So, a few days have passed and that's given me the time to sit down and answer another handful of your questions from the Christmas Day "Ask Series".

This column is the sole opinion of the author and does not represent the opinion of Heaven Media Ltd or the opinion of any affiliates.

This is the second and final part and hopefully it has covered all the big questions that people wanted answers to. If not, post here and we'll see what can be done in between banging my head off my desk as I code the 2011 Cadred Awards.

12 months from now, where would you like esports to be and how do you think it would get there? CK_Wich

I’d like it to be on mainstream television and actually publicised enough so I didn’t have to constantly explain what the fuck it is to people whenever they ask what I do for a living, but it’s highly unlikely that will be happening any time soon. I mean, it still amazes me to this day that SC2 is the e-sports title, of all the titles, that can get people to sit in a bar watching games on a big screen or supposedly attracts the neutral. From the outside looking in it has to be an inaccessible mess if you’ve never played the game. Compare it to something where it’s a bunch of guys shooting each other… Well, we can all understand that thanks to Western foreign policy.

"Robot Wars??!!?"

Anyway, how would it get there? Fuck knows. It’s all about the packaging I guess. I mean, some of the TV shows that are on are absolute fucking garbage on paper yet somehow they are entertaining. Robot Wars? Two virgins operating remote controlled cars with axes sellotaped to the front of them? How did that ever get so popular? But you know, you package it the right way and people can get into almost anything. CGS came close and from the TV side of things it did so much right. Shame they blew a load of money and managed to employ a cross section of the worst people in e-sports at the same time. Could have worked out very different if people didn’t treat it like a cash free for all.

So yeah, I’d like to see an e-sports highlight show or an actual league designed specifically for television and maybe involving something that just wasn’t SC2 because I don’t like the way it eclipses all other games. Who knows? Maybe I’ll be working on something like that myself in 2012.

At this point what do you think CS:GO’s chances are or if there’s a possibility of it being able to 'unite' the 2 scenes?notthatkid

It has absolutely zero chance of uniting the two scenes because one of those two scenes is Counter-Strike 1.6. You have to understand the biggest part of that community have no interest in any other game, in playing anything slightly different from 1.6. It’s not the competitive players that drive this. Pretty much every top 1.6er I have spoken with, regardless of what they say to appease psychotic and brain dead fans in public, will go where the money and the competition is. I’ve heard the same thing from the mouths of so many top players that it’s hilarious to me when you read stuff like “we’ll retire after 1.6 dies” when you’ve had that same player asking you if you know if there’s going to be a million dollar tournament for CS:GO.

There’s no escaping the fact that 1.6 retains a certain popularity that is based on the fact you can play the game on an old PC. I’m not going to make any sweeping generalisations about what countries have what technology but having looked at the figures the bulk of the games support comes from areas where the latest gaming technology is simply not selling well so draw your own conclusions from that. Obviously these people don’t want a switch to a game that needs a shit hot machine to play it because they’re not going to see one any time soon. By contrast, in the countries where you see gaming hardware and peripherals selling well, CS:S is the more popular title. No-one ever talks about it but CS:S is still quite intensive when it comes to PCs and if this wasn’t the case I think we’d see the number of players surpassing 1.6. The argument about it being the better game, which it is, is only part of the argument.

Always looking to school the staff in what's important

Valve don’t want to unite two scenes and we shouldn’t really want them to either. I want NEW players discovering the Counter-Strike series, I want CoD and Battlefield players to make the switch to it, I want a cross platform game that has a huge amount of playing numbers. I definitely don’t want anyone to think the success of CS:GO is linked to a bunch of close minded people who are still looking for a graphical update of a game that came out in 1998. If that’s the case it’s already fucked and we might as well forget it.

What will happen is you’ll get some players move over from 1.6, some from CS:S, and whether or not that sticks and becomes a trend is going to be down to competitions and whether or not the game can be e-sports ready. I’ve revised my opinion of the game since playing this closed beta, which is a lot better than the previous version I was exposed to and I’m hoping that the improvements continue.

How much time does it take for you personally to put all this together? And also how many volunteers are there and how big a contribution do they make? notthatkid

I’m not as bad as I used to be. Like back in the day it’d easily be a 60 hour week, just working non-stop on the site, trawling the forums in between writing stuff, sat talking with staff all day on vent, get articles queued up… These days I make a point of taking days off because I’d go nuts otherwise. The missus is always telling me to smell the roses a bit, spend some time out and about on weekends and for the most part I do it these days, even if I’ll be sat in a coffee shop just reading comments or whatever while she rolls her eyes at me.

The combined effort that goes into the site… I don’t think people realise just how much it is. It’s no secret myself and Mick live together and through the day it’s a bit like an office. I’ll knock on his door and tell him to get something typed up, we’ll kick ideas for articles or videos around, take a lunch break, go in the garden and do some heads and volleys then back to work before breaking out the beers in the evening. Because you can work on the site at any time of day it’s pretty much what we do in our spare time as well if there’s nothing else going on. You have job hours then hobby hours.

You add events to that as well… I mean that’s the biggest bummer. Events happen on weekends and that’s the time you want to have off but instead of hitting a bar, or watching the game, or catching a film, or any of that normal shit, you’re stuck in a cheap hotel getting four hours sleep a night, surrounded by gamers and losing your mind. Physically I struggle with the events these days. I used to be a machine. Now, I always get ill, lose my voice by day two, full blown sick by day three… I always have to take two days to recover from the rigours of a LAN.

Myself and Mick settle a working dispute


Are you sick of seeing the same people post shit? Would you rather see more 'lurkers' get more involved?notthatkid

I think the forum clique is both the best thing and the worst thing about the site. You always know you can rely on the forums to be a lively place where there’s always going to be debate and banter. At the same time, people who use the forums seem to think it’s their place exclusively and they drive away new users. The amount of comments I see along the lines of “fuck off and never comment here again” – it’s like, do you actually want the site to die? If you do, keep doing that, because one day you’ll be bored of it and no-one will be there to replace you.

It’s a recurring selfish attitude that seems almost unique from the Cadred userbase. I mean, you’ve got some members who literally think that by virtue of using the website for a few years they are entitled to have some sort of say in the day to day running in it. That’s like some fat fuck going into McDonalds and demanding that they use his recipe for the special sauce. It’s completely insane. Yet, alarmingly, I see it a lot and have had to deal with the problems that arise from that.

I definitely would love to see more and more new faces post. The vast majority of Cadred users hardly ever post, with a significant amount just not posting at all. I don’t know what the answer to get more people posting actually is. I tried culling all the idiots. That didn’t work. Maybe being more lenient will. If that doesn’t work then fuck it, it’s up to the people. All I’ll say is that if people don’t get involved eventually the forums will look pretty barren so maybe people who don’t post will start making a habit of it, even if it’s just something like “nice read” or whatever.

Your best and worst LAN? KRyS

The worst is either ESWC 2011 or the last LAN79. I mean it’s a toss up but French LANs are just always horrible. The shit that went on at ESWC is well, well documented so I won’t bore you with going over it again. LAN79 was a fucking joke though, a really bad joke from start to finish.

Touching down at that airport that is approximately the same size as the average WH Smiths – Poitiers – and having to wait over six hours, including after the airport closed, for a lift I was promised by the organisers but that didn’t materialise, that was a bad start. The organisers of the LAN also told me not to worry about checking into my hotel on time because they knew the owners, which it transpired wasn’t true so I couldn’t even get into my hotel room for the first night. Turns out the hotel was locked from 5 o’clock onwards, so no key = no access.

The general disdain that the press were treated with was fairly obvious and there was the recurring decision to shut down our internet whenever they wanted to increase STV allocation for the matches involving French teams. This was taken to its illogical extreme during the final where the internet was shut down altogether meaning I couldn’t report on it as it was happening, nor upload anything afterwards.

I'd rather be doing this for a living than attend another French event

The players were promised transportation by the staff there, who then proceeded to get drunk out of their skulls at the after-party, which happened the day before the tournament was even due to finish (a recurring theme in France, who might want to revise the use of the word “after” nationally) and their solution to this was to drink drive tired and depressed players to the youth hostel when someone was vaguely sober enough to get away with it.

On the last day they started to pack down the event several hours before the time advertised on the ticket and this resulted in someone physically wrestling a chair from under me while trying to eat my lunch. Not a word, Nothing. Just tried to whip the chair out from under me like you do at school. I went berserk. I remember being stood in the car park with TCM and just saying “I’m done. Have to quit this shit now. This scene is so unprofessional” and I’ve no idea what made me change my mind.

It was so bad I got Yakkkkk from Fragmasters to drive me home a day early and paid for the ferry out of my own pocket. It made me laugh when those dickheads that treated me, the press and the players so badly had the nerve to come out and say that I was walking around the event “farting higher than my ass” whatever the fuck that means. Thank god there wasn’t one this year. Everyone involved in that event should have been imprisoned.

The best? I dunno… I think there was a point where I was sat in the TV studio at CGS, having fast food brought to me by a runner, about to get some make-up done before a TV slot and sat having a chat to Chris Kamara. Like, it was probably about then where I thought “this actually isn’t all that bad is it?” Of course, like everything else in e-sports, it was fucked wasn’t it. But yeah, the first season of CGS was probably as good as it ever got for me in e-sports.

Swilling beer in between performing on stage in Leamington


What about your writing career? Any book coming up soon?Damoo

Funnily enough, apart from the finished and unfinished novels that sit festering on my hard drive, generating more rejection letters than John Terry’s proposal for a new version of the sociological text “Black Like Me”, I am actually writing a book about the history of competitive gaming and I’m getting quite far into it. I don’t know if anyone will ever want to read it or if it would ever see the light of day but for me I feel like I need to take something a bit more concrete from e-sports, so it’d be nice to get a book out of it at least.

Other than that there’s my sports writing, which pretty much all but heads over to Sabotage Times. I’ve never bothered posting links or anything here because I just feel there’s so many kids… Like, I’ve already seen people who are banned from Cadred go on to that website and abuse me and it’s so cringeworthy having to explain to the editors there that basically there’s this small group of people with something wrong with them.

What was the biggest mistake you made over the course of your career? anakin

The thing I regret the most? It absolutely has to be my decision to stick by CS:S and its community. Back when I first started getting attention as a writer I was offered opportunities to write about other games, 1.6 included back when it still had some juice in the tank. I think, if I had done that I’d have made more money and been in a better position to wheedle my way into a massive “OH YEAH I LOVED STARCRAFT ALL ALONG” cash cow position, either as a commentator or writer.

At the time I was convinced that the game had a future and that it was important that people stood by it. Without blowing my own trumpet I was reading the “top writers” in these other games and the standard was laughably bad compared to the work I was putting out. I thought that if I kept writing about CS:S then it might encourage people to take it seriously, or bring more talented writers out the woodwork.

Long term, while it might have been instrumental in me getting this job here, I think it pretty much didn’t do that much for me. The abuse I’ve got for basically trying to entertain and make the players seem like stars… Well, it’s just embarrassing really and I must have a screw lose for sticking it out. I could have been writing an in depth article about Filip “Neo” Kubski and his many achievements… Instead I spent a time trying to make Richard “ritch” Gibbs seem like an interesting, eccentric e-sports character only to have him virtua stalk me as a result afterwards.

What is your biggest problem (if any) with League of Legends?eebro

No problem with it at all as I hope my recent article shows. It’s my MOBA title of choice and I can definitely see me getting more involved with that community and writing about the game a whole lot more as we cover it here on Cadred.

Leading the charge at i-series


Was it your call to reshuffle the games that Cadred will cover in 2012? if so, why did you choose each specifically? crokey

I consulted with all the staff here on the site and went down to our HQ and had a meeting with the owners but yeah, these were the games that I think need to be covered by a serious e-sports site and that’s what I see us as. I know for some it might be a wrench to see Heroes of Newerth go, especially when we have so many people who play it that use our site but the reality is it is going to be a distant third when the MOBA race gets underway in earnest in 2012 and to dedicate resources to it isn’t sensible.

I think the rest speaks for itself. We’ve already shown we’re the best site for CS:GO having posted two world exclusives and a host of video content. 1.6 is still on the ticket but we know soon enough that won’t matter. LoL and DotA 2 are obvious choices as well and the work we’ve done in SC2 has been brilliant so far and more and more people are getting to realise that.

TF2 had to go. I never really elaborated on it in public, but if you produce maybe one or two features a month about a game, but it takes 25% of your staff interaction time to chase them up because the people involved just aren’t that motivated, it’s a no-brainer to cut it from the ticket. CoD 4 only ever really came here under the DuRuS regime and I’m not sad to see it go because people never really defected from Tek-9 to come here for it, no matter how good the work was.

Have you ever been stopped from publishing work, due to legal reasons? I mean, i'm sure that you've got ALOT of shit on a fair few organisations - but have been stopped in someway from producing it for whatever reason? mee

I’m amazed I’ve never had a threat of legal action but I put that down to the fact I am more aware of journalistic law than the average e-sports employee. Everything I write I write to the standards held up by the PCC. I even have their guidelines on my windowsill next to my desk.

E-sports is a treehouse and pretty much the only times I’ve been stopped from publishing something – and that has never happened while I’ve been in charge of this site – has been based on “courtesy” or “friendships”. You know how it goes, you know someone has been telling lies, or you are going to run some story about them and it starts out with a “oh, maybe you should send them a copy first, just to give them chance to respond” and before you know it that has become “well, the problem will be fixed in a month so maybe run the story then if we’ve not sorted it. In exchange we’ll do X, Y and Z.”

I’d never really come across that sort of negotiation before. For me, if it’s news, or if you have information and you think it’s in the public interest, you print it. You only give the perpetrators an opportunity to respond out of thoroughness, not courtesy. You have no obligation to them or anyone other than the reader. That’s how I’ve always done things and I think that’s why, if you’ve noticed, we’ve really ran some stories that have made a difference, exposing liars or pressurising people to pay out what they owe.

We’re not a watchdog but I am proud when I hear that people who are doing wrong are worried about Cadred getting hold of the story. That brings a smile to my face.

Myself and tiLs during CGS


Biggest fail in eSports?Toxieman

It’s got to be CGS, completely and utterly. I’ve never seen so much money squandered on so little end product and I’ve never seen so many people rewarded for so much failure outside of New Labour. Think about it… The CGS could have been the thing that put competitive gaming of all denominations on the mainstream map. Instead, it’s legacy is that it set a bunch of greedy assholes up for life by basically overpaying them for credibility they didn’t really possess and they never really needed.

Look at Johnathan “Fatal1ty” Wendel… He’s come out of it with quarter of a million dollars or whatever the fuck it was and for what? He couldn’t commentate, had zero charisma and clearly was bored of the whole fucking thing from day one. You know, it might be a good laugh for the people that were involved, like GMs sat around saying “see that extension on my house… CGS did that” but I think everyone who loves e-sports should be really fucking angry that they got punked like that.

People like Scott Valencia all got to slink away and get involved in other things, so many people walked into decent jobs as a result of it, and yet the people who genuinely wanted to make something out of e-sports were left with the mess they made. And the hilarious part of it all is that they still have the fucking balls to come out and bleat about the successes of it, to say it wasn’t a corrupt pile of shit, that it didn’t rob deserving people of opportunities because it was all a big fucking treehouse. That’s the real shame of it all for me, that even now people won’t be candid in their disclosure of just what was going on. No-one wants to give both barrels to the people behind it “just in case” they’re doing themselves out of a job twelve months down the line when a rebranded CPL appears or something.

If I remember rightly they blew $50 million in under 3 years. How do you fuck that up? I mean even if you take into consideration they bullshitted about sponsors this side of the water and massively overpaid on hiring the venue because of some pre-arranged agreement so the people behind Omega Sektor could get a big fat golden handshake… It amazes me that they blew that sort of cash and the best it could do for e-sports was pretty much decimate the scene of every game it touched. That’s a spectacular fail, the biggest I’ve seen or been involved in.