What traditional sports could learn from 5 years of DOTA2?

Few days ago started The International 2016, the sixth annual biggest DOTA2 tournament hosted by Valve in Seattle with an astonishing $20,2M prize pool (and rising).
The first event in 2011 was created as a launching milestone for the game and set the record for the biggest prize pool ever seen on the eSport scene (1.6 million dollars).

5 years has passed, prize pools of DOTA2 events are skyrocketing, player base is increasing both in quantity & quality, and eSport is finally starting to get some recognition in the traditional sports world with well-known professional teams (like Manchester or Schalke04) creating eSport sections.
Let’s not fall into the troll debate about the fact that eSport should be considered a real sport or not (I may write about this later) but focus on what traditional sports could learn from this gigantic rise.

The balancing dream

The constant quest for equilibrium is the nightmare of every game designer. Changing the rules helps to fight the monotony of a single overpowered strategy or play style reigning on the scene, but too frequent or inconsistent changes destroys its interest with randomness.

If we look at balancing statistics about traditional sports, it appears that some of them, especially soccer or tennis, could do way better:

• 11 out of the last 12 Spanish soccer championships were won by 2 teams.
• Djokovic and Wawrinka won 8 of the last 12 Grand Slam tournaments.
• 8 games before the end of the French soccer championship, Paris Saint-Germain was already crowned (for the 6th consecutive time).

On the DOTA2 scene, considering the 9 major tournaments (with a prize pool of at least $1M) since 2011, 7 teams were crowned. Only 5 players were able to attend to each of those events.

Balance is most likely the sole reason why the original StarCraft, which came out years before Warcraft III, is still more widely played and beloved by the community. (Keith Burgun)

This is also the case of DotA for the MOBA genre. It could have stayed an obscure game and slowly perish in the limbs of Battle.net but thanks to the relentless balancing by its designers (especially the mysterious IceFrog) it stood out long enough to attract the eyes of Valve which helped it spread massively to the public.

Changing rules to rule them all

Too few sports regularly update their rules, and it is often seen as something bad (just look at the controversy about adding instant replay into soccer), but in the end I personally feel it is a mistake as it prevent the sport from evolving or adapting to its players or supporters. Even ancient games like Go felt the need to introduced the Komi rule to balance the black player advantage.

Since its official release in July 2013 (2011–2013 was open beta period), DOTA2 was patched more than 165 times, mostly for bug fixes but also 32 times for balancing purpose. It is almost a balancing update per month.
That means that every month, each competitive team has to review the new update and adapt their strategies to make the best out of the current meta-game, there is no comfort zone or definite stronger strategy that dominates the game forever.

Traditional sports are more eager to update the competitive scene rules than the sport itself even if it does not seem to drive more interest. Economic rules (financial fair-play for UEFA) are often seen as sanctions against either richest or poorest clubs, whereas sport rule updates impacts all clubs to the same degree.

Adapting competition to permanent balancing

If rules change every now and then, how can we be sure that competition does not start to be totally random? There are a few tricks that can be listed.

First of all, just like in tennis, matches are played in several games (generally best-of-three, and best-of-five for grand finals). Even if the meta-game has evolved quickly and is still obscure, a team needs to defeat the opponent at least two times to get a victory, proving they are clearly above the other team on the current meta-game.

As this kind of matches are long and exhausting in a round-robin format (especially when there are tiebreakers involved), Swiss-system is often preferred to lower the number of games played.

On the other hand, brackets are always double-elimination. That means that playing well in the pools grants teams the right to lose one game (as a defeat is only synonym to lower bracket relegation and not end of tournament). That is quite a strong difference compared to other sports as in almost every one of them a defeat in the bracket tournament means you are out. Every DOTA2 team that loses in the upper bracket has to regroup itself and gather their strength in order to step back into the tournament whereas in soccer for instance, a losing team has to wait 4 years with their frustration before having the chance to compete again.

It’s not how many times you get knocked down that count, it’s how many times you get back up. (General Custer)

Involving the crowd

As I said earlier, DotA could have stayed a custom map of WarCraft III played only by hardcore fans. Why did Valve decide to invest so much into this game? The constant balancing keeping the game enjoyable is a thing but what Valve saw in this game is most importantly its community.

Back in the days, the Battle.net platform was not at all adapted to play games likes DotA. The limitations of the WarCraft III game engine was restraining the creativity of the game designers, it was a really complicated thing to play alongside a friend in a public game, if a player had an internet connection issue he could not connect back to the game (all other players were then leaving the map without finishing). Nevertheless, the community of players were still growing year after year.

Valve saw the potential that this community could bring. That is why they chose to hire IceFrog (the lead designer of DotA), create with him DOTA2, a full game on its own engine allowing the community to enjoy playing its favorite game, removing those hurdles by using another environment.
While doing so (and still today), they made sure to hear out the pro and casual players desires as well as fears to be sure that the game they were redesigning would fit the community they wanted to target.

For instance the greatest fear of that time was to be sure that the game would be free to play and that there would never be any money involved in the core gameplay (other franchises of the genre have those kind of systems where money can influence the gameplay).

Keeping the community involved and satisfied is complicated but Valve is doing a successful job at it. Their greatest move was when they decided to let the players participate into the prize pool of their tournaments. Each player can buy a $10 object called a Compendium for The International tournament containing various cosmetic objects or games to play during the tournament. For each compendium, $2,5 are added to the prize pool of the tournament (and the rest goes to Valve obviously).
If we stop one second on this, this year, the prize pool rose by more than $18M that means that Valve has earned more than $54M just by allowing fans to participate in their passion.

We could list a lot of other decisions they made to satisfy the community (like cosplay and short-film competitions), but the overall idea is that they are not afraid to take strong decisions (like firing a whole production team during a tournament) to ensure the support of the DOTA2 community to their vision of the game.

This could also be a big step of improvement for traditional sports as most of them clearly believes that TV audiences is the only metric to gauge the supporters love of the sport.

Stepping up the talents

In a context where the meta-game change so quickly, analysts and commentators have to constantly adapt and improve in order to stay up to date with the scene. A common talent panel consists of a host, 3 analysts (TI 2016 added a replay analyst to the mix) in charge of pre and post game analysis, 2 commentators (a play-by-play as well as a specialist), and interviewers (and observers but this is specific to eSport). So far nothing special, it is a common setup in other sports.

What drastically differentiates DOTA2 especially from other traditional sports is the fact that all those talent are backed up by statistician analysts. Indeed, as the meta-game evolve people need to understand which team is ahead of the other, and in complicated games like DOTA2, this is not only reflected by score.
Same thing for soccer, ball possession and field occupation are really good statistics to understand the flow of the game, but you can only see them once or twice per match (along with number of shoots and fouls, or the distance traveled), analysts only comments them lightly, and moreover they are just instant statistics (you can’t have a timed graph).

DOTA2 has some statistics always visible to screen that help to see which team is currently dominating the match. Moreover commentators (more precisely observers) regularly display graphs about gold income or net worth of teams during the game to help understand how and when the game is shifting.

Lot of sport focus their statistic analysis solely on player performances instead of team impact throughout the match and rely heavily on the score for viewers to get a grip on the current situation.

TL;DR

Sports should try to update their rules more often to evolve.
Competitive scene should also change to adapt to those constant updates.
They should also try to involve their community on other levels as well as stop under-using the statistics they can get.