Team Fortress 2

We will examine whether or not Team Fortress 2 is a good choice as an e-sport. Team Fortress 2 was released by Valve in 2007. Team Fortress is known as a class based shooter. Each class in the game has unique stats, guns, and abilities. This presents a complex game which must be finely tuned in order to be playable at a high level. If the game is not balanced for such high level play it stagnates. Since the game has so many classes, leagues have to put bans on how the game can be played in order to keep it fair and interesting. Team Warfare League has set a specific number on the playable classes in TF2. Each team can only have two scouts, two Pyros, one Demoman, two Engineers, two Heavies, one Medic, two Snipers, and two Spies. Also they limit which weapons can be used. Many weapons are too powerful or too weak to be considered in competitive play.

Besides the difficulties imposed by TF2 being a class based shooter it has another problem. Valve puts out constant updates and new weapons. While this is a good idea to keep up interest in their game, it is bad for a competitive scene. With so many new guns and stats being put into the game the leagues have to constantly reevaluate their ban lists. This leads to different ban lists for different leagues. This makes adding TF2 to the World Cyber Games more difficult because the rule-set is hard to agree upon. But Valve is a company that is very much in tune with its community. Valve remains dedicated to strengthening the ties between the modding community and the games industry (Kücklich 2005). Valve has the tools in place which allows for servers to set which items are available for use. This allows each league to have its own mod in place so that servers are forced to run in order to stop players from using banned items.

These problems have not stopped TF2 from being played at a competitive level. But TF2 tournaments have been fewer and farther between than many other e-sports games. Many people express their opinions on various TF2 forums that it cannot function as an e-sport on the same level as other games such as Counter Strike or Quake. While TF2 is a great game I do not think that it is fit to be an official e-sports game.

References

Kücklich, Julian. (2005). Precarious Playbour: Modders and the Digital Games Industry. fiberculture.org.

unknown (2010). TWL: Rules. Retrieved from http://www.teamwarfare.com/rules.asp?set=Team+Fortress+2+NA+League#4-3