The Community
Both Valve and Riot Games are developers that specialize in supporting large communities of gamers. Valve, which has been synonymous with excellence within its own community for what seems like forever now, has a firm grip on its Steam community. The Steam client offers gamers a diverse selection of titles to choose from with DOTA 2 in particular being the huge title that offers the most in terms of sheer hours of investment on the platform. Riot Games, on the other hand, has cultivated its following off of a client that solely affords players access to League of Legends.
Community Outreach:
Each developer also reaches out to the greater community of their player bases through things like the DOTA 2 compendium, which is a crowd funding station for the International, and helping to improve player experiences with their titles. These titles have become so big, that now that level of commitment includes creating player behavior teams within the companies themselves to help to better police and try to quell the negative feedback many players experience on each title. The problem has become so prevalent that even higher ups such as lead producer Travis George on League of Legends has addressed the negativity associated with titles within the MOBA genre. It has gotten so bad in fact, that instances of extreme cases have been reported of players taking their anger outside of the game and retaliating in the real world. However, it is not all negative. As my experiences have proven to me, playing with friends creates a fun team dynamic that regardless of wins or losses is a joy to experience, a point stressed in LOL's "Summoners Code." Peter Bright of arstechnica understood this in his time with the game, and I feel the same way.
Relation to Study:
As is apparent in the above paragraph and the links scattered within, both Riot Games and Valve consider the friendly nature of each of their communities of paramount concern. So much so that they adapted internally to address the issues, something that other developers of equally competitive gaming franchises such as Call of Duty and Battlefield take for granted as a normative element of their games and thus leave up to the community to police itself. By allowing admins on servers to decide how to dole out punishment, the developers concede the point in a way that they themselves have no vested interest in how negative or inflammatory things can get inside the system they've created in the first place. By taking a more hands on approach to the situation, both Valve and Riot Games signal their own understandings of just how wrong things can go from a social standpoint based on the competitive goliaths they've created pushing player's skill sets to the brink.
Each developer also reaches out to the greater community of their player bases through things like the DOTA 2 compendium, which is a crowd funding station for the International, and helping to improve player experiences with their titles. These titles have become so big, that now that level of commitment includes creating player behavior teams within the companies themselves to help to better police and try to quell the negative feedback many players experience on each title. The problem has become so prevalent that even higher ups such as lead producer Travis George on League of Legends has addressed the negativity associated with titles within the MOBA genre. It has gotten so bad in fact, that instances of extreme cases have been reported of players taking their anger outside of the game and retaliating in the real world. However, it is not all negative. As my experiences have proven to me, playing with friends creates a fun team dynamic that regardless of wins or losses is a joy to experience, a point stressed in LOL's "Summoners Code." Peter Bright of arstechnica understood this in his time with the game, and I feel the same way.
Relation to Study:
As is apparent in the above paragraph and the links scattered within, both Riot Games and Valve consider the friendly nature of each of their communities of paramount concern. So much so that they adapted internally to address the issues, something that other developers of equally competitive gaming franchises such as Call of Duty and Battlefield take for granted as a normative element of their games and thus leave up to the community to police itself. By allowing admins on servers to decide how to dole out punishment, the developers concede the point in a way that they themselves have no vested interest in how negative or inflammatory things can get inside the system they've created in the first place. By taking a more hands on approach to the situation, both Valve and Riot Games signal their own understandings of just how wrong things can go from a social standpoint based on the competitive goliaths they've created pushing player's skill sets to the brink.
The "Rivalry":
From my experiences both inside of the games themselves and in the outside world, the rivalry of these games is perpetuated in a number of ways. The first is the online "flame war" that is a continuous debate over which title is truly superior to the other. The other is the competitive nature of the professional scene for each title, where strategy and overall valuation based on how big the prize pool for the winning teams plays a huge role in the conversation of which is better. Overall, the rivalry is a constant that remained noticeable to me throughout my interview process when talking to even casual players. It's the elephant in the room that everyone knows about, and more often than not is a factor in which title is perceived as being better than the other.
Relation to Study:
The rivalry is an essential element to all of my research here, as it is assumed that there is in fact one. What I can say about it is that it is very real indeed, with more than enough evidence popping up in both my research online as well as through my own experiences with the games and confirmed through my interviewees' candid statements on the matter.
From my experiences both inside of the games themselves and in the outside world, the rivalry of these games is perpetuated in a number of ways. The first is the online "flame war" that is a continuous debate over which title is truly superior to the other. The other is the competitive nature of the professional scene for each title, where strategy and overall valuation based on how big the prize pool for the winning teams plays a huge role in the conversation of which is better. Overall, the rivalry is a constant that remained noticeable to me throughout my interview process when talking to even casual players. It's the elephant in the room that everyone knows about, and more often than not is a factor in which title is perceived as being better than the other.
Relation to Study:
The rivalry is an essential element to all of my research here, as it is assumed that there is in fact one. What I can say about it is that it is very real indeed, with more than enough evidence popping up in both my research online as well as through my own experiences with the games and confirmed through my interviewees' candid statements on the matter.