[2023] Our Thoughts on Esports

A little over a month ago, we posted our most recent discussion topic asking for your thoughts on esports, the tools that support them, their structure, and the surrounding communities. We feel the overall feedback we received on that topic is aligned with our plans, and below we’d like to highlight a few thoughts on some specific topics that were discussed.

Replays and Spectating

Spectating is the first step to celebrating highly skilled play, so it’s great to see many of you asking for a robust and accessible replay system to support player development, and we’re excited to work towards improving these systems. /u/demiwraith brought up downloading professional replays to learn from and practice alongside, and /u/TheGoatPuncher discussed their importance in ensuring spectators who miss live events can still enjoy them, as well as their critical role in fostering future esports talent. /u/ghost_operative and /u/Eurstheus noted the difficulty of sharing replays and echoed their educational significance. /u/Novawulfen touched on their importance to clans and other coaching communities. /u/Hope_u_hav_a_gud_day mentioned replay packs and spectator accessibility of professional scenes across time zones.

In short, we agree that replays play numerous vital roles in all these aspects of competitive play, from improving your own skills on the ladder to spectating events across the globe. We plan to prioritize replay accessibility, distribution, and viewing entirely in-client, in addition to live and time-delayed matches. We’re also exploring more complex replay functionality enabled by our use of a high-performance game simulation, such as playing alongside a “shadow” replay to optimize practice. This was touched on in our recent AMA response video.

Integrated Esports

To ensure the smoothest possible user experience, we also plan for other core aspects of esports to exist in-client. /u/chris888889 and many others touched on the difficulty of staying up to speed on match schedules and player standings across different external resources. Our hope is to have information about competitive events, both professional and amateur, easily accessed within the game client, to ensure spectators know when and where their favorite players are competing, as well as how those players have been performing. /u/osobaum resurfaced a great thread about tools and practices important to supporting community tournaments, which is where many of us got our start participating in the RTS community. In a similar vein, we also want the features necessary to run events, such as brackets and rewards, to remain in-client as much as possible.

Grassroots Events

/u/Dance_SC and many others shared fond memories of LAN parties and other amateur competitive events held either online or in person, sometimes automated through in-client systems like League of Legends’ Clash, or handled by third-party tools like Challonge. /u/TheGoatPuncher also brought up how critical the amateur scene is in fostering future professional talent. Many of you voiced a desire for amateur esports to be easily accessed from within the game client, and we agree. We think esports function best if all levels of competition are given the tools, resources, opportunity, and rewards necessary to thrive. While we hope our game inspires grand tournaments with crowds of viewers and high-stakes prizes, we’re also focused on streamlining and enabling competition at lower commitment levels so anyone can enjoy competing and becoming better players. In an ideal scenario, there will be a clear “path to pro” that allows new talent to focus on their climb to be the best they can be. We also want to ensure the competitive environment does not feel overly daunting or discouraging for the largest pool of players who may enjoy playing at lower skill levels.

Finally, we wanted to highlight /u/Morgurtheu’s idea around tying pivotal esports moments to the ongoing stories told by the game’s lore and narrative. There would certainly be a lot of complexity to this, but it’s already inspired some internal discussions and is exactly aligned with our desire for esports and the community to truly feel like an intertwined part of the whole game experience.

With that, thanks for continuing the dialogue with us. We are privileged to have such a knowledgeable and passionate community, and we look forward to your comments on our next discussion topic: User-Generated Content.

-The Frost Giant Team