If you’ve ever wanted to make the worst possible esport but didn’t know how, look no further.
To make not just a bad esport, but the worst possible esport, we’ll need to be cold and calculated. We need to make as many people, frustrated, disillusioned and unhappy as possible.
First, we should break down the people involved in esports: players, competitors, developers, investors, and obviously, the fans, the people who make investing in esports viable.
We could just make a game no one watches, plays or invests in, but then the only people unhappy are the devs. No, we want to cause the most amount of evil through a video game as possible.
Now, we could just design a game infested with so much malware that your only hope is to tear apart your computer and throw its components into a microwave, but I don’t have the programming knowledge to explain that. Also, that would make for a short article, so shut up and read the rest.
So, what type of game should we make?
It should be appealing enough so we can spread our cancer around the world. We should make it childish and with strict rules on content. So, no nudity, blood or cigars to pander to China and other socially conservative countries.
It should be as easy to get into as possible, so probably a strategy game or something similar, and keep people hooked for as long as possible.
With all that said, there should be loot boxes, because that keeps people hooked while also frustrating the player-base, and of course, we’ll make the game pay-to-win. Pay-to-win loot also has the added benefit of making patches, specifically nerfs, even more frustrating.
So, we’ve got our pay-to-win, childish strategy game to sufficiently upset players. Now we need to screw over our competitive base.
In the beginning, we should make the game as fair, simple and skill-expressive as possible. The best players will arise and competition will be fairly based on merit. We’ll promote some tournaments and gradually grow the game until we announce a big world championship.
Maybe promote some highlights on the side, but now that everyone’s hooked, it’s time to implement phase two: upsetting the competitors.
We need to make the game change as fast as possible, which as an added bonus, upsets everyone other than investors, but we’ll get to them in a bit.
There should be as much randomness as possible. A skilless player should have an almost-equal chance to beat a world champion. The effects of game mechanics should be as long as possible so no one knows what’s going on and there should be meta-changing patches, oh, let’s say three days before a major competition.
With long effects, no one will be able to analyze every interaction before competition, leading to suboptimal strategies. Fans won’t have any idea what’s going on either.
Then, we unleash our ultimate plan: making an effect that makes every game a 50/50. We should make this effect basically say that no matter what’s happened during the match, when you use it, the match becomes a coin-flip. And, on top of that, make it as flashy as possible, so it splits the community and infuriates competitors.
Oh, and the best part, we should leave the effect completely untouched until after the world championship and basically let this singular effect dictate the whole tournament.
hmmmmm
If you thought we were done pissing off competitors, not even close, but this time we get to upset every player and fan, not just competitors.
We should fundamentally change the meta every few months to change the game time. Some games could last less than six minutes, and in other metas, games could last over 45 minutes.
Consistency is for fools, and when a spectator has to sit watching the same thing for 45 minutes or blink and miss the whole match while making it impossible for impatient players to climb, you know you’ve got a banger of an idea.
Leak competitors’ strategies every now-and-then to keep it spicy, and you’ve got a clown fiesta™ on your hands.
Now, we need to shift our focus to investors and developers as they’re not upset enough.
So, as we decided previously, we should patch and expand the game as frequently as possible. This will be hell for the developers and have the side-effect of being impossible to balance. Having two major patches or expansions every three months or so should do the trick.
However, your investors love you. So, how do we upset them?
First, we should always over-project our earnings, then say we performed below expectations quarter after quarter.
Next, we should monetize our esport as little as possible.
Don’t sell tickets, don’t make limited edition cosmetics. Do as little as possible to make money from competitive games.
Don’t even bother making limited-edition loot boxes for a world championship. That may make people happy.
No, just barely announce the competition. Be sure to hide information, such as the schedule and results, and bury that info in at least three links. Throw in some dead links and confusing redirects for good measure as well.
But your investors are still fairly happy. We need some juicy controversy to make them, and honestly everyone else, unhappy.
First, we need to make the rules vague, and obviously, we need to selectively enforce them so as to affect only big streamers and professionals, but not impact lower-level players at all.
A horrible policy would be prohibiting outside help. Why is this one of the worst possible things you can do for competition? Allow me to explain.
You need to apply this both to online and offline competitions, but we’re more concerned with online competitions. The spirit of the rule will be to stop cheating, but in reality, every cheater who doesn’t stream will get away with it, while we closely monitor every streamer and professional.
So, say someone has the game on one screen and stream-chat on another. We can just ban them for “seeking outside help.”
HMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM...
Oh, and I forgot to mention we haven’t hired anyone full-time, so everyone, competitors, casters, anyone remotely famous, can say whatever they want with no legal repercussions.
With all this in place, we should now create a major controversy. Something so horrible, it gets the American House of Representatives involved.
Well, since we have all the competitive groundwork laid out, we need to go back to our investors for a second. Some of you may have assumed all our investors are American. Wrong.
We need to get a diverse pool of investors with diametrically opposed goals and political views. So, let’s get part of our investors from America and another chunk from China.
Then we wait. We’ll train our tournament admins poorly and give them power to ban players without consulting high-level officials. Screw it. We’ll even give them the power to seize prize money.
After a while, a political controversy inevitably happens, and some competitors may get the idea of using our platform to make a statement.
Now, of course this is prohibited in the rules, but we don’t give any of our players media training, nor do we train production staff to cut away from political statements, because again, we don’t hire anyone full-time, and we barely tell our casters what they can and can’t do.
So, when someone shows up to an interview in say, a gas mask, and we don’t ask why he’s wearing it, don’t cut the interview, nor give any instruction to the casters, we’re pretty much asking for a controversy, right?
So, when a player named Blitzchung says “Liberate Hong Kong; revolution of our age!” we already wanted it. It was all planned; it had to have been.
If you guessed Hearthstone, you're correct!
Our tournament organizers ban him for a year and seize his prize money. We then lessen that ban and give him back his money. We can’t fire the casters, but we’ll never work with them again.
And of course, when a college does the same thing less than a week later, we only give them a match loss.
Be sure to make vague statements about “Tough Hearthstone esports moment[s]” by the way.
I mean, surely this is all a master plan to make the worst possible esport, right? Surely Hearthstone must actively be trying to be as bad as possible and lose all its viewers.
Why else would they consolidate all tournaments into three competitions, then change the streaming platform to YouTube Gaming where less than 5,000 average people watched Masters Tour Arlington?
Why else would matches start in the morning and end before prime time?
Why else would they make Grandmasters qualifiers vague and keep competitors with less than a 30 percent winrate for two seasons?
Why else would they patch three days before a Masters Tour, cancel Masters Tour Bali and only give a refund for $250? Why’s the refund contingent on you buying potentially more expensive tickets to Los Angeles? Hotel cancellations and potential inability to go to LA isn’t accounted for either.
So, if you can’t go to LA for whatever reason, you’re screwed out of your money.
If everything is ignored, why the hell would Blizzard change formats to best-of-three Specialist for a few months, then cancel Specialist and go back to a format everyone was fine with and no one complained about? Also, why would they change qualifiers from Swiss to best-of-three single elimination?
It can’t possibly be because they have no idea what they’re doing. It must be because they’re intentionally trying to do everything in their power to create the worst possible esport.
They cancelled HOTS with a one-month notice and didn’t warn players in advance. They update their games seemingly at random, but I think, it’s become the mission of Blizzard to create the worst competitive experience they can come up with.
I feel like meetings must just be a pissing contest of who can have the best worst-idea.
Has anyone heard of a tournament where if you get first place, you get no prizing and need to travel across the world to get a prize?
I’ve heard of qualifying for future tournaments, but at least you either get a prize on top of that, or you get your trip covered, but Blizzard does none of that.
I must be going insane, right?
There’s no way a company would sell $250,000 of product and say ‘Okay, that’s enough. We don’t want any more money.’
Have you ever heard of capped crowdfunding? Have you ever heard of capped crowdfunding that covers multiple tournaments instead of one big one, or just uncapping it all together?
This must be by design. Someone must intentionally be making bad decisions. I wrote this article because after seeing the $250 “refund” for Masters Tour Bali, I thought surely this was either a joke or Blizzard was intentionally being awful.
I feel like I’m the only sane person on the Titanic watching Blizzard chop up lifeboats for firewood.
