We made it a point to talk about it. These guys [Halo players] would go to an event … and go home and that's it. That was their job. So when Halo people talk about how they feel like [they] don't get enough support, like you had it for years. Then you as the [players and organizations] should have made something happen from it. Growing core influencers was a major factor in Call of Duty's growth to what it is today, but this approach has its own drawbacks.

During Call of Duty tournaments, concurrent viewership would spike whenever OpTic Gaming was playing. It could be argued that those fans are more OpTic fans than competitive Call of Duty fans, since those fans tend to only care about OpTic players than the games and the overall competitive scene at large. Reliance on OpTic going deep in tournaments is a double-edged sword: great for the viewership numbers when they make it to the grand finals, terrible if they were eliminated early.

Those players may not even be interested in smaller events, which means the interest they've generated means nothing in the lower tiers of competition. The MES Detroit events is a great example of an independent tournament organizer running tournaments for Call of Duty. Even through it doesn't get much attention from the competitive Call of Duty community at large and the viewership for the streams tends to be on the low side 4-figure concurrent viewer numbers , they're still able to throw events year-after-year.

When you can attract 48 4-player teams to compete in a tournament without any support from the publisher, that says a lot about the community.

There was a genuine desire to compete and it didn't matter that it wasn't run by MLG or Activision. It certainly had nowhere near the sheer quantity of tournaments compared to a game like CS:GO , but it was something lower-tier players could look forward to and compete in, with the possibility of new talent rising up and beating established names.

These smaller events are essential in Halo for a variety of reasons; they provide opportunities for lesser players to compete and build their skills and gain experience in an offline environment, they allow players the chance to get to know each other face-to-face, and it provides a way for competitive Halo players to introduce their friends to the scene and give it more exposure.

This ultimately creates more interest in Halo esports long-term, which in turn will translate into more viewership and more prize money in the long run. Even fans within the competitive Call of Duty community who don't compete themselves had projects started up as a hobby, and ended up having an impact in the competitive scene as well.

For example, the people who ran CoDStats were just a bunch of random Call of Duty esports fans who came together and covered their tournaments. For the first time ever, there were stats in professional Call of Duty events at least on console.

A year later, time in hill was a stat added to the game by the developers who took notice of this. This was a direct result of these fans actions and the discussion by the community around it. But just like Halo, Call of Duty had a few bad games for competitive play that the community stuck with.

Black Ops 2 arguably had the best maps and balance for competition, but though MLG, UMG and other organizers, tournaments focused on the latest iteration of the series. Although a "throwback tournament" was ran for Black Ops 2 , there was never any attempt at re-establishing the game on a more permanent basis. All things considered, Call of Duty is still in a much better place than Halo.

The competitive Call of Duty fans have made some of the same mistakes as their Halo counterparts, but they've also done some of the same things that other successful esports communities have done to grow the scene. The talented people running OpTic Gaming , FaZe Clan , and other organizations in that space had a much better understanding of what kept their fans engaged and that carried them through the rough times in Call of Duty's competitive history.

Lesser known members of the community had also went out of their way to make a difference. A large corporation is needed to run grassroots events for Halo. That says it all, doesn't it? While may have good intentions, think of the unintended consequences for Halo esports, and how it ultimately reflects on its community.

In comes the HCS Grassroots program to assist in community growth. What exactly is it? From its original announcement :. In other word, HCS Grassroots is anything but. It's a program designed to help existing organizations and content creators, but doesn't address the underlying problem of competitive Halo fans not supporting them. Within the context of esports, "grassroots" means a scene is grown from the bottom-up, like grass growing on a lawn.

You start small and build your way up. That's what happened with Halo: CE and other competitive games of the time. But as time went on, Halo fans decided with their actions that anything grassroots was not worth supporting and only MLG events and the later HCS events were important.

It's unfortunate because some of these small events can grow and expand into other games. Dreamhack in particular started out as a small gathering in the basement of an elementary school. People just got together and played, and it slowly grew over the years.

Now they have events in multiple countries supporting numerous games. That slowly grew into the largest event for fighting games. Halo had AGP trying to get something going early on, but ultimately went away after a few events. These days, small-scale local events for Halo happens in Microsoft stores, and they don't even attract many entrants anyway.

Halo fans who were "hoping to see a real grassroots effort by Microsoft" really makes me wonder if they even know what "grassroots" means.

Competitive Halo fans can complain about not having more tournaments, but they don't host one themselves — and on the off-chance they do, others don't join those tournaments either. Within the more prolific esports, community tournaments are standard fare and the fans in those communities fundamentally understand that supporting the scene means showing up to those tournaments.

I've entered my local StarCraft II tournaments — no sponsors involved, just one guy at a local shop — where some of the players carpooled for three hours just to compete for fun. It speaks volumes about the general attitude and work ethic of the Halo community if they can't even get small-scale local events up and running without a large corporation holding their hand. You can't even make this stuff up. Halo began the same way as many other esports at the time — with an abundance of LAN events both big and small.

The attitude shift began with the rise of MLG and the subsequent decline in non-MLG events, though many Halo fans will point to a much later date when Halo: Reach was played. Other issues that would be brought up such as the game mechanics, console controls, aim-assist or any "PC Master Race" arguments are largely irrelevant.

Not everyone in the esports world would appreciate a first-person shooter played with a controller; what matters is building interest in those who don't care about such things, and it is possible as Call of Duty has demonstrated. Competitive scenes outside of Halo have also shown that you don't need to support a bad game in a series when previous iterations served the community just fine.

Halo fans need to take a good hard look at what other communities did in their competitive scenes, and replicate it in their own.

The peak of Halo esports — the "golden era" of competitive Halo if you will — should not be defined by MLG burning through cash year-over-year to make it look bigger than it is. When you compare competitive Halo fans to the fans of other esports, the mindset and the priorities over what's important are completely different: dependence on large corporations, artificially inflated prize pools, lackluster amateur and semi-pro scenes, and an arguably excessively-toxic community moreso than others.

They've taken corporate handouts to the extreme, placing all of their eggs in one basket, and the result of that speaks for itself. On the other side of the spectrum, the Fighting Game Community wants all the power and control over their competitive scene, even if it means the prize pools remain low. New Blood Bad Blood Evolutions Fractures Saint's Testimony Shadow of Intent Other Media.

Explore Wikis Community Central. Register Don't have an account? Major League Gaming. Edit source History Talk 4. This article is about the professional gaming company. For the Halo 3 playlist, click here. Categories Websites Add category. Cancel Save. Universal Conquest Wiki. Again, maybe now that they don't have this secondary pressure to appease the MLG "pros" they'll be willing to take bigger, more interesting risks with the multiplayer.

Then again, maybe there simply isn't enough to change with the formula anymore and it is what it is, now and forever. It's unfortunate, but if that's the case I have zero interest in playing Halo multiplayer anymore and very clearly I'm not alone. SomeDeliCook said:. StrainedEyes said:. Replacing that completely with Loadouts and Ordinances completely removes that aspect.

There's never really been a successful, long-term multiplayer FPS that didn't have a core group of competitive gamers lauding it to attract a casual audience. Maybe it would have been better if I had said that if an FPS game isn't built with competition in mind, it will have a short shelf life and fail to find a large audience.

Halo 4 is kind of proving that right now. There might be a technical issue as well. If there is no way to host a spectator or manage teams then it limits orgs like MLG because they have to rig something to generate a feed that frankly looks sloppy. It makes it more difficult to do something like invite 32 teams, play and track them all simultaneously in a tournament allowing PPV subscribers to switch between any of them if the game's server tech doesn't support it.

Halo 4 is a fun game, but they don't let you melee your teammates anymore, so it's no wonder it's no longer recognized by the MLG, honestly. Please Log In to post. This edit will also create new pages on Giant Bomb for:. Until you earn points all your submissions need to be vetted by other Giant Bomb users. This process takes no more than a few hours and we'll send you an email once approved.

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