That’s the rationale I agree with, but I can see why people are salty when lower tiers that could destroy the women’s team can barely make ends meet. You have to understand different point of views and be like “you’re right, it’s not fair that men of equal or better skill are not making a living while a women’s tournament gives them a better prize pool for effectively being less skilled, but to lure people to become better and better, you need to offer incentives”.
OW doesn’t need a “first step”, it needs the company that sold over 60 million games to do the bare minimum and do at least a small women league, not just highlight a “marginalized” cup that shifts the blame of representation on men.
The reason why women’s circuits exist and should exist are incomprehensibly stupid men, that is a fact. That’s not shifting blame, it’s the reality we live in. There are women in OW/OWL who have spoken about how they are been discriminated against, mistreated and had rumors spread about them for being women despite doing nothing wrong.
There’s a girl whose teammates would not focus on playing because they all wanted to be romantically involved with her and get jealous if one player spent more time playing games outside of practice with her. Even team management wouldn’t leave her alone.
Here’s someone who used to work for Dallas Fuel talking about how orgs discriminate against women even though they say otherwise (thread)
This cup was a community organized one that they decided to highlight. By seeing the interest there is in this there’s a chance that it’s something they want to start doing themselves.
Ah perhaps I missed this. Is that something people are assuming about the cup or is that an actual statement made from blizzard about why they are doing it
The modern feminism ideology (what it has supposedly become/…misandry) aside, there really are a lot of men that dislike women. It’s pathetic on both ends. I think the kind of behavior directed towards women in the larger gaming scene has had a much larger impact than we want to accept. I mean collectively, not just a single organization. I wouldn’t know if that’s been the largest role played in how the E-Sport field has evolved, but I don’t suspect it to be the case. Seems like overall, you just have more males invested in it. I’ve watched the history of women in e-sports about 2-3 years ago. But that’s likely a fairly limited take too.
Because it’s already difficult enough to find players with high enough skills as is. You need player, that has high gaming skills, high social skills and doesn’t look like stereotypical “fat nerd”.
Think it’s also one of reasons, why women have hard time getting into OWL. Like someone jokes, “woman can be kind, smart, beautiful - pick any 2”.
In regular sports, athlete can be somewhat ugly and/or somewhat stupid, yet still be successful. And even there are exceptions, like figure skating.
It’s like the organizers of this tournament are telling use Men and other genders shouldn’t play together. It also indirectly says that women and other marginalized groups need special treatment to be able to play.
Check your comprehension skills before talking about baseless claims. The very first thing I mentioned was about feminism and what an abomination it has been seen as, I.E. misandry. You totally glossed over that I think both men and women disliking each other is pathetic on both ends. Re-read the entire post you cherry picked your quote from.
Sorry, I should have remembered not many people have the access to articles that I do (I’m a researcher in academia) so I should have checked if it was an open access source. I’m summarize for those that don’t have access.
Disclaimer: I’m a biochemist/bioinformatician, so my interpretation could be a little off, but I at least know enough about statistics to get the broad strokes.
Overall, the biggest difference from what I can see in the data, is the distribution of errors in tracking. The best performing men always beat the best performing women by rather large margins (~30-100% better than the best woman depending on the test). It was most noticeable when they quantified the error in terms of milliseconds of lag; the top performing male quartile (so the top 25%) had lower lag than the best performing female with the three best males having half the lag of best individual female (~20 ms vs ~45 ms).
The researchers looked to see if there was a difference in the way the males and females were moving their hands through kinematic measures. They found that men and women were moving their hands in highly similar ways and could not find a statistical difference. They also tracked the user’s gaze during the trials (each participant did 10 trials for each test). Looking at the distributions, the shape and values are nearly identical between men and women.
Since the gaze tracking and hand movements of the men and women were nearly identical while the men are substantially better at tracking (30%+ better from what I can gather from the graphs), the researchers concluded that the difference in performance is due to men having a faster processing pathway for decision making based on visual stimuli and converting them into hand movements.
The results of the study make sense overall if you remember the division of labor that occurred while humans were developing. Men were hunters while women were gathers. Evolutionary pressure selected for men that were better at hunting (reacting to prey movements or similar traits) which leads to better hand-eye coordination processing in modern gamers. Meanwhile, women experienced pressures to make them better at gathering (typical example is women have more cones in their eye which allow them to distinguish shades of colors better than men; thought to allow them to better discern between poisonous and edible berries in ancient times)
Hope that summary of the study is helpful.
Now what does that mean at the pro gamer level? Pro gamers are certainly residing at the extreme tail of the distribution of performance regardless of sex. So the fact that the best performing men handily defeat the best female is kind of a big deal at the pro level. And its not just that the best man is just edging out the best woman, it is that that best 10% of men are at least as good as the best individual woman, with the top 5% of men being substantially better at tracking. When it comes to putting together a pro team, that type of difference is going to result in nearly all of the pro players being men if the recruitment is primarily based on mechanical abilities.
