Planetary Annihilation as an eSport

Maybe!

Yeah I can see that. I've tossed a nuke at someones horde to ease the passage of some SXX elsewhere. (they freaked out and moved their commander back in range of their antinukes and out of range of their ground defenses/remnants)

I kind of want to do a Statera 40 man ffa.

Oh, the carnage. <3

most people didn't want do deal with certain peoples so they made exodus.

Yeah stuart, we all know Stratera balance is the only and best way ever to balance this game.. We should all bow in your glory and submit ourselves to your rule.

/s

Well I wouldn't think he believed that, as he also plays RCBM!

Personally I prefer our balance, but I can get behind vanilla, it surely can be fun.

My apologies, I'm just getting tired of stratera being thrown in my face in so many balance threads.

Yeah, he kinda does that. :S

PA is already an 'esport' - there are prize tournaments being held all the time. If by esport you mean mainstream events at DH, MLG, with people making a living doing nothing but playing the game, then no probably not anytime soon.

Though no-one really knows for sure whether it will pick up or not - anyone who tells you otherwise comes from the future. Alot of people thought CS:GO was dead in the water (and it was for a time), then the game got an incredible growth surge seemingly out of nowhere.

There are groups of people who are placing sizeable bets that the scene will grow, and that is always a healthy sign. At the very least, it means there is the infrastructure in place to support community driven competitive activity with 3rd party tournaments like the infamous clopsey series, or the more recent swiss tournament. You don't invest as much as exodus has without some expectation that the game will have a healthy competitive scene for some time to come.

When we talk about competitive however, you also need to consider whether the high level endpoint provides deep gameplay. At the moment i personally think it does not, as it always comes back to dox spam all day erry day being the best reward vs risk (game does not favour vehicles, naval, grenadiers, or t2, unless you force it with multi planet spawns or specifically designed maps). However, it will only take a few very small one number changes, such as reducing dox move speed or increasing naval move speed, to yield drastic improvments. The game is still being supported and we have a new balance dev coming in, so who knows what the future holds.

*Also, i don't think there's anything wrong with the game being accessible to casual play - just look at LoL, the ultimate casuals game. It's actually a good thing for building spectatorship, sponsors, and generating a positive feedback loop. Many games that 100% focus on making their game 'competitive' dont ever find success. I guess it comes down to whether you are after an esport, or a deep good game, and what tradeoffs you are willing to take to achieve your goal.

SC2 and CS are good examples of games that understands how to balance casual and spectator accessibility with depth of complexity.

that might be the quickest way of putting it ever.

I've only directly mentioned Statera 5 times in the past week, two of which were in the modding forum. The remainder consisted of a request for someone to host a massive statera game to see how it played out, pointing out that multi-unit transports (such as those of Statera) can help with the orbital invasion problem but don't fix it, and saying that increasing naval speed as we've done in Statera fixes one of its problems.

Squishy's actually mentioned Statera 12 times in the past week, 3 of which were in the modding forum.

You sly dog you

DID SOMEONE SAY STATERA?

I assume he didn't really mean in one week, he means of all time. I very rarely mention it for the most part, and when I do, it isn't as... In your face did you read the posts you found when you did the term search?

I mean the last time I mentioned it I just said I wanted to do a 40 man ffa of it, one being talking about the fact multi-unit transports actually are possible, etc..

Plus if anyone felt I mentioned it too much, why would you be the one called out on it?

Edit: Plus I almost always mention RCBM along with it, and then PM whoever I was talking to, to discuss it in further detail without derailing the thread.