Drully

First WoW LAN tournement ever...3v3..., for the intressted:

http://www.ampedesports.com/

http://www.thewsvg.com/

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• Bury

Looks like the final will be Team Pandemic (from Notorious) and some Euros named Fnatic. I've been trying to keep up with the live stream from thewsvg.com but unfortunately it seems to be all Warcraft 3 and no WoW.

Interview: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_7dsfWM8H8

 

Drully

Yep, pretty intressting, those Fnatic guys are actually ex CSler, and the mage is supposed to have started on WoW just a couple of weeks ago..lol, oh well.

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Exertim

Team Pandemic takes home first place, along with a check for hefty sum of $9,000. There's a video located at http://www.thewsvg.com/ about this, I believe it was under one of the current videos on demand.

 

Thaumaturge

Hopefully the next tournament will bring better "shoutcasters" to the table. It's pretty obvious that these guys don't know anything about WoW.

 

• goss

Yeah, when the commentator asked to be reminded what Evocation was, I was a little miffed.

 

Kour

Fnatic is a team consisting of former fps players (Quake and CS). They have all been verry good at their games and they decided to start playing wow together about the same time as TBC was released. It will be intressting to see how they will do whit no experience from WoW but great experience from fps games and competive gaming.

The organisation Fnatic is really big and their main team is their Swedish CS team who is ranked number 2 in the world right now. I think it's intressting to see how they managed to play really well in the tournament, taking one round from Pandemic and beating MOB in a close game.

http://www.fnatic.com/frontpage/ is the homepage for fnatic. You can notice how Ztrider and TooGood are from their Quake 4 team

 

skz

Not to mention he was calling a Paladin a Warrior....

 

doogless

That was pretty much my favorite part of the video. The guy calling it seriously didn't sound like he'd leveled a character in Warcraft past 20.

 

◊ Vontre

Seems like they're trying to sell it off as some "extreme" thing and dumbing it down too much, when I think at this point the only people interested enough to actually are people like us, who would like some real meat to the commentary, analysis of the tactics used and why team A lost and team B won, etc. The fact that they don't even show the battle playing out, but they show a full minute of the paladin chasing the mage around after the match has basically been decided is pretty telling.

And yeah, he was calling a paladin a warrior. The worst part is, I didn't even noticed it wasn't a warrior until he used hammer of justice. WoW would need a lot of presentation refinement to really be "spectated".

Edit: Actually naming the opposing team is a good start to generating interest, as well. Why were they showing a video of the top pick matching off against a team that couldn't even bother to be named? He kept saying "The chinese team". What the fuck?

www.magegraf.com
www.magegraf.com/mage_dps.zip

Raiding is full of challenge. Sometimes there is fire. You have to not be in the fire.

 

◊ Vontre

The funny part is, he actually brings up diminishing returns on polymorph, it's hard to catch because he goes so fast. So he must have some indication of what's going on.

www.magegraf.com
www.magegraf.com/mage_dps.zip

Raiding is full of challenge. Sometimes there is fire. You have to not be in the fire.

 

T. Light

I was bothered the announcer's attempt to talk tactics or about what players should or shouldn't do more than I was bothered by the fact he called a paladin a warrior for the entire match. He seemed, somewhat, to know what was going on, but not very well, and he had no more business talking tactics about what these players should be doing than I, a person with next to no competative 5v5 experience would have.

In short? He was a sports announcer, and not a great one. Would it be better to have commentary by a competative WoW player? I think that's a possibility, but I don't really know whether we've got any that would fit the niche that is required for this area. I'd like to see it if one presented themselves.

Either way, it was a pretty exciting match to watch. I liked how they spectated it, with a hostile to everyone movable camera. It's a bit hard to tell what's going on in some of the setups, but overall it seemed like a good compromise. I agree some form of quick identification of which class is which would be nice, but the ambiguousness does help throw off opponent's reactions, sometimes. Of course, I've only really played a warrior and a rogue in PvP for any amount of time, so I was always pretty obvious from my rage/energy bar.

 

Machichi

Dunno if there's many Halo fans around, but it reminds me of the MLG Pro Circuit thing my roommates used to watch. Excited voice tones + dumbing down for casuals + not realizing the only realistic audience is the more extreme/knowledgeable players = pretty annoying. Then again, I feel this way watching most football games, too.

I'd like to see them bust out the Madden telestrator line-drawing/scribbling device and some strategy analysis beyond just 'playing aggressively'.

I like you peoples...

 

◊ Malan

If WoW wants to be spectator friendly they need
a) Some indicators from the spectator point of view of what abilities are being used... a floating combat text sort of indicator, as well as being able to see the dmg being done, etc.
b) Much better health indicators for the 2 teams
c) Higher rez videos so I can actually tell wtf is going on

Basically they need a Spectator UI that shows the 2 teams health and dmg indicators. Would be nice to be able to see that some warrior nailed a huge MS crit, stuff like that. Add to the fact that melee abilities have the same repeated animations and you really can't tell wtf is going on. That warrior could have been just auto attacking + HS for all I could tell.

 

Drully

Actually, i would dumb the commentator all together. Instead they should bring vent of the two teams. That would also help to understand what is going, which calls they make, give an insight on their strategy.

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• Bury

I don't know about your vent, but my vent isn't exactly fit for webcast.

 

Ensign

I was happy to see a reasonable PvP setup for the tournament with characters rolled up on the spot - that sort of thing is absolutely essential for any game in this genre to be taken seriously, competitively. If only they allowed that on live servers for practice.

Peace,
-CxE

 

◊ Shadowed

Not to derail this topic. But I don't think you can have a reasonable competition for these kind of things since it comes down to a roll of the dice.

Couldn't seem to get the video to play in both Firefox and IE7 though, guess i'll have to mess around with Flash somepoint.

 

◊ Malan

They weren't on vent though... didn't you see them playing on laptops right in front of each other?

~Rocks, coming to a shaman near you in the next expansion~

 

Zibro

I hope Louisville is handled better overall that China appeared to have been, and I also hope they get gear issues worked out (jewels, enchants, etc)

 

Bordolar

They should implement something similar to Guild Wars' observer UI. Also, they really need to work on the POV for the spectators. While watching the matches last night, I felt like I was missing a lot of the "real" fight because the person controlling the view was too busy looking at a pillar or, in one situation, the wall, for seconds at a time. A fixed, top-down view from the center of the arena would have been better than what we had last night, even though it'd miss out on the action behind the pillars. This obviously wouldn't work for fights in the Blade's Edge arena, though. I realize that the observing is relatively new feature to the game, and they're probably still working on it, but there has to be a better way.

Another thing that kind of threw me was how they were using the players' live character names when the characters they were controlling were named completely different. The teams were both pal, war, mage and all in pretty much the same gear, so it was very confusing to tell who was who until someone would do something and the commentators would point them out specifically. As other people have mentioned, the commentators were pretty bad, so having to depend on them to figure out who just hit the floor wasn't so hot. Maybe if they could at least introduce which character was which person before the matches, it wouldn't have been as big of a deal.

 

Kour

One more thing they should fix is the possiblity for them to choose which teams join the same arena and what color they are and what arena they end up in. In China they had to manually join the arena queue at the same time so both teams could end up with different colors different rounds. Also the ping in China was bad because there are no burning crusade servers in China so they had to play it on servers in Korea.

 

Burnserker

I was highly disappointed in the videos showing the 3v3. I mean, it shows nothing about what moves they use and the damage they are out putting and such.

As an above poster had said, the commentators were horrible. What would be cool is if they just had a screen of the character information tab to see what there gear is like and such and do a BIO of the person as well would be more interesting.

 

sadistic

well, 2gd has been playing since release. he took a break when q4 came out, played that hardcore for a while and came back around the time naxx was released.
He really helped me get faith in the value of tactics in wow pvp, not only gear=win. He really is an impressive pvp character.

 

Drully

Well, replace vent with micros for a lan...

Blizz already stated that they work on some kind of spectator view for the arenas, that should help.
If you add live recording of the players and may be scrolling combat text for the spectator view...

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