Blizzard admits that currently, World of Warcraft‘s 3v3 Arena PVP is pretty “hard to watch.”
If you were to rattle off a list of popular eSports, Blizzard’s StarCraft, Warcraft, and more recently, Hearthstone would probably be pretty high up there. But why is it that World of Warcraft‘s competitive 3v3 Arena mode never took off? Turns out, it’s just not really that interesting to watch, a problem that Blizzard knows about, and is working towards fixing.
“I can definitely say that WoW 3v3 Arena right now is kind of hard to watch, in the form that it is,” Blizzard eSports head Kim Phan told PCGamesN. “And so there are things that we want to evaluate.” He explained that the biggest problem is that World of Warcraft is closing in on its tenth birthday, meaning that the game launched long before the current eSports craze, spearheaded by StarCraft II and League of Legends, really exploded.
“We knew there was a competitive element to World of Warcraft, and then it just kind of blew up from there,” said Phan, “But it is taking a game that was out before all of this happened, and then figuring out how to enhance it and support it.”
He said that the complexity of the title, with all the minute variants in gear and skills individual players can have, along with the game’s third person perspective and lack of a proper spectator mode, make the game an absolute mess to keep track of.
In Warlords of Dreanor, there will be tools to make organizing tournaments easier for people, but Phan isn’t even sure that the traditional PvP battles is where WoW‘s eSport future lies.
“People enjoy watching live raids at BlizzCon. What makes something an eSport really depends on what people want to see. We are taking a close look into how we can better support eSports.”
He makes a point. Watching high-level guilds raid is a lot more entertaining than watching 3v3 arena matches.
Source: PCGamesN
