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How Pro Gaming Will Change World of Warcraft
1up has a piece looking at the impact that commercial support of WoW Arena teams might have on the game. There are already two teams backed with corporate money, both pulled from prominent PvP guilds in the Bloodlust battlegroup. "It's a challenge to pick teams to sponsor in WoW's PvP: 'The same team that may be ranked #2 or #3 in one Battlegroup may be ranked #1 in another," said Stephen Schoder of Check Six. "this makes the proposition of scouting out the right team more difficult than most other competitive eSports. The arena system in World of Warcraft is much more complicated than the simplistic FPS and RTS games in terms of being able to immediately pick up on what is going on.'"
OK, I have been playing for over a year, and seen a lot of changes since then. I know that there are a lot of players out there that love the Arenas, and are very serious about their time in there. But honestly, I did not see this coming.
It does make sense though. Anytime you have a group of gamers together they naturally want to compete and prove who is better. The Arenas give them that venue. Having pro sponsors is even more likely when you consider that Blizzard is already running a tournament to find out who is the best in the Arenas as it is.
I say good for them. If they can find someone to sponsor them, go for it. Although I think it might be harder to have the sponsor's name out there since we are limited in the way we name things.
Here I come to save the da... *thud*
I gotta get me a shorter cape.
This would make sense if PvP in WoW was actually skill based but it's entirely gear dependent. He who has the best gear wins; it's as simple as that. With a coralary (sp) rule that states among teams with equal gear, those whose timered abilities are up wins.
It's actually pretty nice having corporate sponsorship when you're on a gaming team. I used to be on Pandemic's CS team way back in the day and our manager happened to be the owner of the Arkansas franchise of Subway. All of our trips to Dallas for the CPL were paid for, and plane tickets were bought for me to fly to Arkansas for local tournaments. Saved me lots of money. All we had to do was wear a "Pandemic" shirt with a subway logo on it when we went to the CPL... big deal. It's nice when you actually want make little cash off of professional gaming. It's really hard to do that with out some sort of sponsorship.
There is a lot of people out there who really believe pro gaming will become mainstream someday, I'm a little skeptical of this, but you never know.
Abaddon: An Xbox 360 Indie game
This is just a result of the fact that, for a significant portion of the population, it takes so little effort to generate necessities that some means of justification to give people who aren't producing the necessities those necessities must arise.
Wow, that was a mouthful. Basically, in many countries it is so easy to produce food that not everyone needs to produce food. However, everyone still needs to consume food. So what happens is people decide they're willing to give people food if they do certain things. In this instance, people are willing to give gamers food in exchange for saying that they are playing the game because of the guy giving them food.
It's slightly more complex than that because monetary systems remove many activities quite far from actual food production, but the basic concept holds.
If it were much more difficult to produce food, you couldn't have this type of society, because nobody would be able to have enough extra food to just give to people for playing games. I'd say this is just a natural consequence of sufficient advances in farming and services trade.
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
I don't pvp, I'm not into that style of play. But every time I run through STV, I stop by Gurubashi Arena just to watch players beat each other up over that stupid chest.
I wish Blizzard would develop a facility by which one could simply be a spectator at in the new arenas or the battlegrounds. Maybe create a special portal into these zones so you can see the action but not affect it.
Food was never the only currency even in old times. Flints, skins, furs, knives, wives, etc... Much of it convertable to food, but food had a rather cyclical economy (a bag of berries isn't worth much right after the hunt, but quite a bit in winter) while durable goods or just plain status was a better stock in trade. So while a lot of things can boil down to food, tying it back to farming efficiency is a bit of a post hoc argument. Efficiency creates specializations, specialization creates interdependence, interdependence creates economy, and economies create some pretty weird relationships, as we're now seeing.
It's not that weird though. It's a leisure activity and as such a sport, at least in the eyes of the sponsors.
For those who don't know, the winners of the tournaments are going to be character-copied to a private blizzard arena server, where they will be taking part in the final tournament.
I would be doing a similar thing, licensing a private server for use in this very matter. Why not have WoW:Arena Battles? If Blizzard can swing a private server for this, why not have [insert sponsorship group name] license a private server directly from Blizzard. The sponsorship group handles all the signups and whatever. When the lists are complete, they submit them to Blizzard for a character-copy to the private arena server. This would allow *ANY* character/group/team/guild to compete in a custom arena server.
I mean seriously... it wouldn't be that hard. They restrict transfer of characters from certain places to others based on the ease/difficulty of attaining rank/gear and such... but in the Arena server it wouldn't matter.
I think something like this would have to be a lead project by the sponsorship group. Lets say CheckSix decides to do something like this. They would have to contact Blizzard and do the licensing. Blizzard could have a Licensing System. Something that could do it would be like:
$50,000 USD for an Arena Server License (4month) - 100x5v5 Team Character Transfer (500 Characters) - 200x3v3 Team Character Transfer (600 Characters) - 800x1v1 Team Character Transfer (800 Characters) - Server Farm Rental - 5 GM Accounts for Management Purposes - Must be a known sponsor of tournament competitions (to avoid no-name groups getting their own servers)
Something like that...
Video games are a "sport" in the same way billiards, darts, horseshoes or fishing (river/lake) are sports. It's kind of on the boundary. These "sports" almost entirely consist of minimal physical exertion and rely mainly on hand-eye coordination. However, like video games that can require the player to think ahead and consider strategy or adjusting to local conditions (esp. fishing). Very few people ever get exhausted doing these activities. On the other hand, simply classifying them as "games" puts them in the same category as chess, checkers and poker, which is also a poor fit.
I propose we create a new category: gorts.
Or possibly "spomes."