Pretty much. Like I said though the GAAS model for it has put me off the last 3 months as playing ranked is just a metric of how long you can play for instead of a measurement of skill.

This is a point I was going to bring up, a big issue for organisations for a lot of games at the moment is that the players do the bare minimum for organisations.
A lot of press related stuff is done for specific tournaments. Or at the start when the player first signs for the organisation. For some traditional sports you really have to do quite a bit of sponsorship work that is required with your contract. And that can be throughout the season.
Not only that but the players also work out their own brand deals with other companies, you'll hardly see any of that in esports.

Sponsors aren't going to pay teams big money when the only marketing they get back is from good tournament placements.

In regards to CS being boring or w/e. It's successful because the competitive game mode is easy to understand, for the most part it's clear to see what's going on as well. There has also over time been different "eras" of CS where certain teams have come a long and made a mark with their unique play styles.

Valve events are going for Saudi & UAE money. DOTA2 in China is dying out due to poor quality matchmaking which is why a lot of Chinese pros now play on the SEA server (obviously outside of the rules the Chinese government set).

In general I feel a lot of "e-sport" titles suffer heavily from the GAAS model. The pressure of every developer having to add more and more to the game to keep player retention up and revenue growing. It's also a factor as why CS is a bit of an anomaly for most games as their employees can move to different projects depending on the current focus. E.g. more employees working on CS2, then moving to other areas once released, same with dota2 events.

For me I think a good example of this is possibly Apex Legends, where the foundation of the game is actually really good. It has great feeling guns (for the most part) and heaps of potential for movement tech. It's just massively held back by partly the BR format and the GAAS model. The balancing cycle can really harm the game and at the moment it's pushed forward a lot more to a player retention angle, which results in poor quality matchmaking etc.

In my experience and I NEVER thought I'd say this. But the ALGS tournaments were actually really fucking good. The format they have is actually pretty great and creates a lot of high stakes excitement.

There's a lot of variables that I think heavily effects whether a game actually can become a potential e-sport which would take ages to go through.

Some books I've read since last time:
Hyperion series - Book 1 was really great. Listened to the audio book version which was really cool with great performances. Book 3 I didn't really enjoy that much.
I Am Legend - Pretty neat book.
Rendezvous with Rama
Carrion Comfort - Pretty enjoyable but gets a bit wacky.
The Terror - This was a very cool book. Loved the format.
The City and The City - This was a hard read for me at first but I got engrossed in how bizarre it was at points.
Perdido Street Station & The Scar - These were also a tricky read for me personally (I'm dumb). Mainly because I struggle to concentrate whilst reading sometimes and the weird as fuck names and concepts threw me off. But I'm really glad I stuck with it. The world building and concepts are incredible.

Also on book 8 of WOT. Was struggling to keep going on the last couple of books, I was getting tired of having a detailed description of what people were wearing all the time.

i remember the ESL AC guy (anakin?) who had secretly added a screen grabber to take screenshots of players in game pov to find hacks.

what i do remember one of them tarkus was voted the worst player of the season or some shit and he was running hacks

found the thread: https://etf2l.org/forum/general/topic-21038/page-24/?recent=406689#post-406387

It's like the second coming of jesus

https://img001.prntscr.com/file/img001/oGqXKHc3RGCRw1iE2Agzdg.png

found the cause

i'd imagine that maybe the NEC have upped their prices on renting out the spaces on such a regular busy weekend that insomnia decided it was just not worth it.

Outer Wilds, the best video game I've ever played. The only downside is that it's a game that you can only really complete once (or twice with DLC). The game can be pretty short depending on how invested youi get in to the story.

The Stanley Parable is a good short game, you can be done with it whenever you want to really.

Superliminal is also a really good short puzzle game based on forced perspective and illusions. Really trippy at points.

Return of the Obra Dinn a very unique gameplay experience.

Black Mesa the HL1 remake. Really good 10 hour game. Very high quality remake that makes a good improvement on the first.

Ultrakill, EA boomer shooter with lots of cool mechanics.

bro their game literally has guns with like fish tanks in them i was watching the game just looking at the fishes inside the tank, i dont even know who won i was just staring at those little fishies wondering if they were ok in the gun, but like, what if the gun was shooting the fish from inside the gun? what if the existence of the fish was just to live as essentially as a bullet?

you dont get those deep kind of realisations in a tf2 event

i was sitting behind tf2 easy quite a bit and whenever there was some down time they just seemed to scrim froyo.

I think it's the polite thing to do if a team helps you warm up for your official, like who else are they gonna scrim? SVIFT? LMAO!

having said that there might be more to it that we don't know about!

https://i.imgur.com/CdBXu0g.jpg

still waiting for my svift shirt from like 5 years ago from the last fundraiser

Them doing something now is like finally saving a drowning kid from a pool after watching him for 10 minutes. He's been submerged for ages and his brain has been starved of oxygen. Yeah he's technically living but he's going to be a vegetable for the rest of his life.

cu@