MLG Columbus — The 1st Milion (and American) Major
Hello folks, I am Kássio Machado and this is my 2nd publication about eSports on medium (I covered the last IEM before).
MLG Major was the event of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CSGO) placed in Columbus — Ohio/US. The event got a lot of attention because of the prize pool of $1 million and its location. Sixteen pro teams attended to the event broadcasted in 16 different languages.
We got a ride on the hype and collected some data from Twitter, Facebook and of course, Twitch. The goal of the analysis is to identify the features of the community, relevance of players/teams and how the event impacted on their popularity.
#Twitch
The chat of Twitch channels usually are deluges of data, emotes and 'trash text'. However, we can use it to identify some features of the community, such as its vocabulary.
Terms like Kappa, GG and Pogchamp are well know and widely used during the streams and are closed related to emotions about in-game moves and casters/streamers. The Figure 1 bellow highlights most popular terms (we excluded teams and players’ names to show only terms without subjects). If you have no idea about the Twitch emotes, you can find info on: http://mashable.com/2014/08/08/twitch-emoticons/.
Investigating the player’s popularity (Figure 2 and 3) we found TACO from Luminosity Team as the most mentioned player. His popularity is related to the nickname VACO (a junction of VAC + TACO due to their highlights). It’s interesting because Fallen and pashaBiceps are the most popular on social media. In addition, despite the finals (Luminosity x NA’VI), players of other teams still remain between the most mentioned ones, such as s1mple, Hiko, JW, tarik, etc.
Special mention to Hiko and s1mple from Team Liquid (eliminated during semi-finals), both were mentioned more than Fallen (captain of winner team) and coldzera (most valuable player of the event). It is important to highlight a possible bias on main MLG Twitch channel (broadcasted in english). Furthermore, Team Liquid is the current best team from North America scene and the last representative of NA.
Regarding the popularity of teams (Figure 4), the "surprise" was Virtus.Pro and NiP figuring in 3rd and 4th despite their eliminations during the quarter-finals. However, it is not a big surprise because those are veterans of the scene and have thousands of fans, even in bad seasons. Figure 5 shows the cumulative timeline of team mentions during the broadcasts. Naturally, the mentions are close-related to the live matches.
The Figures 6a shows the timeline of main stream and additional streams (other languages) during the event. Because of presentation, we limited the number of streams according to their number of viewers. The main stream showed separately was the most important and grouped the largest amount of users, but the Polish and Russian (Figure 6b) streams got huge number of viewers during all time. As mentioned before, Virtus.Pro has a legion of fans and they are the best team on Poland, so it explains why Russia exceeded the number of viewers during the finals (NAVI is partially from Russia and Virtus.Pro felt on semi-finals).
Other streams, like BRMA TV (Brazil) and 99Damage (Germany), grouped 10k of users on average, just in the finals the Brazilians reached more than 25k users, naturally because of Luminosity team as finalist and champion. Additional streams did not transmit the entire event, like Hitpoint (China), but showed expressive set o users.
Other important observation about it is despite the huge popularity of Poland and Russia on streams, it is hard to detect their representativity on social media (maybe is necessary to use alternative ways to identify those fans beyond the language and geolocated data).
Get data from Facebook is (a little bit) complicated due to rate of refresh. In the case of eSports, it is normal to organizations to have only one page for all games (LoL, CSGO, DOTA, etc.), usually these pages grouped more communities and consequently more likes.
Figure 7 shows the growing of popularity (according to Facebook likes) 2 days before and 3 days after the event period. The most popular pages are presented on the figure but their timelines are quite different. . Luminosity and FNATIC showed similar shape of growth, and despite the NAVI’s popularity, those team gained more fans with growth of 54% and 6% respectively.
The Facebook metric “talking” corresponds how many people are interacting to the pages and posts. It is a important metric to evaluate the engagement of fans. The Figure 8 shows the dynamic effects of the event and their legions of fans during the period of analysis. NAVI is the most popular, but the most important insight is that apparently the effects of the event were registered on the next day, not during the matches or their intervals like happened on Twitch chat.
The Nationwide Arena appeared on the top #20 on the ranking of locations registered (locations include all kinds of places, such as the entire city, neighbourhoods, suburbs, etc.) and top #1 venue in Columbus.
In a general overview, the list of mentions (Figure 9) includes popular players, teams and some brands of equipments and FOOD! Yes, FOOD! As expected, Luminosity players were the most mentioned players, but, Monster Gaming Energy Drink (MGED) and Jerky XP also appeared between the most mentioned Twitter accounts (more than important players like olofmeister, kennyS and flusha (the last one is a cover boy of MGED).
