Should be fixed now.

Err... that's exact what was supposed to happen. I'll go delete that now.

When I first started the site, I downloaded a list of countries to add to the database. I don't know much about these countries or the naming conventions, but it is based on the ISO-3166 standard. The vast majority of these countries aren't even used, like "British Indian Ocean Territory", "Holy See (Vatican City State)" and "Palestinian Territory, Occupied". It'll probably look just as weird to the Palestinian people if they ever got more involved in esports.

I finally managed to implement the ability to add "unknown players" to tournaments. This will allow the tournament data to do the following:

• Games and Tournaments can now be credited with prize money where the player winning it is unknown
• Partial rosters can now be filled and the known players will be credited properly

This addresses a known problem where we couldn't add all the prize money for tournaments or credit players with their prize money due to not knowing the full rosters. This means people like djWHEAT and SirScoots can now be credited with their prize money. I still have to tweak all the calculation to account for these unknown players, but everything seems to be fully functional in the Development Area. I would expect everything up and running by the end of the weekend. Enjoy! :)

I think the context is also important here. Some teams do bring on players that act as "official standins" at events, and I heard they get a cut even if they don't play at all. But I also heard of "emergency standins" where if, for example, a player on a team gets sick during an event and they have no official subs, they find someone at the LAN to standin (if tournament rules allow it), and just pay them a flat fee (or not). Those standins usually don't get a cut. Not 100% sure though. I don't know the right answer. Perhaps different rules apply to different games?

For now, I think standins that have been officially announced prior to the tournament gets a cut.

I've been looking at how the team data has been working out for a while, and it seems like it only reliable works for CS:GO since roster changes for teams, both big and small, are always announced. There definitely needs to be a way to credit teams where a player's join/leave dates are not known.

While the easiest and most obvious solution is to associate every earning with their respective teams, it doesn't paint the whole picture. I chose to use the join/leaves dates specifically because it provides more information and everything can be calculated in one feel swoop: earnings by team, earnings by squad, earnings by player in a given period on a team, total earnings by player if they leave and rejoin the team, length of time they were on a team, roster changes, etc. I know it's harder and takes more effort overall to get everything working like it should, but it's ultimately going to provide much more information to esports researchers and historians in the long run, and that's the name of the game at the end of the day. I don't know of a single resource out there as comprehensive as this site when it comes to team data.

Of course, that doesn't mean there shouldn't be improvements. It's a system with very strict tolerances, so I'm thinking we should loosen it up a bit. Let me know what you think of the following:

• When adding a player to a squad, I could have another checkbox to indicate that "we don't know when a player joined the team, but we know he/she was on this team in this given period of time." The text on their pages will be stylized differently to indicate this and it will be made clear that it's not a join/leave date, but the calculations will be able to run and everything gets credited like they're supposed to.
• Taking your idea for selecting teams from a dropdown menu on the earning entry forms, how about displaying which teams are set to be credited for each player and the ability to add them to a team right then and there if they're considered teamless? It could be used in conjunction with the above idea: we don't know when they joined, but we know for a fact that they were on the team for the tournament, so logically they were on the team between the start and end of it.
• I'm also working on the tournament pages so that a player's team is displayed right beside their name, similar to how it's displayed on Liquipedia. Teams will also be linked in team tournament results based on the number of players on the team. If all 5 players on a team are on Fnatic when the tournament takes place, then logically, that team is Fnatic and it should be giving you a link to Fnatic's team page. An all-star team or pick-up team considering of several players from different teams (or teamless) should not give you a link at all.

That seems right. Events associated with a league will credit the league with the prize money, though I don't think that matters too much. Can't say when it'll be done, but I'll add it in.

I could have sworn I said something about it... somewhere... maybe... oh well... =\

The underlying structure of the database is pretty much limited by my own limited understanding of esports. Events were originally called "Tournament Groups" because I'm an idiot. Made sense at the time; you're logically grouping tournaments together, like files in a folder. Never occurred to me that a tournament in a group could be part of another group.

Basically, what I'm saying is that I can change it so that tournaments could be a part of as many events as you want. It's a small change on the surface, but this fundamentally changes the site at its core and I need a lot of time to make this work properly. There's a couple questions that I need some good answers to before I can actually do anything, then it becomes a matter of time:

For tournaments associated with multiple events, which event gets credit for the prize money?

How would this be determined?

It's certainly better solely because of the existence of CoDpedia (it's actually CoD eSportspedia). Now they have a place to record the history of their scene, but it has a lot of problems at its core. CoD eSportspedia is the only competitive wiki I know of that doesn't cite any sources on their pages. I remember one of the admins of the site telling me that a lot of the information on the wiki for the earlier tournaments are based on his own personal knowledge and what the pros are telling him. It's hearsay, and this is a problem for me especially because a lot of the information on there may or may not be true.

I've actually caught a lot of inaccuracies on this site. I don't bother recording them because I'm too busy trying to work on this site. The ones I do remember well are the ones that people try to submit tips on. It says somewhere on there that Burnsoff won $25,000 from a MW3 FFA, when in fact he won a jeep and a bunch of prizes worth $25,000. Someone interpreted that cash prize as fact, and tried to pass it off here. Good thing I verify the facts or else I'd have a bunch of CoD kiddies making shit up and devaluing what we have going on here.

They're also missing a lot of their own tournaments everywhere. That's not necessarily the fault of the people who run it, but the blame is on the CoD community as a whole. Competitive wikis rely on user contributions. They just don't care enough to record their own history, especially the Australian scene. They supposedly have their own league and a lot of tournaments, but they never add them. It's their responsibility so if they don't add them, no one will. I managed to find stuff on MES and Gold Coast LANs. The CoD community doesn't really care about these things, so they don't cover them and they don't add them to the wiki.

Basically, the CoD community is self-imposing their own Dark Ages. If their community as whole can't be bothered to record everything, then so be it. It's their game, their community, their history. All we'll ever know about from the outside looking in is MLG. There's nothing I can do to change their attitude. I've accepted that fact that I'm always going to be ignorant of CoD history. I'll try to add whatever I can here whenever I get some reliable information, but I'm not wasting anymore time on them.

I would include it. It's one of those rare cases where you don't use one of the preset rankings. For this case, I would use Misc->"See Note" with a ranking priority of 4 or lower, then add a note to it saying the player was awarded the prize in a random draw.

The prize money will be solely based on the individual player's results and if they happen in the time between the join and leave dates. This way, if a player is subbed in for someone else at an event, it doesn't count towards them being on a team and that team doesn't get the credit for that player's share of the prize money.

Currently, there's no way to see it on here. I just made a bunch of really basic forms on my home PC to test stuff out.

I just got a reply back from ESL about using some of their player photos. They won't give me permission, so that's no longer an option.

I took a quick look at those Wikimedia photos. I can use them, but they're quite old. I don't even remember Genius being on SlayerS. :o

I've added those two games to the event.

I guess I should introduce myself as well.

I'm Vanix from Canada. I run a YouTube channel. https://www.youtube.com/user/GGBeyondcom

I like talking about the older PC games we grew up with in the 90s, and I have an interest in the history of video games in general. As you can imagine, esports history is a part of video game history.

I'm also a former WarCraft III modder, starting in the Reign of Chaos days back when DotA was just another custom map to play. When StarCraft II came around, I was blown away by how powerful the editor was. It was everything WC3 modders ever wanted. But the biggest turnoff to making custom maps was Battle.net 2.0, and it's all because of the way maps were sorted. A lot of us gave up early on (myself included) because there was really no point to it when the only maps you'll be able to populate and play were Desert Strike and Nexus Wars. No point in creating content no one will ever see.

The reason I created this website is because of my YouTube channel. More specifically, this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DltNgldgRv4

My reviews of older PC games includes talking about the history, culture and influence they had on the video game industry. In the case of that video, I needed to talk about the competitive scene of Quake III Arena. At the time, all I knew was that it existed. I didn't know the players or the tournaments except for Quakecon. I didn't know what "strafe-jumping" was, or even how the game was played at a high level. So how do I do research on it? That's where the problem lies: I couldn't. It kind of embarrassing looking back because the information I provided in the video was based solely on what was on Wikipedia. There was no easy way to research esports history. I decided to do something about it. At the time, there was SC2Earnings and LoLEarnings to show a full list of players and tournaments for those specific games. Naturally, I named the site "e-Sports Earnings" because I wanted it to be like those other sites, but for all competitive games.

This should explain why updates tend to be on the slow side; I bounce between video production and site development. My main project is my YouTube channel. The whole point of this site was to provide me with easy access to esports information for my videos. No one was going to make this for me, so I made it myself. And since I'm putting in all this time and effort into making the site, I might as well make it accessible to everyone since I know how extremely difficult finding this stuff can be to begin with.

I guess overall you can say I'm a content creator. I've always been creating content, whether its mods, videos, or websites.

You can find me on Twitter @GGBeyond.

CoD eSportspedia is okay for the more recent major tournaments, but terrible for anything before 2014. Why? Take a look at this:

http://cod.esportspedia.com/wiki/MLGNationalChampionship_2008

I would not use that as a reliable source of information. It's just a table; no tournament format, no brackets, no VODs, no links to anything that can verify the information on the page other than the prize money and teams. It had one external link, and I didn't even use it when I added it to the site. In the cases where I have found more information to back up a CoD eSportspedia page, some of the information was wrong like prizes and rosters. Compare that to their pages for 2014 tournaments:

http://cod.esportspedia.com/wiki/MLGColumbus2014

Although it's missing VODs, it's still amazing. I'm much more confident in citing this as a source because not only does it tell you everything you need to know about the tournament, you can also look at the page history to know that the information was updated live during the tournament itself, so it doesn't need to reference outside sources because it a reliable source in and of itself.

I'd say Liquidpedia is the golden standard in which all other eSports wikis should follow. That, and LoL eSportspedia for team games. As long as they provide all the information (tournament format, results, prize pools, brackets, team rosters and subs), I would consider it a reliable source. I'm just picking on CoD eSportspedia because CoD tournaments were the most frustrating tournaments I had to research, and it's all because their community did an extremely poor job in documenting their own history (to an extent, they still do).

Back when I first began filling out the site, I focused on filling out SC2 since it was the biggest esport at the time. I used the gold/silver/bronze backgrounds to distinguish major tournament wins from those weekly cups, and it really came down to how it was shown on Liquipedia. I used "WIN" when it was winner-takes-all for those cups, but the WIN/LOSE is really intended for showmatches or exhibition matches when there's only two players/teams for the entire thing, since 1st/2nd would usually imply there's an entire bracket for the tournament.

I agree that it should be more consistent, but it's a very minor problem as far as I'm concerned and I don't know a good solution to it anyway. Anyone who can come up with a really good guideline for it is free to suggest it. There's still a lot of other things I need to do with the site, and I'd rather wrap my head around those than this for the time being.

Oh wow... I never noticed that. o.o