces alot of HP of surrounding soldiers on impact (have no idea what its actual AoE is, I am just saying it does x damage for this example). Well now that esports is big in planetside, the devs found from feedback from avid eports twitch "pros", fresh out of the COD circuit, that the AoE of your beloved rocket launcher is too wide and great, and makes it overpowered in an the eports setting- so they NERF it. Now you and your boys are rolling arround Auraxis with ROMAN CANDLES for launchers, pegging each other like a bunch of highschoolers in the back of a Walmart parking lot at 2:00am. This is one of the many 'positive changes' that the armies from all three factions are dealing with after the latest patch and it sucks- but thats OK, because the esports guys are having a BLAST in their inky dinky 8 v 8 arenas!

Even if they created seperate servers wtih seperate balancing, they might still have to allocate valuable development time that could have gone into making epic space battle contintents, or floating mountains or advanced command tools or something. Think about the losses.