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Comment by soneca | Hacker News Reader

I am with you in I am happy too with eSports becoming more mainstream. But I disagree with your perception of "sport thugs" and "purely physical abilities".

Traditional sport stars are looked upon because of their skills, not 'pure physical abilities'. See the recent "one hand catch" on american football. Messi on soccer, NBA best plays of the week. Physical abilities are more of a necessity on pro traditional sports rather than the reason the stars are admired.

At the same time, eSports are not totally "intellectually based". FPS, in my point of view, has the same proportion of skills and strategy as any traditional sports. Games like League of Legends have indeed more strategy involved, but still demand skills. No eSports is like chess or traditional card games, and I guess that is why their are such an interesting show.

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>No eSports is like chess or traditional card games

Hearthstone is an obvious counter point to this.

http://us.battle.net/hearthstone/en/blog/13665270

This tournament is created by blizzard which has an obvious incentive but there are plenty of other large hearthstone tournaments with healthy audiences.

The skills in Hearthstone are in place in form of powerfull and rare cards. It is not like adversaries using the same cards as in poker. Site, different presentation than skills, but the same role

A lot of competitive games have uneven playfields. For example, in League of Legends, you have to play a gimpy fake version of your hero forever to unlock the real version.

In practice the high level players who you see on tournaments on Twitch are all playing with all cards (or max level heroes) available. In Magic: The Gathering this costs $xx,xxx (for modern) or $x,xxx (for standard). In League of Legends, this costs an unskippable grind, but you can pay to make the grind shorter. In Hearthstone, this costs about $800.

Notably, some competitive games do not have this property. In DotA, you can play every hero at full power without paying money or doing a forced grind. In Ultra Street Fighter 4, you can play every character at full power after buying the game for $40 or something.

Edit: anyway, the original comment was about "purely intellectual" esports. I think this means "0 execution" esports? Like, turn-based games where whenever you try to do something, you succeed in doing it, or at least succeed with a known probability instead of a probability based on a test of dexterity. So Hearthstone is definitely that, and "but Hearthstone has cards with rarities" is a red herring.

Your statement about League is not a hundred percent correct. There are no "gimpy fake versions" of heroes and IMHO the initial grind is actually necessary due to the steep learning curve. Yes, you can pay to make the grind shorter, but there's no reason to do so.

Playing a hero with the wrong runes, masteries, and summoner spells (because the game won't let you pick the right ones) is playing a gimpy fake version of the hero. Similarly, if you had to play Street Fighter 3: Third Strike Chun-Li with Super Art 1 while levelling up your summoner to unlock Super Art 2, you would be playing a gimpy fake version of the character.

Why do we expect that playing a fake version of the hero against other fake heroes is better training for playing the real game than just playing the real game? What if the player picks up habits that are only good when the opponent cannot use the correct runes, spells, and masteries? In our Street Fighter example, people could learn to do things that Chun could punish with SA2 but not with SA1, and they would get away with them until their summoners reached the max level.

What if the player is an experienced LoL player who moved to a different continent, or a genre savvy player, or a LoL player whose previous account was banned? These players can't really benefit from the forced grind, even if it has any benefits.

Fighting games are pretty intellectually based; a huge amount of the strategy in them involves being able to 'read' your opponent and predict in a meaningful way what they're going to do, while they're trying to predict exactly the same thing about you. Whoever reads their opponent better is likely to win the match.

>Whoever reads their opponent better is likely to win the match.

After taking into account character matchups and mechanical skill and consistency. It's a fine balance.

The same level of intellectual challenge like every traditional sport.

Exactly. The above comment could be just as easily applied to a penalty shootout in soccer.

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