The Esports Dream
GW2 will never be an E-sport. Their top awards barely break 5 digits and the viewership is about 1500-3000 at any given time.
I just watched smite, a completely F2P 3rd person Moba that barely even shows up in the top 10 twitch championships with 30,000 viewers on just the home channel on twitch at noon on a friday when everyone is working…
Anet either needs to get serious and buckle down on PvP balance and up the ante by increasing the award pools from a measly 25K to something like 200k or 400-500k to be serious about this as a competitive e-sport.
But that’s not going to happen. With patches only coming every 3 months, that’s enough time for 25% of the user base to pick up an leave because of a bad meta or boring gameplay/lack of content delivery. Look what happened to WoW: half their user sub base vanished in a year from underdelivery and poor feedback practice with their user base.
esports is the worst thing that can happen to a game
the only reason i came back to GW2 is because Anet’s attempts to break into esports fail every single time, thus promising a bright future to this game, unlike cesspools around such as WoW, LoL and Dota
Alex Shadowdagger – Thief – Blacktide
The combat system is simply too casual. They’d need a whole new level of interactions, such as skills flipping over into combo states due to environmental status or something. Think like black desert or whatever. I’m sure there’s better ideas, however, the point remains.
It’s simply too easy to face-roll with meta builds and I’d argue that the lack of solid balance is due to the combat’s over-simplistic nature. Sorry, anet, but that perfect balance between casual and hardcore is just not possible without dithering the quality of one gameplay type over another (PvE over PvP etc).