Wednesday, March 19, 2008

Drafting in Professional Gaming

Looking over the article on the CGS earlier I noticed something rather amusing.

http://dallasvenom.thecgs.com/2008_Draft_Evaluations_The_Introductions

The CGS has instituted a draft like in most professional sports. While maybe not shocking, this seems to have some unusual backlash to it. Specifically, the Counterstrike players seem to be angry that the draft picks are based on individuals and not teams. This means that teams are getting split up in the name of the draft pick. The teams, of course, are arguing that this destroys the team dynamic for what is a team sport. Certainly, the idea of drafting one's former hated rival onto your team raises a few eyebrows.

http://thecgs.com/index.php?s=forums&d=topic&id=53931

This does actually make sense for single-player games played in rounds. Team dynamic doesn't exactly matter heavily in games like Forza 2 or single-player WoW PvP. Sponsored teams should pick only the best players in these categories. However, the Counterstrike one seems almost like a situation where someone tried to tie professional gaming into regular professional games. It seems like these analogies just don't work. 

Either way, does being a "Professional" league give you the right to break up teams? Does this lead the way to showmanship and singular stars rather than well-balanced teams? Is this what's different from the CPL that's keeping them alive? Do people find drafts to be more professional or interesting?


4 comments:

Brian Smith said...

Also, I realized that this was brought up last week. Sorry. The comment on the CS community still stands though.

kpenn said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
kpenn said...

On many team games you work together for a team victory not to be the number one player on the game. Many people only can perform at that high level when they have a strong team supporting them. Splitting them up will limit all of their abilities.

"kill -9" said...

The CGS is kind of cool in some respects, but locking in gamers to a contract and disallowing them to compete in other events is more of the problem to competitive e-sports. Teams these days are very fragmented to begin with, so I really don't know how significant the impact of splitting them up really is ... many stay together for mere months and cycle out players frantically.