Last Thoughts on the WSVG Drama

There has been been a lot of recent discussion here, on GameRiot posts, and on IRC centered on the "ethics" of what went down at WSVG. It is rarely my objective to spark up drama and you should be aware that 90% of what I say is in fun or tongue in cheek. While my take on the events is somewhat biased in the favor of YWL, consider that I have been a MoB fan ever since the first WSVG event and we were certainly some of the louder idiots at Bilzzcon professing our love for Godfather during the finals.

I'm not angry at MoB for what happened and I don't think that the MoB players deserve to be the "bad guys" for what went down. I encourage everyone to get the "facts" over on GR from Kow's post. As with most things, the majority of the drama comes from lack of understanding.

Had Blizzard understood the pressing need for updated premades better, had WSVG admins understood the need to be both more flexible and more clear in their rules, had the WSVG admins had better game knowledge to understand that changing a hunter pet is no big deal ethically, had Godfather understood that the Scorpid was not an "unfair advantage", and you could go on and on, but the point is that this situation could have been averted.

I've heard some arguments saying that because this event is "for money" anything goes with respect to sacrificing honor in order to secure the win. I really don't get this line of thinking at all. People are playing competitively because they love the game and because they love the recognition. Certainly there is a "if I'm going to play all weekend anyways, I might as well have a chance to win some money" thing going on, but realistically how many of the WSVG players want to play WoW "professionally?"

Perhaps part of the issue is that it is hard to know if the hardcore PvP audience is really relevant to WoW as a game. How many players are tuning in to these WSVG events, 50k at most? The other 8.95 million players don't give a fuck? And how many of us were watching the CGS 2v2s, at most 100? It doesn't help that the majority of the strong players are on a single battlegroup and that the PvP cliques are generally pretty pretentious. ^^

I think lots of us want people to care a lot more about these events, but truthfully, even though Forgotten Heroes has a lot of PvPers, in a guild with over a 100 members, less than 15 watched the WSVG matches. And to be honest, if I couldn't duel on test between games or talk trash on IRC, I don't know if I would have the patience to sit around to watch the matches. It takes like 10 hrs of wasted time to watch 25 minutes of arena over the span of 3 days. I guarantee the viewership would grow exponentially if the WSVG product was just 25 minutes of solid arena. WSVG either needs overlapping "main stage" matches that they can switch between to reduce dead time or simply needs to not be live. The scheduling needs to be more precise and the whole thing needs to be thought of from the perspective of what the potential viewer wants -- I know this sounds like stupid MBA drivel but how many people have the time/patience for the current format?

You can really look at the idea of competitive WoW in very different ways. One is that you treat the audience as a niche market and tailor your competitive arena PvP product to live up to this small target audience's expectations -- this is the "eSports" approach. I'm not going to go into how else you might market competitive WoW, but is WoW as eSport realistic?

There is a lot of "WoW is a terrible eSport because ..." arguments out there. Too much randomness, too hard to watch as a spectator, too poorly balanced, too much rock/paper/scissors, and too little skill requirement are the most common. Beyond the difficulty in spectating, I'm not sure if this stuff matters too much. Poker has tons of randomness and, because of this randomness, very frequently do players of low relative skill win major events, yet poker has been extremely successful commercially. While the number of poker players is probably an order of magnitude larger than WoW players, I would imagine that the competitive poker market is still several orders of magnitude larger than its WoW equivalent.

I don't want to turn this wall of nonsensical wall of text-ness into a REALLY REALLY long nonsensical wall of text so I'll derail further and say that I think that WoW is a great game in which to be a competitive gamer, but not for the money. (I don't really think that the expected payout of any game or any sport is very good with the exception of poker) I think the whole "there is money on the line" nonsense floating around is well, nonsense. Everyone is playing to have a good time and for the eFame. =p The failures so far in making WoW, which has a huge playerbase, into a successful, competitive game come from not making the spectating experience enjoyable.