I love WoW ladder PvP. In my eyes it is
a fast paced game of skill and teamwork which requires a deep
knowledge of the meta in order to succeed. To anyone who complains
that WoW is too easy I would give them the following challenge – go
forth and break 2k in any of the formats, whether that be 2s, 3s, 5s
or Rated BGs. This is something I have never been able to do despite
literally years of trying, and while I have come close, this
milestone has always eluded me. So if you think the game is too easy
and you want a challenge in WoW, give ladder play a shot. I'll wager
you will get all the challenge you want and more.
There are of course players who have
already done this, and perhaps they are now all sitting around
complaining that the game offers no challenge to them. To these
people I would say that the beauty of ladder play is that you can
always go higher! If you have 2k then I'd say go for Duelist (top 3%)
or even Gladiator (top 0.5%). The ladder is region wide now, so there
are no excuses. Pit yourself against the very best. As for the top
dogs on top of the ladder, they have the opportunity to become
e-sports stars, earning real world money on the tournament circuit.
They can become pro-gamers like Starcraft 2 stars SoS, Polk
and Jaedong, and travel to international tournaments in Brazil,
China, Germany, Poland and the US. How cool would that be?
Oh wait. Can they?
The purpose of that over-long preamble
is to set the stage for the theme of this article, which is the rise
and “fall” of WoW as an e-sport. I will cover the history of WoW
in e-sports, speculate on the reasons of its demise, and make some
predictions as to the future of this format. The idea for this
article germinated sometime during the month of March while I was
watching the Yaspresents and Armageddon WoW Arena tournaments on
Twitch. Armageddon was held on the same weekend of March (15-16) as
the finals of Intel Extreme Masters for League of Legends and
Starcraft 2, and I couldn't help but compare the teeming crowds (see
the picture below) at the Intel Extreme Masters (IEM) with the small
production on offer at Armageddon. I dimly recalled the team of Evil
Geniuses standing triumphant at the very same Extreme Masters event a
few years ago, and started wondering why Arena was no longer
represented at these premiere e-sports events.
A Brief (and Dodgy) History of WoW
Arena as an E-sport
Football game? Nope, it's the crowd at the Starcraft 2 Intel Extreme Masters in Poland on the weekend of 15-16 March. |
It's pretty awe-inspiring to see how far e-sports has come over the years. The players earn more, the shows are becoming slicker and more professional, and the crowds are starting to look like...well, sports crowds! Who would have thought that one day the best teams in the world would walk away with purses in excess of $1,000,000 for first place? Yet that is exactly what happens at the very top tier of the most popular PvP games out there such as Defence of the Ancients 2 and League of Legends. Tournament prize money is also just the tip of the iceberg. Nowadays there are professional teams, salaried players, corporate sponsorships and broadcasting, all of which are beginning to rival, and in some ways eclipse, traditional sports. DOTA 2's annual tournament offers a prize pool of $6 million dollars, with the winning team taking home a staggering $3,000,000. That amount is mind-boggling, and rivals anything on offer from professional sports. There are quite a number of organisations hosting e-sports leagues and tournaments, but my intention in this article is to focus primarily on the Electronic Sports League (ESL) based out of Germany, the Korean E-Sports Association (KeSPA) in South Korea which sponsored the now-defunct World Cyber Games (WCG), and Major League Gaming (MLG) based in the US. These three organisations were chiefly responsible for supporting WoW Arena during its run as an e-sport in 2008-2011.
The very first Arena season began in February 2007. It was introduced in the first WoW expansion of The Burning Crusade, and I'm sure it seemed like a good idea at the time. Speaking for myself personally I have to say that the only reason why I remained a WoW subscriber was because of ladder PvP, despite my own limitations as a player. Blizzard was able to secure seven more years from me as a subscriber based on the presence of their ladder PvP system. It came at a price, however, and that came in the internal schism between PvE and PvP which continues to this day. Balance, class design, population, playstyle and gear were all impacted in a way which radically changed the game forever.
Ladder PvP quickly carved out a large
demographic of its own, effectively creating a game within a game.
There now exists a large and vocal demographic in WoW which only
plays the game for the PvP element, constituting enough of the
subscriber base that Blizzard has continued to cater to them over the
past seven years. It wasn't long before the big organisers took
notice. The golden age of WoW Arena as an e-sport was between 2008 and 2010. During this period ESL, MLG and WCG supported the Arena format and made it part of their regular circuit. This period also coincided with the peak of WoW's popularity. In October 2010 during Wrath of the Lich King WoW peaked at over 12 million subscribers world-wide, a figure which will surely never be surpassed again.
Arena had a three year run at the top,
but sadly it wasn't destined to last forever. Both ESL and MLG dropped WoW in 2010. The last ESL tournament featuring WoW was the World Championships held in Hanover, Germany in March 2010, and this is actually the tournament that I remembered when I first started thinking about this article. MLG soon followed suit by dropping WoW from their National Championships in Dallas in November 2010. The last MLG event featuring WoW was in October 2010. WoW's last hurrah on the pro-circuit was in the World Cyber Games in 2011, held in Busan, South Korea. Since that time WoW has been restricted to Blizzard's own Blizzcon tournaments, which to be fair, are nothing to be sneezed at. The 2012 Battlenet World Championship was a particularly grand production in Shanghai China, on par with many of the bigger events hosted recently, complete with sizeable prize pools, an opening ceremony, and a march of the athletes (erm, players) walking out with their national flags. While the scale of Blizzcon continues to rival any events
held by third party organisers, it is not the same as being
recognised and legitimised by established international cross-gaming
leagues such as ESL, MLG and WCG. WCG itself folded earlier this
year, so perhaps even the legitimacy conferred by these organisations
are a paper distinction at best. There is a big difference to the
state of WoW now, however, and to its exalted position in 2008-2010
where everyone wanted to play it, broadcast it, watch it, hold
tournaments for it, and pay the top players good money for doing well
at it.
Limitations of WoW as a Spectator
E-Sport
In my opinion. WoW Arena had a number
of fundamental limitations which prevented it from establishing
itself as a staple of e-sport:
I. Bad Spectator Client
The biggest obstacle in my mind is that the
Blizzard viewing client is poorly designed. The standard client
utilises a player point of view (PoV), which continually changes
between players as the game progresses. It would have been better
served by a top down view or a floating camera above and separate
from the players, such as the one utilised by the Yaspresents
tournament. Such a client would have created a stable frame of
reference for spectators. As it stands, the first battle spectators
have to fight is to understand the spectator client itself. The constant jumps
between PoV to PoV is tremendously confusing. Movement and
positioning are crucial elements of Arena play - one of the biggest
defences a healer has against offensive CCs is positional play in the
use of LoS obstacles or range management (i.e. moving away from
Cyclone attempts or short range Blinds). Similarly, DPS have to have
good situational awareness in order to avoid overextending into bad
positions, or to swap onto enemy targets who are vulnerable. One of
the things that separates good DPS from great DPS is their ability to
recognise when one of their team mates are in trouble, and “peeling”
(i.e. using defensive CCs to buy them a few seconds, or swapping onto
the enemy to relieve pressure) for them. Unfortunately, attempts to
showcase this in a logical manner are scuppered by the horrendous
spectator UI. How can anyone appreciate great positional play when we
have no idea where the players are standing at any given moment
because of the rapidly changing PoV? Having a static camera would
quickly establish several paradigms of Arena play which are not
immediately obvious with the current spectator client. People would
see how healers are careful about not being too exposed; they would
see how DPS are careful about not overextending, and how
overextending is brutally punished; they would see how players move
in to CC to set up kills; they would see the counter-moves by the
healers to avoid being CCed; they would see when a team is in full
aggressive kill mode, and when a team is playing super defensive; the
list goes on.
Spectators will eventually be able to
learn how to “see” these things with the current spectator UI,
but this is a demand the game shouldn't impose on newcomers,
especially if we want to grow our audience base. Conan O'Brien's
attempts to commentate on tournament matches during Blizzcon 2013,
while being derided by some, clearly illustrates the barrier this
client imposes on potential spectators. While it was amusing to see
O'Brien ham his way through the tournament, it should be obvious
that the current client is a massive impediment to the growth of WoW
as a spectator-friendly e-sport. The spectator client is not for the
existing fans, because they will put up with whatever crap gets
thrown at them because they like the game already. The client should
be designed with newcomers and casual spectators in mind to showcase
the game in a way that is easy to understand. By this criteria the UI
used by Blizzard is an abysmal failure.
II. Obscure Decision Making
Decision making in SC2 is easy to
understand. Base building in the first two to three minutes tells the
spectators what build and army composition each player is going to
utilise, and player skill on both the micro and the macro level are
easily apparent. The slow ramp up time of SC2 gives the commentators
time to explain the build, units and possible ramifications, and the
top down view is intuitive enough that spectators who don't play the
game can still follow the action. Decision-making in WoW Arena, by
contrast, is much more obscure. Even if you know the game it is
difficult to follow what is actually happening. WoW Arena is a death
match. Coordinated burst, pressure and crowd control are used to
force defensive cooldowns (CDs), and eventually land a kill. Viewed
in this way WoW can be seen as a game of CD management, with the
majority of kills being landed by the team which manages its CDs
better. The problem with this game as a spectator sport is that the
use of CDs is something that happens largely off-screen, and it
happens in super-fast succession. It's not like a card game like
Magic or Hearthstone where the ability being played is
quite obvious (i.e. visually represented by the card played on the
table). CDs have small visual cues and icons associated with them
(i.e. players who are bursting turn red, or a recipient of the monk's
Life Cocoon becomes surrounded by a massive green bubble) but unless
you are an experienced player who knows the meta-game quite well,
these cues in of themselves won't mean anything. Further compounding
this is the fact that CDs are used quickly and in rapid-fire
succession, which makes it even more difficult to follow what is
happening if you are a newcomer to the game. Even experienced
commentators like Azael can be taken by surprise by sudden kills
which seemingly come out of nowhere. Experienced players can see
kill opportunities or know when their team is on the back foot, but
the ability to read the play takes hundreds of games to develop. I
subscribe to the Skill Capped website in order to watch videos of
high level matches being broken down and dissected by top players. It
is not uncommon for the commentator to spend 10-15 minutes explaining
their decision-making in a particular match and have the actual match
play out over 30 seconds when played in real-time.
Unlike Magic the Gathering, the use of CDs in Arena is hard to follow, happens largely behind the scenes. and occurs in super-fast succession. |
Healing is also an integral part of
Arena, but the problem with this mechanic as a spectator is that it
is largely invisible. Monks are the most spectator-friendly of
healing classes, because their channelled heals create a clear
graphical link between the healer and the recipient. Other classes have no such mechanic, which further adds to
the enigma of Arena to the untrained eye. People can watch one match
and see two melee train a target to no discernible effect. These
people could watch a similar game and watch two melee absolutely
flatten the same target. The difference between the two examples
could be attributed to five factors - i) whether or not the melee
were using burst CDs; ii) whether or not the target was using
defensive CDs; or iii) whether or not the healer was free casting or
in CC; iv) whether or not the healer was using healing CDs to bolster
their healing effectiveness; and v) whether or not the healer was in
LoS. All the factors which determine whether or not a kill is landed
are largely invisible, or require a deep and specialised knowledge of
the meta-game which newcomers are not privy to. The use of LoS is not
immediately apparent because there is no graphical representation of
the healer healing his/her target. Even spectators who are conversant
with the use of LoS have a hard time determining the relative
positions of the players because the spectator client jumps around
from PoV to PoV. The gauge of effective healing is displayed
primarily by the movement of the health bars, and the simple fact
that the character doesn't fall down and die. This does not make for
exciting viewing, and it also seems to make landing kills random when
it is anything but. There is rapid-fire decision-making happening
behind the scenes which differentiates the good and the great, but
spectators are not privy to this.
III. Constantly Changing Meta
III. Constantly Changing Meta
WoW Arena imposes a further demand on
potential spectators based on its constantly changing meta. Unlike
pure PvP games which can devote all their energies to balancing
around player combat, WoW has to juggle between the conflicting
demands of PvE and PvP. There is ample evidence that Blizzard found
it extremely difficult to balance the PvE and PvP elements of the
game, leading to the famous comment by Rob Pardo in 2009 in which he
stated that Arena was the biggest mistake in the game's history. Add
to this the pressure to innovate with each new expansion as well as
the need to balance between nine, ten, and eventually eleven separate
classes each with three specs apiece, and it's no wonder that
balancing was a nightmarish task for Blizzard's PvP team. WoW is
notorious for “flavour of the month” classes and compositions.
The current MOP meta is dominated by wizard cleaves, meaning
compositions composed primarily of spell casters supported by either
resto druids or resto shamans. Looking at the team comps in the
finals of the last three major Arena tournaments, a theme starts to
emerge:
i) Blizzcon 2013 – MiR (frost
mage/resto druid/shadow priest) vs. Skill Capped (affliction
lock/resto druid/shadow priest);
ii) Yaspresents 2014 – Skill Capped
(affliction lock/elemental shaman/resto druid) vs. Started from the
Bottom (affliction lock/elemental shaman/resto druid);
iii) Armageddon 2014 – Skill Capped
(affliction lock/elemental shaman/resto druid) vs. Three Amigos
(affliction lock/frost mage/resto shaman).
Not a melee in sight, and if you're a
paladin, monk or priest healer you are out of luck. More importantly
however, the changing meta creates further demands on would-be
spectators which limits the game's accessibility. Even if a spectator
took the time to learn the meta, he/she could find that everything
he/she knew was redundant three to four months later with the release
of a new patch or expansion. To be fair, SC2 and LoL also have a
constantly evolving meta, but the advantage that these games have is
that they only have to balance for PvP, and their evolution is usually incremental in nature. WoW is a PvE MMO first and
foremost, and the demands of the PvP base is not their first
priority. Furthermore, changes to the WoW meta can be quite radical, leading to far-reaching changes to play style, composition and even viability.
IV. Competition and Alternatives
Competition from other titles presents
the biggest barrier to the return of WoW Arena as an e-sport, and
oddly enough, most of the competition will be coming from in-house.
Blizzard recently just launched Hearthstone, and is planning
to release their own multi-player online battle arena (MOBA) in the
form of Heroes of the Storm. When you factor in Starcraft
you can see that Blizzard has three titles they can push as
tournament games, with WoW Arena making up a fourth. It makes more
sense for Blizzard to devote most of their resources to their newer
titles rather than to allocate them onto an ageing 10 year old gaming
format. MOBAs represent the current apex of e-sports at the moment, and while WoW Arena can be described as a type of MOBA, it
is old, arcane, and competing with younger, sleeker and established titles such as DOTA 2 and LoL.
The End of WoW
as an E-Sport
The question for me becomes not one of
why WoW was dropped as an e-sport, but rather how it became an
e-sports at all given all its disadvantages. How does a game which is
hard to watch, difficult to understand and requires an up-to-date
knowledge of a rapidly changing meta become an e-sports at all? For
me, the fact that WoW Arena was an e-sport during the halcyon days of
2008-2010 appeared to be a historical fluke based on its amazing
popularity at the time. WoW was at the peak of its popularity, having
peaked at over 12 million subscribers world-wide, and the big
organisers at ESL, MLG and WCG probably wanted to tap into this
demographic. Blizzard already had an impeccable pedigree when it came
to producing popular e-sports by 2008. Starcraft had become a
global phenomenon, and the current MOBA craze which is enthralling
millions of players around the world has its roots in Defence of
the Ancients, which began its life as a Warcraft 3 mod.
Perhaps ESL, MLG and WCG thought Blizzard was onto another e-sports
winner in WoW Arena, and they acted as all sensible organisers would
by jumping on the proverbial bandwagon.
Whether the game could establish itself
at the highest levels was basically up to the game itself, as it
certainly had its shot in the big leagues. In my opinion, the
limitations of the game as a spectator sport meant that the game
could not sustain itself at the highest level, and as WoW began to
wane in popularity and DOTA and League of Legends began their
own meteoric rise WoW was dropped from the circuit. It also has to be
pointed out that while WoW had over 12 million players at its peak,
not all of these players were PvPers. It is hard to know what
percentage of the player base actively pushes rating on the ladder or
are actually interested in WoW Arena as an e-sport, but apparently it
wasn't enough for the decision-makers. ESL and MLG dropped WoW at the
end of 2010, followed shortly by WCG in 2011.
In hindsight it appears to me that WoW
Arena did not have the critical mass of players required to ensure
its growth as a viable e-sport. Starcraft was adopted by Korea while DOTA became a massive hit in China, and the support of the gamers in these
countries fuelled the growth of these respective games both
domestically and on the international stage, which in turn made the
amazing world-wide success of League of Legends possible. WoW Arena's best hope was
to be adopted by North America and Europe the same way Korea took to
Starcraft and China embraced DOTA, but for whatever reason, the game
failed to capture the imagination of the e-sports viewing public
during its run in 2008-2010.
The Blizzard Conspiracy
There is an alternative hypothesis as
to the fall of WoW as an e-sport, and it is hinged on the premise
that Blizzard itself pulled the plug. I mentioned Rob Pardo's quote
about Arena being the single greatest mistake in WoW's history, and
it is worth re-stating here:
It has to be stated that this was said
in 2009 at the VERY height of WoW's popularity as an e-sport. Pardo
realised that it was no longer possible to cut ladder PvP from WoW
now that the genie had been let out of the bottle, but the same
wasn't necessarily true for supporting the format on a tournament
level. Perhaps they recognised all the issues Arena had internally,
and rather than putting a flawed product out on the world stage or
spending the resources to fix it, they decided to pull the game
instead. Adding weight to this hypothesis is the fact that the
Armageddon tournament in March 2014 was the FIRST Arena tournament
since MLG in 2010 to be officially sanctioned by Blizzard. It is hard
to understand why Blizzard would not sanction any tournaments for
FOUR years, unless it was for the simple reason that they just didn't
want to. Perhaps Blizzard got fed up with balancing the game for an
international stage. Perhaps they didn't want to spend the resources
on developing a spectator UI. Perhaps they asked for too much money
from the organisers. Perhaps they wanted to spend their time and
money on SC2, which was already a proven success. Whatever the reason
is Blizzard remains silent about it. I have been unable to find
official statements from either ESL or MLG as to why they decided to
drop WoW, but there are a few clues scattered here and there on
ageing forums. One theory proposed is that the ESL and MLG were
waiting for Cataclysm to launch (December 2010) before they reinstated WoW back to
the active roster. Another theory is that they were waiting for
Blizzard to create a new spectator client. If either are actually the
case then it is apparent that four years on and two expansions later, they are still waiting.
Fast-forward four years to the present
and we suddenly see an about face from Blizzard. Brian Holinka (lead
PvP designer) and Kim Phan (head of Blizzard's e-sports division)
gave a very frank and illuminating interview at the Armageddon
tournament (linked above) in March 2014 in which Holinka commented on
the topic of playability versus “watchability” which lies at the
heart of Arena. From the interview, Blizzard seems to be adopting a
supportive but “wait and see” attitude – Holinka acknowledged
the defects of the spectator client and identified it as the problem
which most urgently needs fixing to make WoW Arena viable as a
spectator e-sport. As to whether or not Blizzard will be actively
pushing Arena, Phan made it clear that they are handing the ball to
the community, and will react based on the level of support generated
by the audience base. Kim Phan also stated on record that MLG has
approached them with the proposal of reinstating WoW Arena once the
new spectator client is introduced in Warlords of Draenor (WOD). This is great news for Arena
fans, and if it pans out, it will be the start of the road back to
e-sports recognition.
One has to ask, however, why Blizzard
waited so long. It is hard to reconcile the theory that Blizzard
pulled the plug on e-sports Arena at the end of 2010 with the
supportive tone now espoused by the current team of Holinka/Phan in
2014. It seems slightly schizophrenic and self-destructive, but it
has to be remembered that companies are not unified, monolithic
entities – they are composed of people, people can have
disagreements, and opinions can change over time. My own personal
“tin foil” theory is that even at the height of its popularity in
2008-2010 an internal battle was taking place within Blizzard over
the role, and even legitimacy, of ladder PvP within the greater game.
The image that comes to mind is that of someone grabbing a tiger by
the tail, and wondering how to let go. Blizzard introduced Arena,
suddenly realised how much work it entailed and the problems it
introduced, thought about dropping it, then watched in horror as it
took on a life of its own and grew its own audience and became an
e-sport supported by the big leagues. Realising that they couldn't
just arbitrarily remove ladder PvP any more, they did the next best
thing and pulled it from the tournament circuit in order to keep the
various issues associated with Arena in-house and away from the
e-sports limelight. It is one thing to be criticised by your own
player base; it is another to be criticised by the entire gaming
world when your game is held up to close scrutiny. The great tragedy
of this ideological battle (for PvPers) is that by the time the dust
settled and PvP became an accepted part of WoW's identity, the chance
to establish the format on the world stage had been lost. Regardless
of whatever steps Blizzard takes in WoD now, it would seem that they
squandered a golden opportunity when they failed to introduce an
accessible spectator client at the opening of Cataclysm.
Future Directions
Watching all the remaining die-hards on
Twitch make earnest and passionate declarations to grow the community
fills me with mixed feelings. I'm a big fan of WoW Arena, but I have
serious doubts as to its ability to ever make it back to the big
time. I still watch all the tournaments on Twitch TV, and keep track
of who the top players are for each of the classes. Nonetheless I am
quite pessimistic of WoW Arena's ability to make it back as a top
tier e-sports outside of Blizzcon and community run tournaments for
all the reasons enumerated above. There is hope in PvP-Live's
continued support of the format, and in the proposed changes in
Warlords of Draenor. The addition of a spectator-mode promises
to make tournaments more accessible, but this is a feature that has
been implemented almost four years too late. If this feature had been
implemented in 2010 or earlier then one of the major impediments to
WoW's success could have been circumvented. The period between 2008
and 2010 is not just WoW Arena's golden period. It also represents a
missed chance to educate the public about the game. Perhaps Arena was
never destined to stay at the top given the issues listed above, but
there is a school of thought that says that there was a tremendous
opportunity to establish the game and its meta at the top in the same
way Starcraft had captured an audience. As it is the window of
opportunity has closed, and it may never come again.
Arena already has a devoted community,
and as long as Blizzard keeps hosting Blizzcon Arena will always have
a large premier tournament in which the top players can showcase
their skills. It cannot be underestimated how large Blizzcon is as an
e-sports event – the prize pool on offer has been on par with the
biggest events any of the other major organisers have offered, and
Blizzard has adroitly positioned it as the apex of the World
Championship Series of Starcraft 2. However, while Starcraft
has taken on a life of its own outside of Blizzard, WoW Arena seems
destined to remain the province of a hardcore audience, and its
eventual fate tied to the fortunes of the MMO and the parent company
which spawned it. The ONLY major tournament hosting WoW Arena this
year will be Blizzcon, while Starcraft 2 is played all year
around and supported by both ESL and MLG with numerous tournaments
boasting prize pools in excess of $100,000. By contrast both
Yaspresents and Armageddon struggled to raise a $10k prize pool for
their respective Arena tournaments. Whether or not the proposed changes in
WoD as to the spectator client and the overhaul of class mechanics
will revive the flagging fortunes of WoW Arena remains to be seen. As
it stands 2014 is another write off for WoW Arena as a major e-sport.
I can't help but feel some sympathy for the players who have worked
their way to the top of the Arena ladder and experienced the highs of
tournament play. While SC2, DOTA 2 and LoL players continue to be lauded and
rewarded for their excellence in their chosen games, the top WoW
Arena players can only look on in quiet envy. Their fate is akin to
ageing prize-fighters reliving their prime, as the golden years of
their sport fade further and further into the past.
It's really good about esports..
ReplyDeleteThanks for the share,.
mobile esports league