Understanding the Challenges of Team-Based Live Streaming for First-person Shooter Games

First-person shooter (FPS) game tournaments take place across the globe. A growing number of people choose to watch FPS games online instead of attending the game events in person. However, live streaming might miss critical highlight moments in the game, including kills and tactics. We identify how and why the live streaming team fails to capture highlight moments to reduce such live streaming mistakes. We named such mistakes jarring observations. We conducted a field study of live streaming competitions of Game For Peace, a popular FPS mobile game, to summarize five typical jarring observations and identify three primary reasons that caused the issues. We further studied how to improve the live streaming system to prevent jarring observations from happening by doing semi-structured interviews with two professional streaming teams for Game For Peace. The study showed that a better system should (1) add a new sub-team role to share the director's responsibility of managing observers; (2) provide interfaces customized for three roles of live streamers in the team; (3) abstract more geographical info; (4) predict the priority of observation targets; and (5) provide non-verbal interfaces for sync-up between sub-teams. Our work provides insights for esports streaming system researchers and developers to improve the system for a smoother audience experience.