War vs War, to start pulling him behind the pillar to break LoS with the priest, forcing him to come out. Once the priest reached intercept range, swapped to him, then bounced back and forth to whichever target was favorable. I'd say we should have won the match but we made 2 crucial errors, early on I had bad communication with my paladin about where I was going and we ended up chasing each other around the pillar, I took huge damage and we had to waste bop, so we couldnt use it for him to drink later on. Also when we were both running low on mana, my paladin was drinking with Schmitty running for him, and I attempted to support him instead of sticking on the priest who was behind the pillar and attempting to drink.

And from the personalities of players. That's the thing, that actually gets big media attention. To become popular on mass market you need sex appeal or something very special to attract personal attention.

How many people watching soccer know about the little details of tactics ? How many know the name of David Beckhams wife ?

Posh Spice wasn't exactly a nobody before she married Beckham. Do you know anyone elses wife's name? =P

E-Sport doesn't need media attention, most of the target audience is smarter than your average tabloid reading person anyways. Games like Quake, CS or anything with a Blizzard stamp on it are already popular enough with the target audience.

Yes but E-Sport gets interesting once money is involved. Except from Korea (and Japan perhabs ?) there is no real mass market on E-Sports. And in Korea these guys definitely have a presentation including sex appeal.

Mass markets work with merchandising. Merchandising works with personalities and with identification. Quake and Counterstrike have mostly only players as audience and no big merchandising. It is always the "stupid" audience that makes the money and this audience likes the tabloid style.

If WoW would turn to the quake and CS audience they would most likely lose money. Big style money would be in, if people that don't even play WoW start becoming fans.

Teams that already have arena sets have a huge advantage over those who don't. This is something that hurts new teams to the arena like mine. We all are in around tier 4ish sets. Pretty much none of us have any resilience since we powerleveled on a new server. While we can still beat teams who sport a couple pieces of arena gear, the only teams we have any trouble at all with are the ones sporting a full set of gear. I'm not saying we are the best there is (our battlegroup is pretty terrible and underpopulated) but we pretty much didn't have any problems versus anyone the entire last week except the teams who were sitting in like 4 pieces s1 gear and 2 pieces season 2 gear, simply because we just couldn't kill anyone. Matches would last so long because we honestly were outplaying them and I have to say our healers are great, but eventually our inability to burst down anyone was pretty sad. No worries though, we should be top 5 in the group this week and we will be pulling down enough points to have a full set in a few weeks anyways, then we will get all our points back, but it just sucks for teams who may not be as coordinated and experienced to have to go in and face seemingly uncrittable players just because they didn't play last season's arena. Oh, and points shouldn't carry over and you should have to pay a fee for a team every season, not just when you make the team. My two cents

Its very depressing how teams with warriors using stormherald lose to those using deep thunder...

I am going to have to agree with Oneiros. I originally liked the idea of points carrying over from the previous season. But all that does is make it so everyone has half their next seasons gear in the first week or two. It doesnt really prevent the whole point behind trying to allow newer teams to catch up to the teams that have been pvping longer. The rich still stay richer, the poor are still living in a pipe dream. Dont let points carry over and reduce the previous seasons gear to a trivial amount so that at the most the better teams get a 2-3 week advantage.

The "real" sports are filled with drama too. See TO, Bonds. Personalities and local success have always driven sports. Formula 1 became huge in Germany because Schumacher was dominant. When the US did somewhat ok in the World Cup, people actually started caring about soccer around here, only to lose interest again when the suck returned.

Also, since WoW is played in a symmetric arena with the same classes available to everyone, it is by definition balanced. Yes, some classes are more powerful than others. But people also care more about the pitcher than about some defender. That has not stopped baseball from becoming popular. Yes it sucks for the underpowered classes, but I am also sure the QB gets more girls than the linemen.


They had to do it, else interest would have waned by the end of the first season. Can't have that. So they traded one problem for another.

Maybe so, if you loose the players who are only PvPing for the loot then yeah you might lose a few of them. I can only speak for myself when I say this, but the gear is nice, but the bragging rights and being able to humiliate your opponents with a Tuxedo outfit before they die is way better then purple pixels. I only get the loot to be more succesfull. This season my 5v5 team is top 3 for our battlegroup, and if it ended tomorrow and I had bought all my gear and saved up 4k points, I wouldn't care if they took it all away. Weeding out the people who are only pvping for shiny epics, is no different then a guild weeding out their players that only raid for loot. Maybe its something that needs to be done to truly balance out the masses, no?

I'm pretty sure the true reason is that most Americans can't see their boys lose, which is why they have their own sports when everyone else plays something else. "World Series" Baseball for example. So if they'd accept E-Sports, their boys would lose at games again.

Maybe E-Sports are too fast paced for the general US audience? From what I've seen there are lots of breaks in the major sports popular in the US.

Typical european attitude at its best. Not to derail this thread but honestly, if we hated to lose then why do we bring home the most medals every Olympics? Keep the topic to wow, lets not get into the whole Euro vs USA debate, is it really necessary?

A single arena match doesn't really give a good idea of the damage. Warr+healer mirrormatches are very gear dependant, obviously, but the difference in damage alone doesn't really show anything unless you know how the fight went. For example if you were beating on Schmity and he was beating on your healer then he had way more rage than you and almost constant enrage on. Also, the opposing healer might have just been better at kiting than your healer. There are just so many variables in an arena match that straight damage comparison from a single match is pretty meaningless.

Not saying that gear doesn't make a difference, obviously it does, especially in the case of mirror matchups. But the difference between pve and pvp gear currently is not large enough to win fights for you alone.

I love your ignorance :P

I hate this thread. (and it's not going in anything resembling a good direction.)