With WoW's development as an e-sport, the need has arisen for a decent spectator UI for viewers and commentators. The goal of a spectator UI is to give the viewer a clear idea which team has the advantage at a given moment and to enable him to recognize the turning points in a match as they happen, rather than after the kill is scored. It's also important that the spectator not be presented with too much information. Blizzard's current spectator UI involves a default-style party frame on each side of the screen, one for each team. Obviously, there's a lot of room for improvement.

Here's my sketch of a better spectator UI, with a team status display for upper left/right and a sample unit frame:


The major feature of the team display aside from the obvious name/players/mana is the cooldown tracker. The cooldown tracker monitors the status of major cooldowns for each class: AP/PoM/Ice Block/Cold Snap for Mages, NS/EM/Mana Tide/Bloodlust for Shamans, etc. This information gives the spectator some data on the momentum of the match, letting him see that Team A has already exhausted most of its defensive cooldowns while A hasn't used its major offensive burst yet, or vice versa.

The unit frame is deliberately kept very simple. A large class icon, a health % display with arrows indicating the incoming DPS (more arrows = more DPS = higher pressure; probably just track damage taken over the last 5 seconds and recalculate). Mana displayed graphically behind health. One single large status icon indicating an immunity effect (DS, BOP, Ice Block), a CC (Fear/Sheep/etc), Spell Lockout (Holy icon with a red X?), or Drinking. Keeping the unit frame to a bare minimum, we want the viewer to be able to see who is under attack, how severe the attack is, and recognize when players are locked down leading to a kill or other clutch play.

This is largely an academic exercise, because there's no public info on what extra units and functions are available to the GM client, but I think there's a worthwhile discussion to be had on what presentation of information leads to the greatest comprehension and pleasure for the viewer of an arena match.

Please forgive my lack of Photoshop-fu in throwing this together.

I think one of the major problems with watching WoW PvP is that blizzard cheaped out on unique animations for each ability, so if it isn't a spell that you can see a cast bar for, there is really no indication (unless you have a heavily filtered combat log showing) to get an idea of what abilities someone is using in what cycle.

Hmmm, when I first saw this post, I thought it would be about a mod that would give normal WoW clients outside of arenas a way to see the status of a current match in progress, which would be possible through the guild addon channel...

Obviously you wouldn't physically see the games, but you could give yourself a set of frames similar to the current mods that exist to show you your opponents as you mouse over them, only this would be for people outside the game.

It's a neat idea, from a coding standpoint.

The problem (Like everything) is that it requires people to actually be running it to work, you could do syncing the old fashion way before we got addon channels, but it's useless unless a large amount of people actually want others to see the match.

You'd have to send a lot of data back and forth too also.

FWIW, a Blizzard guy I spoke to at San Diego regionals said that the current implementation of Spectator UI was something thrown together last-minute, and that something better was in development.

And on an additional note, it will stay something for big events for now as Vaneck stated at the EU-Finals in Hamburg. It wont be implemented on the Live-Realms anytime soon. I have no idea why you would design an interface for it, specifically why you post on EJ-Forums and not on the Blizz suggestions forums.

If only WoW had more default features like this! I'd love to watch some games, whether in-progress or finished, while I'm just sitting around doing absolutely nothing.