Why European Source coverage isn't where it should be.

“I'm disapointed that a site like GotFrag haven't made one single newspost about SLKS” [sic].

There we have the words of just one member of the Source community, and, to use the time old cliché, they’ve hit the nail on the head. Or rather, they’ve hit one of the nails on the head. GotFrag is stale; they have a number of teams and a couple of important competitions to write about, and then they do the same type of article over and over. There may be the odd match report, possibly an interview or two, or a short commentary on how a certain team has been faring within e-sports, and, to top it all off, something like a ‘week in review’. Just looking at the Source home page as I type this, I can see there are 3 articles based around CAL, 2 on CEVO and one focusing on a team. There’s one interview, which is exactly like all the rest of them ever since GotFrag began, and then the other articles contrive of taking in some facts and spitting them out in a nice, neat, concise way – especially for you, the masses.

When I was told I had a job writing for GotFrag, I was pretty pleased with myself: I thought that maybe I could accomplish something by writing for them. My creative-ship quickly sank when I was directed to the GotFrag 1.6 page and was told to write articles like those, but for Source. I was basically doing the European version of what they’d done already: recycling GotFrag USA, with different teams.

One problem was that I’d joined halfway through the first season of CAL-Euro, and another writer was already covering it. I asked what I should do about it, and they said leave it for the same writer. Naturally, he left GotFrag the next week, leaving me with nothing much to cover on this side of the Atlantic, as they still wouldn’t allow me to cover CAL-Euro.

So I put my attention to doing interviews, to help introduce people to the European teams. Looking back, I realise that I gave myself too large a job, and even when I was interviewing each team I’d made things too long-winded. That wasn’t the only problem; any attempt to ‘familiarise’ the players and make them less of a name-on-a-screen and more of a real person resulted in the attempt being edited out by the dear old staff higher up in the food chain.

Heavy editing also struck my match reports with disastrous effect, so I decided to stop doing them after a couple of these escapades.

Eventually, I began wondering if there was anything I could do to really put European Source on par with the USA for coverage. Around that time, the Assembly LAN 2006 was drawing near, so I decided to ask GotFrag if they would fund my way to the LAN to cover it. You may now be wondering why I didn’t fund myself – I’m a student, not a charity, and I’m poor enough as it is, yet I was willing to sacrifice my time to cover a LAN in another country purely to help the website I was writing for. GotFrag said “no” to my plan, obviously thinking that the best way to cover a LAN was from a few hundred miles away, where I could get a firm knowledge of what was going on and sum it up in a lovely article about some of the top European Source teams, which was of course why they’d recruited me in the first place.

It may just seem like I’m railing at GotFrag for doing a piss-poor job. Well, I am. But I’m also saying that, not only are they not going far enough to help their staff cover what they want covering, but the coverage itself is stale and repetitive. It’s like they have one recipe for writing about e-sports that they’ve used since “spring 2002” [sic]. They might not realise that it gets a bit boring when they don’t try anything new to keep their readers entertained, but instead stay with this trustworthy old format that’s getting them nowhere (this may be because they’re where they want to be, and can’t be arsed to do anything new or innovating as a result of that).

Oh, and when the number 1 site for coverage of e-sports can’t write in English (‘spring’ has a capital ‘S’), it might not look too good to any investors in the market, which isn’t what we want.

“I'm disapointed that a site like GotFrag haven't made one single newspost about SLKS”? I’m disappointed with a site like GotFrag – it’s just stale, m8.