eSports: The Downside to Competitive Gaming

With eSports having gained a lot of legitimacy as a serious competitive sport, it has also been beset by some of the negative aspects that plague the conventional sporting world. This includes illegal betting, player exploitation and the use of performance-enhancing drugs such as Adderall.

But as the eSports industry grows, these issues are being addressed by sponsors and tournament hosts, as well as more standardised regulations being implemented to protect players. In Japan, professional gamers can now acquire eSports licenses, making them exempt from the laws prohibiting gambling and allowing them to receive winnings from the tournament itself — and many countries seem to be following suit in some form or another. There have even been discussions about including eSports events in the Olympic Games.

Besides the issues that conventional sports face, eSports also has to contend with connection and hardware failures. On the 18th of June, the open and regional qualifiers for The International 2018 — an annual tournament of the Dota Pro Circuit arranged by Valve — was hindered by constant disconnects.

Given how conveniently entire teams would disconnect at the same time, many began to suspect an organised DDoS attack. Guesses abound as to who the perpetrators were, with some suspecting it was pulled off by the opposing team or by bettors hoping to throw the match in their favour.

A DDoS attack, or distributed denial of service attack, is an orchestrated barrage of service requests upon a server, with the help of a botnet. When the server is overloaded it is unable to deliver service to legitimate requests, resulting in users lagging out or getting kicked off the server altogether. This is a problem that has troubled gaming tournaments for years. Now, many high-profile gaming tournaments are hosted over a LAN that does not rely on an external server or an internet connection. This makes the connection a lot more secure and reliable.

However, LANs are not always feasible as a method of connection, depending on the scale of the tournament and whether all participants can attend. Because not all countries consider eSports to be a valid sport, professional gamers are not typically acknowledged to qualify for the visa that would allow them to travel as an athlete. In 2013, Danny Le — a Canadian professional League of Legends player — was the first eSports player to be granted a P-1 visa, allowing him to travel as an athlete. As eSports becomes more recognised, it is believed that more countries will begin to adopt this policy.

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