Richard “Dr. Gonzo” Lewis shares his derailed train of thought with the wider world in his regular column feature, Gonzorreah.

Read Richard's last column, "The Politics of Blame" HERE

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.

We’ve all had shitty starts to a day at some point…. Waking up next to some unfamiliar woman that could conceivably be attractive if she had some teeth. Or waking up in a bath of ice and realising that they have taken your kidneys. Or waking up in a bath of ice without your kidneys next to the same toothless crone who comes leaning in for the gummiest of kisses just as you regain consciousness… Yes, we’ve all had those rotten mornings that seem all the worse for their juxtaposition against the dreams that are still tangible at the point of waking. After enough of them you can tell when they’re coming at you, that ominous sense of foreboding about the day as you slop down over your depressingly childish cereal.

And so it was just the other day after I’d been lulled into a false sense of security by waking and finding all my organs where they belong… Then the postman deposited his usual load of bills and junk mail through the letter box. Casually flicking through them I found addressed to “CS:S enthusiast and multi-gaming organisation manager” and although my enthusiasm waned sometime ago it was an accurate enough description for me to feel comfortable about opening it rather than leaving it for my housemates. I noticed that it didn’t have any postage on it and must clearly have been hand delivered, so I opened it up expecting maybe another offer to go down to a local LAN centre and run a tournament of some kind.

Waking up next to her? Just one of those mornings...

Instead it was a surprisingly brief hand written letter. It just said “I KNOW WHAT YOU DIDN’T DO THIS SUMMER” in black marker pen. If this sort of thing didn’t happen to me all the time it’d be unsettling, but I had to try and pinpoint exactly what it was I hadn’t done this Summer. One thing is for certain, I didn’t kill that fisherman this summer, so just what was it getting at? I’d barely had time to get my head together before the phone started ringing and the answer machine started picking up calls from my fellow colleagues, co-workers and players… Apparently they’d received the same letter to and were looking to me to explain just what it all meant. I was as confused as they were, until a lightning flash of comprehension hit me. You see, we’d all played our respective parts in a murder of sorts and someone, somewhere wasn’t too happy about it. Nothing left to do but watch this revenge play unfold…

Now just to be clear, none of this actually happened, but it may as well have, because we all know what we didn’t do this summer… And that is we didn’t support the LANs, the events and tournaments that could have brought about much needed attention and stability in the one reason,besides the new influx of trolling accounts, that anyone comes to this site; the old maid that is e-sports. Just what were we all thinking?

I’ll elaborate – it wasn’t so long ago that we were moaning about there not being much to the average e-sports year besides the resident three i-series and the occasional European event that actually had an international attendance. Online leagues and invite tournaments were being scaled down to the point that they were not even worth competing in. Such competitions were, at the time, the sole preserve of second string sides looking to take advantage of the better teams indifference. “We need more and more people to run tournaments and bring sponsors into the game” was the general consensus, and we all sat around muttering agreements and sucking on our pipes. We knew what was best.

"Are you going to LAN?"

Then we actually got what we wanted, a new wave of online leagues and cups with decent cash prizes, more affordable LANs across Europe with prize-pots worth competing for and people waiting in the wings to see just how popular they prove promising they would throw more our way if we got behind them. It prompted everyone to get on an optimistic bent even in the face of the global economic meltdown. Summer was to be the heart of it all, the period of time when there can really be no excuses about how you spend it. People book time off work, exams are over, colleges break up and parents grimace at the prospect of losing their spare room for a few months. It is the optimum time to do anything in e-sports, given the average age of the participants.

And all the organisations talked up a storm about how they’d be attending all the upcoming events, the OOFs, the TEX’s, the FOMs and the i-series, while at the same time maintaining a stable line-up to make serious in-roads into both UKeSA and the ESL leagues with their LAN finals. It sounded like we could look forward to a really competitive season on paper, an opportunity to finally see whether some teams could be knocked off their perches and some unfamiliar names, outside of their domestic scenes, be wedged into the frame of the bigger picture.

Instead what we got was a bunch of mix teams limping across the finishing line and sacrificing much of their prize money in the process, a load of high profile non attendances at LANs that must be wondering if they’d have gotten more attention if they’d booked a circus for the same weekend, and a group of MGOs not seeming to comprehend that if they don’t support tournaments then they’re pretty soon not going to have any to send teams to in the first place. While it’s easy enough to moan about players lacking professionalism, at the end of the day that’s what happens if you let them run amuck. That’s what happens if you continually let standards slip, or don’t enforce contracts, or don’t even have your contracts put together to a level where they don’t get laughed at by an A-level contractual law student. This is what happens if you pick up teams that have the word “fold” tattooed across their foreheads, who take the free LAN and then disappear back to mixing until the next opportunity for a free LAN comes along. Basically, I think the blame for the massive let down lies with the organisations.

I say this because I know players want to play, and I know tournaments are there to be played in. The only vital component that seems to be missing is the sign-ups… And for all the will in the world, you’re not going to pad out event attendance with mix teams during the Summer because most people would rather spend it on a real holiday. Hats off to those that do of course, but generally people will be keeping their money back for something else. LANs are never the cheapest pastime. I don’t think it’d be so bad were it not for the fact that so many organisation managers said “we’ll be there” and provisionally booked to go to all the events, then for one reason or another, they ultimately withdrew, making a lot less noise as they did so. I genuinely feel for events like OOF that must have been thinking, given their location, prize fund and competitive pricing, they would be on to a winner. Instead with only a few weeks to go they are still looking to get a significant amount of sign-ups. Will they be back next time? Well, if they are, I doubt the prize fund will be as good for CS:S, if they represent that game at all.

Millionaires... Every organisation should have one. If you believe them, most do.

What a lot of organisations seem to be doing at the moment is shrugging their shoulders and simply peddling the same old excuse regarding financial downturns and saying that it isn’t economically viable to send their teams to a wide host of events. Do these people not realise that if the money isn’t coming into their organisation that regardless of whether there is indeed a huge reduction of the amount of money coming into e-sports that the buck has to stop with them? What exactly are these people doing to try and kick-start the flow of money coming in to their organisation? I see plenty of people keen to cite mysterious benefactors or fictitious millionaires, but not as many who take the time to put detailed proposals together, work on their sales pitch or actually look to contact a sponsor outside of the usual names that adorn every website. Country simple – if the organisation doesn’t have the money to support teams, that’s the fault of the people running it. That is business.

To put that comment in perspective I can tell you that a reasonably small community side managed to gain an offer of full sponsorship from a major company specialising in alcoholic beverages simply off the back of a well written proposal and some follow up e-mails. Even in difficult times it is possible to get the interest of companies that, with the right sort of marketing savvy and promotional awareness, can benefit from a decent amount of advertising for a relatively cheap outlay. As I wrote many months ago in another column entirely the amount of people still lying about their sponsorship and support in the hope of enticing players, gaining results or just buying more time to actually rope in someone who can actually provide what they are claiming they already can before the house of cards comes crashing down would probably shock you. Or maybe not, because despite chest beating and fang baring nothing really seems to change.

This doesn’t apply to some… I know there are those out there that are seeing the bigger picture and are doing all they can to grow the scene. I’m pretty sure you could reel off the names, so for me to do so is not really necessary. Yet equally there those I know of that would, bizarrely, rather lose money they have already paid up to events rather than try and plug gaps in the team at short notice. That is effectively saying they would rather preserve some completely erroneous perception of their reputation than ensure that a tournament has enough sign-ups to consider maybe doing it again sometime in the near future. It is made all the more stupefyingly ridiculous that this indifference comes at a time when the wish-list that most organisations put together, things they said would improve e-sports and make their jobs easier, has been largely granted. They wanted online leagues that paid retainers and winning bonuses… They got that, but failed to deliver on the stability front. They wanted a schedule that had no large gaps in it to keep teams active and encourage longevity… They get that and then don’t send teams to the events. This isn’t a bit on the side that you’re handling… Treat them mean, keep them keen as an ethos isn’t going to work in e-sports.

The future of European LANs?

I’ve heard the arguments that maybe those organising the tournaments could do a bit more to help teams with accommodation and that sort of thing, but I’m really not buying that as an acceptable reason for why we’ve got a lot of teams all professing to be a vital part of the competitive scene all effectively avoiding these events that are vital to our scene’s survival. It’s not even as if it is just the European events that have some big names missing from them. Even the sold-out i-series looks like it has a lot of the big names missing from the event and it is never likely to become the barometer for who is the best in Europe when hardly any non-UK teams attend. Of course, on the plus side, at least it sells out, so you know it isn’t going to go anywhere anytime soon. Perhaps that is a big part of the general indifference some of the UK MGOs have towards the European LANS… That no matter what happens we can be safe in the knowledge we’ll have our three big events a year, and it will be relatively easy to get a respectable finish. Anything outside of that is a bonus.

But such an attitude ignores a lot of vitally important questions. What is the point of people putting on tournaments only for a handful of teams to show up? What is the point of leagues offering money to teams solely for completing a season, if orgs are going to continually ignore and pass over teams that show what they may lack in skill they make up for in dedication? I’d like to see a radical shift in direction, one that actually involves managers living up to that name, rolling up their sleeves and starting to see where they fit in to the e-sports structure. There’s a lot more to it than a name, a brand, a logo… If we all go back to competing in our bed-rooms or in barns, what does that become worth? If they don’t start supporting the events, respecting the tournaments and keeping teams living up to a bare minimum of expectations, and we don’t make them see that this is the direction they need to be moving in, then we’re all going to be party to the murdering of a scene. If you don’t LAN this Summer, then I don’t know what you’ll be doing come the next one.