It seems that e-sports are finally starting to kick off to the mass media, with the Heroes of the Dorm tournament being on ESPN2 live on April 25th. It may have only been viewed by a few hundred thousand on ESPN2, but how could they compete with a new episode of Game of Thrones? Sports fanatics turned to twitter to unleash their cheesy south park memes about how ESPN2 wasn't a serious sporting network anymore. I mean come on people, ESPN2 plays Poker for half the day and you're going to complain that e-sports don't fit in? The thing is e-sports fans such as myself don't need ESPN or anyother sporting network to broadcast them live, sure it may bring in a few more fans, but those who are interested already know where to go for that. Us fans have twitch.tv for that.
Every weekend myself and a fifty thousand others tune in to watch various Counter-Strike Global Offensive tournaments. This is one of the lesser watched esports too, compared to MOBAs such as DOTA 2 or League of Legends and the new coming Heroes of the Storm CSGO has quite low viewers. For comparison at Katowice 2015, one of the largest CSGO tournaments of the year had a audience of 100,000 at the event alone, with a million others such as myself watching online. Now compare that to the League of Legends World Championships 2014, which had 32 million viewers watching as SK T1 took home to trophy. The CSGO esports community is tiny in comparison to the giants of the industry. But that all might be changing soon enough. The majority of the viewers of CSGO tournaments are located in Europe because the game really hasn't picked up as quick as MOBAs over here in America. When it was announced that a tournament would be going on at X-Games Aspen fans knew that with the help of Major League Gaming (primarily a Call of Duty esports company) that CSGO finally had a chance to go big in America. Fans were delighted when MLG put on one the best tournaments to date. Everything about it was perfect, they did things no one had ever even attempted to do before and did it excellently. They know that the future has great potential as talked about here on the X-Games Official site (Source). The one thing America needs now is a good team. The only two teams that are in the top tier are Cloud 9 and Counter Logic Gaming, but in all honesty they don't belong there. They just can't compete with the likes of any of the European teams. Another thing that needs to come is to make a dedicated stream to helping those who want to learn about the game, but don't know how to. The game isn't new comer friendly, it has a steep learning curve that if you don't figure out what your doing quick you're never going to go anywhere. All in all I think that e-sports expecially CSGO is going somewhere, but it's going to be years before the mass population is willing to give it a chance at competing with athletic sports.
Although skins haven't sold this high since knives sell for high numbers almost everyday. Browsing reddit.com/r/globaloffensivetrade you can find rare knives being bought at prices from $1000 to $5000. So what makes these so expensive in the first place? Well the only way to get them is to open cases. Every case takes a key which costs $2.49. When you use a key on a case you have a very low chance of getting a knife. Even if you spent $1000 on keys to open cases you may not receive one. Knives aren't the only item that people pay loads of money for either, a good example of this is the AWP - Dragon Lore. The only way to receive this skin as a drop is to play missions during an operation. Being a covert item there is an extremely low chance receive it. This has caused the item to sell in between $1000 and $2000 at Factory New condition. So why do people buy these skins? They provide no upper hand in game play, they are purely cosmetic. I myself haven't spent much on skins, I've spent $40 since I started playing about six months ago. It's a feeling of wanting to look good. In the real world people with expensive cars and clothes are complimented by others, it's kinda the same in Counter Strike. That's just my view though, I've asked other players on the GlobalOffensive subreddit on their opinions on the subject. ShadowedGhost1337 said that he thinks that they are okay to have, but have created an elitist community where players with expensive skins try to use their skins as an excuse for their skill level. I 100% agree with that statement. order56 said that he wanted stattrak on all his weapons to keep track of how many kills he got with each weapon. While I myself don't care much for keeping track of the amount of kills I get for each weapon I know plenty of people who do and it's a way to show off how much you use a certain weapon. RJohn12 says that it appeals because you can make money from nothing. This is definitely true, if your willing to put the time into it you can turn that $1 M4A4 skin into a $1000 knife, you've just got to be patient and look for good deals.
After the match the players knew they had made a huge mistake. Their thrown match was far too obvious and Valve (Developers of CSGO) were on to them. The casters knew something was up as can by told by their confusion in the teams tactics. After investigating it was revealed that iBuyPower players had placed max bets against themselves on the site csgolounge.com and had received over ten-thousand dollars worth of skins from the bets. As a result four players from iBuyPower were permanently banned from any Valve hosted tournament, but soon after this announcement other tournaments such as FaceIt, CEVO, and ESL also gave them the lifetime ban sentence. The players "Steel", "Dazed", "AZK", and "Swag" were banned, but that leaves the question, why wasn't "Shazam" banned? Valve stated that all players had received skins from the throw except for "Shazam" so he was not at fault for the throw.
Now more and more teams are being accused of match fixing. The manager of team Epsilon had a feeling his team was throwing matches and because of this decided to pull the team from any future tournaments until there was absolute proof they had not thrown a game. Valve confirmed that Epsilon players had been throwing matches and for this were banned. Valve isn't only focusing on big teams either, smaller teams such as Hyphen, Alsen, and GMX have also been caught and banned from any further tournaments. So how is match fixing going to be stopped? Well first of all players are going to have to start following the new rules set in place about this topic. Valve has stated that no person associated with a team is allowed to bet on any match they are involved in and doing so will result in a lifetime ban. But this isn't going to be enough. Players are still going to try to sneak around this by betting with smurf accounts or having friends bet against them. Valve is going to have to either review players trade history after matches they play in or remove the trading feature off of players accounts. But it is a hard decision to make as either way you are punishing players that haven't done anything wrong. Now people are starting to question the legal standing of sites like csgolounge.com as they have no restrictions to who can bet. This means people under the age of 18 are gambling which in the United States is illegal. But then you can argue that you bet with a virtual currency, Steam Wallet Cash, that isn't convertible to real dollars such as seen in online slots or card games. A player by the name of SirScoots has reported the site to the FBI for investigation. There is a problem with this though as csgolounge.com is hosted in Poland, the FBI can't exactly punish a site that comes from a country where gambling laws are different. The FBI has stated that they will be looking into the legality of esports gambling sites such as csgolounge.com. |