NEWS
ESL promise bright future for WoW
The WoW PvP scene got a huge setback when the WSVG announced its closure, although just a few months later ESL gave everyone hope as they hosted an invitational 3vs3 tournament at Dreamhack. The tournament was a huge success and the World of Warcraft community screams for more details about what to come, and that's why SK Gaming brings you an interview with David "Shawn" K, head admin for World of Warcraft at the ESL.
By Sebastian 'gosey' Selin
Jan 25, 2008 05:47
The WoW PvP scene got a huge setback when the WSVG announced its closure, although just a few months later ESL gave everyone hope as they hosted an invitational 3vs3 tournament at Dreamhack. The tournament was a huge success and the World of Warcraft community screams for more details about what to come, and that's why SK Gaming brings you an interview with David "Shawn" K, head admin for World of Warcraft at the ESL.The ESL hosted a 3vs3 tournament at Dreamhack, which in my eyes atleast was very successful. Howcome that you decided to pick up wow and how was the response afterwards?
I was really happy how the tournament worked out as well. We already gathered some experience with WoW as a competitive game in last summer when we hosted the Season 1 Europe Finals in Hamburg. The spectating was really difficult back then because there was no observation-addon at all and the format was 5vs5. Nonetheless we believed in WoW as a possible eSports-game and that's why we were happy to hold the 3vs3-tourney with the help of Blizzard half a year later. The free stream with expert co-moderators was a huge enhancement as well as the improved observer-UI. The overall response was really good although a lot was organized on very short notice. That's why I believe that there is still a lot of room for improvement, both organization- and coverage-wise.
Does ESL have any plans to host more wow tournaments?
Since the public's response to the Dreamhack tournament was really positive we definitely plan to stick to WoW. One of the big goals that we have is to establish a 'pro'-scene, especially for European teams. The American scene is a lot more evolved right now with their small offline-tournaments on a regular basis, their infamous BG9 and their 'star-players' that actively write blogs and discuss strategies. The European scene is a lot more cluttered right now and only a handful of teams could prove their worth on a more international level. Our first step will be an online tournament on an event realm that Blizzard is providing us with. There is not set date for that yet but it's definitely going to happen quite soon.
An event realm, sounds interesting! Care to elaborate on that?
WoW does not have any kind of custom game option that you usually know from eSport-games and players are spread among dozens of servers. The only way to make sure that only those teams play against each other that you want to is to get them on a special server – an even realm. Those are regular servers but only visible to special accounts. Those accounts have all eight classes at level 70 and every character has thousands of gold and bags packed with all possible PvP-items to chose from. When the players are done with setting up both teams queue up at the same time, join the same arena and there is no risk of interfering.
How many teams do you plan on having in the online tournaments and how will they be selected?
We are currently thinking about a tournament-mode that can feature 30 or more teams. We are in contact with some of the best European teams and keep an eye on the rankings in the most competitive battlegroups. We might have a sign-up period so teams can apply to take part in the tournament. Basically the more teams are interested in taking part in it the better.
So if you're ranked high on the SK100 you have a good shot on getting a spot? ;)
Definitely! Although I'd wish you would implement a filter for US/EU/Asia-servers anytime soon for that - would make it even more awesome. ;)
It's funny that you mention it, by the way. Since it's not really decided which format will be that 'main-bracket' for WoW. It used to be 5vs5, right now it is 3vs3 but Blizzard is still trying to balance each and every aspect of Arena-PvP. That's why it's important to ba able to compete in every possible bracket instead of concentrating on only one aspect of Arena-PvP.
So the ESL will keep the 3vs3 format then I guess?
The upcoming online-tournament will keep the 3vs3-format, yes.
What game type will be used, double elimination brackets, group stage or a ladder maybe?
Our first idea was to combine the random and rated arena matches that WoW-players and -teams are used to with a regular eSport-tournament. To accomplish that we need two stages. The first will be a time trial:
Three hours of regular Arena matches for all invited teams. Teams log on to the event realm, queue up for "Rated 3on3 Arena" and play as much as they like. After three hours no new arena matches may be started and a ranking will be made according to the ratings that the teams accomplished.
The second stage will only feature the best eight teams from the first playday. Those will battle it out in a regular single-elimination/Best of Five tournament.
On Dreamhack you only allowed 3 players per team which most people seemed as a good rule change, are there any other rules that you plan on changing?
I wasn't happy at all with the time it took to respec and switch compositions between games during Dreamhack. That's why we will introduce a tighter time-limit there. We are considering to prohibit stacking classes because steamrolling certain compositions with dual-Rogue during Dreamhack felt a bit cheesy. Besides those points we will stick to what we used in Sweden.
You mentioned an online tournament, are there any plans on having weekly/monthly tournaments and what about offline tournaments?
There are future plans for both. We will have to see how much work such online tournaments actually are to decide if we can have them on a regular basis. Personally, I'd love to see more tournaments with a much more evolved coverage for it.
I was really happy how the tournament worked out as well. We already gathered some experience with WoW as a competitive game in last summer when we hosted the Season 1 Europe Finals in Hamburg. The spectating was really difficult back then because there was no observation-addon at all and the format was 5vs5. Nonetheless we believed in WoW as a possible eSports-game and that's why we were happy to hold the 3vs3-tourney with the help of Blizzard half a year later. The free stream with expert co-moderators was a huge enhancement as well as the improved observer-UI. The overall response was really good although a lot was organized on very short notice. That's why I believe that there is still a lot of room for improvement, both organization- and coverage-wise.
Does ESL have any plans to host more wow tournaments?
"Our first step will be an online tournament on an event realm that Blizzard is providing us with."
Since the public's response to the Dreamhack tournament was really positive we definitely plan to stick to WoW. One of the big goals that we have is to establish a 'pro'-scene, especially for European teams. The American scene is a lot more evolved right now with their small offline-tournaments on a regular basis, their infamous BG9 and their 'star-players' that actively write blogs and discuss strategies. The European scene is a lot more cluttered right now and only a handful of teams could prove their worth on a more international level. Our first step will be an online tournament on an event realm that Blizzard is providing us with. There is not set date for that yet but it's definitely going to happen quite soon.
An event realm, sounds interesting! Care to elaborate on that?
WoW does not have any kind of custom game option that you usually know from eSport-games and players are spread among dozens of servers. The only way to make sure that only those teams play against each other that you want to is to get them on a special server – an even realm. Those are regular servers but only visible to special accounts. Those accounts have all eight classes at level 70 and every character has thousands of gold and bags packed with all possible PvP-items to chose from. When the players are done with setting up both teams queue up at the same time, join the same arena and there is no risk of interfering.
How many teams do you plan on having in the online tournaments and how will they be selected?
We are currently thinking about a tournament-mode that can feature 30 or more teams. We are in contact with some of the best European teams and keep an eye on the rankings in the most competitive battlegroups. We might have a sign-up period so teams can apply to take part in the tournament. Basically the more teams are interested in taking part in it the better.
So if you're ranked high on the SK100 you have a good shot on getting a spot? ;)
Definitely! Although I'd wish you would implement a filter for US/EU/Asia-servers anytime soon for that - would make it even more awesome. ;)
It's funny that you mention it, by the way. Since it's not really decided which format will be that 'main-bracket' for WoW. It used to be 5vs5, right now it is 3vs3 but Blizzard is still trying to balance each and every aspect of Arena-PvP. That's why it's important to ba able to compete in every possible bracket instead of concentrating on only one aspect of Arena-PvP.
So the ESL will keep the 3vs3 format then I guess?The upcoming online-tournament will keep the 3vs3-format, yes.
What game type will be used, double elimination brackets, group stage or a ladder maybe?
Our first idea was to combine the random and rated arena matches that WoW-players and -teams are used to with a regular eSport-tournament. To accomplish that we need two stages. The first will be a time trial:
Three hours of regular Arena matches for all invited teams. Teams log on to the event realm, queue up for "Rated 3on3 Arena" and play as much as they like. After three hours no new arena matches may be started and a ranking will be made according to the ratings that the teams accomplished.
The second stage will only feature the best eight teams from the first playday. Those will battle it out in a regular single-elimination/Best of Five tournament.
On Dreamhack you only allowed 3 players per team which most people seemed as a good rule change, are there any other rules that you plan on changing?
"We are considering to prohibit stacking classes"
I wasn't happy at all with the time it took to respec and switch compositions between games during Dreamhack. That's why we will introduce a tighter time-limit there. We are considering to prohibit stacking classes because steamrolling certain compositions with dual-Rogue during Dreamhack felt a bit cheesy. Besides those points we will stick to what we used in Sweden.
You mentioned an online tournament, are there any plans on having weekly/monthly tournaments and what about offline tournaments?
There are future plans for both. We will have to see how much work such online tournaments actually are to decide if we can have them on a regular basis. Personally, I'd love to see more tournaments with a much more evolved coverage for it.
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givf spectator mode
that's my opinion tho :]
these vid/clip shit isn't really esport :E
http://tv.esl.eu/de/vod/view/20043 (if you have an esl account)
http://delllounge.com/gaming/gamecons/ (in the menu on the right, no fullscreen option)
OT: Very nice!
I think 3s will be the best part if you set up some proper rules, no class stacking of course, then there's two options if you ask me.
1. Only allow 3 players per team, and they can swap classes however they want in between the matches. This will be extremely hard to check online though.
2. Allow 5 players per team and lock them to one class each, this is the best alternative if you ask me for both online and offline tournaments. The players should be locked to one class each, which means that we'll always get to watch world class games/players instead of a keyboard turning warrior, which we saw some great examples of at the Dreamhack tournament. This way people can change their setup "a bit" atleast, and not completely be able to choose the best anit-setup possible against your opponent.
Problem with allowing class switching in an online tournament is it's near impossible to guarantee that nobody is cheating due to the nature of wow accounts.
If a priest suddently is to play a druid there's no way to check that his druid friend isn't logging onto his account and playing in those matches, outside checking IP logs on the Blizzard servers which I believe to be quite extensive work.
They could just do it like with PTR servers. Each account invited to the tournament has one character copy. So each individual chooses a class and gets a character of that class on the event realm.
This would also rule out alot of the crazy counter comping which were an issue at the DreamHack tournament, simply because limiting each team to 5 classes means that unless they have complete confidence in one setup and chooses the 2 additional classes based entirely on one or two teams they want to counter teams will be forced to pick 5 classes that can be matches together into 3-4 different setups that all are viable at high level play.
Such a choice before a tournament starts could actually be a good thing since it also would allow a bit of a unique touch to each individual team much like we have in most (if not all) other tournament games.
One team might have an emphasis on dual healer setups whereas others may have an emphasis on 3 dps. It'd all help on giving the teams sort of an "image" much like certain CS teams are known for an aggresive playstyle or how specific Starcraft players have sort of "signature" rushes.
On top of all that it would as you said eliminate the issue with individuals playing a certain class at a relatively low level and still being successful with it in tournament play simply because their specific setup completely counters what the opponents run with, as was seen at the DreamHack tournament.
That said though, I think it's great that individual players such as Kintt who is capable of playing a huge array of classes at a very high level gets rewarded in tournament play and I fully understand if that's something tournament play wants to promote in the future.
However, as it is right now, especially in Europe, only very few players play more than one class at a top level, and hardly anyone plays more than two. As such it might be benefitial to wait with aspirations for 'super players' who plays every single class in the game flawlessly untill the game has matured more as an eSport as a whole.
then again ESL has real games like CS, WC3.. so it should be fine.. as long as those games carry ESL they can put any shitty no skill game, they might aswell put in some horseback riding barbie adventure game : /
Give us some 5v5 tourney !
Will be nice to see some of the good european teams participating instead of the usual weak teams that have been invites to tournaments previously.
I'm hoping that ESL realizes that the vast majority of the best teams in Europe have no sponsor.
With the exception of the new Nihilum/Mousesports 5v5 team none of the teams currently sponsored are in the very top of competitive arena play in Europe, and I'm hoping ESL has this in mind when doing invites to their tournament.
That said though, any tournament is better than no tournament so regardless of who gets invited for the first ESL 3v3 tournament it's a step forward for WoW as an eSport.
The tournament is meant exactly for those teams that didn't get the opportunity to get sponsored yet. Our goal is to determine who can do really good in tournaments and this has to include the best teams from Cataclysme (fr), Cyclone (en) or Blutdurst (de) but also from every other competitive battlegroup.
I will be looking forward to, if not participating, then following the tournament rigorously.
Will be interresting to see how things work out when the top teams from French, German, Spanish and English battlegroups are matched together. Should provide alot of entertainment from a playstyle standpoint since usually each battlegroup has a tendency of adapting specific ways of fighting vs. particular teams which could provide some very entertaining matches where teams have to adapt in the middle of everything because their opponent is doing something they aren't used to.
Random facts with no reliable source owns!
To me that means being amongst the very very best and maybe with the exception of Kazter I don't know of anyone capable of playing more than one class at a top 3 level.
To me that means being amongst the very very best and maybe with the exception of Kazter I don't know of anyone capable of playing more than one class at a top 3 level.
See you soon !
aAa Herbaliser
www.team-aaa.com