alt Hacker NewsSerious competition as a fulfilling grassroots activity? Sure it existed before Riot.
Artificially propped-up unsustainable "professionalization" whose eventual conclusion is to enforce spyware on casual participants? That's Riot's gift to the world.
Replies
vel0city • today at 7:01 PM
I remember watching Counterstrike tournaments in CPL in the early 2000s and Intel Extreme Masters in 2007.
LoL (Riot's first big "esport" game) didn't really start having large tournaments until 2011. LoL didn't even come out until a few years after ESL started hosting regular professionalized Counter Strike tournaments.
Kernel spyware is at least 2 decades old, and manual scrutiny of casual participants is as old as networked competitive gaming and cheating themselves (id games had that from the start!). It has nothing to do with money. Moreover, people are paying north of $1k/mo to cheat in video games.