Big news. I am incredibly excited.

This tournament will be on special servers with instant 70's (3 allowed per person). All gear, gems and enchants will be provided. This tournament will be about skill only - what a great idea!

Very cool. $20 to gain access to the Arena servers, where you can create up to 3 level 70 premade characters with access to any arena gear, any enchant, unlimited gold, and a selection of raid gear. $75,000 to the champs, $15,000 to each regional champ.

I'm a bit surprised by the decision to go with 3v3 instead of 5v5, as they've always hinted that they primarily balance classes around the 5v5 format. Perhaps they felt 3v3 works a little better as a spectator sport, with the action a little easier to follow.

This is exactly what the people wanted. I have high hopes for this tournament. I hope they have some form of spectator mode especially for the regional/world finals.

Wow that is FANTASTIC! Finally there's a pvp realm, I just hope it doesn't turn out like the PTR

and I'm unsuprised that they went with 3v3, it's a much easier bracket to follow than 5v5 and in my opinion it's much more balanced. 3v3 has so many more playable combos for higher end than 5v5.

Also: Anybody know if you are able to make a 2v2/5v5 team on the realm for non tournament play? The FAQ does imply that we'll only be allowed to play 3v3, but it also says that the tournament is exclusively 3v3 not the entire realm.

Looks like a good idea. I couldn't imaging a better way to create an environment for high end arena. If only blizzard can come up with a way to generate video replays of matches.

$20 though..
That doesn't seem like the correct deterrent to restrict the server to the serious competitive players. I would pay $20 right now just to go mess around with fully customizable epic'd characters!

I think the cost is to get around the laws that caused state/country issues last time, since they are paying to compete it wouldn't be considered gambling and they basically wanted a small but accessible cost.

So... 3v3. Without class limits. I mean didn't they learn anything from Dreamhack?
How hard would it be to make it a 5 players/1 class per player. Would limit countercomping QUITE a bit.

A Counter-comp fest, sure sounds like fun :/ At least they're making progress I guess.

You're saying everyone will create an countersetup for the team they get pwnd by?

Yea thats what happens when you allow everyone on a team 2 toons. Run with Druid/Lock/War, and Priest/Mage/Rogue, and swap it up from there. Counter-comp ahoy. Then it becomes to who has created a Counter Comp for all of the Counter comps. Not very fun.

Hmm sounds very crappy.. anyway, is this competition for US only? Or also for europe?

Sounds pretty good.

I wonder if you have to have an active (non-Arena) subscription to play though. 20$ per 6-week qualifier is pretty close to 15$/month.

Support for 2v2/5v5 would be nice too.

Even though i'm not going to play on this server, it does in fact, sound really cool, and I think will help the game a lot.

Oh, and the fact that they are switching focus to 3v3 is a good thing, as it will definately sort out a lot of (cough) class imbalances around atm.

I have to agree. Given the choice of spending another 100 hours gearing up my mage or spending 20 bucks having some fun with new classes, it is quite the no brainer. Now all I have to do is convince my cheap or broke friends to do the same.

Or maybe we should make an "EJ PvP forum team" purely for experimentation with new classes? Anyone up for that?

The reason they went to 3v3 instead of 5v5 is pretty simple.

The length of the battles is about the same, but the climax in wow arena play is typically which team loses their first character. In 5v5, not many teams can come back after losing their first character, but *can* drag the fight out for a long time (which is not really fun to watch, since it's almost always a foregone conclusion).

In a 3v3, the comeback is somewhat less possible, but you don't have the longer, more drawn out killing of the other team. That makes it more interesting to watch, since you don't feel let down by the end.

Furthermore, it's also a lot easier to follow three/six people moving around than it is to follow five/ten, especially given the tools available. I watched the tournaments at Blizzcon; it was pretty difficult to keep track of everyone in the 5v5 tournament.

This is exciting, and close to about the best solution with the given state of PvP (meaning the counter comping issue).

I look forward to it. A way to watch the matches some how, would be great.

What is going to be really interesting is the timing of the patch relative to the tourney. The patch is bound to shift a lot of power around, especially in the healer department, with druids and priests taking significant hits to their strongest abilities (mana burn and running away). So if it comes out in the middle of the tournament we may see a lot of teams scrambling for a new lineup.

Actually its druid/hunter/x vs healer/healer/warrior vs the ocassional rmp and lock/druid/x

It'll be fun to play in this, but for anyone to go into this thing expecting to win would be completely ridiculous. There's just way too many factors out of our hands to determine who comes outta this thing.

There are far more viable comps in 3 than there are in 5.

I don't agree. In 3's you may not need as specific a backbone, but the variation in 3's is about as stagnant as it is in 5's. You will see the same 3-4 compositions all countering each other, and the team with the most successful counter-comps wins.

In 3's you have druid/hunter/x variants, 2 healers warrior variants, druid/warrior/rogue or warlock, PMR as teams that are strong versus a broad amount of teams, plus some extremly gimmicky teams that are just used to countercomp other teams.