What so hard about adding a spectator mode in arenas ?

[Lordpete]

Could someone with game design experience tell me what is so hard about adding a spectator mode in arenas ? They even did it for tournaments and blizzcon so why arent able to make it live ? So many times when my friends are doing arenas I want to watch them play... Now they added spectate mode for pet battle ? Are you kidding me ? Useless add IMO.

Moba games has it. Pretty sure fps game has it. Why isnt mmo able to do it ?

[Flatspriest]

For one thing, could you add many lines of code and not break something else in-game that could affect everyone and their ability to play? Coding takes time and testing. Any code addition can fundamentally alter the game and not for the better so it must be done carefully.

[lokithor]

I'm sure there would be "exploiting" going on if they did that.

Spectators communicating over skype with an arena team or w/e voice program would be a bad thing.

I don't think its that they can't do it...it's that they won't do it.

[Korgoth]

What's hard about it is giving a dam enough to build out a feature that only a tiny fraction of the player base would even use.

[Lordpete]

What's hard about it is giving a dam enough to build out a feature that only a tiny fraction of the player base would even use.

Many time I've logged while my friends were in a dungeon. Instead of watching tv while the end their instance, i'd watch them ending it. Same goes for Bgs, Arenas, pet battle... There is a lot of bored ppl in front of org. Pretty sure they would spectacle 3s instead of being bored.

Now you will tell me but hey, there is streaming ! It's every same mofo that keep streaming and they are pro player. Now with spectator mode, you could watch some of your noob friend trying to cap 3s.

I vote for spectator mode !

[Voodoo328]

My best guess is they do not want to implement something without a delay on it, and considering all of the coding that would need to go into adding a delay that still allows the spectator to move around after the events have already unfolded can be very tricky. Valve's demo option in counter strike does this, but the difference here would be the servers need to store this information rather than the client which could put heavy load on their servers if they don't do it correctly.

[loki504]

Could someone with game design experience tell me what is so hard about adding a spectator mode in arenas ? They even did it for tournaments and blizzcon so why arent able to make it live ? So many times when my friends are doing arenas I want to watch them play... Now they added spectate mode for pet battle ? Are you kidding me ? Useless add IMO.

Moba games has it. Pretty sure fps game has it. Why isnt mmo able to do it ?

it all depend on the code they used. a even played a flash game where the devoloper couldn't even add a proper speed up button with out killing it completly.
yet he did it perfectly fine in his older games. where he used a diffrent code.

and ofc its the cost and the gains. sure they could try to make it works and spend alot of money on it to make it work. yet to find out not alot of people using it

[Deleted]

It comes down to money, once again. But on the other with that logic I wonder why there are HC raids, since I doubt they are more than people who play arena.

it comes down to money lol blizzard have enough funds to make arena spectator stuff it already in game in brawler arena and now coming to pet battles so its only a matter of time before arena gets it

[Dcruize]

If it is a tricky concept for them to produce it doesn't necessarily mean it's not cost effective for them to try - no reason why they can't use it as a test for similar functionality in their next MMO.

[Togarox]

You can't really compare arena spectator mode to pet battle/brawlers guild spectator modes. The former is a form of instanced PvP while both of the latter are un-instanced PvE. Brawlers guild's spectator mode is just the far sight ability applied to an object when clicked. From what it looks, the pet battle spectator mode is just simply un-phasing the battle. With arenas you run into the issue of having to work with time delays so that it's fair for both teams and you also have to create a system for spectators to determine how they view a game.

[Korgoth]

It comes down to money, once again. But on the other with that logic I wonder why there are HC raids, since I doubt they are more than people who play arena.

I'd bet 10000g that there is far more people who want HC raids in the game then arena spectating. At least a 5/1 ratio.

[kosechi]

most of the high end arena players ( ie people that are are actually worth watching that you might actually learn things from) either fraps or stream.

why do we need spectator modes again?

[Ridethelight]

most of the high end arena players ( ie people that are are actually worth watching that you might actually learn things from) either fraps or stream.

why do we need spectator modes again?

Because you know not ALL of them do it. I like to watch a high rated elemental shaman well you can bet there are not alot of people streaming that. But this all comes down to how they want to put it into the game. It will be really complicated to make it. People want more than watching some battlenet friends doing arena. I would like to spectate high rated people from other servers.

It feels like they can't achieve such thing in wow itself but they can prob make a special program for it that you use outside wow.

[Nicola]

Many high end arena players already stream, which works perfectly fine. I don't really think there's a reason to waste money on spectating arena.
You can look at it like the ingame voice client, nobody uses that shit because there are better alternatives outside of the game and imo streaming > spectating.

[Curanhadin]

What's hard about it is giving a dam enough to build out a feature that only a tiny fraction of the player base would even use.

I agree and say being ver generous 50% of the playerbase uses the first week and about 3% for ever after not really worth the time cost or chance of making lag or other potential problems.

[ebah]

Exploiting as in queueing against friends at 4 am and wintrading without anyone being able to see it?

People never seen other games spectator modes... example hltv its like 1min behind the game.

[Drummer]

Would be awesome if every match was uploaded to a site so we could watch all the wintraders

[Nalfeinn]

I Cant see why they thought pet battle spectating would be a good idea and not arena, Both are a waste of developers time imo

[SuperomegaOP]

I Cant see why they thought pet battle spectating would be a good idea and not arena, Both are a waste of developers time imo

and we have a winner!!

but seriously if private servers can create make-shift spectating then i dont see how hard it could be to do that and add in a little bit of blizzard suace to polish it into some interface.

[DiscoGhost]

to prevent cheating. only effects probably 10% of the actual player base...