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Rod “Slasher” Breslau, eSports correspondent for GameSpot and a panelist on Live on Three, joins Julian and Rob to help them with their recent conversion to the cause of eSports and pro gaming. They discuss the difficulties of getting into the pro gaming scene, how it evolved, and the different forms of success embodied by StarCraft 2 and League of Legends. They also describe why eSports appeal to them, and how it speaks to them as strategy gamers.

Listen here.

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What are the best casters to follow if I want to go into Lol and SC2 watching. I mostly watch DW2: Retribution and some Men of War but I am interested in checking out the big 2?

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What are the best casters to follow if I want to go into Lol and SC2 watching. I mostly watch DW2: Retribution and some Men of War but I am interested in checking out the big 2?

Day[9] is probably the best to start with, I also rate Apollo. Tastosis is a good call too.

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Incontrol is fucking awful, his knowledge of the game and being able to judge situations is very often misjudged or straight up wrong. Small mistakes are fine, but misleading the audience, by simply being blind to situations is not.

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One of my favorite episodes I have listened to so far!

As a spectator sport sc2 has gotten its hooks into me. Unfortunately LoL hasn't seemed to do the same. Something about the length of the game and some of the sometimes very long boring parts of a lol game gets to me. Plus, getting invested in the average LoL match (up to 3 games!) takes way too huge of an investment. I would rather just play the game myself.

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Thanks for the podcast, it started to explore the tension for RTS games between satisfying strategy and watchable e-sport.

The metaphor of being a general in overall command gives way to the more frenetic "I am the brain of each and every one of my units."

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Good podcast, Great guest. Super knowledgeable about the topic. Shame he doesn't actually play games anymore.

The closing statement about not liking sports seems to hit home.

I honestly could not care at all about watching sports. I don't mind it. But it does nothing for me. If my dad's watching a hockey game or something I'll glance at it here or there. But it could be Stanley cup final or a pre-exhibition match and I'd treat them both the same.

Same goes for E-sports. I don't mind watching them from time to time. I watched Starcraft 2 a little bit for the first 4 months. But only when I was eating food at my computer.

I haven't watched a match since I stopped playing.

I watch DOTA2 matches... before my match begins. That's about it. I can't stand the LoL meta-game so I don't watch it at all.

The entire time I'm watching these games being played I constantly say to myself: "Why am I not playing it myself?" Then I realize I can and just play the game.

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The parallels between e-sports and traditional sports is pretty apparent, and both beg the similar question: Is it really more fun to sit and watch a "sport," whatever it may be, than it is if one can potentially go out and play it oneself? I think that very question was raised by Rob toward the end.

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What are the best casters to follow if I want to go into Lol and SC2 watching. I mostly watch DW2: Retribution and some Men of War but I am interested in checking out the big 2?

If you want to watch some good SC2 just pony up some cash and get a GOMTV GSL season pass. You get an impossible to watch number of top quality games, the better ones all casted by Tastetosis the casting archon. I bought a year pass, and it has been a constant source of entertainment. It took me a while to warm up to Tasteless, but I've come to love their weird tangents, and general goofyness. They have a habit of going off the rails, but I don't mind it, a bit like the Idle Thumbs podcast.

Incontrol is fucking awful...

This.

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This episode is not showing up in my iTunes feed for some reason. Anyone have any idea why?

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Flynn nailed it. After those guys Apollo is pretty good too, likewise Mr Bitter.

The biggest name in League of Legends casting is Phreak, who is a Riot employee.

I don't have the same problem that other people have mentioned with Incontrol. He generally knows what he's talking about, but definitely goes out of his way to try to make games sound closer than they are, even when one player is way ahead. This is a general trend in SC2 casting though, and not unique to him. SC2 games will frequently be decided in the early to mid game by economic damage or an army being crushed out of position, but the actual final killing blow can take a while to come. Good players generally exploit early advantages by increasing their economic lead rather than going immediately for the kill, leaving commentators to say "how do you think the other player could come back from this?" for several minutes.

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I thought this episode was really interesting. I think that Starcraft 1 pro games were much more interesting than Starcraft 2... i don't know why exactly. It has to do with the changes to the engine and the units I suppose. The whole ball of units thing makes battles boring and they had to nerf AOE damage as a result, which reduces the fireworks.

In any case, I just wanted to point out that I started following Blood Bowl recently. Its basically warhammer meets football, I don't watch real football but adding a pretty deep TBS game on top of it makes it very engaging. I don't know if there is a big competitive community but they do have online tournaments and watching this youtube series was really fun and interesting.

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This episode is not showing up in my iTunes feed for some reason. Anyone have any idea why?

It finally showed up today.

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What are the best casters to follow if I want to go into Lol and SC2 watching. I mostly watch DW2: Retribution and some Men of War but I am interested in checking out the big 2?

For StarCraft I'd say watch a few of the big tournaments, they fly in all the top casters and you should get a good feel for them after watching a few. There is usually a big tournament each month or so with smaller ones in between.

The GSLis in full swing these days with Tasteless and Artosis casting, can't go wrong with that. Otherwise you can monitor the TeamLiquid tournament forum, there's a calendar on the right and the top threads are very active for the current ongoing tournament.

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I've only ever watched a lot of Day9, I got the feeling he was really big into teaching you the proper StarCraft II skills. Also, sometimes it was just pure comedy.

Psst, as you seem to dislike the M.O.B.A. monniker for League of Legends et al, you should just switch to the universally accepted (or maybe not) Lords Management. /runs

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What are the best casters to follow if I want to go into Lol and SC2 watching.

Everyones covered SC2 so I'll jump in and say that IMHO the best LoL casters are Joe Miller (ESL LoL caster, @Joe_Miller on Twitter) and Leigh 'Deman' Smith (Freelance, @qvDeman). The three Riot employees who also handle casting ( Daniel Klein, Rivington and Phreak) do an acceptable job but nothing special.

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Just wondering, might traditional combat sports like boxing and the martial arts actually be the closest real world analog to SC2?

Some of the ways the guys talk about SC2 seem to apply to the way I've heard the appeal of boxing explained.

I think part of the appeal of both is the perceived prowess of the participants, think of the focus on the insane APM of SC players especially in wider gaming culture. Also the one on one nature of the both SC2 and boxing allow participants to be characterized strongly by their styles, to a extent that isn't possible in team games.

on a entirely separate point, the 'cloaks for my zergling' point Rob brings up kinda has already happened to a extent with the Dawn of War franchise. As you play it more you unlock new uniforms for your troops, and while it's true this isn't technically the same i bet THQ will be looking at the metrics and trying to decided when they release Company of Heroes 2 whether they want to let people earn or buy alternate uniforms for their squads.

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The problem with customizing your units in a competitive game is that it usually makes it hard to easily pick out the units and understand whats going on in the battle. Even its just simple reskins that don't dramatically alter the unit, it still takes extra brain power to look at the shape of the unit and figure out what it is.

The obvious solution of course is that you can turn off customizations on a per player basis so that you can play with all of your cool skins but ignore everyone elses.

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Blizzard have some history regarding the idea of keeping a recognizable silhouette for competitive gaming. In WoW they introduced a concept called transmuting which allowed people to completely change their character's gear's appearance, but restricted so it couldn't affect competitive PvP gear.

And as Shadowtiger suggests, it would be pretty easy for a company to make skin changes a client side only affect if they wanted to go that way.

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Being able to make quick evaluations is key in the competitive scene. Player/Unit customization can be really annoying, even abused if not done well. Client side options to override customization features is a must. That reminds me of the old Quake days, we used console commands to turn off all the player customization. We used to force a red self illuminated hitbox-shaped skin on all opponents, combined with reducing wall textures to almost solid colours. Negated all the morons who had over-sized/under-sized skins to mess with our aiming (since the hitbox didn't change), super high poly skins made that would slow down slow computers (fuck you giant kiwi bird with individual feathers), or all black skins for shadow lurking campers. We don't have control like that anymore.

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