I love GotFrag, I really do. They provide a lot of content, coverage, and statistics that just can’t be found anywhere else. I can’t imagine all the work they have to put in to cover not only Counter-Strike 1.6 and Source, but Quake 4, DoTA, WoW Arena, Call of Duty, Day of Defeat, and any other games that pop up in the competitive gaming landscape (and there are plenty of those, I didn't even mention all the console games). I appreciate all of that, but there are two things they do that drive me absolutely insane.
First, they’ll have a headline that doesn’t correspond at all with where the link sends a user. Their breaking news/biggest story link is usually an egregious example of this (like it currently is). Headline: Forbidden, Pandemic win Buy. Link: sends you to the Buy.com Preview. If the headline is about them winning, shouldn’t the content follow suit? ESPN would never have a headline that said, “Florida wins the NCAA Tournament” and have the link send you to the NCAA Tournament bracket. They already have the final scores on a different page – they could at least link to those instead of the preview. It’s like going to a showing of the original Star Wars movie and being shown Episode I (which I think should be called Revenge of the Jar-Jar) instead. It’s something different than what you signed up for, and the difference is so bad you’ll never trust a Star Wars movie (or a GotFrag title link) ever again.
The other pet peeve of mine is connected to, but slightly different than, the first one: the lack of commentary on some events. Honestly, I can forgive them for not having the full recap even if they should have some content there . Recaps are time consuming to write, even moreso to edit, and sometimes there just isn’t much to say about a 16-5 victory. Not only that, but considering the amount of coverage they have to provide over so many different games, a recap for every match is completely unrealistic.
That being said, there are a lot of stories that are bigger than simple match results. I’m expecting a real story when I see this Q4 headline: “OoZe makes Ztrider quit in SNL Q4 PD1.” It’s an attention grabbing headline – professional players usually don’t quit mid-match. Naturally, I click on the “Full Story” link under the picture. Where does it send me? If you guessed that it sent me to a story about OoZe making Ztrider quit ingame, clearly you’ve skipped the previous three paragraphs.
There isn’t a single mention in the “full story” about what happened during the match, commentary on the demo, any report on the words or actions from either of the players. It’s a few paragraphs of text that clearly haven’t been updated since the matches started being played – another tournament preview. The only mention of anything that happened in the match is in the score, which states, “Torment: 12: -1 (Ztrider quits after 6 minutes).” (Torment is the map they played on, although it apparently doubled as Ztrider’s mental state.) Why even make it a story by giving it a headline if there isn’t going to be anything written about it?
It’s a good story, too. Ztrider is a prominent figure in the Q4 community. In fact, he’s the defending champion of that event – OoZe didn’t make just anybody leave, he made the champ quit mid-match. Clearly that has some kind of impact on the tournament predictions, and at the very least leaving before the competition is unprofessional. If you remember, LeBron James had a huge public backlash when he left the basketball court before the game was over, and he left after the outcome was guaranteed. Ztrider still had time to make a comeback (although it was improbable). There was plenty of opportunity to put a story (or any kind of content) there, and they just didn’t do it. Basically, it comes down to this: if it’s worth a headline, it’s worth a story. And if it’s not worth a story, it has no business being a headline.
Again, just so we’re clear: this isn’t a “GOTFRAG SUX” post, because they do a great job of reporting the eSports news in a variety of gaming genres. I just wish they did a better job of synching their content and their headline links, or didn’t bother at all with updating the headlines if they’re just going to link to something else. Hopefully in the coming days there’ll be a full Buy.com LAN recap and a story about Ztrider leaving. It’d be great to get the input from people that know so much about gaming and the community.
