[nordsieck]

> Teams are not geographical

Some teams are geographical. For example: Overwatch league.

> There is way less team loyalty.

My only real experience is with Dota. There is a lot of nationalist sentiment in tournaments, but you're right - most people follow players, not teams.

In Dota, in particular, Valve has tried to make changes to encourage team stability, but the fundamental problem is that pay is so heavily stacked towards winning a few top tier tournaments per year, that people become very mercenary.

I think the big challenge is that it really doesn't cost very much money to run an esports tournament. There is no need for an expensive stadium (except to sell tickets to fans). Basically anyone can create the new premiere tournament by just paying a bit of money to organize the thing and have a prize pool bigger than the current biggest prize pool.

This really cuts into the power that a franchise model could potentially have - they'd have much less power to control the sport in the way that the NBA controls basketball or the NFL controls football.

[trynewideas]

> Some teams are geographical. For example: Overwatch league.

OWL never made it to a full home-and-away season; they planned one in 2020 but never executed it. Are there any esports leagues that play in home-city venues?

[bigger_cheese]

Dota Esports started as kind of region based there was a big rivalry between Chinese and Western teams it was always hype when one of the top Chinese teams like IG, LGD or DK etc would get invited to a Western tournament and vice versa the metagames across the region were different with each region prioritizing a different play style.

I'm pretty sure The qualifiers for TI (largest Dota tournament) are still region based. But nowadays the scenes have become much more homogenized. For a while the winners of TI would flip back and fourth (West would win one year then China and so fourth) it was a really good story to follow.

I think it started to change after TI 4 you began to get "Super Teams" which would just stack the best players on a single team, you tended to get very volatile rosters and team stability was basically non existent. Teams would form for one tournament then break up almost immediately afterwards. As a result you tended to follow players you liked rather than the teams.

[sophrocyne]

Similarly, my only real experience following is Dota - I blame my teenage years in War3 mods with that fascination.

Aside from the payout & incentive structure for players, the game is very much dependent on aligning player skillsets, heroes in the meta, and player attitudes/communication styles -- So much so, that some teams thrive some years, and completely disintegrate the next.

Plenty of examples of teams feeling they're being brought down by 'those one/two players', while they keep the "streaming stars" for the player fan base.

[Ekaros]

> Some teams are geographical. For example: Overwatch league.

Haven't checked the latest status, but I understood before that didn't really work out.

[nerdponx]

> In Dota, in particular, Valve has tried to make changes to encourage team stability, but the fundamental problem is that pay is so heavily stacked towards winning a few top tier tournaments per year, that people become very mercenary.

And ironically, Valve is the organization that created this problem.