Kreedz and Professional Gaming (eSports)
This is going to be a very long read... if you're short on time and don't feel like reading my rather lengthy prose feel free to skip to the bottom for the tl;dr.
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Electronic sports
Most of you here are probably familiar with the term 'electronic sports,' or perhaps you've heard it termed differently: digital sports (digisports), cybersports, professional gaming, competitive gaming, what have you - it's all the same.
Electronic sports is booming, there's no doubt about that - especially in recent years. Games such as our very own Counter-Strike have experienced great success in the competitive scene, and still does today. Notwithstanding, other games have experienced great success as well - big hit titles such as StarCraft and it's sequel are often dubbed the "very best" electronic sport, receiving the most attention and success and gathering a massive following in South Korea.
Kreedz is at an awkward place in eSports. It is a very different kind of game from what you'd typically expect - it's a platformer with a high learning curve and unusual gameplay aspects - which are all based off of the faults of the GoldSource engine.
Kreedz finds it's home in the game of Counter-Strike, the game that has received great success on the competitive forefront, and Kreedz also draws comparisons to a game like Quake and, to a more extreme extent, DEFRAG - all the aspects of the 'art of movement' exist within Kreedz, as they do in Quake, but to a lesser degree. Expectedly, Quake is also a game that has received great success in the electronic sports community.
Yet, Kreedz and DEFRAG; both games based purely off of the art of movement, have received little to no praise on a grand competitive scale. Both games thrive within themselves, and, despite all the right conditions, the potential for true eSport success has been left untouched.
What makes an eSport
Through my many years of observing, playing and competing in Kreedz, it's become an environment that's sort of akin to home. I feel like I belong here, where I'm in my element, and I feel as if I'm rather knowledgeable on the subject of Kreedz itself, as well as the community. Most of you probably don't know me, but that's okay - I'm sort of a Source engine nub.
So what really makes Kreedz all that different from well-established, 'true' eSports such as Counter-Strike, or StarCraft II? From what I can gather... not a lot. Let's look at the prime aspects of an eSport:
- Interest. This is absolutely the biggest one, for what's the point of a game becoming an eSport if there's no one to play, to watch?
- Competition. eSports generally have a well-established competitive nature within the game, or an existing competitive scene. This also encompasses players, rivalries, and personalities.
- Spectatorship. All eSports have one thing in common: they're fun to watch. Whether it's the action-packed brawl of a Painkiller duel; or an engaging and exciting StarCraft match, it's all an enjoyable experience to not only play, but to watch as well. Games like StarCraft have an audience climbing into the tens of thousands just watching professional players duke it out.
- Gameplay. There's a reason games like "Jeopardy! The Video Game" don't have an eSport community... eSports are generally original works of art, games that rely on action-packed, engaging gameplay that is not only fun to spectate but fun to compete in as well. Whether it's blasting your opponent's face all over the wall in Quake or outwitting your rival in WarCraft 3, it's all there.
Games that meet these criteria of being fun, watchable, and highly competitive - as well as having interest - encapsulate the electronic sports scene.
Kreedz - an eSport?
So, having gone through all that, why is Kreedz not an eSport?
Let's examine the Kreedz community in detail, matching up Kreedz with the criteria of eSports, and maybe try and figure out why it hasn't really caught onto the public eye.
- Interest - Kreedz has been in existence since 2004, and has been steadily growing and changing ever since then. To say there isn't interest in Kreedz is an outright lie.
- Competition - Kreedz has been highly successful on the competition forefront. XJ has been through countless demo releases, not only through the dedication of the administrators but through the dedication of the competitors as well. Kreedz has had it's "big names" (tarGet-, FikoN, Supa...) as well as it's "legends" (T3dbundy, brian, zhady, koukouz...) and not to mention rivalries (KeltA/koukouz, NAPZ/shNz...)
- Spectatorship - Kreedz's massive moviemaking community says it all. RotW, trickjump videos constantly being pumped out, battle videos... even an entire section dedicated to movies on XJ's new layout. People like to watch Kreedz, whether it's sick jumps or amazing runs. Live viewership for the tournaments ran at XJ is also an example of this.
In Closing...
Kreedz never really (or at least, it hasn't yet) made it "big." It has always thrived within itself and hasn't really branched out into a truly competitive scene. While I feel like Kreedz has been under fantastic management here at XJ, organizing events, as well as a great World Records list... Kreedz also has a lot of potential to be something big. To me, there's no reason Kreedz shouldn't be an eSport.
The biggest problem with Kreedz branching out, however, is probably the fact that speedrunning has never really been a part of eSports. But I feel as if, especially in the coming years, that has the chance to change. Kreedz could be the forefront of the change to the eSports community, even if now that reality is probably a bit of a stretch...
But, I digress.
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I'd like to hear the community's thoughts on this. Clearly, it's been ruminating around my head for a few hours (after quite a lengthy discussion with my friends on eSports) and I'm curious as to what XJ thinks about this. Am I crazy? Is there potential for Kreedz as an eSport? If not, why not? And if so, why? Do you agree or disagree with anything I've said? Should I probably just shut up? :P
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tl;dr - Kreedz has great potential to be an eSport (like Counter-Strike, StarCraft, Call of Duty: Black Ops, Quake...) but never really caught on, despite it's own host game being a wildly successful eSport.
02/01/2012 23:03I think kreedz have potentionals for being an eSport but i think its to "spread out" to become big in one perticular country. kz/hns i think is pretty popular here in sweden, just at my school i see several people playing at kz and hns at the school computers and if i remember this right at Dreamhack 2010 (swedish lan party for those who dont know) arranged a HNS competition. Dont know how popular it is in other countries.
But If Defrag can be a esport kreedz can be a esport
02/01/2012 23:22First of all, thanks for typing out a well-thought out constructive post. This has been on my mind ever since I started recording world records. How can such a competitive game not be associated with more tournaments and such? I feel like people didn't realize this until 2010 and it might be too late considering CS isn't as active.. why wasn't anyone pushing to make this become more of an eSport? I mean like in 2005, everyone was just playing for fun and nobody realized the potential KZ had? It boggles my mind.
Anyway, first thing would be getting cups up and running again. Also finish the current tournament and get some plans for new ones (with incentives to actually play in them - website rewards are sub-par) I don't know how many of you guys know this, but ESEA actually has a Jump Map section (http://esea.net/index.php?s=servers&d=jump) that premium members can play. I don't even know when this happened, and I'm pretty sure it's dead but it would be nice to get it active again.
Another thing that was brought to my attention was that Xsplit now enables you to stream in fullscreen and I've been thinking about streaming some KZ. We should take advantage of this considering how popular streaming has become and it can help get the word out there. There's a guy that streams speedruns of Super Mario and averages like 2000 viewers.
There was one tournament, where it was zhady vs koukouz in the grand final and I believe it had like 500 viewers on the HLTV at least and that's just the people who play KZ. That's pretty good considering how little we've advertised around? I wish HLTV.org would do like a spotlight article about KZ because I feel that would help bring together the entire CS community a tad more. How many people that play only regular CS are aware of the KZ community too?
Anyway just random thoughts I had. I just feel we need to stop being lazy especially if we're going to start this late.. We might've missed the chance.
@proppan: It must be cool to be surrounded by so many kreedz players at your school. I'm the only Kreedz player for miles around here. :( I was aware of Dreamhack but I wasn't aware of this HNS competition though...
@pizza^: We share the same sentiments my friend... here's my take on it: eSports wasn't anywhere near as big as it was in 2005, and the emphasis wasn't on professional competition. I'd say closer to 2007, 2008 maybe, is when we should've taken it further.
We should've been aware of our potential for it. But eSports wasn't the goal for XJ or Kreedz, or really anyone at that point. But, eSports really blew up last year... Major League Gaming (MLG) was massive, and for their last tournament last year they had 250,000 concurrent stream viewers, not to mention the attendance.
I don't think it's too late, but I think the interest in Kreedz overall has kind of died down recently. It doesn't help that Counter-Strike's pro scene isn't that great nowadays either, BUT, 1.6 is still the Counter-Strike game, at least in comparison to Source. Whether or not Global Offensive will change that is up in the air, but I wouldn't count on it. Kreedz still has an opportunity, in my opinion.
Also, as a sidenote, I would love to watch you stream. I used to spend a lot of time watching pro StarCraft 2 players stream and watching a KZ stream would be quite cool :D
nice speech there but it's already been tried to make it into an e-sport.... MugNMouse....lagster tried it.... xj killed it.
03/01/2012 00:18that hns competition i spoke about earlier wasnt anything big at all, just something minor for fun. Dont even know if anybody signed in or if there were to little members, just heard the one on stage mentioning it. Would have been fun to enter tho :)
I think the reason why KZ isn't an eSport is because the community/amount of players (and consequently general interest) isn't big enough. I think this is a result of KZ not being dynamic enough:
1) KZ lacks tactical and/or strategical aspects in a competitive context; all it might come down to is risk assessment.
2) The gameplay in KZ is too linear; start to end and restricted ways to go about in between.
Obviously we are a big bunch of people who like KZ a lot and love playing it, but because of the limitations above (there are probably more aswell) I don't think it will ever have a place in the public arena (including sponsorship, media attention and so on).
03/01/2012 14:17(edited 03/01/2012 14:18)This is a huge omission for sure. Well, honestly I see more hns as an eSports than the kreedz, even though I would love to make it happen in the opposite way. Anyway, hns has a good potential for an eSports since it's a team game with various ways of trickjumps, combos, space for imagination and diversity, hence it's really fun to watch. What takes kreedz, I can see it(?) on eSports only as cupgame, where players will perform everytime the same route on each map, which brings less fun neither hns itself, imo.
This way I'm not saying kreedz has a little success within all gamimng sports and it may be even bigger with, actually, good pizza's suggestion about our own livestream channel in case of decent advertisement wich will attract "untouchable" attention. This would bring us no doubt good popularity and attendance, but kreedz will not ever reach eSports level imo.
My sorry, my truth.
Well i think that hns is more like eSport than Kreedz because if you look up on how many tournaments,cups n stuff are made and compare to Kreedz,you will actually notice that the audience wants more teamplay so that makes hns more eSports than Kreedz.Kreedz can actually make some progress on the teamplay side with doing some 3man or 5man actions on regular kreedz maps(that allow to)so we can watch some epic bhops,climbs and boosts for sure it will make the hns players more oriented about kreedz i think.So that's my point of view.
I have to say i disagree. An eSport is not about the mechanics of the game and the fun or enjoyment of the players, but rather the enjoyment of the watchers.
The game must be enjoyable while being a spectator and hard/complicated as a pro gamer.
I agree, hns could get at this level, mostly because it's quite alike with quake live, which has quite a success nowadays. Of course, the strafing system, the lj system, the team tricks make it different, while the quake speed makes it unique.
Kreedz, on the other hand, is about not making mistakes. It's a much harder, much more perfectionist game, which can be stressful both as player and as watcher.
Another example i'm thinking of is Starcraft 2. Big tournaments get over 60k online viewers, not just because it's a game made by Blizzard, a huge online gaming company, but because it's viewer enjoyable, the casters make it more entertaining.
In the end, no eSport would be so successful if it wasn't for viewers. Viewers bring sponsors, and sponsor keep the teams and pro gamers alive.
07/01/2012 22:52Most of you weren't active at that time, but TheBiShOp* and I succeeded in convincing ESL to launch a kz ladder in 2006, with a close system from the 5vs5 regular CS one, except that we were only doing 1vs1.
It unfortunately failed since the ladder was not active enough, with a huge lack of dynamism but more importantly, a lack of participants.
KZ has always had a huge potential, but in my honest opinion, it's too late: CS 1.6 is dying.
About MugNmouse, there's no need to keep on debating about this, I think we've had enough flame wars, and I know what I'm talking about since I was part of mNm and XJ at that time.
All I can say is that XJ, I agree, did not support mNm, but the failure mainly came from the head-staff of mNm, and lagster couldn't do much about that.
The guys were not giving a fuck about the KZ team, the only thing they did was writting a newspost on their website as an annoucement of the creation of the KZ team, just in order to attract more visitors, and then that's it.
Good and intresting thread! I think the main reason because KZ doesn't become a real eSport is that there's no teamplay. Unlike in regular shooting matches kreedzers jump for themselves. The best you could do is a 1on1 battle, but that's pretty boring in the virtual gaming world.
ndR, you should mention that the ladder was .fr only, maybe there would've been more players if it were .eu :(
but now its too late ofc, let's wait for kzmod and his sucess in the esl..
08/01/2012 01:43Yup you're right I forgot to mention this point, the fact was that ESL had a head-staff for every country, and being french, we were closer to the french staff :-)
I do not support hns in any way but it deserves to be an eSport, its way more entertaining.
For ppl who remember, i tried to talk on it (the eSports related thing) in as early as 2010 and also jot down some points in the-then totw of the weekly edition, if some1 had missed it, they can read it right here
http://xtreme-jumps.eu/news.php?extend.1317
[blockquote]ndR wrote...
KZ has always had a huge potential, but in my honest opinion, it's too late: CS 1.6 is dying.[/blockquote]
I am not disheartening you people, but Yohan is right on this.
Cs 1.6 is dying.
[blockquote]Kangaroo wrote...
To say there isn't interest in Kreedz is an outright lie.[/blockquote]
Whatever you say, is right.
But, within the community.
Thats the problem.
Kz didnt find any global takers in all these 7 years, and it is painful for me to say that kz didnt have any major incoming mass acceptance in the major competitive scenario. If we have been a little more observant, it's not hard to realize that it's the same no of constant people everywhere, its just that no of communities are increasing, but it's the same people who are doing the works in all those communities.
New bloods aren't coming in.
[blockquote]Kangaroo wrote...
Kreedz's massive moviemaking community says it all.[/blockquote]
If there's one department where we can give a tough competition to the other global gaming scenes is the moviemaking department. It has become highly developed, no wait, its over-developed. Even mainstream cs hasn't has so much fresh skills in the moviemaking genre, and that's a fact.
[blockquote]Kangaroo wrote...
Kreedz never really (or at least, it hasn't yet) made it "big." It has always thrived within itself and hasn't really branched out into a truly competitive scene.
Kraeft wrote..
KZ lacks tactical and/or strategical aspects in a competitive context; all it might come down to is risk assessment.
ndR wrote...
...with a close system from the 5vs5 regular CS one, except that we were only doing 1vs1.[/blockquote]
The reason why kreedz never made it to the mainstream scenario is pretty much conclusive from the three convergent points as said from the above three players.
Consider a practical situation.
---case 1-----
2 guys are talking, 1 is familiar to kz, 1 is unknown
situation : stream, wr attempt, single play
1: what are they doing?
2: its a stream, he's trying to beat the present wr.
1: whats that?
2: ah well, you have to beat the best timing on this map
1: how do i know that?
2: well you have to go a site called xtreme-jumps.eu, and theer u can know abt the latest world timing.
1: bleh, lets go play crysis.
---case 2----
2 guys are talking, 1 is familiar to kz, 1 is unknown
situation : stream, clan/2-man/any, team play
1: what are they doing?
2: its a stream, they're trying to beat each other in an attempt to make the best time. theyre a team of 2, and they have to play a 2 man map or something
1: well i dont know whats that but it sounds cool
2: why dont u try visiting xtreme-jumps.eu and you can find more details?
1: maybe i'll. thanks.
whats my point?
pretty simple.
maximum of the new things to get accepted by the public always depends on the
1) prior knowledge necessary
(accept it or not, a complete 3rd foreign party who has never known/seen kz, dont know what a wr is, would instantly get ousted by it. i am not bluffing, it happened with my friends. they were like, why should the f we try to beat the time? dont you people have any team game or something? i dont know what the f should i answer them then)
2) direct implementation
a team, clan play always gets much more highlighted, famous than single player modes (ya i know now you would give me nfs or fifa examples, but let's just talk about cs).
the main point why kz cant branch out, it will if it starts some multiplayer thing. a single player mode would only give u a zonal success, but to go out global, we gotta think in terms of team play.
make 2man maps, form the idea of kz clans, then it could flourish.
3) amount of practice/skill level involved
lets just accept it, kz gets tough. if you are in teh scenario, its good, if you take a break for an year or so, it becomes almost impossible to come back. consider on the other hand, you can still leave shooting, and can still get back.
[blockquote]proppan wrote..
I think kreedz have potentionals for being an eSport but i think it has to "spread out" to become big in one perticular country. kz/hns i think is pretty popular here in sweden... Dont know how popular it is in other countries.[/blockquote]
You've hit the bulls' eye, sir.
cs has pretty much brunched out, hell I am wrong, its almost gettin over now.
kz, on the other hand, is pretty much popular over .eu, on your side of the world. Here on the asian counterparts i dont think there's any serious involvement. Yes, I know ndR would step in now and say yes china has a bigger community than xj, ya but it has to spread out evenly, tbh it sucks here in asia.
[blockquote]pizza^ wrote...
There was one tournament, where it was zhady vs koukouz in the grand final and I believe it had like 500 viewers on the HLTV at least and that's just the people who play KZ.[/blockquote]
You're absolutely right pizza^, that was the best time ever in xj, its sad those times are never gonna come back :(
These days I dont recognize half of the recorders, don't know even half of the new maps, don't even know what movies are releasing, I dont even download the wr demos.
No zhady/heL/chrizZo<3/mjuuh/kkz/brian, kz might be super talented now, but its dead for me anyway. I dont find interest anymore.
[blockquote]Z0ck3rOO7 wrote...
but now its too late ofc, let's wait for kzmod and his sucess in the esl..[/blockquote]
I am sorry zocker, but think abt it, if it had been only abt gfx, lots of games would have been popular by now. Kzmod i dont know, how many ppl even knows abt it.
I am pretty sure all of us are pretty much hard ardents of cs, that's why we all are here. Now you think, how many games have you installed, played and completely run it and finished it? I dont know abt you, I just cant finish any game, I get bored. They are all just heavy on gfx, but lacks the gameplay. cs has been all thriving all these years, because of the gameplay and the competitive strategic environment and thinking. Hadn't it been for this, it would have been gone non-existent years ago.
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Anyway, big congratulation to akkord, pizza^, jusuuh, kangaroo.
May you succeed, and may our children see a kz competition in the esl in the future years :D
In my opinion, one of the biggest problems making KZ a part of eSports is that if a newcomer wants to get known or something related, there is barely a chance for him to get his name in 'The Hall Of Fame' due to the high standarts.
Originally posted by nobody^In my opinion, one of the biggest problems making KZ a part of eSports is that if a newcomer wants to get known or something related, there is barely a chance for him to get his name in 'The Hall Of Fame' due to the high standarts.
What do you expect ? its the freacking "Hall of Fame" .. ofc it will have high standards .. if you want to enter it .. you gotta practice hard .. not everyone can be part of it.
Anywayz nice initiative ..
Originally posted by unBreakSOriginally posted by nobody^In my opinion, one of the biggest problems making KZ a part of eSports is that if a newcomer wants to get known or something related, there is barely a chance for him to get his name in 'The Hall Of Fame' due to the high standarts.
What do you expect ? its the freacking "Hall of Fame" .. ofc it will have high standards .. if you want to enter it .. you gotta practice hard .. not everyone can be part of it.
Anywayz nice initiative ..
Yep man, I understand that perfectly. But that wasn't my point. I meant that there should be a chance for the newcomers because if they do not get any 'attention' they could easily quit.
27/01/2012 00:43(edited 27/01/2012 00:50)Nobody, thats how every competitive game works. Nobody leaves you a chance to make it easier for you, yet the entire skill always grows up and the later you enter the game, the harder your experience to the top is. Especially when we're talking about games with near-clear limits (physic-wise). Easy as that. And I don't see why somebody would stop play just because of being not able to become famous, as long as he likes playing it.
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