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> It had amazing spectator functions where you could jump from player to player at will, it had the ability to host the server yourself, you could trade players from the sideline onto your team at anytime, you could pause the match, you could practice on any map you wanted, you could pick a map and run around for an unlimited amount of time practicing, etc.. etc...

Other than subbing in players, most source games have all of these features. Not sure about Dota 2, but certainly CS:GO and TF2 have all those features with a community that uses them.

Interesting, can you host your own servers with cs:go on your own lan and allow other random players to connect and spectate the match? If so I’m impressed and I need to check it out. The ability to swap players from spectators would be an important one as well. But even without this, I’d still be really interested.

The thing you are looking for is HLTV, which is something that has been around since goldsrc under sv_hltv: https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Console_Command_Lis...

I haven't looked at the config/set one up since HL1 days so here is a relevant article to how you would set that up https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=1990-UAV... and I am sure there is an equivalent one for source/hl2 games. It lets you set things like delay and so on and I remember it being relatively straightforward.

It's called GOTV for CS:GO, fyi.

Basic guide here: https://www.reddit.com/r/GlobalOffensive/comments/2arae2/how..., might be slightly outdated.

However, the swapping players from spectators would require them to directly connect into the game server, and simply spectate from there. I believe you can set them as coaches to prevent ghosting, as spectating directly from the server doesn't allow setting any sort of delay.

> can you host your own servers

So the thing holding esports back is not enough barriers to entry?

Needing explicit permission / cooperation from the developer of a game to run a tournament is more of a barrier to entry than needing to host a server.

I can’t think of a single popular online multiplayer game where I would need permission or cooperation from the developer to operate a tournament with my friends/local community...

This doesn't raise the barrier to entry it lowers it. Players can continue to host their own servers for old games. Back in the day, teams would host their own servers and recruit good players they met on them. Also allowing LAN parties (not quite the same thing as hosting servers, but similar) fosters a physical sense of community which is crucial. The culture of kids going to each others' houses to play Smash is probably a huge part of why it's so popular as a competitive game.

> fosters a physical sense of community which is crucial

Then why have none of the most successful esports had this characteristic? A characteristic they have all shared however, is a simple, out-of-the-box online multiplayer experience.

Archiving old games is an entirely seperate concern.

Well the original—at least from my perspective—esports game was quake, which spawned quake con. At some point when quakecon startee really gaining traction, most games from that point forward stopped implementing a lot of the capability which fostered those types of communities.

While esports has gained a little bit more traction since then, my suspicions are aligned with the article, it’s mostly due to dumping massive venture capital into hyping it. And it seems to have hit a wall.

I bet, if they want to move beyond the wall it has hit, one of the key moves will be to start implementing those features discussed above, which will foster the communities which will allow those organic communities to form.

Dota 2 has that. Except for subbing players (would be probably a bit of a mess).

Counterpoint: fighting games have zero direct interaction with the companies who control the IP for a tournament, and while they're certainly bigger now than they used to be, I think you'd be hard pressed to argue honestly that fighting games are in any way ubiquitous.

The issue, in my opinion, is that getting good at something is _hard_. When you're a kid playing pickup basketball with your neighbors, that doesn't matter; you're all in the same pond and sure, while you can watch pro ball on TV and see what the pro players are like, you're never going to play against them. You're only playing against your local friends, and the skill level is probably going to be a bunch of people in the same order of magnitude. Maybe on occasion you'll get to a live tournament and run into somebody who's way better than you, but they're not local; after the tournament, they'll disappear back into their own pond and you don't have to worry about them.

With esports, there's no such thing as a pond; everybody's in the same ocean, and while the game will try to matchmake you with somebody around your skill level, that won't always happen. So when you beat your friends and think "huh, I'm pretty good at street fighter, aren't I?", you can immediately hop online and get double perfected by somebody using the worst character, and you realize that no, you're actually not good at all. And if you're not good, you can either put in the work to get better (which is hard) or you can play some other game where you don't have to confront the fact that you're not good at it (like basketball).

> Modern games, at least as far as I can tell require you to connect to the IP holders company’s servers and often don’t allow you to pick and choose specifically who you play against which in turn makes it nearly impossible to build leagues and do team scrimmages, team practices, local community leagues, etc...

Most amateur leagues that do form around a game do use these kinds of features it may need to actually phone the home servers but online leagues generally just use default game functionality. I don't know any game that's worth playing competitively that doesn't have a feature for a 'custom game' or invite-only game. If it's worth playing competitively usually a group will spring up- it can be a hundred people or hundreds of thousands of people but those communities do exist from everything from soldat to Dota 2. You just have to go find them. Generally you don't start with a full team either, you play pugs (pick up games) and start to learn the competitive ropes just like you would in a more traditional game.

The downfall is unlike older titles where individuals rented servers and communities grew around servers easily, the lazy matchmaking that you can do nowadays makes actually meeting people you want to play with much harder than it used to be. You can play 10 hours in a matchmaking competitive game and never play with the same people twice, whereas you usually were playing with/against the same people all for at least an hour or two at a time. It's not impossible to do just is less organic to find people you want to play with at their worst and at their best.

So you’re saying esports will take off when things are how they used to be? Why didn’t they take off then? Why not now? We still have the things we used to, plus whatever we have now that’s allowed for their limited success.

I’m not trying to be cheeky. It’s just a very curious argument.

I think the reason they’ve already taken off is because the LAN party was replaced with the far more accessible online multiplayer.

>Why didn’t they take off then

They did. We already went through this bubble / bust cycle once about 10 years ago, albeit on a much smaller scale. Look up the Championship Gaming Series.

Oh man q3osp dm17 all day. You just really took me back. I really miss rocket arena and the first LAN parties I went to. Right as broadband had really started to be available. Still have not found anything close to q3. Maybe it’s just my nostalgia.

It probably is. I’ve found it impossible to play for more than half an hour now when I could easily play for 10 hours straight when I was a teenager. But I don’t know why. I just get bored.

dammit

That's how things used to work with Quake and GameSpy. I worked at an isp, played for one of the better Team Fortress clans. I'd haul my computer to work every day, hook it up and use it to practice for hours after work and host matches. I even built a website that was a primitive social network just for our clan.

I loved it! I had so much fun and I was playing with the best of the best and not a single person in my 10,000 student University (I was co-oping at the time) could even come close to challenging me. We had LAN parties all the time. We'd take over a computer lab, install Quake on every PC, then compete all afternoon long. I'd travel to regional lan parties (the big one hosted by members of my clan in Detroit) all the time. All my clan mates were located within a couple hours of each other. We were a Midwestern team (mostly Ohio and Michigan).

There was even a minor league. I once dropped down into the minor league because I got fed up with the politics of the majors and I was always very very good, but not Michael Jordan good. I was one of the guys on the team who supported the big star. I just couldn't quite make that super star tier. Our clan was always in the top 10 but couldn't crack the top 3.

Anyway I dropped down to the minors for a couple months. It was a mistake. I was so much better than everyone else I literally single handedly won games for the clan. Only one or two other people on the other teams challenged me, and they were likely A Leaguers moonlighting in the minors or just hadn't moved up yet. It was eye opening and felt like a real second tier league prepping people for the shot at the big league. I eventually moved back to the majors because it was unfair for the others on my team and I simply needed the challenge. I brought some of the better players with me.

I really believed that this was the beggining of true esports. Unfortunately my career as a professional gamer came to an abrupt end. I began to suffer from severe motion sickness as the games became more realistic graphically and real life became more of a priority.

We did all this via GameSpy and IRC. I look at things now and it's so different. It feels less organic, but it might just be that I'm removed from it now.

I also wonder how good I could have gotten had I been able to keep playing at this level. I would have another 20 years of experience. Also cheating (wall hacks and aim bots) were rampant at the time. To this day I believe the reason our team never broke into the top 3 wasn't for to lack of talent, it was due to the cheating. We were a good crew and we played honorably. Some of the better players in the better teams were eventually outed as cheaters.

I miss those days. Some of the best experiences of my life and I learned more than just the game. I learned politics, managing people and personalities, scheduling and discipline. I learned how to practice something rigorously and made many good friends who I have unfortunately lost touch with.

I sure hope others can still experience this today.

> esports will take off once

eSports has already taken off. 10mm tournaments, player salaries in excess of 200k, and 1mm+ viewer events.

Did you read the article? You see those numbers in bubbles all the time, it doesn't mean it has taken off.

The article is talking about a particular type of corporate dishonesty that we're only seeing from 1-2 specific actors in the industry.