New Year’s eve (well, its coming up for us NA east coasters at least!) is a time of reflection. Thus, I’d like to take a moment to look back on how much change the PVP community has experienced in such a short amount of time this year:
In late April/Early May, we saw the Tournament of Legends. This was the biggest tournament we had seen since PAX with the most substantial prizing. (Yes, more cash was offered to 10 players at PAX but prizes for the top 32 teams from both regions=320 players potentially rewarded=more prizes overall for the community). DPS was a part of this tournament as we helped Mistpedia admin the event . This tournament will always be a fond memory for me personally as most of the admining took place from my townhouse as DPS scrambled to get 64 teams each weekend where they needed to be consistently and report results as fast as possible. It was a great experience and I wanna publicly thank Blu again for bringing us onboard.
Much talk was made about how the APEX “bunker comp” was unbeatable following the NA ToL finals but then a super PuG beat them 3-0 in the DPS fight night in July. We had the GamesCom All Star event after that, the first LAN event we had seen in a year! ToL2 happened shortly thereafter, and the competitive scene was dominated consistently by TCG and Outplayed By Children til the Tournament of Glory and WTS announcements were made in August.
Yup, a major LAN tournament was announced the past fall and I was PUMPED. DPS was asked by ANET to handle the NA ToG. We were excited about all of our ideas on how we could elevate the way PVP was streamed but also stressed as this was a huge commitment for us. It required us to spend time away from our families for 5 weekends without any financial compensation (every other weekend for basically 2 months) while we tried to put on the best event we possibly could. The event was again an incredible experience and we consider ourselves blessed to have been a part of it! This marked the 3rd major tournament the PVP community saw this year!
The first WTS happened after and it marked the first time in GW2 history that major cash was up for grabs. Congrats again to the Abjured for winning the event! They’ve proven to be a dominating force over the past few months!
But ANET wasnt done! They announced a partnership with ESL where pvp players now have the opportunity to compete for weekly cash prizes with a bigger cash prize event at the end of every month. We also saw the first ever pvp feature patch, a patch that was solely dedicated to just adding pvp features.
So, in light of all this talk about que’s, bugs, the cele meta, engies and eles, I wanted to take a moment to thank ANET and Josh Davis for elevating pvp this past year. Cant wait to see what 2015 brings!
DPS Co-Owner and CEO
Digital Pro Sports
Bear Cavalry of Legend PVP 4life!
