I used to be pretty blaise when it came to someone spoiling things for me. Whilst it could be a little irritating to find out the ultimate outcome of something before I had had a chance to experience it for myself I still usually enjoyed it regardless. However my rather voracious appetite for competitive DOTA2 has seen my tolerance of results drop considerably as much of the tension disappears when you know who’s going to win a certain match. In this modern age where everything is broadcast immediately and with reckless abandon avoiding spoilers has become an exercise in frustration. It seems that no matter where you go there’s someone, or something, that will ruin your experience, intentionally or otherwise.
I had this exact problem happen to me today when I was browsing around for the wild card games being played for this year’s The International DOTA2 tournament. After not being able to find the games (likely due to me being offline at the time) I saw some updates in my compendium and figured I check them out. Lo and behold there was the winner of the current round of games displayed, thereby informing me of the ultimate outcome. Considering there weren’t that many teams competing in this round it meant pretty much every game had a very predictable outcome and whilst I still enjoyed watching the games afterwards the usual tension was gone and I was far less invested than I’d normally be.
The game client itself isn’t the only source of spoilerific content either, the live streams which many tune into for this content are also quite guilty of spoiling things by casually mentioning results or even displaying future games as part of their highlights section. Since they’re witnessing the games live it’s understandable that they’d forget that not everyone was tuning in at the same time they were, however it’s still something that can really ruin your experience. Watching the entire stream in chronological order can alleviate this somewhat however that also means wading through hours of content in order to see the parts you want.
This isn’t a problem without solutions however they’re often slow in coming forward or completely ineffectual. The DOTA2 client has come some way in that regard, letting you select individual games to watch the replays of, however since the most recent game is always displayed at the top you’re guaranteed to see it unless you cover your screen with your hand (a rather unreliable method). There are some good VOD sites like DOTA2vods which do spoiler free sections although they’re often out of order, meaning you have to figure out the order of matches yourself. Both of these issues can be sorted out with a little more development work and manual intervention where appropriate, something which I’m hoping both Valve and the site owners do sooner rather than later.
The communities are thankfully becoming more aware of just how much spoilers can ruin one’s experience of things like this with the community on Reddit being rather good at policing threads with spoilers in their titles. By far the best example of this is the spoilerfreesc subreddit which I’ve yet to see replicated for other eSports. It’s somewhat understandable that this hasn’t happened due to the rather large amount of overhead incurred but it’s still something that I’m sure many would like to see developed.
Indeed I don’t think these problems are unique to my sport of choice, nor are they new. It’s more that the problem has been exacerbated by the ease of which information can spread, both through intentional and unintentional means. There’s really no quick and easy solution for it, more the responsibility is on everyone involved to avoid divulging information that might not be appropriate. Hopefully between that and a few more technological advances we can do away with spoilers of this nature for good.
