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Old 07/01/08, 11:51 AM   #31 (permalink)
Sydane
Don Flamenco
 
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Human Warlock
 
Argent Dawn
A World Series was won on a broken bat bloop single. A Super Bowl was lost because a player slipped. Countless hundreds of hits every day in baseball go foul because they hit the seam of the ball. You can throw examples like that out until the end of time. The difference is you know the small percent chances in WoW and it annoys you when they happen. You openly admit you win on those 5% as much as you lose. I'll also bring in the "bad calls don't cost you the game" analogy. One particular resist or bad call will never cost you the game. You had to do more than just that one thing to win or lose. It may have been the difference, but if you weren't enough better than the other team to win anyway, it was just going to come down to luck, and you got unlucky.

Let's approach the eSport concept. First, there's the idea that Blizzard wants WoW to be an eSport for the 5% elite. Wrong. No sport exists for the players. Sports exist as entertainment. For WoW to be an eSport, people have to want to watch it. They don't have to worry in the least about if people want to play it, because with 10 million players, there's more than enough people out there that will do it. If you quit in a huff because you don't like the randomness, Blizzard couldn't care in the least, there's a thousand people waiting to fill your spot.

So what is fun to watch? Pillar hugging? Hour long drain battles? It's like the pitcher's duels of WoW. You seem to want to make the game more predictable, more boring to watch. The things that are exciting in sports are the things that are unexpected, or look impressive. Did anyone's pvp videos before arenas consist of hours of chasing someone in a circle in a battle of counterspells? Of course not. They were slaughter and big numbers. People like homeruns, hard hits, and buzzer beaters. Now, if you ask the players, or the "hardcore" fans of the sport, they might be interested in the nuances of pitching, formations, and club selection. But none of those things end up on Sportscenter.

I understand that it is frustrating when you execute something perfectly and it fails. Every day, pitchers locate pitches perfectly only to see a shoestring homerun from a lucky swing or a broken bat single. The only way to reproduce something like this is to add randomness. Would you rather you had to line up your reticule on the arm of the caster perfectly every time in order to counterspell? If the answer is yes, then you are playing the wrong game, because there are plenty of games out there trying to do just that. That goes back to the myth of "skill" and whether or not the ability to control a mouse well is all skill really is. I very much doubt anyone who plays this game seriously believes that skill is only mouse control.

For Blizzard to make WoW an eSport, they have to make it fun to watch. Dynamic arenas add an element of that, and so does luck. What do you think the highlights of an arena match will be? The well timed counterspell that was barely noticable? The kidney shot resist? Or the one crit that gets through and kills someone at 30% just at the moment they were getting away? "Amazing Bob, did you see that? He was almost behind the waterfall where he could have recovered but that fireball caught him just in time! Let's watch that explosion in slow motion."
 
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