I'm disappointed to hear b4nny's thoughts on iSeries. Having worked on i65, which I feel was a decent event, I believe that a lot of what he described and in turn his perception of what the game should look like are infeasible for both events and the esport as a whole.
He is a major critic of the ruleset of iSeries and other LANs like CPG and such, which typically follows this:
- Timelimit 30
- Winlimit 5
- 10 Minute Golden Cap
Having a finite time may encourage parking the bus and one of the key consequences of that is garbage time, but the benefits of it FAR outweigh its drawbacks from an organisational perspectives. If I cast your minds back to i63, you may remember that we had a massive delay for our Grand Finals due to the LoL finals (which have a unlimited timepool) overran its expected runtime by a significant margin. To my understanding, we have almost never overrun on stage finals as we can give a strong estimate for how long a match will take. In a BYOC LAN setting, with multiple matches in a single day, we can confidently say that (technical issues permitting) a BO1 match will be completed within an hour. This makes scheduling when matches happen over a weekend whilst not overworking Staff or Players is actually possible with a massive pool of players, that is if people don't go on constant smoking breaks. ;)
b4nny's perspective on the notion that major international events should be the platform to experiment or something similar is a flawed belief, in my view. Tournaments like iSeries or CPG should be representative of how the esport plays currently, and has remained this way. Whilst I do agree with him that the community does sometimes use LANs as an excuse to not push changes, there are so many more factors that effect rulemaking that perhaps someone in his position may have overlooked. When I worked with ETF2L on changing the Global Whitelist/Experimental Maps, a lot of our decisions were based more on statistics than qualitative feedback, those polls have a bigger influence than random nerd essays on the internet. By taking on statistics, you can draw a more objective conclusion which, reinforced by the admins subjective perspective on rulemaking, creates a decently strong (but not perfect) environment for implementing change. LAN is not the environment to play newly accepted maps that have only been in rotation briefly, and when I worked on i63 the map pool and rulesets were dictated a lot by in depth discussions with admins and feedback from players. I didn't choose the final map pool because "we've always done it that way", I chose it because the players agreed that it would be optimal.
An esport is more than just the game, you have the productions, the leagues, the matchmaking platforms, and more importantly you have the community as a whole. Decisions made should be based on the community perspective, filtered through the people that run the organisations, not made by a select few people who play the game well and have their own uncompromising perspective. That sort of perspective is what I believe was TF2PL's major downfall, as both the people in charge and the organisation on the whole were not particularly willing to push the changes that the community wanted.
Perhaps leagues could do more to encourage more consistent and regular feedback, particularly statistical feedback through polls, etc. But not supporting events, which take a fuck ton of time and effort from so many people, because you feel that the rules don't fit your agenda is pretty poor reasoning.
TL;DR
- The LAN ruleset isn't just about the game itself, but the event as a whole.
- Timelimits save Tournament Organisers a lot of headaches.
- LAN isn't the place to try untested rules and maps
- Statistical Feedback from a large pool of players is far better than the opinions of a few good players
- Rulemaking isn't done arbitrarily, lots of thought goes into them
- An esport is bigger than the game that you play