 What's up everybody I'm the Mangus, you are awesome and today we're going to be talking about esports in the para-zombies, turns out that it's one hell of a hot button issue. Bottom line up front, I think esports are fine as long as it's something that organically grows from the community, however there are several problems that can arise if developers involve themselves in growing the scene. What problems you may ask? Well I'm going to delve a little deeper today into what I think they may be. As always, if you enjoyed the content please leave a like and subscribe for more if you want to, if you disagree with any of my opinions feel free to let me know in the comments you may even be able to change my mind. Now let's get into it. As we all know our already small community has more cracks than a titty bar in Atlanta and tailoring the game to suit a budding esports scene will split those small portions even further. I don't want to sound like I'm picking one over prime here, but they have already implemented a draft lobby and it seems that the purpose behind that was for the tournaments that they have had, or planned to hold. When you already have a very small population playing the game and introduce a draft mode even if it's unranked you're going to have some people that want to play draft and others who do not. I've already seen people complain that it's difficult for them to find a match and if you have half the players trying to go draft and the other half not then you're going to have an even harder time. All of these games are in their infancy, not only are there not enough playable heroes for a draft mode to make sense, there aren't enough players. With the way over prime is set up it was already perfect for accommodating player-driven tournaments. People can create their own band system if need be, there isn't a reason to introduce draft functionality into the game at this point in time. The next point is that it's a waste of resources. Esports can be invaluable for casting a spotlight on a game and creating some awareness, but let the community set that stuff up, don't waste time, effort, or money on it. If you instead use those assets to create a great game, an esports scene will naturally develop around it. At this point in time we don't even know how many people are interested, just because an enthusiastic few are clamoring for competitive play doesn't mean that the majority wants it. It's going to look like a failure if a developer injects effort into an esport that no one watches. A fine example of this was Blizzard with Heroes of the Storm. They pumped so much money into trying to create a pro scene for a very casual game and it didn't work. What's worse is that when they pulled the backing, they not only left several casters jobless, but they destroyed any remaining confidence anyone had in the game. Hotz is actually still going strong and is updated now more than ever, however when Blizzard pulled the plug on esports it sent a message to the gaming world that that message was, Hotz is dead. There are currently fan driven pro tournaments for that game that may possibly bring it back to where it once was, but the moon may prove too deep. These pair of zombie developers need to learn from that and let the tournaments develop organically instead of trying to force it. Finally and this one will probably be the most controversial is that attempting to balance the game for professional play runs the risk of alienating the majority of your player base. I agree that top down balance is the way to go. People will learn and get better, but you can't put all of your focus into pleasing the top 1% of your player base. If you design your game around competitive play, that's what's going to happen. I'll use Chimera as an example. He was a terror for silver elo players to deal with, however once you got the high gold or plat, you rarely saw him picked. And if he was picked, it was by someone who 100% knew what they were doing with him. Not some dude that picked him up at random pressed W and left click and just straight shit on teams that didn't know how to use crowd control. If Epic would have attempted to balance Chimera in a way that made him viable for top players, he would have been even more of an absolute monster at the low elos. Every game would have been decided by who had the better Chi. Nobody wants that. Except Chimera mains probably. The developers need to keep the majority of the community in mind when creating their game. Some of us have jobs and bills and shit. I don't have time to learn the game to the point that I could play professionally. The top 1% of players is an important demographic, but not as important as the other 99. Another example was the honest hero of reviews I used to do. Master players didn't get those. They didn't get those because they address problems that only us poor solo queue schmucks dealt with. When I did those videos, I was channeling the frustrations of the community majority into spirit bombs that I threw at Epic. The games are going to be played the most by regular people, not pro gamers and 5 stacks. Most people experience the game in a completely different way that a professional player does. There is no need, especially at this point in time, to balance the games around professional play. I already see some things about a lot of these games that I don't particularly like. Showing elo for an alpha state game is one that I've harped on a bit and I think it ties in here. The developers need to decide between crafting a paragon successor that most of us can enjoy or creating a platform for people to launch their streaming careers from. If everyone is focused on playing like a pro or worried about how a loss will affect their ranking, then who is going to actually test the game for bugs? Who is going to make silly builds and find out that something got overlooked and some random item insta kills people? The developers focusing on esports is unnecessary and possibly detrimental. However, if fans of the game want to start their own scene, well that's just indicative of a job well done. Let the players dictate interest and professional play and the esports will develop all on their own. That's all I have to say on this topic for now, this is the mangu signing off, you guys have a good one.