That was fairly ugly: CBS constantly trying to explain various moves in the middle of fights, an ugly custom health bar thing so you could see both teams health (but not mana/energy/rage), very little explanation of what the teams were trying to do, very little mention of how classes interact and no mention of spec's and how that changes tactics. I kept watching in an effort to support the general idea of games on TV, but major improvements need to be made. First and foremost is actually showing the whole matches rather then constantly cutting away to show the people, also the interface was strange looking without the resolution to see what's on it. It might be better to not show it at all.
If anyone else saw this what came to your mind for improvements that could be made to make this more accessible and easier to watch?
I actually liked the healthbar thing for explaining what was going on.
As far as the skill abilities, one of the major things is not to make stupid mistakes (confusing Whirlwind and Cyclone, warriors are sometimes called tanks because they put out so much damage), and perhaps not even mentioning the ability names.
That being said, WoW was much more fun to watch than, say, the Mike Tyson 2007 boxing (though the GH2 coverage was fun).
The constant commentary like "They're not good enough to take them down 2v3" was gratuitous though, and took away from the competition.
Maybe just explain beforehand, a little bit better, what the class makeups mean, and then just let people watch for themselves. The minute-by-minute commentary was absolutely idiotic, though I still enjoyed the action.
Jesus don't want me in a sunbeam
Sunbeams are always made on me
Don't expect me to cry, for all the reasons I'm gonna die
Don't ever ask your kick of me.
Yes, the commentary was pretty poor, but you have to dumb it down if you want everyone who could be watching to understand (or they could just be confused themselves). Calling Hunters casters was one thing that I caught while watching, among with their play call.
On the content, I was a bit shocked to not see a warrior in the final (or paladin for that matter). Does anyone know when the competition took place? It looked like they were all in cookie cutter Season 1 gear.
It would be cool if blizzard added a health bar feature like they had for the competition.
The problem is that they are trying to appeal to people that have never played the game before, and rightly so. There are probably only 1-2 million WoW players in North America, and I doubt any large percentage of them actually watched the broadcast, or would watch on a regular basis. So this leaves them with trying to grab an audience from people who don't have a clue what is going on... To do this they have to make the game seem exciting, and to be honest, I think they failed miserably - at least for someone who has played WoW.
If anything, this was probably just meant to be some sort of marketing scheme by Blizzard to try to reach out and grab more paying customers from the masses. If anyone at CBS, WSVG, or Blizzard actually thought that this type of event would be a successful ratings grabber on a long term basis, I would be very surprised. I doubt E-sport will ever catch on in NA, there is just too many big time competitors such as the NBA, NHL, NFL, MLB, and I don't think that games really translate well to the type of broadcast American sports viewers have come to expect.
If anything, this was probably just meant to be some sort of marketing scheme by Blizzard to try to reach out and grab more paying customers from the masses. If anyone at CBS, WSVG, or Blizzard actually thought that this type of event would be a successful ratings grabber on a long term basis, I would be very surprised.
That's the thing, though. It doesn't need to be a successful ratings grabber on a long term basis, just "once in a while" when there's no golf being played (as an example).
Paintball? Strongest Man? Most of these obscure 'sports' on TV? All of these were/are attempts to capture a certain audience during a time that there are few people otherwise watching. Prior to WSVG, there was an infomercial on for some kind of stupid steam-powered mop.
Drum up a little bit of interest, sell the right advertisements (Intel, Gamefly, etc) and it can prove to be beneficial for all parties.
Jesus don't want me in a sunbeam
Sunbeams are always made on me
Don't expect me to cry, for all the reasons I'm gonna die
Don't ever ask your kick of me.
I personally think they did a very poor job. i imagine it might have been decent for someone who has never played the game before, but if you have, it was simply horrible. The commentator frequently called the wrong class, wrong ability, etc. Although, I have to say, i did laugh at some of the commentary...
WSVG broadcasts live streams when their events are going on, and archive some of it on their website (www.thewsvg.com! I believe). The next major event is end of August in Toronto, I think.
Unless you have friends competing I just can't see the appeal of this, you may as well just play yourself and futz around with friends. Yeah, its interesting a few times to see some vids of "pros" playing but a tv show?
I guess with some tweaking they can make it as viewable as Poker I suppose. Definitely need to be able to see the action clearly w/ clear identification overlays, and hidden TV/streaming viewer tags, similar to Poker's "hole card camera". Names, health, current attack, etc all shown clearly in a video overlay instead of this grainy crap where everything looks like sprites from an atari 2600.
A few things, when they started putting poker on TV, it was done in dusky, smokefilled casinos without cameras showing the players cards, now you can't turn on the TV without Poker being on at least one channel, with fancy graphics showing percentages, etc. This will get better.
As for it being popular, competitive eating is now on TV, so I've now realised that I can't predict what will and what won't be popular.
It was awesome to see my old servermates of Insurrection on TV. They used to play back on Deathwing and just dominated the Nightfall bracket back in Pretty Pink Pwnies and Caal in Raiding Rainbow before they left for better PvP competition on Tichondrius.
I liked the health bars at the bottom, but adding mana and a class icon would have done wonders for readability. Also making a custom UI for the observers to minimize clutter would have been really beneficial. Also maybe adding a second box showing whow as targeting what would have been nice.
My real complaint is the commentators really not knowing what they were talking about. If you look at any sport the commentators generally know their game inside and out, and that is what it really needs to be if it is ever to be taken seriously.
I was watching some of the videos on the WSVG website, and I think the biggest thing that stuck out was that one of the commentators stuttered, I mean come on now. There was a scene where the commentators were just sitting there talking, and the stuttering guy was the only one who seemed to have any idea what he was talking about, and the other two were just smiling and nodding. They need to at least get halfway decent commentators if they're going to try and make something like this entertaining.
I think they need to rethink their whole format. Ditch the play-by-play, or at least make it one guy talking who doesn't feel the need to go "Uh-Oh!" every time someone goes below 20%. Also get rid of the teams talking to each other. Replace it with a detailed analysis supplemented by replays after the fight, done by people who know what the hell whirlwind is.
It really seemed like it was geared towards 5th graders, and the yellow UI thing when they weren't in first person mode reminded me of a Pokemon TV Show. On the bright side, they are trying new things now, like not staying in FPS mode the whole time (whether that's good or bad is to be determined)
On the content, I was a bit shocked to not see a warrior in the final (or paladin for that matter). Does anyone know when the competition took place? It looked like they were all in cookie cutter Season 1 gear.
You shouldn't be TBQH. Warriors are probably one of the weaker classes in 3v3, due primarily to their lack of CC. Also it's must easier to exploit warriors weakness to CC in 3v3, due to less classes to support them. Paladins fall in the same boat, since a paladin has virtually no instant healing potential, it's very hard for them to keep people up once their shield has been used, and very hard for them to recover from being disrupted.
Pandemic typically runs a warrior/pally/mage lineup, and while I can't say for certain since I can't find a ladder on the WSVG page, if MoB Turtle Force was in the finals w/ their SP/rogue/mage, they wouldn't have played a warrior.
The general public still views video games in a relatively poor light - as well as an uneducated one. Video games have been the past time of America (and lately the world) for decades now, and since 1997 the revenue stream of video games has passed that of movies.
Millions of people log in nightly to play WoW, and it has the nightly population approaching a large city, yet the latest Bill Murray disaster will receive more press in 1 week than WoW will in a year. Games in general are simply looked down upon in mainstream media in the US - as some sort of freakish hobby, that only people who have no time/lives would invest in. In Korea, gaming is mainstream - and the gamers there are bigger than most celebrities.
In the US, the media is ran by old people who are still fascinated by the web and their mouse buttons. I still remember when web page links were frowned upon by professional America because of ignorance - you could practically see people blush back in the day talking about the web, just as you would today if you mentioned in your work that you played WoW. When the media tries to cover gaming, games, or anything of this nature, it tends to be an absolute disaster.
Pandemic typically runs a warrior/pally/mage lineup, and while I can't say for certain since I can't find a ladder on the WSVG page, if MoB Turtle Force was in the finals w/ their SP/rogue/mage, they wouldn't have played a warrior.
I think Pandemic ended up with a holy priest/rogue/mage team against MoB Turtle Force - at least I remember seeing one game where they had a (semi)mirror match.
The general public still views video games in a relatively poor light - as well as an uneducated one. Video games have been the past time of America (and lately the world) for decades now, and since 1997 the revenue stream of video games has passed that of movies.
Millions of people log in nightly to play WoW, and it has the nightly population approaching a large city, yet the latest Bill Murray disaster will receive more press in 1 week than WoW will in a year. Games in general are simply looked down upon in mainstream media in the US - as some sort of freakish hobby, that only people who have no time/lives would invest in. In Korea, gaming is mainstream - and the gamers there are bigger than most celebrities.
In the US, the media is ran by old people who are still fascinated by the web and their mouse buttons. I still remember when web page links were frowned upon by professional America because of ignorance - you could practically see people blush back in the day talking about the web, just as you would today if you mentioned in your work that you played WoW. When the media tries to cover gaming, games, or anything of this nature, it tends to be an absolute disaster.
As a slight derail, the attitude you talk about here is fairly well ingrained. Even my friends, all of whom play video games to some degree(all of them play various consoles, several play computer games) find it remarkably easy to rib on me for playing a MMO. It's interesting to me that console games have penetrated into social acceptance, at least in my generation of males(mid 20's), while computer games in general and internet computer games in particular are stil lfair game for "nerd" mockery. It's considered nothing out of the ordinary to kill an evening with Madden or Guitar Hero, but say that you're going to go play WoW(or DDO or LotRO or what have you) and you are instantly frowned upon. My mother wonders when I'll grow out of video games, and I have a hard time convincing her that video games are my generation's TV, and TV shows no signs of slowing down.
Anyway, the coverage was laughable. The commentary was awful and the display of the game was minimal. If they want to televise Arena, Blizzard needs to cook up some sort of spectator interface they can hook into, a freefloating camera point that can zoom around without restriction within the arena. PoV cameras are minimally useful when watching a game as a spectator.
For Arena games to be watchable TV they really need slo-mo instant replay and good editing. In a 5v5 you've got 10 people doing different things all at the same time, 1.5 times a second. There is some dead time, especially at the start of a game, but when the shit hits the fan you get 6-7 actions per second (more if rogues/druids are involved, or when trinkets or abilities like counterspell that are off the GCD get used).
Its those fast paced moments that win or lose a game.
No coverage, be it tournament, or player made PvP vids, gets all that across in a entertaining and interesting way. Yet. But the potential is there for it, the game just needs a record / playback mechanism with slo-mo / fast forward / rewind with controllable viewpoints, including player health, targets, and abilities used and damage done (and mana burned) displays.
Last edited by Braque : 07/31/07 at 11:21 AM.
Reason: typo and whitespace fixes
The main problem with PvP in WoW (imo) is that there is no collision detection with other people. This means people can be hidden inside each other while performing actions, and as theres no chat bubble saying "sinister strike" over the top of a gnome rogue half hidden inside a cow, you can't tell he's actually doing anything unless you're looking from that players camera, and even then it's very hard to tell.
WoW PvP just isn't designed as a spectator sport, it will take a lot of work for Blizzard to make it work well, and even then you need some base knowledge of the game to be able to understand it (although I doubt you'd understand most sports properly without some base knowledge of the game, the thing is WoW is a lot more complicated than most sports in those terms).
The WSVG coverage is pretty appauling really, the only thing that makes it good is the MoB godfather downing cans of redbull and shouting loudly at the other team
Yeah, the arena coverage was laughably awful. The commentators could have used a higher Charisma attribute, the visual presentation was muddy and poorly laid out, and the editing was horrendous.
Agreed with the need for a real spectator cam. That in the hands of a skillful broadcaster could make for some interesting viewing. I dunno how to make things compelling in real time, though -- there's far too much going on at the super-fast speed of a team arena battle to let the announcers explain the action on anything but the most superficial of levels.
Last Blizzcon ('05), I found myself fascenated by the WC3 and SC finals that they were hosting there. That was surprising to me, as I had never had any interest in professional gaming or specifically, RTS multiplayer. The most-compelling part of the experience was that Blizzard has this (smoking hot) woman doing announcer duties for all the proceedings. She did an absolutely amazing job of explaining what was happening, why people were constructing building x, and what this meant for long-term strategy and everything else. Her encyclopedic knowledge of the games made it really fun to watch, and she did a phenomenal job getting the crowd wrapped up in the action.
So it was with much dissapointment that I watched the 3v3 coverage on Sunday. I know that a 3v3 match which is effectively decided in the first 30-60 seconds and an RTS battle with 4-5 minutes of base-building and prep are two very different things to do play-by-play for, but I was still left wanting. They didn't give us so much as a "The red team is fielding a Priest, a Rogue and Mage. The priest has specialized in healing, the rogue is a tactical damage-dealer and the Mage has specialized in frost magic, which helps to increase his ability to survive a direct attack. Their challenger is the green team, which is fielding...", so I kept pausing in order to try and see what classes were on each team, what their specs were, etc.
As this is the first network broadcast, I'm willing to cut them some slack, but I think that with some professional editing, some slow-mo and competant announcing, that it could be very watchable. Couldn't you picture them using the old football announcing system of drawing on the screen? X's and O's laying out strategy for each team, etc? Seems like a perfect fit.
Also, I could watch competative guitar hero all day long.
Last Blizzcon ('05), I found myself fascenated by the WC3 and SC finals that they were hosting there. That was surprising to me, as I had never had any interest in professional gaming or specifically, RTS multiplayer. The most-compelling part of the experience was that Blizzard has this (smoking hot) woman doing announcer duties for all the proceedings. She did an absolutely amazing job of explaining what was happening, why people were constructing building x, and what this meant for long-term strategy and everything else. Her encyclopedic knowledge of the games made it really fun to watch, and she did a phenomenal job getting the crowd wrapped up in the action.
So it was with much dissapointment that I watched the 3v3 coverage on Sunday. I know that a 3v3 match which is effectively decided in the first 30-60 seconds and an RTS battle with 4-5 minutes of base-building and prep are two very different things to do play-by-play for, but I was still left wanting. They didn't give us so much as a "The red team is fielding a Priest, a Rogue and Mage. The priest has specialized in healing, the rogue is a tactical damage-dealer and the Mage has specialized in frost magic, which helps to increase his ability to survive a direct attack. Their challenger is the green team, which is fielding...", so I kept pausing in order to try and see what classes were on each team, what their specs were, etc.
As this is the first network broadcast, I'm willing to cut them some slack, but I think that with some professional editing, some slow-mo and competant announcing, that it could be very watchable. Couldn't you picture them using the old football announcing system of drawing on the screen? X's and O's laying out strategy for each team, etc? Seems like a perfect fit.
Also, I could watch competative guitar hero all day long.
I found the 5v5 official tournament a lot more interesting to watch, surprisingly. Everyone said it's harder to follow the action than say, 3v3, but it honestly wasn't. The matches were a lot more intense a lot of the time too.
Last Blizzcon ('05), I found myself fascenated by the WC3 and SC finals that they were hosting there. That was surprising to me, as I had never had any interest in professional gaming or specifically, RTS multiplayer. The most-compelling part of the experience was that Blizzard has this (smoking hot) woman doing announcer duties for all the proceedings. She did an absolutely amazing job of explaining what was happening, why people were constructing building x, and what this meant for long-term strategy and everything else. Her encyclopedic knowledge of the games made it really fun to watch, and she did a phenomenal job getting the crowd wrapped up in the action.
So it was with much dissapointment that I watched the 3v3 coverage on Sunday. I know that a 3v3 match which is effectively decided in the first 30-60 seconds and an RTS battle with 4-5 minutes of base-building and prep are two very different things to do play-by-play for, but I was still left wanting. They didn't give us so much as a "The red team is fielding a Priest, a Rogue and Mage. The priest has specialized in healing, the rogue is a tactical damage-dealer and the Mage has specialized in frost magic, which helps to increase his ability to survive a direct attack. Their challenger is the green team, which is fielding...", so I kept pausing in order to try and see what classes were on each team, what their specs were, etc.
As this is the first network broadcast, I'm willing to cut them some slack, but I think that with some professional editing, some slow-mo and competant announcing, that it could be very watchable. Couldn't you picture them using the old football announcing system of drawing on the screen? X's and O's laying out strategy for each team, etc? Seems like a perfect fit.
Also, I could watch competative guitar hero all day long.
When they do coverage for any given sport/even/whatever the first few times, it just blows. Holy cow was poker tv coverage bad a few years ago. Commentators did not even use the right terms or just misread winning/losing hands. Same thing we have currently on german tv. If they keep doing live commentatory online o on tv, they will get better eventually.
07/29/07, 9:23 PM
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