Isys E-Sports: CS:GO and the history of Counter-Strike's involvement in E-Sports by Hamid

A little bit about the History of Counter-Strike:Global Offensive (CS:GO):

Counter-Strike:Global Offensive (CS:GO) is the fifth game from the Counter-Strike (CS) series which is developed by Valve Corporations. The game is a First Person Shooter (FPS) and has seen great light in the competitive E-Sports scene. CS:GO was released in 2012 and is the latest CS game to date. 
However, before the release of CS:GO, the Counter-Strike franchise had already sold over 25 million units (estimated in 2011), and the first release of the game had already taken over the competitive FPS scene of E-Sports by 2004.
As you can now imagine, it didn't take a long time before CS:GO came around to be considered as one of the most successful FPS in the E-Sports competitive global community. The game was very well anticipated since the Beta release, and has grown into what looks like a very promising future for FPS gaming in E-Sports. 
The success of CS:GO was almost a given; it was just a continuation of the fairy-tail success story of the Counter-Strike franchise. 

From Counter-Strike, to Counter-Strike:Source, to CS:GO; a series of screenshots portraying the backbones of what CS looks like today and how it compares to earlier versions:

How it all came about:

It all started back in 1999, when Counter-Strike was released as a modified version of Half-Life. The game received highly positive reviews ranging from The New York Times reporting that E-Sports Entertainment ESEA League started with the first professional fantasy E-Sports league in 2004 with the game Counter-Strike. 
Some reporters credit the move to professional competitive team play with prizes as a major factor in Counter-Strike's longevity and success. 
The success continued onto Valve's sequels to the game, CS:Condition zero and CS:Source which were both released in 2004 respectively. The competitive CS scene in the global community has been running strong from 2004 'til today, and is one of, if not the most successful FPS games series for E-Sports and competitive play specially.

In the next blog, I will be talking a little bit about the game-play in CS:GO, along with some information about the leagues, tournaments, teams and players which the anticipating CS player should know about. With this idea, I am aiming to give you a grasp of the skill level and competitiveness of CS:GO and how it has helped build E-Sports over the years.

League of Legends and eSports - 22/4/14 - Sam

League of Legends, in my biased opinion, would have to be the definitive eSport heading into this current decades rounds of competition.

(For information on how the game is played, League of Legends follows close-to the exact formula as Dota, so one can look to Sean's previous blog post for information.)

Simply put, they are carrying on from two successful competitive seasons of 2012 and 2013 on their shoulders, both with their own narratives and internal conflicts, all meshed together in one deeply strategic, yet simple on the surface, video game.
Who could forget the deep rivalry between the KT Bullets and SK Telecom T1 as the new blood in Korea, or how hard Team SoloMid tried to defend their hold on the North American scene against the rising Cloud 9 in the LCS?

Coming into the 2014 Season, shakeups have already been seen. The so called best team in the world was almost universally known to be SK Telecom, who had won both the summer season of OnGameNet champions, and the Season 3 World Championship. However, after going on an unprecedented 18 game win streak during the winter season, they proceeded to crash and burn in the spring season, being almost knocked out in the group stages, before being properly knocked out in the first rounds of the bracket. In America, top performing team Vulcun fell from a regular 3rd place to the last place. New teams such as Edward Gaming in China, Roccat in Europe and Najin Shield in Korea are going to make this season all the more interesting to watch for both first time viewers, and those who have been watching since the inception of League of Legends professional competitive circuit.

The global competitive circuit has five regions, each with their own competitive regional tournaments:
Korea: OnGameNet Champions, NiceGameTV LoL Battle
Europe: Riot EU League of Legends Championship Series, Riot EU Challenger Series
North America: Riot NA League of Legends Championship Series, Riot NA Challenger Series
China: Tencent League of Legends Proleague
South East Asia: Garena Premier League 

Each region eventually fields 2 to 3 teams based on regional success to feed into the World Championship at the end of the year, where the winner is crowned world champions and granted $1,000,000 in winnings.

Next week I will discuss the fundamentals of League of Legends and how they are applied, but for now I'll leave you with a game from the American Circuit of League of Legends, the NA LCS.

                                          

~~Sam

Isys Esports - Dota 2 - Sean Will - 21/04

Hello World! I'm Sean and my blogs will be focused on Dota 2 and it's relation to Esports!

What is Esports? The official definition is

“Electronic sports is a term for organized video game competitions, especially between professionals.”

Personally I think it’s a combination of things, passion, entertainment, competitiveness, online-gaming, sport, awards, winning, losing, fame, shame and so on.

Think of it like this, imagine this scene, the Olympics, thousands of people watching one event:

And this, the Dota international event:

 

My passion in Esports lies in the franchise of ‘DOTA’ thus my posts will be in relation to how current competitions are going, things I like and interests.

For those who are unaware of  Dota here’s a basic outline of the objectives in a game.

-          Two teams of 5 players

-          Each player can choose 1 ‘hero’ out of the possible 100+

-          The victor is declared when the other teams main base or ‘ancient’ is destroyed.

      -      In 'professional' games the winner is determined by best of '5' games in one session.

Seems simple enough right?

Wrong…. So very, very wrong…

Dota is reputedly (in the gaming-world) one of if not the hardest game to understand and get a hold of for a new player, this is because that these initial basic outlines are JUST the beginning. Think of it like someone's just told you that a game of Football has 11 players on each team and whoever has more goals wins, there's just so much more too it tactically.

I’m not going to be posting how to play dota and the mechanics etc, as there’s just so many and that’s not what my first post is going to focus on.

To get an idea, I’ve spent approximately 1000+ hours on Dota, somewhere around the 1200 mark, and I’d still say that I’m an ‘average’ player.

To finish off my first post, here’s a video clip from one of the most historic moments in Dota history in Esports.

It’s quite hard to understand whats happening to someone that isn’t familiar with the game, but to get a grasp on how competitive it is this is the highlights from the final game in the 2013 Internationals. The winner takes home $1.4million dollars.

This event had approximately 600,000 people attend, about 100,000 – 500,000 online via the Dota 2 broadcast and 1million + viewers on Twitch (An online-streaming website, essentially how gamers 'televise' their events at the moment... Unless you live in Korea and then it is ACTUALLY televised!) 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zA6PDHnye9k – Skip to 15:10 for the final moments of the final game

 ~~Sean