
League of Legends quickly gaining on traditional sports in American popularity - wallflower
https://www.espn.com/esports/story/_/id/28319463/league-legends-quickly-gaining-traditional-sports-american-popularity
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annnoo
As a guy in the mid twenties League of Legend was a big part of my teenage
years. My friends and I played a lot and even watched some matches live. A few
classmates were pretty good in the game (around Top 1000ish on the european
ladder), but no one of them really tried to play it in a team on a more
competetive level. Back then we had a lot of fun playing smaller Fun-
Tournaments in which we participated together with hundreds of other teams,
much of them way better then we were at the point.. but we had a lot of fun
and we have some great memories.

Now one of my mates switched from LoL to CS:GO and plays on a semi-
professional level (national league). We try to watch every game via Twitch.tv
together while talking via Teamspeak. We are not playing that much anymore,
but because we grew up with these games and still know the rules watching
E-Sports feels natural and we are more connected to it than to regular sport.

Another cool fact is that we all know the game and sometimes come together to
play one or two rounds of League of Legends together. It is the game everyone
at my age played.

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LatteLazy
I'm not into watching sports "e-" or otherwise. That said, it's worth
remembering that the gaming industry is (way) bigger than music and films
combined. Why wouldn't e-sports eventually be bigger than... "p-sports" (p for
physical)

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MLpractitioner
The fact that people like playing video games does not have to necessarily
imply that they also like watching other people playing video games.

On the other hand it is also not clear what is the audience of people who
don't play games but still watch esports (like me).

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rasvj
I've always wondered why someone may like to watch people playing videogames
when you can play said videogames yourself.

It's not like the case of football, where you need friends and you need to go
out to play. Thanks to matchmaking systems in games, you don't even need
friends to play. You just click a button.

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csydas
>It's not like the case of football, where you need friends and you need to go
out to play

In fact this is part of the problem. the Dota-like/MOBA genre indeed has
decent match making for the major games, but having a team you know, are
communicative with and have a long/deep experience with one-another's
playstyles helps immensely. I only really played League, so I can speak mostly
towards that, but it's a different game queuing with friends than it is
queuing with randoms. A lot of the excess communication required for a smooth
match is removed when you have established a "sense" of how your teammates
will react to situations, and it changes your judgement a lot when you no
longer have as many random variables to consider during team fights, ganks,
etc.

Watching pros play does a few things as well; you see not just good
strategies, but mathematically sound and consistent strategies, which make the
times you do play much more fun since a lot of your guesswork is removed. Pros
also tend to have the skill for higher performance, and you get a chance to
see pretty unique situations and plays that just never happen in ranked/normal
queues. Plus, the pros have a huge audience typically, and you respond with
the audience; being excited about an awesome play is amplified when you and
thousands of other fans are collectively "losing your shit" over a play.

So yeah, you can go solo in such games, but the experience is always better
with a team of people you know and can trust, and you end up in the same
situation as football where you need to find others.

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bovermyer
I don't really watch sports in general. However, every so often I'll watch an
NFL game or an OWL game with friends. In both cases, it's a fun social event,
and its own particular type of entertainment. Nothing feels quite the same.

