the changes that were coming down the pipeline. For the past 100 or so episodes of The Loser's Bracket podcast, we have talked about the evolution of eSports and our ever growing role in its development. As you all know, after MLG Columbus, we started a serious crackdown on social media use, dropping many members, and moving many into the community gamer group.
After that, we had to take a close look at where we were and where eSports was headed. When we took a look at the numbers, we realized that we had been too nice. We had let things linger. I was reminded of the 2008 Darren Aronofsky film, The Wrestler. In this film, Rourke plays an aging professional wrestler who continues to wrestle matches in an attempt to cling on to his 1980s heyday despite his failing health. If you haven't seen it, I can't recommend it enough.
Let me show the Top XBox titles played for the week of April 9th taken from Major Nelson's Blog
- Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3
- Call of Duty: Black Ops
- FIFA 12
- Battlefield 3
- Halo: Reach
- Modern Warfare 2
- Skyrim
- Gears of War 3
- NBA 2K12
- Mass Effect 3
We decided to take all non-sponsored players (no effect on sponsored players) for all games that were not at a major events and put them in the Community Gamer group. We needed to lose the distinction between Halo/Gears/CoD/Rhythm Gaming groups and merge them into a more diverse Community Gamer Group. We want our community gamers to be a diverse group. We chose red as their color to reflect that community gamers were our blood, our beginning and what makes vVv Gaming so special.
This change makes it easier to manage and better align our efforts with the titles that actually are at major events and have the kind of developer support needed for success as an eSport.
With that, some of you saw our non-sponsored Halo players basically revolt, force us to take down the shoutbox 3 times, and then resign. I was very disappointed with the behavior of one person in particular, and he has been banned. We take the chain of command very seriously, and the shoutbox is not the place to fight. Sadly, he could not separate the critique of his game, Halo, from the critique of himself. We always respect the person in vVv Gaming, but we CAN attack the game someone loves while still respecting the person. Hate the game, not the gamer. If your game gets attacked, don't make it personal. Period.
I can promise you that if any of those games listed above end up at a major event, we will gladly give them their own group. Please know that all our sponsored players still keep their user group. Until then, I want everyone to know our priorities:
- Starcraft 2
- League of Legends
- Mortal Kombat 9/Soul Caliber V/King of Fighters XIII
- Diablo 3 (release May 15th)
- Guild Wars 2 (release June 26th est.)
- Halo Reach/Halo 4 (release November 6th)
- Call of Duty MW3/Call of Duty Black Ops 2 (we will know the release date on 5/2/2012)
- DotA2?
- Counter Strike: Go?
- Possible Rhythm Gaming revival?
As far as sponsorships, we are now offering two kind of sponsorships: Professional and Content.
Professional sponsorships are awarded to our best players who are working to be professional gamers. This covers all of our current sponsorships.
Content sponsorships are our community players who are working to become professional content producers.
I also want to talk about staff. As you know, they work very hard. We recently have gone through some staff changes as well. All were due to burnout or staffers getting busy with balancing life and their duties on staff, so expect to see some new faces. We have seen so much interest in vVv Gaming that I am excited to get some fresh blood and fresh ideas onto our staff.
I want to wish both Voison and Slauney good luck, as they both need to attend to other parts of their life. They will both remain vVv members, but their time on staff, for now, has come to an end. Thank you both for all your hard work.
I want to cover everyone's roles so you know what they do:
Executives
vVv LordJerith (President/Owner)
vVv Doomhammer (Senior Vice President)
Administrators
vVv Brock (Vice President of Visual Media)
vVv Paradise (Podcast Producer)
vVv Robzgod (Marketing Manager)
vVv SugarBear (StarCraft 2 Manager)
Moderators
vVv AmpeD (DotA2 Manager)
vVv Arkaine (Community Gamer Manager)
vVv Bizkit (Community Gamer Manager)
vVv Esoteric (Fighting Games Manager)
vVv Nocontrol (LoL Manager)
vVv Plattypus (LoL Community Manager)
Writers
vVv Blazek
vVv Rapture
We will be recruiting more writers and casters, as well as selecting our GW2 Guild Leader and officers and a Diablo 3 manager. We have so much great stuff happening!
