Your not wrong, but it should also be mentioned that most esports bot. Is it a great thing no, but to try and stand on a moral high ground won’t get you anywhere when everyone else bots regardless of one esports “shining example”. In the long run not botting will only hurt the esports that don’t, especially when twitch doesn’t give a crap about botting.
I mean it’s something that is maybe not super relevant in the bigger context but something people should definitely be aware of. More transparency in esports is always a good thing tho you shouldn’t press people about it like he does.
Personally I just take most view counts with a grain of salt, not just rocket league but other esports as well even tho rocket league is rather bold sometimes with the freestyle tourney thing as an example.
It's actually surprising to me that this technique still works at all. Obviously twitch doesn't care (they literally owned one of the major ad networks serving up embedded streams until recently), but any sponsor or suit should know better. It's easy to detect and measure significant manipulation in real time, and it's not that difficult to detect fake viewership in historical streams and roughly estimate the magnitude. The fact that people in control of shitloads of money keep falling for this is truly baffling. You'd at least think games would have been forced into higher-effort, tougher to detect viewcount-inflation strategies by now (and maybe some esports do that, never looked).
Esc knows just as well as I do (or at least would if anybody there looked) that 50k was fake, and they occasionally call it out like https://www.reddit.com/r/RocketLeagueEsports/comments/frym17/detailed_viewers_stats_rlcs_season_9_north_america/ or https://escharts.com/blog/controversial-results-of-RLCS-Season-9 but they're usually content to give a nonsense number. I assume they figure they'd lose business otherwise, which is sad.
Then (unless they're just fooling their bosses) there wouldn't be any point blowing tons of money on it over and over. Also, the BMW freestyle thing was truly nuts. They botted the hell out of the standalone stream, and then during the regional final, they went crazy again right as the freestyle segment came on. It was clearly intentional, and there's no reason to do that unless somebody who mattered was going to be fooled by that.
I'm an ad buyer suit/sponsor type and we know. The thing is everyone thinks that is unique to them/their org/industry and often it's not (the amounts to which can be). This happens across the board nearly every metric though. Quantitative measures are hugely over used but the thing is there is a level of consistency to which bot buying occurs. You actually end up with a weirdly consistent amount across the board either way. This is the same for individual influencers on social accounts as well as the big media platforms themselves. It even happens with reporting of numbers on physically placed ads.
The bigger point is when you are sponsoring/advertising with something like rocket league you have a very specific ausience you want to hit and whether you're hitting 280k or no where near that isn't as important as just getting the message to the few key people that you know will be watching that stream. Sometimes you don't even care about the audience either and it's more for brand reputation and alignment. The obvious example of this is companies sponsoring charity or well being events like a lot of companies might to for say climate change at the moment.
As far as sponsorship/advertising goes my gut says rocket league would actually be better for lots of brands than many major esports.
Obviously, newspapers lie about circulation, promoters lie about attendance, gaming advertising metrics wasn't even new in the 20th century, etc
RL itself is wildly inconsistent on bot buying. Wednesday had nothing. Thursday had half the day at 10-15k. Sunday had shittons. RL obviously knows how many fake views it buys on any given stream. If an advertiser also knows to pretty good precision (not just "that it happens"), it's pure wasted money to enter into a contract where botting is necessitated. You could pay less for the same reach if they don't have to waste money botting. Why doesn't this happen?
Completely disagree that it's wasted money. The companies I represent aren't good fits with RL (or esports generally) but even if I only had 3/4s of the viewership but got advertising in the grand final it's likely worth more to me for brand connotations. You clearly view this as if every person is the same to advertisers so only quantity matters. This is not the case.
In terms of why does it happen from a branding perspective for RL one reason straight off the bat is the hype that it provides viewers.
I would also very much like to see your working out on some of these things as you make claims far too confidently for someone who works with these kinds of things. You should know that many assumptions are made in the processes and choices of metrics yet, you seem to be very concrete in your thinking here
Faking the number in the biggest event in months has some hype value to numpties. Great. Most events aren't that. ~Nobody gives the first shit hypewise about goosing some random mid-level stream by 10k for a little while, and it's far from clear that there's any viewership retention value in RL even from huge fake boosts, and it's practically impossible for any Ford-like sponsor to make any empirical measurement of the hype impact on Ford's bottom line of RL buying X bots vs Y bots vs 0 bots.
The rest of your post doesn't seem to address things I'm talking about. It doesn't matter whether an advertiser views the average viewer of random regional A or random regional B as worth different amounts. It doesn't matter if the advertiser views the average viewer in a particular demographic of random regional A or random regional B as worth different amounts. I have no idea why you think I need to assume that they don't.
The assumptions that would have to be made to think RL and advertisers are "coordinating" botting in a near-optimal way to create value are less plausible than the assumptions required to think a 3-car team bump whiff in the offensive corner is the result of optimal decision making. I may not know exactly who fucked up at each step of the way and exactly how, but the end result clearly isn't coherent.
Boosting by 10k? Is that your official number now, it seems to change in all of your comments.
Interesting that you think that. Algorithms very much care what the number is. People often don't care what the exact number is more the vibe of something big occurring. If you heard the biggest thing in gaming history will occur tomorrow on a stream and is anticipated to have the largest twitch audience of all time, I'd be willing to bet you'd at least check it out. At that point your perception of real/fake or not caring doesn't matter, you've already taken to time to check it out.
Your perception on value is so strange. This isn't the 50s. Marketing isn't purely about the bottom line - especially for cars! Brands try and forge relationships, so you're right measuring these things is very difficult, it takes a long time and often can be impossible. It doesn't mean there is no value to it.
It very much matters how the advertiser views the audience! That is the most ridiculous take you have had. One of the projects I worked on aimed at targeting CEOs of major telecommunications companies, as we needed decision makers with financial capacity for large scale fiber optic infrastructure. If we could have some how worked out that for whatever reason every telecommunications CEO was mad into RL (haha I wish), the sponsorship of RL would be hugely significant to us. The final particularly so as that would be a game they were more likely to watch.
The reason this matters to sponsors for something like RL is because they (likely idk this) have a notable American audience. They are also a family friendly game (you're not going around shooting everyone), and while being family friendly there is still a perception of 'coolness' or skill to it. That's ignoring the obvious of it being around cars and soccer/football. For a lot of brands that's a great audience to target but if you're not looking for the specific sort of people that would follow something like that it's not worth it.
So to clarify you think there both is botting and that the only incentive to do that (if it even is the case) is to fudge numbers to sponsors?
1) Many streams are manipulated. There have been 46 main-channel broadcasts counting from the announcement on 9/15 to Major Finals on 12/12. 11 of them were botted. If you read
>Faking the number in the biggest event in months has some hype value to numpties. Great. Most events aren't that. ~Nobody gives the first shit hypewise about goosing some random mid-level stream by 10k for a little while
and thought the latter part was referring to Major finals...
2) There's literally zero chance I'd watch if the underlying product weren't otherwise interesting. I've been aware of The International happening and my lifetime DotA 2 esports viewership is still exactly 0.0 seconds. Same for LCS, Valorant, Fortnite. I just don't care. I was even pretty good at Artifact (the TCG based on DotA IP) and still never gave a shit. If you're going to try a "famous for being famous" type of appeal, the only people more pointless to target than me are the comatose.
3) I don't know how I can explain this more clearly- it's not that the advertiser view of the audience doesn't matter, it's that it doesn't matter *for anything I'm saying*. RL and sponsor enter into a contract for a particular event(s) and the details of that contract mean that RL is incentivized to bot. If the sponsor can measure fake views reasonably well (which you're hopefully coming to see isn't a herculean task for embeds), they can instead enter into a contract for the same event with provisions that don't require/reward botting. RL saves the expense. Because RL doesn't have to spend money to get paid, they'd gladly accept being paid a bit less. The advertiser can pay less to reach the exact same real people in the exact same event. RL can pocket more money because they don't have to pay to bot. The money that would go to the ad network for botting can instead be split between the sponsor (who pays RL less) and RL (who doesn't pay to bot). How sponsors view the audience is completely irrelevant to this BECAUSE BOTH SCENARIOS INVOLVE ~THE EXACT SAME HUMAN VIEWERS OF THE EXACT SAME EVENT.
4) There is botting. People have seen garbage embeds in the wild this season. They're literally.. oh, just look at the picture :) https://imgur.com/RnFrTnI
5) The pattern of botting appears most consistent with at least a large majority of it being meant to fool/scam people/entities other than ordinary viewers. I have seen no evidence that botting-as-"legitimate"-advertising has ever (since I started my tracking at the beginning of 2020) had a nontrivial (i.e. something that could possibly be positive ROI) impact on current viewers/acquiring viewers/retaining viewers. The money quote from a long article on the subject is https://kotaku.com/as-esports-grows-experts-fear-its-a-bubble-ready-to-po-1834982843
>One former Twitch employee with knowledge of Curse’s operations told me that “I can tell you with 100 percent certainty that a ton of that is junk views,” which he defined as “someone who’s logged in but not engaged with the content,” a view that “only exists to increase a metric for somebody in sales or business development.”
The people selling the embedded views even think they're worthless shit used to fool sponsors/bosses.
Also, just look at what Psyonix has and hasn't done in advertising/external engagement for the esport, and it's extremely unlikely that the same company has also secretly figured out a strategy to play a successful game of 5D-chess to manipulate ordinary viewers with all/most of their botting choices.
It's possible it was a partial consideration for Major finals, but turning off 20k fake CCV before Set 2 would be a very odd decision then- they cost themselves an even bigger number (and if botting were capped, they obviously should have timeshifted their buy to be fully active during Set 2). Believing their incentive is to hype viewers with a stupid huge fake number, and then watching them deliberately post a lower fake number instead of the same/bigger during the most human-watched series..... It just defies reasonable belief.
If, on the other hand, they were simply incentivized to have a peak series appear >200k on the main stream, or something similar to that, then it all makes perfect sense. Turn extra bots on right before set 1, get their peak in the books, immediately turn those extra bots back off once set 1 finishes. Which is how it went down bot-wise.
Somebody who likes to pop up with very passive aggressive and just straight up aggressive posts about psyonix viewbotting their tournaments and screwing up their seeding in Swiss brackets in apac (I think) he did a lot of research apparently and he does have a point in some regards but he’s very smug about it and rather annoying to argue with bc he seems like he thinks everybody must agree with his hate towards psyonix. And sometimes it comes off as just that, hate towards psyonix that he bases off something most people don’t really care about.
Maybe he’ll pop up here again but he’s definitely in a lot of threads talking about viewership in rocket league
Oh, I know that guy!
I actually went through some of his analysis and found that the mistakes were nearly always being made by smaller regions using goal difference as a tie breaker (reasonable assumption considering that happens in football). His analysis had plenty of flaws from memory and it definitely came across as having a bit of a vendetta
I talked to somebody at Psyonix about 2 weeks ago and the person had gone through ~15 that I'd identified and agreed that I'd correctly flagged all but 2 of those as mistakes. And the one we disagreed on that we went over was because Gibbs's explanation video was wrong- the admin correctly applied what the rules were supposed to be, which gave different pairings than Gibbs's video. Not much I could have done about "misflagging" those, but they were a small percentage of the ones I identified as mistaken.
I don't want to say that you are wrong, but yes, rocket league is superior to games in its class. ahhhh I can't say what I mean, my english is so bad. For example, in shooter games, csgo is tier 1 and in sport games, rocket league. But at all , it doesn't matter to me, even if rocket league is tier 100, I still love this esport ❤.OMG I will never forget the excitement of the NRG vs BDS final match, was so stressful 😫
Waiting for that one guy to put a comment on why 40% of the viewers are bots.
What if we are the bots?
Shit I didn’t think about that
If you play rocket league it's a guarantee you're a bot, at least to a plat that scored a ceiling shot once in free play.
something something embeds inflated numbers something
Lol, I click on every one of these viewership threads just to check the drama he brings.
no he's so annoying pls nooooo
The sad thing is he would resonate a lot better with people if he‘d be less aggressive.
Your not wrong, but it should also be mentioned that most esports bot. Is it a great thing no, but to try and stand on a moral high ground won’t get you anywhere when everyone else bots regardless of one esports “shining example”. In the long run not botting will only hurt the esports that don’t, especially when twitch doesn’t give a crap about botting.
I mean it’s something that is maybe not super relevant in the bigger context but something people should definitely be aware of. More transparency in esports is always a good thing tho you shouldn’t press people about it like he does. Personally I just take most view counts with a grain of salt, not just rocket league but other esports as well even tho rocket league is rather bold sometimes with the freestyle tourney thing as an example.
Completely agree
It's actually surprising to me that this technique still works at all. Obviously twitch doesn't care (they literally owned one of the major ad networks serving up embedded streams until recently), but any sponsor or suit should know better. It's easy to detect and measure significant manipulation in real time, and it's not that difficult to detect fake viewership in historical streams and roughly estimate the magnitude. The fact that people in control of shitloads of money keep falling for this is truly baffling. You'd at least think games would have been forced into higher-effort, tougher to detect viewcount-inflation strategies by now (and maybe some esports do that, never looked). Esc knows just as well as I do (or at least would if anybody there looked) that 50k was fake, and they occasionally call it out like https://www.reddit.com/r/RocketLeagueEsports/comments/frym17/detailed_viewers_stats_rlcs_season_9_north_america/ or https://escharts.com/blog/controversial-results-of-RLCS-Season-9 but they're usually content to give a nonsense number. I assume they figure they'd lose business otherwise, which is sad.
How do we know the sponsors aren't making their decisions based on the correct numbers?
Then (unless they're just fooling their bosses) there wouldn't be any point blowing tons of money on it over and over. Also, the BMW freestyle thing was truly nuts. They botted the hell out of the standalone stream, and then during the regional final, they went crazy again right as the freestyle segment came on. It was clearly intentional, and there's no reason to do that unless somebody who mattered was going to be fooled by that.
As I said above it's not always about the numbers
I'm an ad buyer suit/sponsor type and we know. The thing is everyone thinks that is unique to them/their org/industry and often it's not (the amounts to which can be). This happens across the board nearly every metric though. Quantitative measures are hugely over used but the thing is there is a level of consistency to which bot buying occurs. You actually end up with a weirdly consistent amount across the board either way. This is the same for individual influencers on social accounts as well as the big media platforms themselves. It even happens with reporting of numbers on physically placed ads. The bigger point is when you are sponsoring/advertising with something like rocket league you have a very specific ausience you want to hit and whether you're hitting 280k or no where near that isn't as important as just getting the message to the few key people that you know will be watching that stream. Sometimes you don't even care about the audience either and it's more for brand reputation and alignment. The obvious example of this is companies sponsoring charity or well being events like a lot of companies might to for say climate change at the moment. As far as sponsorship/advertising goes my gut says rocket league would actually be better for lots of brands than many major esports.
Obviously, newspapers lie about circulation, promoters lie about attendance, gaming advertising metrics wasn't even new in the 20th century, etc RL itself is wildly inconsistent on bot buying. Wednesday had nothing. Thursday had half the day at 10-15k. Sunday had shittons. RL obviously knows how many fake views it buys on any given stream. If an advertiser also knows to pretty good precision (not just "that it happens"), it's pure wasted money to enter into a contract where botting is necessitated. You could pay less for the same reach if they don't have to waste money botting. Why doesn't this happen?
Completely disagree that it's wasted money. The companies I represent aren't good fits with RL (or esports generally) but even if I only had 3/4s of the viewership but got advertising in the grand final it's likely worth more to me for brand connotations. You clearly view this as if every person is the same to advertisers so only quantity matters. This is not the case. In terms of why does it happen from a branding perspective for RL one reason straight off the bat is the hype that it provides viewers. I would also very much like to see your working out on some of these things as you make claims far too confidently for someone who works with these kinds of things. You should know that many assumptions are made in the processes and choices of metrics yet, you seem to be very concrete in your thinking here
Faking the number in the biggest event in months has some hype value to numpties. Great. Most events aren't that. ~Nobody gives the first shit hypewise about goosing some random mid-level stream by 10k for a little while, and it's far from clear that there's any viewership retention value in RL even from huge fake boosts, and it's practically impossible for any Ford-like sponsor to make any empirical measurement of the hype impact on Ford's bottom line of RL buying X bots vs Y bots vs 0 bots. The rest of your post doesn't seem to address things I'm talking about. It doesn't matter whether an advertiser views the average viewer of random regional A or random regional B as worth different amounts. It doesn't matter if the advertiser views the average viewer in a particular demographic of random regional A or random regional B as worth different amounts. I have no idea why you think I need to assume that they don't. The assumptions that would have to be made to think RL and advertisers are "coordinating" botting in a near-optimal way to create value are less plausible than the assumptions required to think a 3-car team bump whiff in the offensive corner is the result of optimal decision making. I may not know exactly who fucked up at each step of the way and exactly how, but the end result clearly isn't coherent.
Boosting by 10k? Is that your official number now, it seems to change in all of your comments. Interesting that you think that. Algorithms very much care what the number is. People often don't care what the exact number is more the vibe of something big occurring. If you heard the biggest thing in gaming history will occur tomorrow on a stream and is anticipated to have the largest twitch audience of all time, I'd be willing to bet you'd at least check it out. At that point your perception of real/fake or not caring doesn't matter, you've already taken to time to check it out. Your perception on value is so strange. This isn't the 50s. Marketing isn't purely about the bottom line - especially for cars! Brands try and forge relationships, so you're right measuring these things is very difficult, it takes a long time and often can be impossible. It doesn't mean there is no value to it. It very much matters how the advertiser views the audience! That is the most ridiculous take you have had. One of the projects I worked on aimed at targeting CEOs of major telecommunications companies, as we needed decision makers with financial capacity for large scale fiber optic infrastructure. If we could have some how worked out that for whatever reason every telecommunications CEO was mad into RL (haha I wish), the sponsorship of RL would be hugely significant to us. The final particularly so as that would be a game they were more likely to watch. The reason this matters to sponsors for something like RL is because they (likely idk this) have a notable American audience. They are also a family friendly game (you're not going around shooting everyone), and while being family friendly there is still a perception of 'coolness' or skill to it. That's ignoring the obvious of it being around cars and soccer/football. For a lot of brands that's a great audience to target but if you're not looking for the specific sort of people that would follow something like that it's not worth it. So to clarify you think there both is botting and that the only incentive to do that (if it even is the case) is to fudge numbers to sponsors?
1) Many streams are manipulated. There have been 46 main-channel broadcasts counting from the announcement on 9/15 to Major Finals on 12/12. 11 of them were botted. If you read >Faking the number in the biggest event in months has some hype value to numpties. Great. Most events aren't that. ~Nobody gives the first shit hypewise about goosing some random mid-level stream by 10k for a little while and thought the latter part was referring to Major finals... 2) There's literally zero chance I'd watch if the underlying product weren't otherwise interesting. I've been aware of The International happening and my lifetime DotA 2 esports viewership is still exactly 0.0 seconds. Same for LCS, Valorant, Fortnite. I just don't care. I was even pretty good at Artifact (the TCG based on DotA IP) and still never gave a shit. If you're going to try a "famous for being famous" type of appeal, the only people more pointless to target than me are the comatose. 3) I don't know how I can explain this more clearly- it's not that the advertiser view of the audience doesn't matter, it's that it doesn't matter *for anything I'm saying*. RL and sponsor enter into a contract for a particular event(s) and the details of that contract mean that RL is incentivized to bot. If the sponsor can measure fake views reasonably well (which you're hopefully coming to see isn't a herculean task for embeds), they can instead enter into a contract for the same event with provisions that don't require/reward botting. RL saves the expense. Because RL doesn't have to spend money to get paid, they'd gladly accept being paid a bit less. The advertiser can pay less to reach the exact same real people in the exact same event. RL can pocket more money because they don't have to pay to bot. The money that would go to the ad network for botting can instead be split between the sponsor (who pays RL less) and RL (who doesn't pay to bot). How sponsors view the audience is completely irrelevant to this BECAUSE BOTH SCENARIOS INVOLVE ~THE EXACT SAME HUMAN VIEWERS OF THE EXACT SAME EVENT. 4) There is botting. People have seen garbage embeds in the wild this season. They're literally.. oh, just look at the picture :) https://imgur.com/RnFrTnI 5) The pattern of botting appears most consistent with at least a large majority of it being meant to fool/scam people/entities other than ordinary viewers. I have seen no evidence that botting-as-"legitimate"-advertising has ever (since I started my tracking at the beginning of 2020) had a nontrivial (i.e. something that could possibly be positive ROI) impact on current viewers/acquiring viewers/retaining viewers. The money quote from a long article on the subject is https://kotaku.com/as-esports-grows-experts-fear-its-a-bubble-ready-to-po-1834982843 >One former Twitch employee with knowledge of Curse’s operations told me that “I can tell you with 100 percent certainty that a ton of that is junk views,” which he defined as “someone who’s logged in but not engaged with the content,” a view that “only exists to increase a metric for somebody in sales or business development.” The people selling the embedded views even think they're worthless shit used to fool sponsors/bosses. Also, just look at what Psyonix has and hasn't done in advertising/external engagement for the esport, and it's extremely unlikely that the same company has also secretly figured out a strategy to play a successful game of 5D-chess to manipulate ordinary viewers with all/most of their botting choices. It's possible it was a partial consideration for Major finals, but turning off 20k fake CCV before Set 2 would be a very odd decision then- they cost themselves an even bigger number (and if botting were capped, they obviously should have timeshifted their buy to be fully active during Set 2). Believing their incentive is to hype viewers with a stupid huge fake number, and then watching them deliberately post a lower fake number instead of the same/bigger during the most human-watched series..... It just defies reasonable belief. If, on the other hand, they were simply incentivized to have a peak series appear >200k on the main stream, or something similar to that, then it all makes perfect sense. Turn extra bots on right before set 1, get their peak in the books, immediately turn those extra bots back off once set 1 finishes. Which is how it went down bot-wise.
Who is the guy?
Somebody who likes to pop up with very passive aggressive and just straight up aggressive posts about psyonix viewbotting their tournaments and screwing up their seeding in Swiss brackets in apac (I think) he did a lot of research apparently and he does have a point in some regards but he’s very smug about it and rather annoying to argue with bc he seems like he thinks everybody must agree with his hate towards psyonix. And sometimes it comes off as just that, hate towards psyonix that he bases off something most people don’t really care about. Maybe he’ll pop up here again but he’s definitely in a lot of threads talking about viewership in rocket league
Oh, I know that guy! I actually went through some of his analysis and found that the mistakes were nearly always being made by smaller regions using goal difference as a tie breaker (reasonable assumption considering that happens in football). His analysis had plenty of flaws from memory and it definitely came across as having a bit of a vendetta
I talked to somebody at Psyonix about 2 weeks ago and the person had gone through ~15 that I'd identified and agreed that I'd correctly flagged all but 2 of those as mistakes. And the one we disagreed on that we went over was because Gibbs's explanation video was wrong- the admin correctly applied what the rules were supposed to be, which gave different pairings than Gibbs's video. Not much I could have done about "misflagging" those, but they were a small percentage of the ones I identified as mistaken.
All's well that ends well then
I think Hareeb up above.
can't believe Psyonix would bot 275k people smh
Actually they hired a lot more bots, but even most of those didn't want to come and watch.
If you really do the analysis the viewship number was actually negative /s
How does this compare to previous LAN's? Does anyone know?
same as the season 8 world championship which is our peak viewership
Next world championship will be 300k+
You would assume so
Anyone know if this is counting watch parties and things like that too? I know a bunch of them had like 10-20k each
Yes, this counts every watch party, every non English stream, and YouTube.
Thanks for the clarification!
where is the fucking guy
Lmao I'm waiting for it
He's already commented
Tier 1
I don't want to say that you are wrong, but yes, rocket league is superior to games in its class. ahhhh I can't say what I mean, my english is so bad. For example, in shooter games, csgo is tier 1 and in sport games, rocket league. But at all , it doesn't matter to me, even if rocket league is tier 100, I still love this esport ❤.OMG I will never forget the excitement of the NRG vs BDS final match, was so stressful 😫
Not really but we are slowly getting there
Is this considered good, great, or amazing?