Dear Gears Competitive / Hardcore Community,
[This is a long post, and I didn’t want this to be a YouTube video but a little reading won’t kill you.]
Some days I’m really torn as to what this community wants from this game and how they want to enjoy it. I personally love the game, I love playing it (even though ragey at times), and I love watching good people play this game. Maybe that’s my problem as to why I don’t understand the lack of involvement from players.
If you like the game so much, you should want to do something about it. Simply playing the game doesn’t do anything above and beyond just playing the game. It’s a video game and it’s meant to be played. Just playing it only fulfills exactly what the game was meant to do. Be played.
If prize money is what drives you to play a game and the hope of some sort of lifestyle change, well damn, maybe you picked the wrong game because looking at the eSports scene, we clearly can see who the winners are. The prizes can only reflect how good the community is.
This is one of the reasons sometimes I wish I never took interest in this community. I see so much potential, so much energy and passion and its wasted because quite frankly, most of the members are clueless and completely unmotivated to contribute to the community. Mostly everyone is selfish, they want to play for themselves because they enjoy getting better at the game, and they want to display their talent at a competitive venue and get something for it. That’s what most of this core community is.
Ask yourself then why should other SELFLESS people even care about the SELFISH gamers in this community that don’t even help themselves and motivate others to enjoy this game? A lot of you blame it on the game. “Oh it’s crap.” Why even comment and waste your breath then? There’s 6 years of Gears of War culture out there. Are some of you THAT completely demotivated as to not share any of that culture beyond yourselves and show other competitive communities the potential this game should have?
The Hypefestation crew did a lot of work trying to keep this community alive but this saying is true. “You can’t help people that don’t want to help themselves.” This statement couldn’t be any truer.
I’d like to use the Halo community as an example here because what happened to them is similar to what happened to the Gears of War community. The miracle eSports wonder organization, MLG, supported Halo and gave Halo players way more than they ever deserved or built up to. All Halo was before MLG, was 4 player split screen LAN parties in college dorms and homes, and then BOOM! Main Stage, Lights, Prize Money, Tons of Stations, Interviews, Pro Status, Semi-Pro Status, and Sponsors WHOA!
This created the mind set for the community that they were entitled to that treatment all the time when in reality, they never were. When MLG dropped Halo, that community was so torn and in disarray because they never did stand on their own two feet. The only NORTH AMERICAN community entitled to their own growth is the Fighting Game Community. They’ve been at it for 20+ years and the Counter-Strike community did a great job with playing their game in an online fashion and some of their LANs were good.
Enter the Gears of War community. The GoW Players had a taste of those MLG lights and fame when they also… never deserved it and grew up to it. Again, that was instant miracle growth and investment by MLG and whatever other parties invested into the community thinking it was going to be worth it. Guess what happened? You all know how the story ends if your reading this.
There never was any growth. MLG didn’t pick up Gears of War because there was an over abundance of LANs happening all over the country. MLG didn’t pick up Gears of War because there was just SO many players competiting in it, it would have been a no brainer. They picked it up as an investment. Here’s the dictionary definition of investment if you don’t know what that means. Investment – the investing of money or capital in order to gain profitable returns, as interest, income, or appreciation in value.
I want to point out the word value here. This is where I’ll start to end this. The keyword is value. Seriously, besides a select few individuals in the community, what have YOU personally done to increase the value of this community? If all you can think of is “I play the game” that doesn’t add value. If you argue and complain on forums, that doesn’t add value.
If you have traveled and flown to events for Gears of War, thank you. That adds value but that adds PASSIVE value. In a sense, you are ASSISTING someone else’s work. The true question is, how have YOU … ACTIVELY added value to the community?
Try to think of people who have actively tried to add value and you’ll see the problem.
Source: hypefestation
