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Serious question. If every suggestion in the initial post was implemented do you honestly think WoW arena would make for a good esport and people would seek out arena matches and watch them?

Personally I think a much larger problem is that aside from the avid arena players there is no audience for these games.

It is very difficult for observers who are not very familiar with arena to get any fun out of watching arena. The general audience does not see well orchestrated turn 'n burns. They do not see earth shock and purge of feldom after you blowup a felhound. They dont see the 0.5 second iceblock due to great anticipation from your priest. They see a bunch of goofy looking players run in, wiggle around and then one dies and the rest of the team drops out. If you cut out the announcing I think casual observers would have a difficulty distinguishing between top end and low end arena play.


Furthermore the tools for broadcasting arena are not acceptable. They need a way with default ui to view the entirety of both teams and all meaningful buffs/debuffs/cooldowns. Replays and observer mode are obviously very important and need to be added as well.

I also believe there is a fundamental flaw with the whole 'controlled burst' system of PVP. (I mean this from an observer standpoint, it is fine for the players.) The first half of many matches serve as nothing other than an attempt to get the other team to blow their defensive cooldowns. Then the real match begins. Controlled burst does not lend itself to good broadcasting. Your audience needs to know enough to anticipate when the important moment is at hand. The other problem with 'controlled burst' pvp is that in most cases the winning team loses nobody. Watching teams win with all 3 left standing round after round kills some suspense that a 'last man standing' format is supposed to have.

So I agree with you that RNG is a problem but at the same time I think there is much more that they can be working on right now to improve arena and actually get people to watch it more actively. For the short term Arena kind of gets a free pass for esports because the popularity of the game can overcome how the matches are generally received. A few years down the road though if arenahas not improved dramatically I have difficulty believing that any gaming tournaments would go out of their way to host these events.

The bottom line is that for any eSport to thrive there has to be a large and dedicated community of fans. If people choose to watch competing games instead then the independent tournies will have no reason to stick with Arena.