Thursday 13 April 2017

Journey to a New World

Jason Batzofin being inducted into IeSF's Athlete's Commission in Shanghai, China
Journey to a New World

Just recently I left my home town and moved abroad in the hopes to pursue a future in eSports. There are many changes when you move, both within yourself as a person and your environment. And it all starts from the second you step off the airplane…

Coming from South Africa there are things that just don’t work, or not as well as they should. The infrastructure is lacking and being an eSports Athlete that does make life a lot harder. I found that it was especially hard to get consistent internet that doesn’t drop connection every hour or so. The speed was slow and the latency high. I arrived in London, England and found out that there were almost no homes that didn’t have fibre optic. The internet speed is such an important aspect of eSports.

There are other things that make living in London a huge benefit to myself. I could walk to the local shops to get what I needed without the fear of being run over by someone who didn’t have a license or being mugged on the way home. London being so close to the rest of Europe also has a massive benefit in that an eSports Athlete has easy access to other strong competition. Not only does this help myself in improving my game but it also helps Europe. By having so much competition so near they create a very strong central superpower in eSports. However….

It is very expensive. Nothing here is cheap and coming from a country where the currency gets weaker every day you feel the punch in everything you buy. And there are problems here that many other countries also have problems with. eSports coaching is almost nonexistent. The only way to find coaching for many of the eSports is online over Skype or the likes. There’s no one on one, face to face coaching and I find that that is a major problem in making eSports bigger and stronger.

The journey has only just begun and many more pros and cons will make themselves evident as time goes on. For now I am convinced that the pros far outweigh the cons. 

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