Team Queso leaves VG

Well, they just announced that they were leaving VG as there is no competitive scene to support the team, so… another one, rip EU.

https://teamqueso.com/gracias-vainglory/

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So… In Europe we have now… Qlash… XD well done SEMC

I’m surprised just how few players care for watching Esports.

Where are all the fans?

I support Esports. I quite enjoy watching it. Heck, I even tuned into the vietnamese scene, korean and Japan Esports scene whenever I can.

I don’t believe we should put all the blame onto SEMC.

The fan base needs to grow. How? well i really don’t know… I just have a few idea’s here n there…

Better announcers? More hype? I don’t know…

i just know that SEMC should be responsible for in-game improvements, which does effect overall enjoyment by all players and it does effect on how popular a game is.

What makes a twitch STREAM or youtube video watchable is another thing altogether. I believe a team should be responsible for hyping themselves up for the fans.

I kinda feel sorry that their Esports program didn’t pay off. I’m talking from a position of somebody with very little knowledge of Esports. I don’t even know how popular these teams are in other games. But I can understand this from a marketing / advertising point of view.

I wonder how much effort each team gave to grow their fan base in those 3 years.



SEMC’s problem in 3 images …

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This meta doesn’t help either: triple tank meta is boring to play and watch.

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Well, to be more accurate… it’s Vainglory’s problem.

it just so happens that Vainglory is the sole product of SEMC, or Super Evil Mega Corp.

I wonder if all this falling out is actually a good thing and SEMC go on to learn, improve… and ultimately create something else.

it seems like SEMC put all their eggs in the Vainglory basket and they’re just praying those eggs turn into golden eggs one day…

Well, as you say, the two are equivalent at the moment, because SEMC only has one product.

There are some signs that perhaps they are finally realizing that their current path is unsustainable. I firmly believe that they thought that 5v5 was going to turn the ship around – I think they believed that those two spikes at the right side of the first graph were the shape of things to come, not simply blips in a steady downward trend. Could they have actually done what they set out to do? Well, I’m not sure, but they at least had an opportunity with 5v5. I think they failed for 2 reasons: (1) 5v5 turned out to be nothing special – it wasn’t obviously better than AoV or ML, especially at launch, with the bugs and missing features and terrible matchmaking – and (2) 5v5 severely damaged the 3v3 modes that players already enjoyed.

I think they knew they were going to wreck 3v3 and risk losing some veteran players. But I think they made two assumptions that turned out to be false (despite being told those assumptions might well be incorrect by many veterans): (1) most veteran players would transition to 5v5 and enjoy it more than 3v3, and (2) any loss of 3v3 players would be more than made up by an influx of new players who wanted to play 5v5.

I really hope that if they survive to make a second game that they end up applying the lessons learned from Vainglory.

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very well put.

They had a niche market that nobody else had: a highly polished 3v3 moba using tap touch.

The 2 things that set them apart from others are no longer after the introduction of 5v5 and joystick.

I don’t think they made a wrong choice though in going down the 5v5 road and ultimately making it cross platform. I think they decided to go that route after the game hit a peak and growth slowed to a halt. (as it can be seen in those graphs).

I wonder if the game would’ve grown if they kept going down the 3v3 path and continually improve on the touch tap controls. I will stop wondering now. it does no good. Somewhere in an alternate time-line, VG 3v3 is thriving strong…

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Queso left like 10 days ago, tetno tyruzz and hundor joined sly

But they officially announced it today.

SEMC really needs to nail it in the 2 week delay when it comes to fixing technical issues. Once those are dealt with SEMC will have far more freedom with fixing other issues relating to the playerbase (dodging, trolling, etc.). I still wanna stay optimistic for the future of the game since I am sure none of us want VG to die, but SEMC really needs to step it up here

lol semc’s problem is relating to reality and balance. Specifically to e-sports, they tried to rush success instead of letting it grow organically, one, and two they made the e-sports scene feel like a plastic copy of everything a successful e-sports scene is supposed to be by micromanaging its growth in ineffective ways that don’t get to the point of what’s most important. SEMC has a general problem with intuition when it comes to the company on a whole.

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And then - they killed it. :smiley:
In all the seriousness, they should had lower the money for price pools and organisations and demand a little bit more involvement from them - thus keeping the esports alive. Instead they cut all the money towards esports and basically from a good (tho artificial) health, it was destroyed completely.

It was really all in 5vs5, but they didn’t have the money to support the start and/or were thinking that it’s ok to kill your good already matured esport scene to let it grow naturally from the new players that never come. Why? Because AOV and ML are not that sh*t anymore as they were once. They are still worse than vainglory (gameplay wise only, otherwise are much better experience) ofc, but not by that much if you want a fast fun on the go before firing up the PC at home to play some dota 2/lol/etc.

Edit: but why I would like to play dota when I can watch the “find match” screen on my phone for 15m just for someone to dodge/instalock saw/be real t4 vs t10 silvers in the enemy team and that if the match is accepted, otherwise - another 10m wait time. :slight_smile:

Few days ago I was paired with the number two currently player in Europe. I was t9 silver at that time and only t10 bronze real rank. He was trioq-ing with TWO of his friends that are in top50, one of them was l3on, the other one max. I was captain for them and… totally unneeded, could have eaten something just clicking with one hand to not afk. Wait time for me was short also - good matchmaker and I am sure the enemy team had a lot of fun. :slight_smile:

lol i love your edit. sums up the general experience nowadays. I really feel for semc as much as I criticise them, because by my analysis, there is no easy fix for all the real problems the game has. The quality of match times is a product of the diversity of modes, which in theory is a good thing but in practice half these modes are unnecessarily redundant because they don’t really provide a different gaming experience from each other, and the player pool size, which semc has dropped the ball on giving incentives to grow & stay time and time again, the latest of which being their lack of capitalizing on the momentum of interest their latest ad could have generated in meaningful ways.

The quality of players is a product of the game design. The game is easy to pick up, hard to master, and all of the things that make it hard to master are also all things that greatly sway fights, so you get a whole bunch of players thinking they know how to play when really none of the basic gameplay matters as much as the strategy around it, creating a vast skill gap that isn’t easily closed because the method of teaching strategies to players is so drawn out when it comes to ALL the strategic options you need to consider in every fight to win.

The look and aesthetics of the UI were an excessive concession that didn’t need to be made. Like I literally don’t enjoy looking at the screen anymore unless I’m in a match, and that might be a preference, but it’s a preference a lot of people share.

The match times and dragging, boring fights are again partially by game design, as they’re meant to leave room for strategies and counter strategies but they often end up feeling like trading blows with no movement closer to winning for minutes on end with the actual action-y, exciting parts coming so far between in most fights, yet they can’t shorten the time either because the problem isn’t the actual match time, it’s the non-explosiveness of the action.

The community isn’t as unified as it could be because semc hasn’t focused on giving it the tools to be nor has it streamlined all the info you need about the game to one simple place to get it, which seems like it was a partially intentional marketing strategy that didn’t quite pan out.

The magic of the game world fades hard with the absence of lore. Though lore isn’t a core part of the game experience, the world was built with unique heroes that kinda need some kinda explanation or they’re just kinda weird, with no relevance to established video game tropes. Unfortunately, this kind of binds semc into making more heroes like this because general heroes like Constanti - I mean, Silvernail, don’t really fit with the game world, not to mention this string of mostly humaniod heroes makes having lore even more important to distinguish all these people…or they’re all just people
with powers, who all kinda look similar in game when it comes down to it but that might partly be because of the character modeling.

The trolling or simply bad playing is worse in this game because to win every bit of your team has to be on point: this game isn’t forgiving, and the matches are long, so trolling, afking, or bad play has an even worse impact on the game, but on top of that everyone gets punished in the team loss no matter what.

I could keep going but why bother. It’s just gonna be something that someone else has already said, in one way or another, time amd time again, so it’s not like semc doesn’t already know all this.

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You make a lot of really good points in your post, and in general, I agree with your assessment of what are some fundamental issues with the game. I’d just like to particularly call out two points I think are worth emphasizing:

I couldn’t agree more with both of these statements, and sadly, I think the damage to the game caused by both changes is (still) underappreciated by SEMC.

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Thanks @hazeleyes. Completely agree on the underappreciated part. The UI maybe I can look past but the lore is going to be a real sore point when it comes to new heroes, new environments, items, skins, etc.

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Imagine how epic the Anka lore could have been…