Doom Esports?

[Gordon228]

linking my thread on the doomsday engine forums http://dengine.net/forums/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=2111 how possible would it be to make Doom into an Esports game?

[TerminusEst13]

I'm not 100% competitive, but I think the short answer would be "Good luck".

I suspect the first thing to do would be to find investors who are willing to back players/tournaments. Get some real money on the line, start having regular tournaments with a variety of serious players, make this a regular and established thing.
Second thing to do would be to make it an appealing thing for spectators to watch. Something really exciting that gets people talking. This would mean a meta that goes beyond "use Super Shotgun 90% of the time", which alone is extremely troublesome because the competitive scene has spent 20 years revolving around this weapon.

[Cruduxy]

Doom 4 might have a chance. Doom 3 if rebalanced. The other 2 are too old and would need some serious work to re-ignite them as e-sports.

[Doomkid]

Team deathmatch with timelimit instead of fraglimit and friendly fire off, of good, large FFA maps. You never see enough of this and it's goddamn fun, and more entertaining for specs since there's many eyes to watch from.

Doing in with a variety of different wads and gun mods couldn't hurt, unless it was supposed to be OS but that wouldn't really work in the context of esports.

[ibm5155]

I would like to see some All Out War e-sport, Imagine, 32x32 players, all of them being pro players, and not a random team that every player act alone *__*

Or maybe a speedrun into invasion wads, where the team that completes first the invasion wad wins...

But, it's just a dream, mobas dominated the esports world, there're some rare survivors there like counter strike and starcraft, but other than that, the rest is just moba :(

[one_Two]

Quake e-sport is mostly kept allive by a wealthy Russian so I suspect doom would require similar. Personally think UT is our best bet for a fast/reaction fps to become a main e-sport.

[Gordon228]

mods would be a thing but hears how i look at it we have brutal doom and it has 2 classes aka modern and classic and i was thinking of 1on1 dm then TDM and finally CTF but the main problem is maps there would need to be at least 5-20 maps that everyone agrees to for each one that would be interesting enough to make it interesting to watch. also for TDM and CTF what would be the team size.

[Arctangent]

The best thing to use as a reference for potential e-sports structure would be Halo, as all other FPSes with the slightest bit of an e-sports scene don't really match Doom's style of play. Games like Call of Duty and Counter-Strike have two different kinds of loadout systems, and games like TF2 and Overwatch just flat-out have premade classes. Halo actually shares a bunch of game modes with multiplayer-ported Doom, plus everyone starts out with a base weapon and collects more advanced ones on the map.

That said, I'm not really sure if unmodded Doom has much of an appeal as an e-sport, as the meta is stale as all hell. I honestly see far more potential in a Doom mod or even an independent idTech 1 game designed for more e-sports-esque play. Doom just doesn't really have much depth for developing a style on either the individual or teamwork level.

[Lollipop]

It is an interesting thought that I've had myself, but we would need money for this to work and people intersted in watching t. We could probably scrape together a few bucks but not a few viewers, simply because the game is that dated. We would need something revolutionizing that the solid players would like to play and that could also scrape together some viewers.
What makes e-sports work is a lot of advertising, stuck around everywhere. It could be possible to get advertisements on from smaller companies that make games fitting the Doom player demographic if we had a decent number of viewers.

It could technically be pulled off, but in the hypothetcal scenario that we try, how would we gain viewer interest? How do we make a competetive environment on a level high enough?
Perhaps we could gain some inspiration from other games with competetive elements, such as MOBAS, and see how they grew and uphold their current competetive scenes?

Just a few thoughts, I don't have too much time on my hands so I cannot help out with such an arrangement with anything besides ideas. I hope to help out though.

EDIT:
Two oosts were posted before I was done wriring, so another thought:
I agree that vanilla Doom doesn't have what it takes, it was simply not designed for it.
A mod would do much better for this type of thing, and with all the ACS tech we have we could easily make some of the things modern e-sports games have.
The question is really about what would make Doom the goto FPS livestream experience?

[Arctangent]

For reference, I definitely think either a Counter-Strike-based or class-based system would probably be the best choices for an e-sports-based mod. The former would allow gating powerful combinations of items and weapons through high costs, while the latter doesn't have to worry about busted combos ( from a single person, anyway ) at all.

Though with a far larger weapon selection in general, the Halo style could still work, too. Arguably, that'd be more Doom-ish, but that depends on if that's actually what should be aimed on in the first place.

Another thing is that something like GvH, I feel, has quite a bit of potential for this, if a coin flip was done before the first match of a set and the winner decides their team's starting side, then after each match the teams switch sides. Food for thought.

[Gordon228]

hears how i look at it we use brutal doom for the base mod or use one of the other mods based of brutal doom that adds more weapons then we can make it class based with no trouble since brutal doom is class based already with a modern theme and a classic theme. there is this mod for brutal doom but unsure if it works on Zandronum. http://www.moddb.com/mods/brutal-doom/a ... ub-mod-v15

Edit: the mod i posted is not working with the 3.0 alpha builds of Zandronum.

[TerminusEst13]

Using Brutal Doom as a base mod completely defeats the purpose of this.

Not only is the mod not at all balanced for competitive play, but gameplay-wise it bears so little resemblance to the original Doom that you might as well use Russian Overkill or Tortured Transmission.
If you insist on having a mod for e-sports rather than vanilla play, it would be significantly better to have a mod that stays close to Doom with only a few tweaks and touch-ups, with most of the changes being purely graphical polish and a few balance adjustments.

[Arctangent]

with most of the changes being purely graphical polish and a few balance adjustments.

I'll have to disagree there, I definitely think you'll have to do a lot of balance changes and perhaps even expand the arsenal to have an actual e-sports-ready Doom experience.

The SSG fest most Doom maps devolve into can be fine from the player perspective, but most people wouldn't want to watch players rush the SSG spawn over and over again and try to double-barrel their opponents' butts afterwards.

[Gordon228]

well then taking brutal doom out of the equation how would we tweak the weapons for competitive play that dose not take away from doom? lets get it to a good point before we consider mods like brutal doom. if the speed is the problem for some weapons then witch weapons and if it's damage then a gen what weapons? what do you mean by gfx polish? do you mean more hi-def sprites?

Edit: hears what i think we need to do even tho brutal doom is out of the question but many the weapons are not as with the weapons it has we can make something good out of it since it has both a chaingun and a mini gun granted different classes. then do a 5v5 TDM wile trying to make it more esports like that way we can keep the feel of doom wile adding in more stuff.

[Ænima]

So how many Doom mods have you played, other than Brutal Doom?

And have you even tried playing Brutal Doom PvP? It's a mess and I guarantee that trying to be "competitive" with it will lead to ragequits within the first match. If anything it might make the tournament more appealing to the plebs who will find out that Zandronum exists next week when YouTube suggests them a Brutal Doom video. But consider most of the lifelong Doom veterans out.


And trying to carefully craft the Doom experience to be more like CS or COD for the sole purpose of MLG-compatibility is moot, nobody's gonna pay for/torrent Doom just to play CounterZandronum when they can just play Counterstrike competitively because lol better graphics and gun skins

[Gordon228]

well i encountered a bug with brutal doom and that is my movement stops but i was only suggesting it for the weapons since it technically has 11 weapons if you do not count the alt weapons i think are still in Zandronum.

Edit: found it all it's in the skulltag compatibility stuff.

[Arctangent]

And trying to carefully craft the Doom experience to be more like CS or COD for the sole purpose of MLG-compatibility is moot, nobody's gonna pay for/torrent Doom just to play CounterZandronum when they can just play Counterstrike competitively because lol better graphics and gun skins

That's why you don't make Counter-Strike in Doom, you examine its systems, how they work, and apply them to a new game with alternate executions and perhaps different gameplay in other places.

There are ways to take inspiration from other games without just ripping them wholesale.

[ibm5155]

I think Brutal Doom fits better Coop than DM.
Also, Project MSX would be a nice try to DM, Or Zdoom Wars (but it could get boring since many rounds may require 1 hour of gameplay).
It's a bit off, but, Dota 1 was just a warcraft 3 mod, and look where is it now, dota 1 gameplay was nothing like warcraft 1 one, but even then, people liked it and played it (but idk if Dota 1 had some esport participation).

So, my must try list would be btw:
-All out War, Ghouls vs humans (not this Aeod/Salad vs Humans that we see today), Zdoom War, Project MSX.

Who Dun It has also a unique gameplay outside Doom mods, but, idk how could it be played in esports, hm if you kill an inocente you get like -1 point, kill the murder gets 5 points, and if the murder kill someone he gets +2 points, so at the end the team with most points together could win)

[Gordon228]

what i think we need to do is examine all the weapons including the skulltag ones that it adds and by in large the power ups and see what could be added and what could be removed also too maps are a big part not just the weapons. if you have excellent weapons but a shitty map is the game interesting to watch the short answer is no the long answer is there is not enough places to have action choke points. we can take a look at the dwango wads as the best example of popular maps for dm back in the day and with new stuff in the engine it's self how can we improve upon it to make it more appealing to the view/commentator. if we make it to complex then how can any one follow the action where as if we make it to simple then it's no fun to watch and potentially play.

so i think DM/TDM on any dwango wads is viable but now we talk about the weapons i think there should be a max of 15 if we are to add more but sticking with the skulltag set is also a good option as well.

[Ch0wW]

Doom, as an "e-Sports" game? Good laugh here, I'm wishing the best of luck to make it happen.

Seriously, good luck trying that. Given the amounts of multiplayer ports that are in DooM (3+ already), we've already lost the battle. Nobody would like to install another port or fork of an existing port just to play DooM competitively; the community has been split up for a while, no need for more fracturation, especially that each ports have a gameplay style and speed far too different from one another.

Plus, the game has become flawed because of the community itself. Remember the countless discussions about if using auto-SR50 was considered as a cheat or not? Some ports tried to do their best to limit alias/autoSR50 a lot (hi ZDaemon), yet some are blaming these because they can't play without their assisted scripts. Plus, seeing the numbers of people being on countless clans at the same time, you can't really rely on the seriousness of some players/clans.

As being someone caring a lot for competition, I myself worked for a full month on a fork of Odamex, in order to make DooM "truly" competitive (since I myself see odamex as a competitive yet very close port to OS DooM) : making an HLTV-like client/server, "timeout" vote, new client functions, customisations (such as HUD Scripting, weapon opacity), gameplay fixes, stats, dynamic spectator-views à la QL. 3,4 people really wanted to see the project continued, but I stopped instead. As a result, I asked for some of these features to be on Odamex (and Zand btw). The rest of the source has been deleted because I honestly don't like to lose my time for nothing. Same thing done server-side on Zandronum btw, nobody also cared.

Also, I know many are caring about the port here, but it'd be largely better if some gameplay-related fixes were applied (as if it was totally ignored by people apparently). Some examples: Here, Here, Here, or Here. I hope they'll be seen asap, especially as I mostly wrote a fix.

I won't express my opinion of GZDoom TCs. Not because I don't care of these at all, but because I don't play TCs that doesn't feel like DooM.

Someone was speaking of DooM 3. The game was interesting competitively, but the netcode was far worse than QW or even Q3A. Also, the weapons were more unbalanced than DooM 2 (ie: RL for long-distance attacks, chaingun for close ones, GGs). Let's not talk about D3BFG, this game wasn't even trying.

TL;DR: DooM 1/2 was heavily possible to be an e-Sports game, but because of the 3 existing multiplayer ports having each kind of gameplay different, it certainly won't be possible. What's bad has been done.