Professional raiding - The future

[Krille]

You mean you don't want to sit and watch a guild wipe on Rag 400 times or something really fun like that!!

I just remember when Rikh streamed his progression on Twitch with Nihilum, it's basically the whole experience with Twitch chat being spastic too, "sacred vines"-memes and what not. Like it's not just you sitting there alone watching someone die over and over to a boss. It's a community thing and it's supposed to be a race where you can see what the "other guild" is also doing.

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Professional raiding will never be a thing for several reasons. The primary of which is that it will never be very interesting to watch a guild wipe hundreds of times in a row, several days straight. It's just not entertaining. When people watch esports, they want to watch two teams actively compete against each other in a pvp type format.

The second of which is strat protection. You can say guilds may not change a strat, but if one guild has wiped 100 times on a boss and still working on it, and not close, but another guild with a very different strat beat the boss in 50 pulls, maybe you might consider switching to that strat. Any guild behind in the race will always adopt what is determined as the better strat, if they haven't reached a boss yet that a couple others have killed.

Third, unlike other games that are moving to a professional level, warcraft raiding has no method to equalize gear, and balance the field at the raiding level. In all other blizzard esports, all teams start from a balanced play field, and there is no RNG gear to deal with. In wow raiding all guilds start with slightly different starting gear sets and ilvls. The gear drops are RNG and unequal. A guild with better gear drops, more titanforging in week one, may have a leg up in week two. Esports doesn't work well in an environment where you have RNG equipped gear. The only way you could effectively turn wow raiding into an esport, is to have multiple teams selected by blizzard, and given equalized gear, at a predetermined level, and have them work through the raid, with no raid drops.

All valid points. I think that you underestimate the fun-value of watching someone fail repeatedly though. And no boss lives through 400 wipes these days, highest in mythic NH was little more than 200 wipes. And yea i went over the strat part which is obviously a problem, but i still feel that top guilds today are a bit too conservative when it comes to their strats. If you jump at the chance of copying someone elses strat that wasn't even made to cater to your specific raidgroup i think you might end up gimping yourself.

Gear is obviously also an issue that plays into the WF race, but thats just another variable to take into account. As you also say, you could use pre-determined templates that wouldnt make the raid trivial.

[Alvito]

So you want some of the worst parts of the WoW community mixed in with watching somebody die repeatedly. Boy that sounds like a blast. Big Brother meets WoW raiding.

[Krille]

So you want some of the worst parts of the WoW community mixed in with watching somebody die repeatedly. Boy that sounds like a blast. Big Brother meets WoW raiding.

Obviously not meant for everyone. But the reason Twitch is immensely popular isn't only tied to extremely good streaming content, but the community is where it's at. And i've seen that there are a lot of discussions between different supporters on here and on other websites, so the community around the WF race does exist already.

[klaps_05]

You can maybe have some kind of Mythic+ competition at blizzcon like last time which will fail drastically. The PvE race doesnt work because guilds have different schedules, timings, the kills happen on different days, unless you want to bring back limited attempts. Plus, the money received from sponsors are much higher than what blizzard will EVER provide - case in point 3v3 arena which exists for so many years now, yet its prizepool is a total joke.

for blizzard there is only 1 esports game - Overwatch League, all the eggs are in that basket. PvE streams were somewhat popular on twitch because of the twitch chat, not because of what people are actually streaming.

[HuxNeva]

Basically, wow-raiding is not an eSports format.
You need something that has a few more or less 30 minute episodes (all popular eSports and Sports have this), each of which resulting in a persistant 'score'
You preferably want something where the different teams are competing against each other in a shared environment (not indirectly, that is why races are far more popular than time trials)
You need something that is easy enough to digest for 'analysts', not too fast so it is observable yet intense enough to have rolling commentary (try watching a LoL match without sound)
You need something that has very little 'downtime'. Viewers are easily bored.
You need something with a fixed schedule (race tonight from 8pm and at 10pm it is over and we know the winners and losers)

I could go on, but you see the pattern. Progression raiding is almost the anti-thesis of a good eSport.

[Evilmoo]

Or these players can just play the game for fun and not expect to be paid or something? If you are getting paid to play a video game then it's basically a job to you and where does that start drawing the line on things.

WF raiding is basicly a full time job with unpaid overtimes and mundane grind.
There is barely any fun in it for those who are on the market for a while.

[Deleted]

It doesn't make sense wow raiding to be an esport. Games like dota, cs:go, hs or ow are fun to watch because is a competition, the world first race is about preparation and then kill bosses and lately the first aspect is more and more important (a lot of split runs, ap farming, legendaries, alters, so anything but fun to watch).

[Deleted]

"Professional raiding" lolwat. It's a profession right now, if you consider hard shilling for hardware companies and scraping donations from Joe Public a profession. I guess?

Of the top 10 guilds, there are a handful of "personalities" that stream/post to youtube. And their "portfolios" often include stuff entirely unrelated to WoW. Or even worse, feature cringingly embarrassing "RL" vids of them unboxing promotional rubbish, working out, or going on trips and making kissyfaces with their girlfriends (hi, Sco).

Point I'm making here is that the "professionals" themselves don't have enough content from the game itself to subsidise their "careers", and this is what they do all day, every day.

The reality is this: if the top mythic guilds all imploded tomorrow, outside the tiny echo chamber of these forums no one would notice, and no one would care - including Blizzard. There never has been and never will be official support/promotion of progression raiding because, shocker, the game isn't affected by it at all.You're delusional or naive if you believe otherwise. Mythic raiding is at the thin end of a very narrow niche.

Blizzard would need to be sure of a return on investment to support "professional raiding"; they know it'd just be a waste of time and money, and so they don't invest; never have, never will. It's really that simple. WoW isn't Starcraft, and the World is not Korea.

[Kokolums]

They aren't lazy, they are intentional. If you incentive raiding like this people will literally die. People do RETARDED things in order to raid for a week straight. There is no reason to allow them to turn it into a job.
If anything, they should be futher DECENTIZIVING this type of play. It is hazardous to the health and life of the player doing it and it perpetuates this nonsense idea that the game is easy because bosses get killed in one week.

Just cap the number of attempts. The cap would be applied on the guild. So endgame raiding guild A gets 10 total attempts per week on boss for world first. After that, the guild is locked out.

[Deleted]

I would love if Blizzard could give some reward to guilds and stream the race somehow, I know wow is alot more boring than other games such as Dota 2 etc but having livestreamed content from Blizzard, perhaps livestreaming 10 different top guilds, like.. you have access to 1-5 streamers from each guild, and they have to share their streaming to be allowed into the price pool.

That price pool is paid by the people watching the stream and top 3 guilds out of the top 10 gets a price reward from blizz / viewers.

Blizzard can be creative, I sure hope they do something cool with world first races in the future! =)

[Gasparde]

There is no realistic way to sponsor professional raiding in any way.

Top guilds don't stream their progress, they don't even have their logs public. So there's no viewership. Blizzard would basically have to enforce top guilds streaming their progress or kinda have to follow them around throughout their whole progres. The world first race is already pretty short, mythic Nighthold was cleared after 10 days already. making the progress of all the guilds publicly visible would shorten this even more as top guilds would prolly have 10 people scouting 10 other guilds 24/7.

With this in mind, Blizz would have to sponsor something that would most likely last for no longer... than a week. Considering how much time players invest into the world first race.... getting like $1000 for getting world first doesn't seem all that great after 200h /played across 5 chars - especially not if you have to stream it and run the risk of someone else using your tactics and killing the boss before you since they happen to bring 8 DHs vs your 6.

And with all that investment from Blizzards site... who would even watch the race? There's barely 10k people watching WoW at pretty much any time. Arena tournaments or expansion/patch launches usually push this numbers to 20k tops. So yea, they'd invest an irrelevant amount of money into something maybe 2k people (if at all, watching someone wipe 300 times is not really entertaining) would watch. There's absolutely nothing to be gained from it.

[f4ncybear]

Wow, ToS is not even open yet but "Guilds chasing the World First" threads are already popping.

In order to endorse "competitive raiding" Blizzard would have to enforce ToS and ban people. That would result in top guilds dropping out and the race would turn into special olympics.

Why don't you people get together just like you did with legacy servers and crowdfund a prize pool for the race. Elect some washed up community member to oversee it and accept applications from guilds. You have to stream 100% of your progress and the guild that finishes first within those applied gets the money. Or mail G2A.com and tell them there's a huge interest in a sponsored race.

[Deleted]

Just cap the number of attempts. The cap would be applied on the guild. So endgame raiding guild A gets 10 total attempts per week on boss for world first. After that, the guild is locked out.

theyve tried limited attemps in past and it sucked, aslo 10wipes is way way way to little as a max for a any decent/hard M boss

[Jimson]

Just cap the number of attempts. The cap would be applied on the guild. So endgame raiding guild A gets 10 total attempts per week on boss for world first. After that, the guild is locked out.

For one, limited attempts always lead to trouble because of bugs and such. For another, even if you upped the number of attempts, at some point something will happen that gives one group an advantage (Guild A progressed on Tuesday but uncovered bugs, Bliz hotfixes that night, Guild B goes in Wednesday and changes their strat based on the hotfix).

[Krille]

So yea with the news to what happened in Serenity today i guess it's all dead. Method vs Method. Race is dead, move on.

[Kazuchika]

The obsession people have with wanting to watch a top guild wipe 200 times on a boss is weird.

Go outside.

[Krille]

The obsession people have with wanting to watch a top guild wipe 200 times on a boss is weird.

Go outside.

What if you combine them both!? Silly comment.

[The Oblivion]

The obsession people have with wanting to watch a top guild wipe 200 times on a boss is weird.

Go outside.

2265 posts on 1 internet forum alone. The obsession you have with wanting to post on a website multiple times a day is weird.

Go outside.

[towelliee]

M+ Esports WILL be a thing. "Professional" raiding will not. Guilds will uselessly try to form power guilds and still be beat out by the 2-3 guilds who raid the 16 hours a day. The race is already the same guilds. Lazy? Sure they could probably find a method to organize it but too many variables are at play.

[Crimewave]

It's already too late, for a few years.
We are just waiting for raiding to slowly die.