A Question for the Developers

Lasaathnann

Ralms wrote: »

Historically, MMOs don't do well with ESports.

This. If eSports for the game works out, great....but MMOs tend to be boring (to a large extent) to watch people play competitively.

Marcet

Nah, that is starting the house on the roof, and it's never good.
You can't create a community forged by fire that lasts for many years by shoving boring Esports in their faces, it has to be created by them.

Morek

Honestly, my opinion is that eSports ruins games.

The whole culture around eSports actually makes me feel dirty and depressed. When I teleport from reality into a magical world of danger and adventure, the last thing I want is that reality to follow me.

Keep AoC eSports free!

ariatras

Hmmmm.

MMO's are not designed to be e-sports. The WoW e-sport scene is an even smaller niche than the RP community.

On top of that it doesn't work. Back when Arena's first appeared (which is arguably the most popular e-sport from WoW) people were summarily against it. We had just come from a world where PvP was part of the world itself. Especially so on a PvP server. Even the battlegrounds. Whilst it is true, they were instanced. Warsong Gulch, for example had you travel to the physical entrance, when it was first presented. You got a quest. You had to read it, to know where to go. A skirmish had been going on, and your faction needed the resources. Giving some degree of meaning to it.

Same with Alterac Valley, and Arathi Basin. They were part of the world just like raids and dungeons.

Now the advantage of that is. Other then it is better (although not perfect) for immersion. Classes could be balanced a lot more globally. You are a simple recruit, tasked to join a handful of other recruits and win the Skirmish. So, warriors were not great at PvP at the time, though they had tools like reflect, hamstring. The logical thing to do leave him, and go for his support. But, you're all a bunch of recruits, and technically untrained. So when a warrior is in your face as a ranged dps, it is hard to ignore. They worked. Warlocks were overal strong but were quite weak against melee (once they got close)

But when Arena came, it had three formats.
2v2
3v3
5v5
This is where they balanced the entire PvP system around. It was during the era of PvP montages and videos.

People say there were specs that simply didn't work. Often using shadow priest as an example. Shadow Priests were monsters in PvP, absolute beasts. They were in PvE too, but only if the fight doesn't last long, because their spells were very mana intensive. The point is, it was balanced differently. From TBC on, most specs worked for everything. A design choice that carries on to this day.

And, is the game better for it? I'd say no. There's a checkbox system at work. It looks a little like this.

<Class> <spec>
Escape? Check
Crown-control? Check
Some form of self-sustain? Check
Area of Effect? Check

It makes classes homogenous. And even with that approach, classes are never balanced. If you get caught in a 1 v 1 in the world right now, class doesn't really matter, they all have roughly the same toolkit.

Personally, I'd prefer a more rock paper scissors approach, it makes it easier to make classes feel unique, and you're a lot more likely to venture out with others, not even friends per say. Oh, you're a healer? Yea, you'll probably have a bad time questing solo. But guess what, these daggers aren't going to do much damage to that big, animated, aggressive rock. Perhaps we should team up.

And that is where the genius of older mmos comes in. You had to rest every so often, encouraging exchange of ideas, plans, or just simple bants. The same happened in PvP, especially battlegrounds. You had just won the fight to take the Lumber Mill. You have to sit, to drink/eat. Recover your stength. Now people just instantly ride off again. Because they can. Otherwise watching it is boring. the high octane gameplay just doesn't fit.

Whilst I understand the want to get on with it, and go from pack to pack or mob to mob. The little breaks in-between are very important, especially in dungeons. But that doesn't work in e-sports.


But yea, anyway, that's why I think they have no place in mmos