pLANning it out

First of all, let me make it very clear that these words are nothing but precise representations of my thoughts and mine only. They are simply opinions, so to speak. Nothing more, nothing less. This is not a personal vendetta against any person or organization. That being said, I am going to start my rant about the eSports scene in India so either read on or click on another link.

Kids playing video games is not something new to our country. I remember my first Nintendo Entertainment System which was given to me when I was merely four. I also remember that I always had other kids from the neighbourhood trying to surpass my scores in Super Mario Brothers which implies that these video games were quite popular among the middle to upper class society. Not everyone owned a console but they sure as hell did know about them. PC games have been around for a very long time too. For those who bought their first computers aeons ago, games like Prince of Persia, Karateka, Dave, Doom, Wolfenstein 3d and a few others may ring a bell. The point is, these games have existed for decades and have progressed with the course of time.

With the advent of sophisticated hardware, PC games continued to get better and better. In India, consoles became the second banana at some point of time with computers gaining popularity in households. Fathers could type out documents and their sons could play 3D games later on. However, most of these games were limited to single player or turn based two player modes.

Networking brought about a revolution in the PC gaming world by popularizing multiplayer games. Developers began integrating multiplayer modes into their best selling titles. With the advent of the Internet, players could play these games online too. These people inherited the virtuous title of ‘Gamer’. With online communities building up rapidly, games like Warcraft, StarCraft, Counter-Strike and Quake were sold with online multiplayer as their USPs. That’s Unique Selling Proposition, not the pistol by Heckler & Koch. Millions of gamers were playing these games online, battling it out against each other. The winners felt happy. The losers felt like whining. So they ‘invented’ ping, packet loss, choke, FPS and anything else they could come up with. The solution to end the incessant whine : a standard for the players known as LAN. A standard which made excuses redundant and skill paramount. Although these LANs existed even before the Internet, they were suddenly being favoured by gamers who insisted on fair play.

What began as fun slowly turned into a sport of sorts. Gamers competed with one another either individually or in teams. Competitions sprung up all over the world boasting exciting prizes for the winners which ranged from cash to cars. Dennis ‘Thresh’ Fong who is widely regarded as the best Quake player ever won a Ferrari in a tournament organized by id Software. eSports soon became a reality in many countries. Sadly, India is not one of them.

Kawabonka.com and Frag-shack.com can be called the pioneers of Indian online gaming. Thank you Ricky and Peter for putting up servers for us. Unfortunately, the infrastructure relating to the Internet in India is very poor. Online gaming in India is still an ordeal but we can find plenty of players who are willing to ignore bad pings and lost packets, just out of enthusiasm to play their favourite games with their friends. Going back to the past, CS clans like TUA marched ahead of the rest and managed to represent India in the first ever World Cyber Games held in Korea. With this, the door to competitive gaming in our country was finally unlocked.

The following year saw many new clans emerging and they all had one motive : To take TUA’s place on the flight to Korea. Many local LAN tournaments were held at regular intervals in many cities offering small sums of money as cash prizes. WCG India came around again and TUA held on to their place at the top with ease. A few more years went by and a few more WCGs came along. More games were added to the list spelling opportunity for players like Karthik ‘Str3y’ Gopal (Q3), Nickunj ‘FINaL.ELEMENT’ Bansal (War3), Jai ‘BurN’ Prasad (UT2k3) and Ashwin ‘bzrk3r’ Warrier (UT2k4). TUA was replaced by ACID but one guy named Rahul Rohira aka Bittu, remained constant through all the lineups. By this time, companies like Nvidia, ATI, AMD, Intel, Microsoft and Logitech seemed to have gained a new found interest in the gaming sector in India. Products designed to enhance gaming experiences were suddenly readily available in the market albeit at expensive prices. Other Indian companies like Reliance and Sify were also trying to capitalize on gaming over here, announcing tournaments for different games with exorbitant amounts of cash as prizes. Even the big gun Microsoft, conducted an all India Halo tournament in collaboration with Reliance and Ten Sports offering prize money of Rs. 2,00,000. This was won by Nickunj from Chennai. Such tournaments were great publicity for the companies and for the media. Unfortunately, they proved to be horrible experiences for the players due to various factors including poor hardware and organization.

Many of these tournaments did not allow the players to use their own equipment and enforced improper rules. This was probably because of the organizers not being aware of the requirements of the games being played. I’d like to make something very clear to any would-be organizers reading this : A gamer’s mouse is an important piece of equipment. Imagine taking away a Tennis player’s racquet and forcing him to play with one of your own. He will not be able to play at his full potential, probably not even at half of it. The same thing happens in computer gaming when a player is used to his mouse, his keyboard, his headphones, his customizations and is finally denied of all that just before a difficult match. Maintaining a standard for all the participants is fine… to a certain extent. It isn’t practical for a player to bring his CPU and monitor to a tournament. On the other hand, the player is in physical contact with the peripherals like mice, keyboards and headphones. These are the things he has grown accustomed to over time. Using them will definitely make him perform better than playing with something that feels absolutely alien to him. In the end, the objective of these tournaments should be to bring out the best in the participants. The norm in competitions all over the world is to let the players use their stuff. Why can’t it be the same over here when it has been proven to be a good thing?

The kind of money that goes into organizing these tournaments would probably be enough to feed a family of four for a year, maybe more. The sad thing is that most of the time the money is being blown on all the wrong reasons. ‘The Gaming Contest’, a tournament held in Mumbai recently spent a fortune on advertising and publicity causing thousands of gamers to show up. Unfortunately, the motive behind the tournament seemed to be to attract as many people as possible and not conduct an efficient competition for the more serious players. The needs of the eager gamers were not catered to with more than a quarter of the total participants for Counter-Strike just sent away randomly. The Quake 3 section ended up being first to five frags and most of the matches got over in a minute for which the players were made to wait two whole days. The front page ads in the newspaper mentioned exciting prizes for the winners. I would hardly call keyboards, mice and CDs exciting. Those are not something that can be given away as prizes. Not after generating a massive heap of hype causing players from all over the country to spend on trains, flights and accommodation just to get to the venue. The tournament ended up like some sort of a carnival where one can hear people yelling “Roll up, Roll up! Ride the mystery tour for free!” I even heard from friends who attended the tournament that all the players who were sent away caused a ruckus in the place by breaking all the merchandise given to them and throwing them around.

The saving grace is that not all tournaments held in India have been failures. We have had successful WCGs in the past and all of them went by without too many hassles. Blitzkrieg ‘04, the LAN tournament organized by Frag-Shack.com at Crossroads Mall, Mumbai was one of the biggest and arguably the best event held so far in this country, thanks to people like Peter, Sanjay, Yogi and others who knew exactly what they were doing. I personally participated in this tournament and also helped in the organization by handling the Quake 3 division. The atmosphere was great as was the competition. The prizes were great too. Many people including myself won high-end computers and some won valuable pieces of hardware like processors, graphics cards, top of the line mice etc. Blitzkrieg ‘04 did have its share of flaws and technical difficulties but they were all quickly dealt with by able hands and minds. At the end of the strenuous three days, there were smiles all around. The players were happy, the sponsors were happy and the members of the organizing team were positively beaming with pride and happiness. The tournament really was one hell of an experience and I am confident it will only get better this year. Another tournament worth mentioning is Urban Fury which was held in Mumbai, Pune, Bangalore and Chennai. Organized by TechTree.com, this tournament proved to be competition oriented like Blitzkrieg was, allowing the players to use their gear and conforming to standard rules for all the games. The prizes given to the players were also definitely worth fighting for.

Things could be a lot better with just a wee bit of research and systematic planning. Organizers definitely need to read up on the latest rules and implementations being followed in eSports around the world and do the same thing. A few small examples : 16 bit colour mode has been banned in the CPL CS tournaments since it is very easy to see through the smoke emitted by a smoke grenade. All the players are forced to use 32 bit mode. Minor details like this can make a big difference in the game, yet most of the computers in tournaments here have CS setup to use 16 bit colours even when the hardware can comfortably run at 32 bit. Another example regarding Counter-Strike would be the usage of the console and config files in game. None of these are allowed in any of the international tournaments since players can accidentally execute some commands which could screw up important things like proper shot registration. Therefore, the in-game console is disabled and the game is enhanced with a special GUI which provides players with extra legal options which would normally require typing a few commands. The hardware at Indian tournaments is also under-utilized most of the time. The monitors usually used are capable of much higher refresh rates than the ones they are set to. Using a small utility like ReForce or Powerstrip could make the games feel much smoother at no extra cost. One more thing that organizers really need to do in tournaments is to close registrations early and post properly planned draws for each game with seeds and the times of the matches marked clearly. Allowing people to register a day after the commencement of the tournament is a big no-no, as it could prove to be unfair to other players who have worked their way up the draw. It isn’t pleasing for a player to think that he’s through to the quarter-finals and then find out that there are a few more challengers who have advanced that much without doing anything. Many of these tournaments exclude registration fees in order to attract a larger number. Repeatedly, the hordes of people present at the venue with the idea of playing for free have proved too much for the organizers to handle, especially when under a time constraint. I’m quite sure most competitive gamers would be willing to pay a nominal entry fee as long as they get a decent playing experience. This fee could be used to cover a few expenses.

I’m not saying that all the people who organize tournaments are doing it for personal benefits or for money. A lot of them do it with the best intentions of spreading awareness about gaming. A big ‘Thank You’ to those guys for giving us something when we had nothing. However, a lot of people already are aware of gaming and I really mean a lot. While conducting the Microsoft War of a Million tournament in Chennai, it was a shock and a thrill for all of us to see unknown people hailing from remote corners of the city coming forward and beating the likes of the RTS gaming expert Nickunj Bansal in Rise of Nations. Since this awareness is already there thanks to five years of gaming tournaments, the focus should shift to taking the level of competition to new heights. Throw game exhibitions out, bring eSports competitions in and Indian gamers may become world beaters.

/quit

Ashwath Ravee