WoW in MLG again are you kidding me?!

[Aldurion]

For those of you that don't know, MLG or Major League Gaming will be hosting "Professional" tournaments involving WoW PVP. (MLG defines what they consider professional)

How is it that World of Warcraft actually fits in as an E-Sport? It has five battlegrounds and you can't even choose your opponents to scrim against, and a handful of arenas which again, you can't even choose your friends to scrim against. (I agree there is a tricky way to do this but unpractical)

With gear, stats, and class balance issues, how is the competition in this game even viable for "professional" gaming?

In my opinion, MLG should find another game, and WoW should stop trying.

MLG is another kind of WoW. Players there are 100% free to choose their own perfect setup and gear, there is no endless honor grind, no fotm rerolling, no need to visit wintergrasp, no need to PvE. When you take these things out of equation, wow pvp actually gets pretty exciting and fun.

[Ninetales]

i woukd imagine blizzard pays MLG sooo much cash to host it that MLG is willing to take the risk to its credibility because they hope its so obvious that wow isnt a viable esport that it must be clear to the players/viewers its just something unpleasant they do for cash

alright...uhmmmm
learn2reason logically?

MLG vs Blizzard...
MLG is paying the big bucks just to put WoW on their poor webby

[Parameter]

This. It sounds like the OP doesn't know about them. Doesn't know that when you get on the Tournament Realm, that you pick a class, at lvl 80, with full PVP gear, and not the crap either. Gems, chants ect ect. I can see this totally going to MLG and being an E-sport, since that is kinda what it is. the OP is a moron.

Oh so now being unaware of how something works makes you a moron? Can you calculate Pi to the last digit? Wow aren't you a moron.

On topic, I don't think WoW is a good game for MLG because no matter how well you play your class, the good ol' RNG can fuck you with minimal damage hits and you get raped by a 4 yr old faceroller. IMO games which require pure skill and don't rely on luck are the games that should be in the MLG.

[Clay]

As far as class balance issues. WoW is pretty well balanced. No game can be "perfect" when there are more than one class/character to play. It's called a tier list and every game has them.

I dont agree with you. You see, in my opinion, WoW is to much of an RNG game. And dont say that this does'nt matter, because it does. This is why the game itself will never be completely balanced.

[Rafgar]

For those of you that don't know, MLG or Major League Gaming will be hosting "Professional" tournaments involving WoW PVP. (MLG defines what they consider professional)

How is it that World of Warcraft actually fits in as an E-Sport? It has five battlegrounds and you can't even choose your opponents to scrim against, and a handful of arenas which again, you can't even choose your friends to scrim against. (I agree there is a tricky way to do this but unpractical)

With gear, stats, and class balance issues, how is the competition in this game even viable for "professional" gaming?

In my opinion, MLG should find another game, and WoW should stop trying.

You clearly haven't got any idea how wow tournaments work, let me educate you with that.
First off, they invite a couple of teams, which most of them are the sponpored teams (like Gravitas, EG etc.).
The teams can choose which gear to use, which classes / race to play / pvp or pve gear / which enchants or gems to get.
Now when blizz has given tournament realms they can practise to play different comps.
And as they are using the realms given by blizzard they know which team they are gonna go against, which is done by drawing them into pairs, but not knowing what comp the other team is gonna play makes it partly mindgame too.
I can't see nothing in here that doesnt fit into E-sport,

agreed.
blizzard has already created its own competitive play, and surprisingly! you have to pay for it! NO WAI!?!!
MLG belongs elsewhere

So playing Halo 3 on Xbox Live is completely free? Not! ... I think your argument is invalid.

[Shimata]

That Blizzard is balancing their own game around something it can never be is already a known fact. Games with everything decided by random rolls (such as mmo's) should not even be conisdererd as a game you play professionally.
Instead of going towards PvE and the fun way to PvP in WoW (vanilla pvp) we see a game balanced for "professional play".
They dont want PvE encounters that "only a few handful will see", but they tune the entire game after something only a handful "PvP-ers" will see.
GG?

[Rafgar]

Blizzard seem to spend all their time trying to turn one tiny part of the game to fit into an e-sport category.
Tournaments last a few days, the game lasts a lifetime.

1) Right now we have little to no raid content, no challenges in the game, and nothing to do apart from level alts.
2) PvP consists of a few bg's, and a few arena maps, and even if there was more, PvP is just tiny in this game.
3) PvP is highly imbalanced anyway,

This notion of turning WoW into an e-sport is starving the game of actual content.

Blizzard would be much better off creating a new game based around WoW Arena, and turn that into an e-sport.

They should stop focusing on Arena so much in this game and actually put sme work, time and effort into delivering challenging instances, challenging raid content, and some more BG maps (not arena).

Arena belongs in a new game tbh, not this one.

I agree with you mate, but instead of putting arena into completely new game I would keep the present WoW, but PvP getting more focused and the new MMO (the unannounced one) to be something focused on raiding more, and keep it hardcore... as I can't see WoW PvE coming ever back to the level it got into in BC, so I think it might be better to keep WoW going for casuals and people who don't have the skills, but focus mcuh more on PvP, then it would keep the intrest in PvP and casual community, but the new MMO would be the players that have time to raid, that know what they are doing... bit like EVE is doing, but maybe not as punishing.

[bbr]

Oh so now being unaware of how something works makes you a moron? Can you calculate Pi to the last digit?

Being ignorant about something which to most others is common knowledge would come close however.

Calculating Pi is something QUITE different to reading up on basic information.

[Lark]

Offhand but please let me know when you discover a real world sport (the ones where people go outside) that actually has a balanced playing field. Or how that massively impacts their ability to attract a viewing audience. Essentially, an esport is akin to a sport in that it should be evaluated based on whether or not people want to watch it.

Everything else entirely misses the point and is a big soup of nerdrage from people who are mad at WoW for various reasons.

[Rafgar]

Also the fact that everytime there is WoW streamed, about 100 000 people watch it and it makes that very good marketing point for sponsors.

[Kharkov]

Oh so now being unaware of how something works makes you a moron? Can you calculate Pi to the last digit? Wow aren't you a moron.

Using a decimal to calculate Pi is inaccurate. It's 22/7ths.

So, yes, you're a moron. Not only did you fail at understanding what the arena tournament realm was for (MLG watche it) you used a bad analogy on top of that to try and sound smarter.

[Hrethel]

Using a decimal to calculate Pi is inaccurate. It's 22/7ths.

Wow. I can feel the mathmaticians squirming in discomfort already. 22/7 is a rough approximation of pi, accurate to only three significant figures.

[Offhand]

Offhand but please let me know when you discover a real world sport (the ones where people go outside) that actually has a balanced playing field. Or how that massively impacts their ability to attract a viewing audience. Essentially, an esport is akin to a sport in that it should be evaluated based on whether or not people want to watch it.

Soccer, two teams with an equal number of players on a symmetrical playing field. Each team attempts to recruit the best players for themselves. It's the most popular sport the world over.

What do I win?

SC is the most balanced asymmetrical E-sport I've ever seen. Even then, some people have their gripes about it,

[qae]

Wow. I can feel the mathmaticians squirming in discomfort already. 22/7 is a rough approximation of pi, accurate to only three significant figures.

^this

*Not quite a mathematician*
*Squirm in discomfort anyway*

Peoples without a clue trying to sound smart by making fun of people trying to sound smart but actually not being wrong..

:'(

[Exorte]

You have a point, but Blizzard continues to not listen.


Though there will always be class balance issues, but arena would be in a much better spot if you could pick who to scrim/match against (Like a B.net private game), and be forced to have a tournament realm gear style. A Counter-Strike HLTV format for spectating would be awesome as well.

you think Blizz don't want to balance the game???
LOL
Of cause they want their game to be the best....
So they take time to think about HOW to balance, not like those ppl that only talk it is not balance.

[FRicanKrazy]

Ok the OP is back and wow I didn't know I was going to stir the pot this much.

For starters, I'm a video game media event cameraman and I was just at MLG in New Jersey covering the Halo 3 and Gears of War 2 tournament brackets. I was looking up MLG to see the schedule for the next day when I came across Ohio's event which had WoW as the 3rd event next to Gears of War 2 and Halo 3. That's when I came over here and had my outburst. (This eliminates me being ignorant of the e-sport scene)

I played wow for 2.5 years, I know the PVP very well, and I definitely know it lacks a real competitive layout. Five BGs and a handful of randomly selected arenas.

There are readers in this post that agree with me, and I'm sure it's because they play OTHER games that PVP in this game lacks a small scale competitive edge. We can completely debunk battlegrounds because you'll never see the same faction be able to compete against itself. If I wanted to talk trash and say "My Arena Team can own your Arena Team," how could we figure that out if we chose to set up a match???? (**Answer this one without a whole team spending money on transfer fees**)

I know there are "tournament servers." That's the developers lame excuse of acknowledging that WoW as a stand alone client can not support E-Sport viability. If it's separate from the main game, why isn't it just a different game or an independent expansion? Also, I can't sign up for the "tournament realm" at the moment because it's closed and only open to subscribers, and maybe some players aren't even interested in the PVE content so that $ investment isn't worth it. (or found out about it late)

The queue system doesn't allow local events to host 3v3 Arena matches for LAN centers and bunkers to independently set up. THIS is the biggest fault of WoW Arena PVP E-Sport Viability.