Curse

The Real Roy Keane · Jan 20, 2007, 11:03 PM // 23:03

The Games Keep Changing
'Imagine if Major League Baseball suddenly decided to start using softballs instead of baseballs, aluminum bats instead of wood, and forced every team to move into new stadiums. Then six months after that, they’d announce that they'd be changing the softballs back to baseballs, moving the bases ten-feet closer, adding two new positions, and forcing players to wear five pounds of lead in each shoe to prevent them from jumping too high.

Pretty dumb, huh? Unfortunately, that’s pretty much exactly how video gaming works.

Thanks to patches, updates, and advancing technology, the games used in competition change constantly. But you can’t even compare the Counter-Strike matches of today to the ones from two years ago, because so much has changed thanks to the release of new versions and rule changes. And you certainly can’t compare the modern Unreal Tournament 2003 player to a Quake II player from four years ago, they are completely different beasts.

There’s almost no tradition. There’s no legacy, no sense of history, and that makes it all seems pretty illegitimate. Part of the fun of professional sports is you can compare teams from different eras against each other, cheer on attempts to break records, follow a favorite player throughout his career ... you can’t really do any of that in professional gaming, because the players, teams, and even the games themselves change at a rapid pace.'

Taken from the link posted by juliyamaxwell (excellent article by the way), this clinched it for me.