I watched the last 2 or 3 games of the WTS because I’m coming back to play GW2 regularly and I wanted to know what a competitive match looked like.
I enjoy watching competitive matches of the games I enjoy, and I’m an avid fan of LoL and I watch a lot of LCS and OGN whenever I have the chance, this is a comparison of some sort with a great eSports game scene, so please take this as critique.
I enjoyed the production values, the casters didn’t felt awkward and the quality seemed really good, but they didn’t speak much about plays (like just pointing out) and for a fast paced, chaotic PvP battle I got lost on what was happening on various occasions, even though I do know the game (it’s skills, mechanics and such).
At some point, they shouted “he sent him flying!” or something like that. It was a Hammer Guardian who hit #4 on someone and sent them flying out of the point, and the rest of their team were around.
I was like “So it’s a mess of a battle, 3v3 at least, and someone got hit by Hammer’s #4. Is that a big deal?”
I might be ignorant since I don’t play much PvP.
My greatest gripe with it was the camera/observer control. That felt… awful, really.
I wanted to watch some action, see the players in action, their cooldowns and such (their PoV) and the camera switched between player PoV and observer PoV too often – which is not bad, but it was really badly timed.
I remember the caster shouting “FOUR DOWN!” or something like that so I thought “woa, four down is a nice thing but… where, where is it? Why is this camera showing an empty point with no one there while they’re screaming about something I’m not seeing?”
Another time was when the camera went to a player’s PoV as he 1v1 someone else. The fight went on for like 15 seconds, things started to get exciting, one of them was in danger of going down, I was curious as to how it would go, who would win and… for some reason, the camera moved to show someone else capping a point by himself.
I was like “so capping a point alone must be more thrilling and interesting than watching whatever was the result of that fight”.
The camera being too far away from the point is also good to see the entire scene, but also makes it harder to follow when good moves/plays.
Using LoL as an example, when a solo/team fight is happening it’s much more interesting to actually see the fighting than someone else farming their lane solo in my opinion.
It’s also easy to follow moves/plays since the camera follows the same pattern and show a specific thing, it doesn’t change angles and positions to show that the fight has extended and is divided in 2 subfights. If something interesting happens and the camera doesn’t pick, it’s replayed later.
This is my particular taste, but I enjoy watching competitive games to see the playerskill of those players and teams that trained hard to obtain them, so the more and better you can show it, the better.
Please keep improving these streams, I especially enjoy the action combat of GW2 and would love to see it become as big as it deserves.