99

So, conclusions:

my clique of nerds can beat up your clique of nerds.

the guilty gear community’s spokesperson is an anime pillow.

eSports = Starcraft

SNK couldn’t have made a good game! I played a neo geo once in 1997!

oldschool_BR is a militant hipster

100

What do you care about that guy though, you like the games don’t you?

You did this with Arcana too, you started running around like a chicken with its head cut off in fear that someone might see you enjoying the game. You know, in public?

I mean I’ve been part of the MvC2, CvS2, GG, MB, 3S, and other communities for a little over a decade and each game had its share of weird ass mother fuckers. I just never gave a damn about them. They were there to play and so was I, and that’s the extent of the relationship. So the guy who comes dressed up as Bridget to a GG tournament is nothing more then another obstacle between me and getting first.

After ten years I still don’t understand the internal conflict this community goes through.

:looney:

101

fixed
though iirc it was a melty blood player who did that (from what DD said in a previous post where he told this same story)

102

sigh

man are serious?, you seem like an old geezer that refuses change. I was to counter argue your…wall of text 'cause is not even an argument but I think I’ll save some space in this thread instead.

103

Well, its like soccer hooligans and other such sports fans. Except we dont have team rivalries so we have to resort to game fandom for our tribalism.

104

What other decent fighting game is not overly japanese

105

I guess VF is not particularly japanese? Its aesthetic was established before everything in japan went anime.

106

Hey, I will say I liked the aesthetic of Melty Blood too. People can call me a weaboo all they want.

I gotta say tho, its Dudleys package that really won me over with 3s

107

It’s not an argument, it’s a decent expression of his firmly held and justified opinion. While I don’t agree with it, it deserves respect.

108

Hmm, whilst discussing this issue in another forum, a thought came to me.

When you think about the audience for a particular event, consider ratio of players (people watching who personally play the game) versus spectators (people watching who dont play the game.)

I was talking about the $1 mil DOTA2 tournament at gamescom. I dont know much about DOTA and I found the matches to be immensely boring to watch. Someone else said that they quite enjoyed it, because they were players and fans of DOTA and could appreciate what was going on.

If you think about the player:spectator ratio for any esport or videogame, its pretty dominated by players. Pure spectators are fairly rare. (maybe except for korean Starcraft? But that’s a total aberration imo.)

Whereas if you look at the player : spectator ratio for most sports, people who are fans, enjoy spectating, but dont actually play or know that much about the sport outnumber audience members who actually play by a huge margin.

That’s a key sign of the difference between something that’s niche and something that’s mainstream.

I think spectator friendliness is something the video game world (devs, publishers, promoters, and fans) haven’t quite figured out yet. We know roughly what makes a game fun, competitively deep, graphically attractive etc. But we dont really know or care about making games fun, accessible and interesting for outsiders to spectate.

(then again, I wonder if the creators of Basketball or NASCAR had to worry about how to make things spectator friendly? Maybe “real life” has a natural advantage in that area, that games have to work hard to keep up?)

Of course, its valid to argue that we already hate the influx of SF4 casuals, weeaboo anime game fans, etc. It would be even more horrifying to add an even larger group of nongamers into FG fandom. It’s that old purity vs. popularity thing again.
(disclaimer: I am actually a casual and an anime fan, so I use those derogative terms to describe the opinions I find here, rather than my own views :wink: )

So why should we care about popularity, anyways? Unfortunately, like it or not, the competitive gaming experience benefits from larger communities. No matter how much I like Supreme Commander and think its a fundamentally better game (if only it had the profits to properly patch and balance) than Starcraft 2, nevertheless, playing matches with the same 20 or so guys year after year pales in comparison to participating in SC2’s multileague ladder system.

Certain things like ranked ladders, large tournaments, etc simply cant work unless the game is sufficiently popular.
FGs are popular enough for small local tournaments and one-off big ones like EVO, but compare EVO to SBO or even your local amateur basketball leagues, and you’ll see the difference player population makes in terms of what kinds of competitive structures you can organise.

109

uh I dunno where you’ve been but sf is already spectator driven

110

Sports are never a fair comparison because they (as an American anyway) are shoved down our throat since birth. Our schools promote sports and reward athletes. We are taught to look up to athletes. Going to the games with peers provides a generally fun atmosphere (friends, new people, cheerleaders). Its to a point where everyone has a basic grasp of some aspect of sports, even if they don’t fully understand the game itself. Anything that ingrained in culture will be popular. SF is already heavily spectator driven. I would venture to guess the majority of steam monsters rarely to only casually play themselves, or maybe just tune into streams due something like nostalgia. Look at the number of people who watched the EVO stream, then look at the average tournament turnout. Theres a disconnect somewhere in there. Theres already so much talk of how EVO looks like a convention now, drawing all kinds of spectators and people who aren’t really there to just compete.

111

I’m an Australian, not an American, so I can’t say how it is over there, but here, in my own primary school, I remember the principal telling us one day how the school would prefer us to better at athletics than school work.

But on the Evo stream vs tournament entry thing, you have to remember that a lot of people from outside America simply can’t afford to go. Using myself as an example again, it would cost me about $2500 on flights alone, and being a poor uni student who has noodles for lunch every day, that’s just a bit out of my price range. I imagine its like that for a lot of people across Europe, Australia and Asia, so that at least somewhat accounts for some of the stream monsters. (I am scrounging every penny I can so I can attempt to go next year, though :D)

112

My assumption is that the majority of SF4 stream viewers are currently playing the game, to a greater degree than the average NBA or Tennis watcher, plays their sport. (ie. probably not at all.) Your “threshold” seems a bit higher - you only count competitive players.

Your post follows on from my earlier post - a large part of SF’s popularity comes from how so many people grew up with it. To a greater extent than almost any other videogame, SF has been ingrained in culture. (at least the 25-35 year old male semi-nerd one :wink:

113

Wow, who cares? I don’t care about MLG and whatever. I play games because they’re fun. I don’t look for others opinions or follow a scene. If I like it, I like it. I can find people to play it with.

Most people that watch SF streams are SF players. A lot of them simply tune in to learn. Jeeze, what happened to the fun?

114

Good shit on the whole post. I think the FG community is doing fine all over the globe (here in europe, it’s slowly evolving), without the need to turn to some corporate bullshit to help us get through. We have the outstanding support of the game companies themselves (With Ono and Harada flying out to the events, etc, etc)

115

cant we all just get along :confused:

116

Well I’d say your right, they probably are more actively involved…currently. Regardless, it doesn’t seem to matter if a guy shot hoops 10 minutes before the NBA game came on, or the last time he touched a ball was 10 years ago in gym class. The fact is, he did it at one point, likes it (or was conditioned to like it), and continues to support it. Casual players are much the same, whether playing or not. They don’t impact the meta, they don’t discover things, they don’t contribute strategy, you’d be lucky if they come out to support a local scene, and probably will have waning interest. They are as much as a player as a random kid shooting hoops on a saturday afternoon is a basketball player, thats why I consider them more spectator than player.

If you had no idea what football was, at all, and you watched people play it, you’d have no clue whats happening except theres a ball and people going to opposite ends. Sports are only spectator friendly because we learn so much about them. I don’t play StarCraft II but I enjoy watching it, because I understand whats happening. All thats needed is more exposure to fundamentals and basic gameplay mechanics for the spectator market to grow.

tl;dr - Casual players more or less are spectators in the long run.

117

It is tough to compare it to sports for some reasons that have already been brought up. I’d argue that a large percent of fans of a given sport (with the possibly exception of the NFL) at least played the sport at a recreational level at some point in their lives. Most soccer fans played soccer in high school or even in elementary school before moving on. People tend to move on from playing sports due to the body slowing down, the lack of a meaningful competitive arena in adulthood aside from the pro leagues, and time constraints. The thing is, competitive fighting games haven’t been around long enough to develop many of these kinds of fans, especially considering if people stopped playing any time before the last year or two, there was nothing to spectate after they stopped playing seriously. plus as someone said, sports are forced upon us from birth.

118

sounds like a Texan.

Seriously, sponsors will be the death of games. As more and more spectators are drawn into the scene, the stupider games will get.

I personally don’t care. i don’t plan on being a top player ever, to much of my time better spent elsewhere. This issue is better left to those who get sponsored.