Gaming
Gaming
Fantasy eSports are coming: Pick your players!
Fantasy leagues are a big deal in traditional sports but what about their eSports potential?
Fantasy eSports is coming: Pick your players!
© Valve/Red Bull Media House
I'm currently glaring at my options for a League of Legends fantasy team. Having spent too much of my imaginary starting budget on a jungler, carry, mid and top, none of the supports I want are even remotely affordable. Someone has to go, but who? I'm left furrowing my brow and picking through player stats.
Fantasy sports allow us to take our what-if pontificating and prove we know best when it comes to our hobby. But while the team management role might be a fantasy, the money that fantasy sports can generate and the impact they can have are real and substantial. Fantasy eSports could well do the same.
Fantasy sports get the player to take on the role of a team manager, creating their imaginary squad using real players. They can then track how this imaginary team is doing by following how those individual players do in their games. Points are awarded for being on the winning side, but are also given for individual shows of skill – scoring goals and so on. As the season progresses some players will become more valuable. Managers can tweak their lineup by making trades. The right trade at the right time can have a significant impact on the points your team earns and, therefore, how well you're doing in your fantasy league.
According to the Fantasy Sports Trade Association, in 2013 there were over 33.5 million people playing fantasy sports in the US alone. On average, each one of them spent over a hundred dollars on their hobby. That's things like entry fees, information services and other bits and bobs. In 2006, fantasy sports were estimated to have a $3-4 billion economic impact across the sports industry as a whole with only 12.6 million people playing. More recently fantasy sports' economic punch was pegged at a staggering $4.5bn.
The system doesn't just benefit the sports involved or any third-party organisations running the leagues. It has benefits for people operating related services and websites. Statistics providers are invaluable when you're working on your team lineup, telling you exactly how players have performed and analysing the skills and information by which fantasy points can be awarded. Baseball's obsession with stats comes in handy here, but so too would the many websites devoted to tracking the numbers generated by online games; the services which track kills, items, XP per minute, gold earned, win rates with particular characters and classes.
There are also a raft of analysis pieces which describe and pick apart the metagame of each eSport, perhaps offering insight into who you could swap out for a given set of matches based on the heroes they play and their current strengths and weaknesses in terms of the game.
The idea behind fantasy sports means that you pick players because they're likely to earn you more points, so rather than just sticking with a favourite team, it encourages you to look at how everyone else is playing, picking and choosing from across the pro scene. It's this which can widen someone's engagement with eSports. You don't just watch League of Legends matches involving, say, Team Solomid. You start to follow Curse because you picked Quas as your top and you keep an eye on Evil Geniuses because Krepo was the player you put in the support slot.
Fantasy eSports
© Fantasy eSports
It sounds fun – and it’s already begun. Valve created a compendium which formed an accompaniment to their Dota 2 tournament, The International. Valve’s Erik Johnson explained that it had been created because the vast majority of spectators would be based at home and the dev team was interested in ways to engage them. One of the aspects of the compendium was a fantasy league of sorts where you could pick players to form a team and track how well they did over the competition. There wasn't the player trading element you get in most fantasy sports, but it was an interesting way to encourage fans to take a deeper interest in the players and follow their exploits in the run-up to the tournament.
Valve’s not alone either. Cyanide's upcoming game Blood Bowl 2 takes the idea of American football team management as its central premise and is keen to develop an eSports scene around that. The developers told Red Bull, “Blood Bowl 2 features a wild array of options for players to create and administrate their own leagues. Leagues can have multiple tournaments of different formats (round robin, ladder, tournament). Each of them can lead to another, thanks to an integrated invitation system. In addition, players can create rewards for players within competitions.”
Fulfilling more of a traditional fantasy sports role is the Fantasy eSports site which specialises in the League of Legends LCS games. It's the one which was causing me the support-related consternation at the beginning of this article. You can create a North American team and a European team, which are automatically entered into a worldwide public league. You start with an imaginary $1 million budget and use that to acquire players. The players then earn imaginary salaries allowing you to make changes to said team – up to two per week. The three teams with the most points at the end of the season will get a prize worth $2,000.
An interesting point here is that the way the points are awarded and the value of each action must be tweaked according to the player role. For example, supports are aiming to help set up kills for other players. Because of this they can only earn 20 points for a kill while players in other roles earn 40, however they'll pick up 78 points for an assist while an AD carry will only get 20. It's a way of thinking about contributions to the game which could be useful in public matches where a low kill count can often be equated with not making a contribution to the team.
But while they bring deeper engagement with professional gaming and have economic benefits, fantasy sports can cause problems too. An obvious concern is the impact on people's time because of the need or desire to get a competitive edge. Other problems have been seen already in traditional sports with players being berated by fans for poor performances which have an impact on their fantasy teams or inundated with requests to do better or score more. The NFL's Arian Foster took to Twitter after an injury thanking fans for their genuine concern but adding “4 those worried abt your fantasy team, u ppl are sick.”
Fantasy sports have also been accused of distracting from enjoyment of the game itself and corrupting the idea of being a fan. “I think it's ruined the game, actually,” said quarterback Jake Plummer in an interview with ESPN. “When I was growing up, I was a fan of my team, not the points I'm getting. It's kind of unnerving to me because you're like, 'We didn't win, but you're happy.' That's not right, because I'm not happy. I don't care if I throw five [touchdowns] if we lose. It's all about getting the win.”
If large sums of money become involved there's also a risk of match fixing and associated corruption becoming more attractive. Earlier in 2014 a former League of Legends player attempted suicide after exposing a match-fixing scandal which involved betting against the team and then throwing matches. It's a thankfully rare occurrence, but one which highlights the fact that big money can skew any sport and have a hugely detrimental effect on players and the integrity of the scene.
Fantasy eSports leagues could be an immensely powerful tool in terms of enriching the experiences of spectators, encouraging growth of secondary industries and bringing more money into the industry. They're already cropping up in various forms, both as third party projects and ideas implemented by the developers themselves. The main challenge will be making the concept work without having a negative impact on the games.
Would you play fantasy eSports? Tell us your thoughts in the comments below...
