I much prefer SC2, but I agree League of Legends is really designed to be watched in a way that StarCraft 2 is not.

A StarCraft 2 game can last anywhere from 5 minutes to 2+ hours. And they tend to stack so a series might take 20 minutes or 5 hours. Games often snowball from minor advantages so only a seconds of that may be really important.

League of Legends games on the other hand have some back a forth and are bound fairly closely to 25 minutes at top play. Allowing for more bite sized games, you can also jump into the middle of a match and understand what's going on more easily. Even better, lower level games tend to more closely match top play like other sports.

The problem with games like League & DotA is they're nearly impossible to understand what's going on as a spectator unless you already play the games. They're a victim of their own complexity - over 100 characters each with a minimum of 4 unique abilities. It makes major fights practically impossible to follow as a person who doesn't play the game.

SC2, on the other hand, is much easier to grok as a spectator. It's 1v1, so you know each army is controlled by 1 player, and the capabilities of the units are far more obvious as well, since a lot of them are based on pre-existing science fiction concepts.

League & Dota get far more viewers because the games are far more popular, however, as a spectator sport, they fall short because of their complexity.

I don't know that either is particularly gentle with its burden of knowledge; you say SCII is very clear, but truthfully I can't really tell what's going on in most pro games except for Cheese games with commentaries (I think there's a youtube channel called When Cheese Fails which I watched a few episodes of). As someone who grew up with Warcraft and Diablo eating up most of his time, I never played Star Craft and honestly the strategies used in pro-matches are so far removed from what I would do as a kid in the few games I played that it was a new game altogether.

I do agree that League is a downright mess in team fights, but at the same time, it's pretty true for SCII as well; when the armies, regardless of what stage of gameplay they're at, collide, I'm usually pretty lost as to why one is just eating the other or why this match up is a scenario that requires a retreat.

League has put a lot of effort into spectator clarity, with many of the status effects now having pretty clear symbols, the team-fight view with relative "power bars" that just give you a generic look at which side is faring better, and the commentators are usually fairly good at their fight recaps. A completely uninitiated is still going to miss the majority of nuances in matchups, trades, rotations, and all other such meta-game aspects, but Riot has done a pretty decent job of adding a simple interface for seeing what's going on in a match at any given time, and very simple meter for who is ahead in a team fight.

(It's still a mess to figure out sometimes, eve if you played for several years like I did. Sometimes I can't pick out what's happening until the casters walk us through it on the instant replay)

> SC2, on the other hand, is much easier to grok as a spectator. It's 1v1, so you know each army is controlled by 1 player, and the capabilities of the units are far more obvious as well, since a lot of them are based on pre-existing science fiction concepts.

The problem is that SC2 had very long periods of unwatchable metas. Twelve months of pro games consisting of two players building deathballs, having one battle (Where someone gets caught out of position, and loses their entire army in 5 seconds,) and the game ending was awful, as a spectator sport. (That was any Heart of the Swarm match involving Zerg in a nutshell.)

I was like watching a chess game, that, at turn 15, if one side didn't have a clear advantage, getting decided by a coin flip. This may be fun from a player's perspective, but is awful as a spectator sport.

Yeah I stopped playing during HotS despite being very passionate about the game because it just became so boring to watch at the highest levels which broke my heart. But I recently picked it up again and just finished watching the WCS finals this past weekend. I think SC2 is the best it has ever been in terms of gameplay for both players and spectators. Most of the matches I watched over the last few weeks have had intense, back-and-forth games that really showed off the multitasking these pros can exhibit. I didn't see very many games which were decided by a mid-game deathball fight which has been fantastic to watch. This is how it should have been all along. I highly recommend that anyone who put it down some time ago check it out again, I think you'll be pleasantly surprised!

Hots has greatly improved recently, enough heroes that comps are fairly diverse and change even more based on map. Fights are a lot longer now (buffed support, and nerfed cc), so less of a "oh that guy just got DELETED, gg" fight and more of something that keeps you on the edge of your seat. Only thing I don't like as a viewer (but like as a player) are the shorter games. 15 minutes feels good when playing as you can hop in another game, but 15 minute pro game means you have to sit through like 30 minutes of commentary + new draft before you get to the game.

Hah I should clarify, when I said HotS, I meant Heart of the Swarm expansion for SC2!

My cousins like to play and watch League, but I never did. That said, we did an impromptu road trip to LA awhile back to watch some professional games live. As someone who never played and only watched a handful of games, it was really a ton of fun and not that difficult to follow. Though they're far from perfect, the announcers do a pretty good job of explaining the action. From a layperson point of view, I really only needed to know whatever the super attacks were for the characters and could figure that out pretty quickly with the help of the announcers.

Really, I think what helps League over StarCraft is that it's pretty clear who's winning and who's losing since there's a relatively easy to follow flow across the map. When one team loses their towers, which are clearly denoted, they're probably behind. Further, gold and experience also give a pretty good indication of who's winning and losing. With StarCraft, which I've also never played, but have watched a handful of games, I find it difficult to follow on a macro scale. Certainly, it's easy to see when one battle is won or lost, but then suddenly one player will concede and I'm left wondering why. I think that rapid nature of forfeiting and loss of the game hurts its spectator appeal.

As a League spectator you don't really need to understand the combat to understand the meta. I mean when watching baseball you can't really tell much about a specific pitch, it's just the outcome you care about. Team X killed Team Y, that was good for Team X is enough to care.

Sometimes I find that casters miss a few small but important details in the heat of the moment and get derailed about most obvious topic. Playing the game or at least knowing about the mechanics from having spectated before gives you some analytical predictions. Whether that's to better enjoyment of watching the game is up to you.

Is there an RTS that will replace it (besides bw)? RTS may be a relative niche but that doesn't mean it's disappearing. Lots of traditional sports persist indefinitely without ever reaching the popularity of (either kind of) football. To some extent, the less popular the sport the purer it remains as it's less likely to be subsumed by profit motives.

Little bit tongue in the cheek but littlewargame can be a contender :)

http://www.littlewargame.com/

I think SC2 is in a pretty good place right now. The craziness of 2010-2014 was fun and exciting, but ultimately untenable for an RTS.

I see a lot of new RTS games produced, but what I don't see is any reason to play them. They're pretty much the same as what we already have with different graphics and different tech trees. Different, but not better, or at least not appreciably so.