Guild Wars 2

A lot of people is asking about this: " Why gw2 isn’t a e-sport? Anet promised it!"

There is the answer: There aren’t money prices.

In GW1 Anet made a great GvG monthly tournament system with 10.000$ prices all the months arround 2 years. If GW1 haven’t “Extra payments” and less sells than gw2, why they dont do this? Because they don’t want, just that.

If Anet wants to do this game an e-sport, they would move the money here. The e-sports is a job, and without money, profesional players, e-sport squads and sponsors won’t come here.

Some people will say “there are a lot of fails that are making this game not being a e-sport” and it is true, but with the pressure of sponsors and e-sport squads Anet would fix that more fast than they are doing right now.

I just want to told you my opinion about the situation of “e-sports” on gw2.

Hugs!

In August 5 guys will fly all the way from NA to germany to compete for ingame items, how more esports can you get?

There are more reasons why Gw2 isnt (and imo never will be) an esport. For example.

As an esport it needs spectators, and needs to be something spectators can get into. Your game needs to be viewable by an audience thats never ever played your game.

I’ve played Gw2 since launch, i might not be a pro gamer, but i am surely miles more experienced then new players, or people who never played at all. And i cannot follow what the balls is going on during a match.
The casters cannot even follow whats going on during a match.

So the lack of cash prices isnt the only thing. You could hand out big fat cash prices, but if not enough people want to watch your tournaments, youre not going anywhere. You wont get big sponsorship deals, which is what arenanet would be fishing for with an esports game.
So they give out ingame prizes because they are free.

GW2 will never become an e-sport. Even WoW struggles to be an e-sport because MMos are not really made to be an e sport, unlike MOBAs, they scream e-sport.

WoW e-sports are 2v2 and 3v3. Very limited compared to LoL 5v5 map with objectives and such, also easier to follow similar to a football match.

Regarding GW2, I watched half a match before I gave up. Watching a particle spam gets old really fast. As someone mentioned, even the casters have a hard time keeping up with whats going on and are just yelling things they notice through the particle spam.

Gervaise.4163:

GW2 will never become an e-sport. Even WoW struggles to be an e-sport because MMos are not really made to be an e sport, unlike MOBAs, they scream e-sport.

WoW e-sports are 2v2 and 3v3. Very limited compared to LoL 5v5 map with objectives and such, also easier to follow similar to a football match.

Regarding GW2, I watched half a match before I gave up. Watching a particle spam gets old really fast. As someone mentioned, even the casters have a hard time keeping up with whats going on and are just yelling things they notice through the particle spam.

As much as I hate to admit it, this is true.

The reason MMO’s aren’t e-sports is because of their complexity. People don’t understand why and how others do certain rotations and ability combinations with their 15-30 abilities they have available.

Unlike MMO’s, MOBA’s like LoL are extremely easy to follow because each player has 4 unique abilities and 2 abilities everyone has access to. Because the game is so easy to understand, people enjoy watching it since they know what is going on at all times. Casters don’t have to jumble through a thousand words to get their point across for what happened because there is a limited amount of abilities.

Overall, I think MOBA’s are extremely easy to play and learn unlike MMO’s which aren’t as easy to understand. Just look at the most popular games in esports:

1. LoL/Dota 2
2. CoD
3. Starcraft 2
…

Look at the complexity of each game. As we go down the list the game gets more complex. You could go watch LoL and understand what is happening after 20 minutes if you’ve never played before. Go watch Starcraft 2 and you’ll be confused as hell. The only reason it’s #3 is because Blizzard has made that game an esport from day one with BW back in ’98 and ’99 and people have followed it since (and they have money).

Complexity of the game is everything!

I think the main problem with complexity is it doesn’t leave much room for extremely clutch plays. If you watch LoL, you’ll see someone Flash through an Ashe arrow to win a 1v1 that snowballs into an Inhibitor push. In Guild Wars you’ll see two people whacking at each other and dodging periodically. It’s hard to have clutch moments like in LoL.

I think the issue with spectating GW2 matches comes from the game type + combat pace + team size.

I think it’s a popular opinion that capture points is not that fun to watch. It’s actually distracting to the actual combat because it’s giving the viewers the idea that fighting doesn’t really matter that much. If it’s your first time watching GW2 matches—after the first few engagements, it’s not hard to think “Oh, well, they just need to bunker up, zerg, and #lolrunaroundinacircle to win.” Although that is slightly true, that shouldn’t be the impression that GW2 matches should give. If you compare a GW2 stream hosted by someone watching vs a GW2 stream hosted by someone playing, IMHO the difference is crazy. It’s a lot more interesting hearing the players thoughts and picking up the small details on decisions that they choose to make in all the situations. In addition to that, the way they fight and handle different match-ups is also very enjoyable. Currently, viewers and hosts at the moment cannot capture even a small amount of that good detail at all and that’s an issue! (And it’s not the hosts problem—-you need to be a pro auction house announcer with the eyes of an eagle to capture 10 people making all these decisions and plays).

When it comes to the pace of the fight, that is also an issue. For MOBAs, you know that the result of an engagement is going to be quick and/or fairly quick so you will not see the host loiter around aimlessly until the fight ends. They can move along quickly to the next engagement or what others are doing shortly after an engagement occurs. For GW2, fights are more variable—they could be drawn out for ages or they can end quick even in high level play—you cannot tell. This causes issues because if you have two fights going on. The host could talk about one fight, but then miss another fight that just ended or they think this one fight is going to take awhile and they switch screens, and then that fight ends immediately after the host switches camera views. If you want a team game to work well, you need to balance the pace where viewers and hosts can easily capture all of what’s going on. This cannot be helped due to the team size and game type though.

Now for team size; with the all the people to keep up with in a team fight, it’s hard to capture skillful plays that’s changing the tide of the battle. Literally, the viewers just see “Oh, he’s down. Oh he’s dead. Oh, they wiped. Oh they got the point. Oh, they got a team res. Oh, there’s a fight going on at home. Oh they got a stomp.” It’s hard to see/capture the strategies and skill level if you do not go in-depth about a player and change cameras rapidly to try to view all the action.

Again, MOBAs do better at 5v5s because their game-type is well-designed for 5v5s. It’s suspenseful when it comes to pre-engagements and quick and exciting when it comes to engagements. GW2 has a great combat system, but the game mode, team sizes, and pace take away from that.

The only way to fix this with the current game mode IMO is to speed up the pace of engagements so viewers can capture burst strategies as opposed to bunker strategies. Either that or put much more well-designed secondary objectives to limit the team fight sizes and zerging/snowballing. Either that or decrease the team sizes. 2v2s, 3v3s are much better to spectate and host than 4v4s and 5v5s. With smaller team sizes, you can capture the details of skill usage/decision making better and then teach the audience members how the game works in better detail.

A new game mode could solve all of these problems if done well.

Speed up the pace of engagements? Weird you should say that, I and a lot of people actually think the speed of the combat should go WAY down instead to be followable! Autoattack damage needs to be drastically decreased, and the casting times of other abilities (except stunbreaks obviously) needs to go up, as well as their casting animations made more visually distinct, so that they are easily telegraphed, both to players and to audiences, allowing for meaningful dodges, interrupts, and other clutch moves.

Damage should be better balanced too. I have no problem with zerker thieves being able to burst someone down from 100-0 on their own, but it should have a significant cost to them, forcing them to blow all their cooldowns. Currently initiative regenerates so quickly that if it didn’t work the first time htey’re able to come back and try it again 5" later! That’s way too soon for their target to have gotten back any of their defensive cooldowns, and way too soon for a teammate to have come to help.

CC also needs to be reduced. It shouldn’t be possible for a single player to chain-CC someone until they have completely burst them down. If 2 people team up and alternate their CC, that’s fine, but if a single character has that amount of CC, their damage should also be appropriately low.

Leeto.1570:

In August 5 guys will fly all the way from NA to germany to compete for ingame items, how more esports can you get?

About 5 million dollars more esports.

OlrunTheBlade.1486:

I think the main problem with complexity is it doesn’t leave much room for extremely clutch plays. If you watch LoL, you’ll see someone Flash through an Ashe arrow to win a 1v1 that snowballs into an Inhibitor push. In Guild Wars you’ll see two people whacking at each other and dodging periodically. It’s hard to have clutch moments like in LoL.

This can be done in GW2 as well. Just double the damage of everything and reduce time to kill severely.

manveruppd.7601:

Speed up the pace of engagements? Weird you should say that, I and a lot of people actually think the speed of the combat should go WAY down instead to be followable! Autoattack damage needs to be drastically decreased, and the casting times of other abilities (except stunbreaks obviously) needs to go up, as well as their casting animations made more visually distinct, so that they are easily telegraphed, both to players and to audiences, allowing for meaningful dodges, interrupts, and other clutch moves.

Damage should be better balanced too. I have no problem with zerker thieves being able to burst someone down from 100-0 on their own, but it should have a significant cost to them, forcing them to blow all their cooldowns. Currently initiative regenerates so quickly that if it didn’t work the first time htey’re able to come back and try it again 5" later! That’s way too soon for their target to have gotten back any of their defensive cooldowns, and way too soon for a teammate to have come to help.

CC also needs to be reduced. It shouldn’t be possible for a single player to chain-CC someone until they have completely burst them down. If 2 people team up and alternate their CC, that’s fine, but if a single character has that amount of CC, their damage should also be appropriately low.

Slowing down the fight may make it easier to see what’s going on but you still have a group of 10 people fighting constantly. What makes a host want to view one fight over the other and how long should they spend time viewing it? Slower fights may be boring too and may be too forgiving. If you mean slow down the skill usage but speeding up the fight, I definitely support that. I don’t want spammable fast attacks or slow drawn out fights, I want well-timed attacks that can make or break a fight.

Engagement speed <> skill usage speed.

Drawn out fights are good if there is a combo system or there is no self-healing, but gw2 doesn’t have either.

Yeah but if you slow down skill usage surely that will make fights longer anyway? Even if you increase the damage on cooldown skills, making the cast times longer will just make them easier to dodge or interrupt.

The pace of fights really needs a lot of work. At the moment there’s far too great a delta between the burstiest and the tankiest builds. Full-on bunkers have so much healing that the only way to beat them 1v1 is to burst them down before they can even activate their healing. Meaning bursty builds need to have so much damage that anything less tanky than a full-on bunker can be burst down even THROUGH all their healing! That’s far too dramatic a difference, and it means fights will even be over in 2" flat or will drag on for ages and be boring, depending on the stats of the participants. Not to mention that it’s a balancing nightmare!