Previously male-only Hearthstone competition now open to all genders | Hacker News Reader

Previously male-only Hearthstone competition now open to all genders

polygon.com

11 pointssampo9 comments

"the segregation was in accordance with IeSF tournament regulations and was to 'avoid possible conflicts (e.g. a female player eliminating a male player during RO8 [round of eight]) among other things.'"

What makes that a 'possible conflict'?

The previous IeSF regulations had separate male and female tournaments, and there wasn't a female one for Hearthstone, so allowing a women to knock a man out when she couldn't go forward herself made no sense.

Fixing it by allowing women to go forward was what made the most sense.

Hmm, and do you know what was the reasoning behind the original rule that said women couldn't go forward?

Well, before IeSF changed their rules yesterday (under massive social media feedback + comments from Blizzard), there was no world championship for women in Hearthstone; it was male-only.

So even if the local organizers in Finland would have rebelled (which they did not), and allowed women to participate in the national event (which would have been against the IeSF rules), they probably could not have sent the national champion – in case she was female – to the international championship games.

So the local organizers decided to follow the IeSF rules and not allow female participants. But something like this stands out in Europe, so there was something of a media storm, and everything turned out nicely: IeSF decided to update their rules.

Makes sense to me. There's nothing intrinsically making either gender better at computer games.

It's not like running the 100m or a marathon, where women aren't capable of competing, so there's no reason to keep them segregated.

Also - it's fascinating how fast changes happen nowadays. A bunch of people point out how stupid something is and it changes within days.

Wait instead of men's and women's, it's now women+men and women-men? How is that equal?

Systems like this are pretty common in programs where one gender greatly outnumbers the other (such as eSports). At my university, which is mostly (75%) men, broomball is a popular sport among students. Within our broomball organization, there was a main league (for men or women) and a women's only league. The main purpose of the women's league was to get them involved in a male-dominated sport in a way that makes them feel more comfortable.

In the case of Hearthstone, the main tournaments are primarily men anyway. So having the women's league in addition to the mixed league will help women get involved in the activity. As the gender gap gets closer to 50-50, the need for the women's league decline and they could consider switching to a mixed only league.

It isn't intended to be equal. Women are very under-represented in eSports compared to the gaming population at large and they're attempting to change that. Once the level of eSports participation matches gaming in general perhaps they'll do away with it.

From TFA:

"The IeSF Board addressed its reason for maintaining events for women, citing the importance of providing female gamers with ample opportunities to compete in e-Sports-currently a male-dominated industry, [..] Female gamers make up half of the world's gaming population, but only a small percentage of e-Sports competitors are women. The IeSF's female-only competitions aim to bring more diversity to competitive play by improving the representation of women at these events. Without efforts to improve representation, e-Sports can't achieve true gender equality."

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