Stimulants use in e-sports

Clueless Llama·10/20/2015, 6:26:16 PM·2 votes·851 views

Hi, Being a fan of e-sports (LoL, SC1/2) I was wondering one day - what stops these guys on the top to push through competition with some "help" of unfair stimulants? This led to discussion with my friend and sad thing is that it concluded with "nothing".

If you are not familiar with a methodology of analysing cheating/fraud/illegal actions, let me introduce the "fraud triangle". If anyone wants to assess if there might be a fraudulent/illegal action performed, he should measure 3 areas: Financial incentive - self explanatory Opportunity - answers the questions "Is it relatively safe?", "What are the chances of being caught?", "What happens if i get caught?" and so on Ratinalisation - a personal attitude towards the given action and rationale behind it, with negative examples would be "Everyone does it, so why shouldnt i do it", "it gets me where i want to be, nothing else matters" and so on.

To finish the theory - illegal stimulants would be anything that enhances your perception, reactions, stamina (hell, these Bo5 mathes are 5hrs+). Would probably like to refer to many substances forbidden in ordinary sports (although most of them are physical improvement oriented, there are some that are not) and obvious illegal substances that improve reactions/stamina.

So lets go with the triangle:

  1. With USD 1mn on the line, and more in contracts, there is a high incentive to use illegal stimulants. Not much to discus here. People do worse things for less money on the line that USD 1mn. Contrary argument will be these guys are smart and intelligent (you have to have some IQ to be good at this game), but hey, its not all about smarts in taking such decisions. Its also about ambition, and you need loands of ambition to go to LCS.
  2. Opportunity - finding the substances is childs play. Silk road is closed but hey, its easy for a 32 yr old white collar guy, so its easy for those 17+ guys that have the time to find it. They wont be controlled outside of the team (which might or may not know/support). They wont be fined/expelled/jailed cuz there is no system to control them nor legal points that would endanger their career.
  3. Rationalisation - I'd come back to ambition. These guys are smart, but most of financial worlds frauds were done by much smarter guys only due to their attitude. And Attitude is something im not sure aout the LCS guys. Many of them are great guys with moral standards, but many of them are overambitious bastards as well (multiple pro players suspensions and "internal disagrement" team roster changes doesnt come from nowhere).

So all 3 corners of triangle indicate there might be something in it. And that was the conclusion of my discussion with my friend - there are so many arguments supporting the thesis of substance use to enhance players potential and almost no arguments on the contrary. Right now, there is litterally "nothing" that stops potential "cheaters".

What do you think about that? Should Riot investigate such potential? Should there be controls in place?

3 Comments

ModWulf Helhammer10/20/2015, 7:22:25 PM1 votes

It's already being worked on, such as when a (CS:GO? CoD?) player got caught doping, and it was banned. PEDs are being investigated

Makneto10/22/2015, 6:51:33 PM1 votes

Does riot have explicit rules against PEDs?

Honestly I don't know.

These rules are also very difficult to enforce....how are you going to know if a player drinks a red bull or takes an adderall before their match? More clicks per minute or something?

Very difficult to prove something like that.

The Lexer10/23/2015, 11:19:06 PM1 votes

{quoted}

there are so many arguments supporting the thesis of substance use to enhance players potential and almost no arguments on the contrary.

Honestly, it's probably because everybody thought people would be smart enough to not have to argue this situation. It's one of those unspoken understandings