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Comment by sylens | Hacker News Reader

As someone who played a lot of Starcraft back during SC1/SC2 Wings of Liberty days, Starcraft was a game I loved watching other people play - mostly due to fog of war knowledge asymmetry in the audience.

If I was someone who didn't play video games, I think Rocket League would be the title I would be interested in watching others play.

I just can't fathom any non-gamer ever finding Call of Duty, League of Legends, DOTA, Overwatch, Valorant, etc. interesting enough to watch. I played many of those same games at some point and even I don't find them interesting to watch. First person shooters in particular seem so confining in terms of spectating.

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So I stopped gaming soon after the original Xbox came out. Rocket League is about the only game I understand now. I have the new Xbox now and started playing it and find it extremely difficult. I improved a lot with some practice and even studied some other players. Until then, the whole concept of Twitch didn’t really make sense to me. Anyways the point I wanted to make is Rocket League has some mass appeal as a game to watch tournaments. However, it kind of falls a part because of how the pros play. It just looks like the game is glitching out. A layperson is just watching some weird physics without the context of how difficult some of those moves are to perform.

I think for esports to be as huge as a traditional athletic sport, you need mass appeal. Most sport fans don’t play those sports they watch. But they can appreciate the difficulty and it’s not easy to appreciate the difficulty of a video game you’ve never played.

Agreed. Starcraft in particular is fun to watch because you can see some longer term strategies at work.

Compare to CSGO or COD. I have no idea what's going on, only that one side has better mechanics than the other. I know these games have strategies / formations as well. But they're a lot less apparent to me, and engagements are so quick I can't grok what's happening.

I play SC2 and watch from time to time. I don't see how you can claim there are longer term strategies at work when the average game lasts about 6 minutes, and the first minute or two of the game are basically "filler". I think one reason SC2 is kind of boring to watch is because you get maybe 1-2 minutes of actually interesting game play, and the rest of the 4-5 minutes is just repetitive.

Each race has 8-10 viable “standard” openings and 2-3 “cheese” openings… sure, if you just watch one player who leans heavily on “skytoss” or “1-1-1 Terran” it gets repetitive, but also watching how each player responds to the increasing info about their opponents build from scouting is also interesting.

You make it seem like 8-10 openings is diverse. 8-10 openings gets very stale and repetitive for a game that only lasts about 6-8 minutes with only 1-2 minutes of actual engagement (and 4-6 minutes of setup).

I'd struggle to imagine an average game being resolved in 6-8 minutes.

Are you being serious? What is your experience or background with SC2? Do you watch it or play it?

At any rate, the average game duration for GSL is 00:07:51. You can review the statistics here:

https://liquipedia.net/starcraft2/Global_StarCraft_II_League...

Note that the statistics say 11 minutes, but that's 11 in-game minutes and since tournament games are played on "Fastest" mode with a 1.4 multiplier that translates to roughly 8 minutes.

If you want to see how actual tournament games are played, here is the most recent GSL playlist, which is considered the premier SC2 tournament:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLo2fPnM8EiQyT0kicBS5C...

Feel free to breeze through any random game of your choice, most finish within 8 minutes, a lot of them finish within 6 minutes, and on rare occasion you get games that go 15 minutes or longer.

Those statistics are from wings of liberty though (10 years ago). Looking through the playlist you sent the average length seems closer to 15 minutes.

I decided to take the very first 12 games of the playlist and averaged them out, it comes out to 9 minutes and 23 seconds. I don't have a way to automate this and don't have another source for how long modern games take, but sure, for the sake of argument we can say a game is closer to 10 minutes instead of 8 minutes. It doesn't really change anything.

Is this the average game, or ten games from the top tournament played on high speed from ten years ago? :)

Uh, that part isn't really interesting, 10 different ways to start a game is not much.

I like it for the whole back and forth between players reacting to what the other does, trying to bait them into suboptimal play etc.

Kinda same reason why I like Dota2

10 openings x3 races with some openings being hard counters to others.

Is chess boring because there’s 20 opening moves? It’s all about the mid-late game.

The average game is closer to 12 minutes.

The only evidence I can verify online, based on replay packs of DreamHack I managed to download, this link below [1], and other quantifiable sources such as discussions on the Team Liquid forums suggests that professional games are shorter than 12 minutes and about 7-9 minutes. But even for the sake of argument if you want to go with 12 minutes... 10 openers per race is incredibly small for a 12 minute game and only reinforces the point that for the average viewer, SC2 is quite repetitive.

Compare that to DOTA or LoL where the average match at the professional level is on the order of 30-45 minutes and the level of diversity in both of those games is astronomical.

[1] https://liquipedia.net/starcraft2/Global_StarCraft_II_League...

- professional SC2 games are definitely longer than 6 minutes.

- not all strategy is action oriented, scouting early to discover your opponents strategy is a thing, for example

- in professional SC2 it's also about the meta-game. It's a game of bluffs and predictions. If a strategy doesn't work out both opponents have to decide if they're going to change or not in the next game in the series. Sometimes your strategy failed because the other player used the counter-strategy. But if they keep the same strategy and you use THEIR counter-strategy, you'll win the next one.

That last point is much larger than you might expect. It's a bit like poker.

Dota2 (really most PvP games) have same information asymmetry tho ?

It even has a bit of metagaming like SC2, there you pick the opening build and in Dota your team picks/bans heroes and decides where they go on a map in early game.

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