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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.'"
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.
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.
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."