“Finally, 27 percent of the players questioned “know players who take amphetamines and/or Ritalin to stay sharp for competition.” This is exactly the kind of worrying thing that might justify more drug tests in the future.” – https://esportsobserver.com/lcs-player-survey-reveals-high-salaries-shocking-views-women/
Doping isn’t an issue that is limited to league of legends, multiple CS:GO professionals have also been implicated in doping scandals. I’m interested to hear your opinion as to how the league should be approaching these kind of issues.
Currently, in traditional sports, we can see that doping is a problem taken very seriously – the IOC banned Russia from participating in the 2018 Olympics.
Additionally, we see esports is becoming aware of the issue. WESA’s Rules and Regulations section 20.1 states: “20.1 Doping is strictly prohibited. Doping and anti-doping rule violations will be sanctioned in accordance with the Sanctions Regulations.” However, despite stating that, it is my understanding that WESA has not formally sanctioned anyone for doping. So, we can’t see the degree of severity that is attached to these issues just yet.
The ESL (Electronic Sports League), which is an esports organization and production company the hosts video game tournaments worldwide, is also developing an anti-doping regime. Game publishers have also reacted strongly against doping in esports.
I’m curious to hear your opinion on how an anti-doping regime can be successfully established and also who should lead such an endeavor. In my opinion, one of the core issues to esports is that it is extremely decentralized. Everyone’s kind of doing their own things, and there’s conflicting information everywhere – that confuses people. So, I pose the question of how can this problem be addressed?
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I’m a big fan of introducing anti-doping to esports personally. If it’s going to be treated like professional sports, then it should be subject to the same prohibitions on doping to ensure fair play. The other thing that worries me is the fact that because esports players as streamers tend to have a very close connection to their audience, I would be concerned with young viewers emulating their favorite players. If they feel like these are an option to improve their game I can see this as being pretty problematic.
As for whether an anti-doping regime can be successfully established I think this is a good start and feel that public shaming is probably the best way to get standards put into place in such a decentralized industry like esports. If tournaments start introducing standards than I think it puts pressure on others. Anti-doping is probably one of the most successful possible applications of shaming since there really aren’t good pro-doping arguments out there. Developers and likely most players are unified in opposing it (I assume), so I think this is one area where I am quite confident that an industry standard might come about just due to internal pressure though I could imagine that the list of banned substances might vary from competition to competition.
Also on a tangent that I find really interesting is the list of banned substances, it includes weed as a banned substance during competitions. Is marijuana performance enhancing? I would rather have thought it was precisely the opposite…