At the high level of competition, you'd be surprised at the skills being developed. We don't use IM, we use radio comms similar to when I was in the military. PTT. We also have programs that model the maps (3rd party software) and allow us to draw and place icons and such so as to communicate out a strategy for everyone to work out and understand. It's like a chalkboard, but far better.

At the end of the day, you guys naysaying eSports simply lack the experience to know what you're talking about. So far every comment that dislikes eSports has been incredibly naive and demostrates a lack of knowing anything at all about the difference between competitive and casual gaming. Did you know that some people cheat by using methampetamines? Did you know that meth is to eSports as steroids are to baseball? Did you know the pro-leagues, when competing in person, test for these substances to ensure integrity?

You just don't understand the competition. The competition in gaming is not at all the same as the regular 'public' play. Competitive gaming is about developing and resonating on new advantages that other teams do not have and then applying them in carefully orchestrated strategies. You're right that it's not fun for you because your expectation of the game is similar to how the game was advertised. The people having fun with competitive gaming are reaping the rewards of hard work and the feeling of success when some very intricate feat the team developed actually worked.

A great example of what it means to game competitively comes from the Kubra Dam map on 8v8 battlefield 2. On that map there is to most people only one way for vehicles to go at the beginning -- straight across the top of the dam. If you tried to get to the lower part of the dam from the MEC side, you'd have to drive a long snaking road in the wide open. But.. while screwing around, my friend and I accidentally drove the MEC Vodnic (van-like vehicle) off of the top of the dam at the spawn down a huge veritcal drop, and the vehicle didn't explode! We were very surprised and *knew* immediately that we had discovered an advantage nobody had but needed to figure out how it happened and how to use it.

This then became an event taking a full evening of testing to find out that if you drive the van off the cliff at the right speed, and the front wheels go off, you can hit reverse, which would stop the vehicle from flipping forward while braking, and keep the vodnic level as its rear wheels exited the cliff lip. The vodnic goes off the cliff perfectly flat (when trained correctly for a couple hours), and lands on all four wheels. This makes it bounce very high and lose half of its health, BUT IT SURVIVES! And so this gave us a strategy nobody had. We could use the vehicle from the breakout, load people up on the top of the dam at the full frontal attack, but run one guy off the cliff in the Vodnik across the bottom of the dam, unnoticed, and into the USA Main base in under 30 seconds. This was not even known to be possible, so arriving in that base is unexpected and unprotected. The guys ramming to the full frontal on the top of the dam are battling alongside tanks, but to be smart, they are in the squad of the guy in the vodnik arriving at the USA main. This means that if your push for the middle flag gets killed, they will take it and it will stack the invasion of their main base further against them as those guys respawn in on the USA main that is just now being invaded.

The end result is that no matter how you approached it, you would capture key flags, and if necessary, the enemy would be left without any main base, stranded in the middle of the top of the dam.
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And that is just a glimpse at one technique required to win in the top of competition. When my crew took the TGL 8v8 world championship, we had a shoutcast with 2200 viewers. It was pure glory. We even took a game from what is known as the best BF2 team ever, Team HOT, in the TWL 12v12 ladder because we had a large array of these awesome technical feats trained for Sharqi Peninsula, and I developed a strategy for about 60 hours of effort and trained all 15 members (backups included) on how each stage of the strategy should happen and what fallback procedures would occur if primary objectives fail. We sacked their main in under a minute.

eSports have been my long-time favorite way to spectate gaming (or demonstrate skill to an audience). I've never been much of a fan of watching real-life sports -- some have been pretty interesting, especially if they don't have downtime (like soccer, rugby, etc) -- but at the end of the day, the fact that I don't participate in these sports has left me with less interest.

Competitive Gaming on the other hand, has been a staple in my life since Doom II. I will never forget how Quake 1 had great multiplayer mods with capture the flag, etc, and that you could go into a spectator mode. At that point, I was very excited to see how other players would react and strategize in situations I myself would encounter.

Fast forward over a decade and we've got competitive counter strike, battlefield 2, etc, rolling along and the shoutcasts started. These were always very niche, but they were far more frequent than the extremely rare CPL video streams and the poor attempts by big media companies to create an eSport event on television. Back then (about 10 years ago), those big media events usually had too many shots of the crowds and of the gamers themselves, and not enough attention to the gameplay. For me, the best shoutcasts were direct video streams from observer mode and first person mode, with announcers discussing the game as it unfolds.

Anyway... In the last several years, there have been Twitch streams and much larger scaled video game streams or recordings on youtube that are really starting to please my tastes. It's good to see that gaming, a very popular medium for competition and pleasure, is gaining mainstream attention. This is also a great sign that our generation is finally starting to matter.

... that the Policemen involved will be charged with fraud or lying of some sort.

Please tell me that the police are not immune to law.

The intelligence oversight act of 1974 gave small groups in congress the ability to oversee intelligence activities that breach rights -- the basis being that warranting evidence would then lead to permissions of privacy violations, etc. I don't understand why this isn't still important. It was important in August 2001. It was important on September 10th 2001.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H...

Every lock you build has a key. A security cold war is inevitable.

Our politicians (Obama included) continue to say we need more STEM education. They also continue to expand H1-B visas. What does this mean? It means a hypersaturation of the workforce. This merely reduces the value of the most passionate and educated people in the country. We don't need more STEM. We need more reasons for STEM educated people to exist.

No no no... lets just stop buying things that need to be reliable from people who cannot produce reliable things.

.... you could just buy XCom. A little work, like mowing someone's lawn or just saving on a few tactful choices, can pay for the game. I have a saying... You can spend your life building a ladder to the moon, or you could work for a few years to pay for a trip there.

Analog is how information is collected from nature. For most (if not all) digital systems, the device used for actual measurement will have analog sensors. The electrical, then converted to digital, signals are dependent on the analog receptor.

People can always improve on these tools.

Personal XP here. SF cabs will skip you for the fare they just noticed on the street. Uber (a rideshare company) will be there waiting for you at least 2 minutes before you asked for them. No, I don't own stock in Uber -- but I wish I did. They just bought 2500 driverless cars from google (approved by DOT) for their fleet.

Welcome to reality. We've been getting screwed as 99%ers for a couple decades now.

Scan around the odd pics on the internet. You want a sign of the times? There are dozens of pictures of people that are driving on the street WITH NO TIRES AT ALL. They are driving on the metal rim. Deduce it. It's simple. The frequency of that kind of absurdity has gone up not because there are more ridiculous/insane people driving -- it has increased because the ability of people to afford their lives is being so heavily squeezed now that they simply cannot, and yet they still have to get to the store and to work. So they drive on metal rims.

I don't know anyone under 40 that isn't struggling. And that's because I don't have banker friends.

So what you're saying is that they are using a loophole by relying on their drivers to lie about what they were doing. A lawyer might even argue that, of course, the driver was going in that direction because money was waiting for them when they arrive! How keen!

Pffft. Why not just deregulate taxi driving and be honest about it. I know Lyft drivers. They are *not* picking people up randomly. They treat it as a job and appreciate the income.

What good and honorable people of the earth, that you know, measure success by money? If my band were to ever come upon a windfall of cash we would start a charity with it. We are the type of people who only wish for sustenance and stability. Money is for fools.

I apologize if that was how I was taken. I've been vetted and validated personally by hundreds of listeners by CD/Radio/Live-Show, and, to be honest, it's not hard to be better than mainstream