World of Warcraft was a first for me in many ways. Not least, it was my first MMORPG. It was the first game I think I can truly say I was ever addicted to and – since this is an esports site, after all – it is the first competitive game I have played which doesn’t come with a spectator mode.

I picked up CS at a crucial time: Autumn 2001. For those reading this who don’t know their esports history, that’s a couple of months after HLTV was invented. It premiered at CPL that summer and so for me it’s been there the whole time.

Likewise, I started Warcraft with WaaaghTV not exactly built-in but there, none the less. An interesting point to note, however, is that WTV is not run by WC3’s developers, Blizzard, and that leads nicely to the point of this article.

Well, almost.

WoW’s arenas have been with us for a year now and we still have no way of watching them, save for the kind people at Fraps. For a game that wants to call itself competitive and be part of the esports stable this just isn’t good enough. The argument rages on as to whether WoW can be considered an esports, whether or not it’s suitable but if both sides are honest we simply have no proof either way. The only people who get to see arena games, other than the ones they play themselves, are the hardcore elite who watch first person movies. By contrast, anyone with CS installed can watch a live game as easily as he can connect to a public server.

CS has been the great success story of our fledgling sport but I feel there is a strong case to back the argument that HLTV made CS. Reading the results the day after a game is all well and good but would CS really have made it so far if we couldn’t watch it? It’s hard for CS fans to imagine the scenario but for the WoW faithful it’s a painful, nay, embarrassing reality. When people come at the WoW community with accusations of the game being difficult, even boring, to watch an honest WoW fan can only reply along the lines of “er, I don’t really know.”

The simple fact is that esports, or any sport for that matter, will not succeed if people can’t watch it. It might have escaped Blizzard’s notice, but people can’t really turn up and watch people play WoW in a field like the early days of football or cricket. Not many plugs in your average field. No, it requires a little more effort than that but the rewards are copious.

You can forgive a developer whose game has 11,000,000 or so customers for not really caring about the money it would bring in. But if, as they say, they are devoted to developing esports then WoWTV is vital. It is difficult to overstate the importance of a spectator tool – it simply must be done and should be Blizzard’s number one priority, at least on the PvP side of the game. It beggars belief that they allowed the first phase of their own tournament go by without it and there is still no mention of such a program in any patch notes.

This past weekend we saw GotfragTV broadcast the first WoW tournament from MLG and it was okay. The casters were decent; the mistakes they made were forgivable in my eyes and they did a much better job than the old WSVG casters (“GETTING IT DONE IN A 3ON3 SITUATION!!!”). But the visuals were severely lacking.

I’m not sure if it was a problem with the stream itself or my connection, but the character info seemed to update five seconds or so after something actually happened. Every time someone died you would see them fall over, hear the commentators announce it and only then would the UI update. This is a big problem for a game like WoW, which is not so easy to watch.

In CS there are very obvious visual indicators to tell the viewer what's going on. Imagine there's a grenade flying towards Forest and it says 10hp below his name. Even the most uneducated neophyte could hazard a guess as to the result. In WoW, as it stands, that is far from the case. The commentators on GFTV did a great job of calling target swaps, for example, but they had to. If they hadn't been on the ball, the spectators would probably have missed them.

The game itself is still very difficult to watch. There’s far too much going on for the camera to possibly cover. The GFTV stream would constantly be following the wrong player (especially on Blades Edge Mountain) when something important happened. If it weren’t for the casters telling the viewer how someone died it would have been near impossible to discern. Compare this to WaaaghTV and WC3: If someone splits his army to creep and harass, a spectator left to his own devices could eaisly miss one or other of these actions. Instead, WTV pings the map and gives an audible signifier ("a player's forces are under attack!"). A simple press of the space bar or click of the minimap will show the viewer what's going on.

WoWTV would do wonders for the game as an esport. It would make everyone's life easier. I'm sure I'm not the only WoW player who's frustrated because he wants to record his games but Fraps creates big FPS drops. WoWTV solves! Everything mentioned above about the difficult-to-watch livestreams is sorted - we can pick what we watch, from what angle. Finally, it gives broadcasters like GFTV a much easier time. Even if it transpires that WoW will be forever difficult to watch, at least the casters might have some replays to work with and show us what we missed.