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The Plan To Bring Analytics To eSports
An anonymous reader writes: We're used to seeing instant replays, halftime analysis and in depth analytics in traditional sports, but now they're coming to eSports too. A new start-up, Dojo Madness, is hoping to bring the same techniques to games like League of Legends and Dota, in the hopes players can learn from their mistakes in a game when shown them. In a new interview, founder and former Electronic Sports League boss Jens Hilgers reveals that the company's main product, Dota training and replay site Bruce.GG, will use machine learning to teach itself what are good and bad plays — and he hopes to bring the tech to other games, like Counter-Strike, too. "The feedback of the users watching these videos, these input points, are allowing us to determine the relevancy of what we have done and the system will learn from that and get smarter," he says.
Ever listen to football commentary or basketball? Its all color commentary or idiotic observations like "team X won because they scored more points"... no shit, fucktards.
The eSports commentary is vastly more incisive in most cases. They'll talk about tactics and strategies... they'll get into issues like the micro if we're talking about starcraft.
We don't need analytics and the last thing we want to emulate is the professional sports commentary for ANYTHING besides the quality color commentary.
And the issue there is that color commentary is actually already pretty good in esports. There are some commentators that are HILARIOUS while at the same time actually making good points about what is going on.
Watch three or four esports games with commentary from the esports community. THEN watch an normal sports game on tv. Whole thing... watch it all... all four hours of it or whatever.
Try as best you can to do apples to apples comparisons. eSports doesn't need any pointers from traditional sports coverage. Its already better.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
The scam to bring some kind of relevance to something totally irrelevant. It's just like sports, people watch them, but they created all those stat boards to try and legitimize all the jobs around them. In the end, they are useless figures on something that doesn't matter.
Think what you will, but the scene speaks for itself. Writing it off as "playing games" is disingenuous.
esports is just a popular label for it, and no professional gamer gives a shit if they're "officially" in the same category as Football/F1 or not. But again, the scene speaks for itself in that it has:
events with over 1 million concurrent viewers
events with a prize pool over 10 million dollars
pros who train in regimented schedules down to what meals they eat, with coaching staff, dedicated practice partners, and big name team sponsors
ongoing team leagues
dedicated full time casters/analysts, news coverage, and talk shows
thriving sports betting market (and all the problems it brings)
Again, no fan or pro cares if it's "officially" a sport or not. It's just about giving the fans what they want. Regardless, the scene is massive, and it's growing insanely fast. With the numbers that it has, don't be surprised (or irrationally angry) if you see esports headlines on the top of news outlets in the coming years.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt00...
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
Aren't all sports classified as 'games'?
It's certainly true that the impact of playing a field game vs. playing a computer game is likely to be different for the player(whether it will actually be healthier depends on how brutally the field sport chews up the human resources vs. how badly inactivity and carpal tunnel syndrome get you); but from the perspective of the audience there isn't much difference.
It's not as though watching intense phsyical exertion gives you exercise by osmosis; so while I'd tend to agree that gamers are not 'athletes', I have little time for the people who are sitting on the couch with a beer and a bowl of chips, decrying the physical passivity of the gamer geeks.
And, like, everyone else in the arena?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I think this might be a generation gap issue or something, I have lots of friends who have no interest in watching regular sport coverage but find well commented e sports entertaining.
What is boring and what isn't really depends on tastes, the fact that twitch streaming of e sport tournaments is successful should speak for itself.
If you can be beaten in your "eSport" by a random 12 year old kid then its not a sport. Oh and show me a game where someone had a million viewers.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Counter strike is far more limited in the range of possibilities of what that can happen in a single match. Not only are the matches far shorter (and as such does not have phases like dota) given a map there are only a handful of strategies possible to use. A bunch of other reasons too, statistically mine a game like dota to me seems to be an impossible task, there is just too much variation between matches.
Actually the pros do care a lot if it considered a sport or not, it can make it a lot easier to travel (getting visas for example), get incentives from their governments (tax breaks and such), companies can have a "sports budget" to sponsor sport teams and guess what, they can not use that budget if it is not an sport.
In short, the pros don't care what it is labeled as long as their governments (and the governments of the countries they will visit) recognize them as sports or at least have a specific rules for competitive eletronic games.
as long as their governments (and the governments of the countries they will visit) recognize them as sports
And many people are probably unaware that the United States does recognize eSports, and there are at least a few dozen progamers living in the United States on athlete visas.
.: Semper Absurda
I am not from the US, but do they recognize eSports as actual sports or is it a different category? If so what are the difference between each category?
I wasn't familiar with the specifics so I found this Wiki page. Apparently P visas are a general category for athletes, entertainers and their families who either represent something culturally unique, are part of an exchange program, or are internationally recognized (the main kind, P-1).
According the LA Times article linked in the Wiki page, programers have received P1-A visas specifically - the same subcategory as for any athlete.
.: Semper Absurda
When the kids were playing baseball and then grew up to play in the MLB... would it make sense to point at the crowd and talk about kids?
There's a difference. Activision Blizzard owns the exclusive rights to its games and has shown itself eager to enforce them (as in the bnetd case). Publishers of fighting games have been known to demand public performance royalties from tournament organizers or even to deny a license entirely and shut down a tournament's stream. I can fetch citations from Ars Technica and elsewhere if you want. By contrast, nobody owns the exclusive rights to baseball. Leagues like MLB can't ban people from baseball; they can only ban people from playing on MLB teams or MLB-affiliated minor league teams. Baseball leagues independent of MLB have existed and continue to exist.
But again, the scene speaks for itself in that it has:
...copyright strikes from a game's publisher against a league for broadcasting the league's matches.
That's the one big difference between physical sports and electronic sports: electronic sports are almost always non-free. See "Why Nintendo can legally shut down any Smash Bros. tournament it wants" by Kyle Orland.
This lack or presence of ownership allows or disallows you from doing what exactly?
The lack of ownership of a sport allows a competing league to begin operation without having to first seek permission from the owner of the sport. This allows for competition among leagues.
The kids need to buy baseballs and bats.
From any of several competing equipment manufacturers. Only Blizzard can sell copies of StarCraft.
And if you play professionally you're going to sign on with an official team or you won't be professional.
In any of several competing leagues, not just the one endorsed by the owner of a sport.
No one needs Blizzard's permission to have a SC tourney
Technically they do, at least if they're streaming the tourney to the public. The graphics of StarCraft and StarCraft II are copyrighted.
so... again... what is the restriction?
It's considered performing the video game publicly. Video games are considered audiovisual works in U.S. copyright law, and the owner of copyright in an audiovisual work has the exclusive right to perform that work publicly. Doing so without express permission is copyright infringement, as if you were offering to stream . Please see the article "Why Nintendo can legally shut down any Smash Bros. tournament it wants" by Kyle Orland and this appellate brief from a moot court.
No one needs Blizzard's permission to have a SC tourney
Blizzard disagrees. It filed suit.
cite an instance of Blizzard either demanding money for a tourney or denying someone a right to have a tourney.
As to dumb things Nintendo has done recently... everyone in the gaming world is well aware of that. And honestly... after some bitching no one cared because Nintendo's most recent offerings have been garbage. They just had a really bad generation.
I hope they do better next time but ... they're having a hard time.
Anywho... when it comes to esports we're talking about SC, Counterstrike... etc So... can you show me an instance of blizzard of valve shutting a tourney down?
Otherwise I'm going to yawn and hand wave.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
cite an instance of Blizzard either demanding money for a tourney or denying someone a right to have a tourney.
From the article "Crafting an Industry: An Analysis of Korean Starcraft and Intellectual Properties Law" by Jacob Rogers:
So yes, Blizzard filed a lawsuit against a broadcaster of a tournament.
you can shift to other games in the same genre if you need to put leverage on a particular company that is being irritating.
For one thing, a lot of skills won't transfer, especially the need to re-learn how everything is balanced. It'd be like trying to switch from Tetrinet to Puyo Pop or from baseball to cricket or from soccer to Gaelic football. For another, once a league switches to a different game, how can the league be sure that the new game's copyright won't get sold, such as at acquisition or bankruptcy, to another "company that is being irritating"? I can't see any way other than making sure the game is free software or has some other sort of irrevocable guarantee of non-interference with public performance for profit.
the issue there is more about people making money off the league
Independent baseball leagues are free to make money without having to negotiate with any owner of exclusive rights to a sport, as were the African-American leagues before them.