My perspective on the ESHL

Hello everyone. For those of you who don't know me, I have been playing 6s since 2009, and a part of VHL / LG on and off since 2010. I'm currently a Professional League of Legends Coach who has spent the past 5 years of my life working in the esports scene and have seen it develop from the grass roots to the global phenomenon it is today. The reason I feel it is necessary to point this out is I have sat back and watched the setup of the ESHL and feel that my perspective is not only something valuable due to my years of experience in esports, but also because I very much enjoy the NHL Series and playing 6s in general. In this post I am going to outline my thoughts on the ESHL, my suggestions and changes, and leave the comment section to you guys for additional suggestions and perspective. Our goal as a community should be to ensure the ESHL is run optimally for everyone and I'm hopeful that this thread will be the catalyst for this.


Initial Thoughts

The idea of the ESHL is fantastic. There has not been a real incentive to play club 6s since 2010 and I feel that Tris and LG are taking initiative many have been asking for by setting up this sort of league. It provides all of us a chance to play competitive 6s with a club for a prize pool. When looking at how the league has been setup, I am a huge fan of multiple divisions and a Promotion / Relegation system. I think this is extremely important for a mostly self-funded league with no major sponsorship. That being said, I am not a huge fan of several things, most notably the selection process for this season as I feel the competitive integrity of the ESHL is immediately questionable at best.

Issue #1: Selection Process

I look at this season of ESHL as a fresh start and I personally believe that no former achievements in the last ESHL seasons should be considered. This is effectively Day 1 of the real ESHL. With that in mind, I believe that having a committee of players selected to vote on the Top 16 teams is ludicrous, especially considering SEVERAL OF THE VOTERS HAVE TEAMS COMPETING IN THE LEAGUE. For any esports league to be successful, there has to be COMPETITIVE INTEGRITY and looking at the selection process, I have to unfortunately say that there quite frankly was none in this process.

If you're going to have a selection process, Rule #1 is don't pick people who are on teams in consideration even if their team is a shoe-in team. This is absolutely unacceptable and unprofessional. Whether people claim to not have any bias, it does exist and putting current players in charge of voting is unacceptable. Secondly, if you do wish to choose players from current teams, why was there not one representative from every registered team? I don't care if someone is a "well respected community leader," that should not in any way be used as justification for using them as a voter.

In my opinion, if you are going to choose people to vote teams in (and I'll explain why this is a very poor choice later) there are only 3 options that keep the integrity of the league.

Option #1: Every Registered Team appoints 1 Player as their Representative and the vote can be conducted. I still think this is not what you should ever do. NEVER, EVER HAVE PLAYERS CURRENTLY PLAYING VOTING ON THE TEAMS DIVISION PLACEMENT

Option #2: Have a website wide Poll to determine who is elected as a Community Leader. At least this way, the people have some say in who makes decisions and they're not hand chosen based on ranking.

Option #3: Don't use a selection process for the inaugural season of an esports league. The only time this rule is ignored is if you have major sponsorship money in the Prize Pool and no teams have to pay a buy-in. If that happens, do whatever you want. Until then, you MUST keep the player base involved otherwise the league will be nothing more then a circlejerk with no growth outside of the people who have always been here.

My solution to this issue would have been to have a full-on qualifier. Please bear in mind my knowledge of the scene isn't completely up to date but I would assume there are 4 teams that would be 100% guaranteed shoe-ins. My definition of a shoe-in would be people look at the team and wouldn't argue seeing them in the top league. Give those 4 teams their spots, and leave the remaining spots to be played via a qualifier event.

Depending on the # of spots and # of teams in the qualifier, the format would have to be decided upon, but it's never a bad idea to just have a 64 team bracket created and randomized (if teams get byes round 1 via the randomizer that's just life,) and take the top 8 teams from that qualifier and put them in pro series. Yes there is always the potential of two great teams facing off early and some teams having easier roads, but that is a far more acceptable route than selecting 10 out of 12 spots and then only having 6 teams contend for the final 2 spots.


Issue #2: Buy-In

This isn't a major issue, but Invite / Main shouldn't be the same amount to play-in. Main should have a lower buy-in and lower prize pool, since promoting to Invite is a huge part of the prize in itself. This is whatever, just think it's weird to have the Top League and the one below it have the same buy-in price


Issue #3: Competitive Integrity

You've seen me use this phrase and I will use it again. Here's the problem. ESHL is run by a community website in LG. This isn't a group of qualified professionals whose sole purpose is esports. Over the years, the 6s community has had to come together and do things ourselves because EA and the NHL team are not involved as much as they should be. With that in mind, for an esports league to work we need to adopt a new mindset. I don't care who you are, I don't care what you've accomplished in 6s, if you are an active player / member of a team competing in the ESHL you SHOULD NOT be someone used in League / Team decisions. The only people making league decisions should be an appointed committee of people who are not playing and overseeing the league. A Board of Governors if you will. The only exception to this rule should come if the entire ESHL player base agrees to exempt and give a player that power. I should not see the names of Odie or Nuge ever again in any ESHL decison making process. No disrespect guys, but you're not the ones who should be placed in those influential decisions regarding the league. I love you guys, but you're not the people who should be in that position.

The solution here is simple: Tris and LG can appoint whoever the hell they want as the League Operators for ESHL, they just simply cannot be active in the league and the entire ESHL playerbase should run a poll and nominate 1 player to be a part of the League Operation discussions. It has to be polled and voted on by the players, people should not be given special treatment based on how long they've been around or what they have accomplished. esports does not give special exceptions to people, they should be earned through the respect of their peers.


CONCLUSION

The ESHL concept is fantastic and I fully support this endeavor and Tris and LG have my utmost respect for attempting this venture. With that being said, I strongly urge you guys to take a step back here and think about what changes you will need to make as the ESHL moves forward.

To the players and general member base: I strongly urge you to use the comment section of this thread to voice your suggestions, comment on the points I have brought up and give actual suggestions for Tris and LG to digest so we can make the ESHL as awesome as it can be. It's clear that we have to make this work if we want competitive 6s, so let's put an effort forward and do that. Let's settle the shit talking and ego killing on the ice surface.

Thanks for taking the time to read this post guys. There's really only one thing left to do: We all need to come together and get to work.

 

completely agree

 

Everything kubz said is pretty obvious and should go without saying... but ' obviously' it's not.

Great job man. You can't get 6 for FNP but you write a great post.

I say each team elects a representative not to vote, but to enter in a double elimination versus tourney. That is miles better than Jonlol and nuge facetiming in their undies 'voting'

 

As someone on a team that got voted into invite, I agree that voting in teams is preposterous especially by people with equity in the league. But this was already decided well in advance and clearly communicated. People don't have to buy-in if they don't think it was just and it is silly to complain about this now when it's been clearly stated for weeks. Complaining now comes across as salty because your team didn't get voted in. Obviously, those teams with a good track record and individual talent are going to get the most votes. This was the format that was chosen and there is still opportunity to compete for a couple of spots. In theory, moving forward this structure should work and wont require anymore voting (as far as I know).

 

Been a big circle jerk for years, doubt that will ever change

 

I think the bigger takeaway than the voting format should be the decision to have Community Leaders involved and that entire process. I think that's where more of the focus should go looking forward

 

If you'r on the outside ( esports ) and looking at the selection process
I get that it's unethical to have guys in the voting booth that are members of chosen organization.

 

It would be nice to have people not involved in the tournament but we are just not big enough to do that. That is definitely not a good option for this.

I do agree every team should of had one person vote or a team vote on the overall rankings of team. In that vote, you can't vote for your team. That probably would have been the best way. But even then, you could have teams collude to vote one team last and have them in the open instead of invite.

My perspective is: this was a lose-lose situation because no one was going to be happy about any decision that was made. If you are in the open or might be in the open and think you should be in the invite be happy it is a short season. Win the open (because you should be in the invite), win some money (that most invite teams won't win), make it to invite and do work in Season 2 and 3 of this year and qualify for the final tournament.

This should be the first and last time we ever have to vote if we can keep this thing going with the structure we have in place.

 

I'm only going to post once in here, sorry but its over with now. All of this was clearly communicated during the announcement of the event. It was also discussed on multiple mediums months ago before the format was determined. There was plenty of time to give feedback and be a part of the process. I understand where a lot of people are coming from and the frustration of not being voted in by some committee to Invite. Good news is your team still has plenty of opportunities to play in Invite - from the qualifier to winning Open.

Everything Scheckel has said above is how I also feel about this scenario. I do feel bad for teams like Rated R who were grinding in NHL 17 and are now forced to grind again, but at the same time nothing carried over from Pro Series to ESHL as they are different events. They have a chance to qualify for Invite again and if they are good enough to be there they will be there. If they aren't good enough, they won't be there. Same goes for teams voted in to the top spots. If they are good enough, they'll stay there. If not they'll be demoted to open S2.

I made the committee by selecting people I trusted and people that I knew would be in the top division regardless. I did not include my self in this vote for a good reason. The issue with having 1 person from every team is collusion, as Scheckel stated. I do not know very many people on this console, but I do know it has had a history of people banding together to go above the rules and league structure to reach a desired result. I do not want to see any of that ever again and by using the people I trusted I feel we accomplished a result that was 100% within the spirit of the league and its goals. The voting was done in private, they did not know who each other voted for. I kept an eye on the votes and there was nothing that suggested anyone had a hidden agenda. The idea is to generate quality competition. The format will achieve that regardless of the starting vote. If I see that this had a greater effect in the end result than we initially thought, we will figure something out. Until then all you guys can do is win games and try to be as good as you all claim to be.

To say the committee should be made up of people not participating in the event may seem logical from an outsiders perspective, but who else is better to vote than the players who know the competition the best? Can you imagine the divisions being determined by a guy in the CHL who thinks he knows who's good in club? People would go s. Maybe in the future when we have dedicated armchair esports fans and media that are not a part of the event we can have that, but that was not the right approach with our current community.

Good news is a committee will not be needed again for while (only thing it would be considered for is a mass collection of PS4 teams, but even then there are other ways to handle that).

We want to keep the seasons moving and the events short as that was a big complaint from the community last year. The goal is to have a final tournament right before the hype for the real NHL dies off and before everyone goes outside in the summer (lol). This will push things forward on schedule and we should see the event starting next week if all goes well with the qualifier.

Good luck everyone.

 

Great job keep up the good work as for you salty bums not being good enough to get into the invite division be sure to tune in on twitch and help give your support.

 

Well it wouldn't have been lose lose if they just had a seedng tournament to determine who was seeded where.

I still think that ESHL has to be built more like the PGA with weekly or bi weekly tournaments. Each tournament can stand on its own as a great event and all of them put together make a great ESHL season. It allows teams to enter the ESHL at any time of the season and still have a chance to do well. Or a team can enter 1 event and still have fun.

 

So how would you seed the teams? By vote? (people pissed there) By random? What if two of the top teams faced off in the first round, now one is in open (people still pissed)

I still will go with my lose-lose on no matter what you decided to do.

 

first event would be by random, it would be a double elimination tournament so even if 2 teams match up in the first round the loser can still come through the losers bracket to get to the finals.

 

Last thing I will say about this.. the joke will be on you if you think teams (esp teams voted in) will remain a team if they get demoted. Literally 0 chance any team will stay together. This thing will fall apart after 1 season

 

Double elimination but is each match up one game? best of 3? 5? This could go as long as one season...

Even in double elimination 2 good teams could face other earlier and knock each other out because they faced two good teams in the first round. Not saying your way is wrong, but i guarantee people would still be pissed about the set up.

It is still a lose-lose in my opinion. This is the way it was discussed and set up about 2/3 months ago. There was some kick back but there wasn't any extreme outrage over it.

 

Even if 2 good teams did face off early , well like Jon says just win your games, win some money, and c u in the inv division season 2.

 

hello??? that's my point...its a lose-lose situation on anything they chose!

 

Well if it's lose lose might as well do the most fair / fun option right ? It's like talking to TH3 W4LL geez

 

Could of just had like a pre season, to see where each team should rank.

 

what way is the most fun, fair and efficient way to get this season rolling?

just because one option is the most fair and most fun in your opinion doesn't mean that everyone agrees....