WoW PvP tournaments are finally watchable (with a new interface)

[Big Thanks]

Only took Blizzard 20 years to realize the interface was crap
We can FINALLY differentiate between teams...Purple VS Yellow...

Seriously...why...did...it...take...20 years? WAS I THE ONLY ONE asking for this for years?

2025:

2026:

Having fun watching it for first time in many years.

[Schwert]

Na.
RPG esports are lame, arenas are a cancer and even the devs admit it was a mistake, and the fact it's still going despite arena being on life support in game is a miracle.

Complete waste of resources
This is never going to be big and it's viewership shows.

[kranur]

Nope. Still one of the worst gaming things to watch.

[Itisamuh]

I prefer the old class colors personally, never had trouble keeping up with teams, even in mirrors. Now they are all the same color, and the class icon is replaced half the time by CC. No doubt I will get used to it but yeah, at the moment it feels worse to me. Not that it will ever be a great spectator experience compared to other games.

[Big Thanks]

I prefer the old class colors personally, never had trouble keeping up with teams, even in mirrors. Now they are all the same color, and the class icon is replaced half the time by CC. No doubt I will get used to it but yeah, at the moment it feels worse to me. Not that it will ever be a great spectator experience compared to other games.

I've seen other people with your same comment...i simply dont get it.
How in hell can you follow with class colors instead of team colors (>_<) what the...

[Mysterymask]

eh still not to me

Wow pvp tournaments struggle with the fact that if you don't already know how the game works half of it means absolutely nothing

Take this stream from EVO for Street Fighter 3. Its like a a couple decades old but at the very least even if you know NOTHING about this game you can see and understand EVERYTHING going on


Wow on the other hand. "Oh HE DID A CLUTCH STUN TO A TRINKET" Non wow player: ok I get stun but trinket what? Adding in the animations basically look like they kinda swinging around and bars are moving left and right and to a non wow player this just seems like W/E

that's just my opinion though

[Ereb]

eww I hate that so much I prefer the class colored nameplates it wasn't hard to keep track of everybody given both teams unit frames were hard stuck on both sides of the screen for you to cross-reference at literally any point

This new color scheme actively deters me from wanting to watch lol

[exochaft]

I've seen other people with your same comment...i simply dont get it.
How in hell can you follow with class colors instead of team colors (>_<) what the...

I understand what they mean, and it sort of depends on what how you like to keep track of the match. With the purple/yellow setup, it's easier to tell apart teams at a glance at the expense of delineating class; with the class color setup, it's easier to tell the classes apart and glean potential moves/interactions at a glance at the expense of delineating who is on what team. Personally, unless there's multiples of the same class on different teams, I prefer seeing class colors versus purple/yellow teams because I get more information that way. It's probably influenced by how much PvP I've done and how you can get used to looking at class colors versus "Are they friendly?" when actually participating in the content, as more often than not you know if they're an enemy and at that point you only care what class/spec they are during encounters.

In the context of PvP tournaments, it's still not that great either way as a viewable eSport. Class/spec design and game balancing is too complicated to understand without overcomplicating/overloading UI information if you aren't already knowledgeable of the minutia of PvP and class/spec interactions. Too much specialized knowledge is required to get beyond surface-level understanding as a viewer to allow actually appreciating timing and skill.

From a more abstract perspective, I do agree that arenas (and all the eSport aspects Blizz is trying to push in general) is just a plague on the game. People tend to forget that when you design and balance a game around including these aspects, there is a cost to it either in terms of man-hours or just the primary/secondary/tertiary/etc. effects that such design and balance have on the rest of the game. This applies not only to arenas, but also M+ and mythic raiding as well.

[justawower]

Na.
RPG esports are lame, arenas are a cancer and even the devs admit it was a mistake, and the fact it's still going despite arena being on life support in game is a miracle.

Complete waste of resources
This is never going to be big and it's viewership shows.

Something doesn't have to be huge for it to be a success. Plenty of things in WoW exist that only cater to a small subset of the community. Also, let's not act like they pour resources into PvP...

[mbit2]

improvement but doesn't fix game state being mostly hidden.
League anyone can understand "destroy tower, destroy base" and its watched by people who never played the game. In wow the game state is how many CDs are on cooldown. You have no clue who is winning or losing in wow as a casual watcher because "side A used CDs x,y,z" means fuck all to you.

I would make a street fighter style Hp overlay as a simply % meta score of enemies available burst cds vs currently targets dev cds. If you were smart about it you would also consider ignoring cds not usable while trinket is down and target is in stun but accounting for cds usable within stun and same for healer of course. Pain sup always works. You can obviously improve it much better but core is 2 simple HP bars on top anyone can understand as a score function to substitute not having anything like towers taken.

[Itisamuh]

I've seen other people with your same comment...i simply dont get it.
How in hell can you follow with class colors instead of team colors (>_<) what the...

The only time it would have been worse to me was in a mirror match, but even then I was familiar enough with the players and teams that I had no trouble keeping track of who was who, plus there was a small yellow and purple outline around their nameplates. In non mirror matches the first thing I look at is the comps, from there just keeping an eye on the class colors was easy for someone who has watched for over a decade. But like I said I will have no problem following along with the current version either and can see why some would prefer it.

[loras]

I am not into esports watching at all but why the fuvk are those UI bars so prominent for viewers anyway?
Just minimise them and add a generic color over the player models a la Warcraft 3, seriously how hard can it be to "reinvent" a wheel?