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PS: On the topic of competitive GW2 as a whole:
As someone who has had competitive gaming and video game tournaments be a regular part of my life for over 5 years, I’d like to see these sorts of things taken more seriously. I’ve seeded and helped organize many tournaments, with much more entrants and much stricter time constraints than GW2 tourneys, and I can attest to the fact that the competitive aspects of GW2 are not run to the standard of other competitive communities. To be honest, I don’t think that the people in charge of GW2’s competitive growth are people who have ever been a part of a successful competitive community.
The main problem is though: This isn’t their fault. The devs have a responsibility to their product, GW2, as a whole, and perhaps the amount of resources spent organizing GW2 as an e-sport is simply too much of a cost; moreover, as I said, they most likely aren’t people who have had much experience organizing a competitive e-sport, as there are only a handful of such people. Even volunteers, like Blu (whose support I much appreciate), are doing the best they can, yet they aren’t necessarily experienced with these sorts of things.
Compare this to the Super Smash Bros. Melee community, which I have been an active member in for years. Running a local tournament is a full time 12 hour job, and can involve being responsible for up to 100 entrants (and even more if it’s a regional or national tournament). These people are extremely dedicated and passionate about growing the competition of Melee, and everything is handled with the utmost efficiency in mind. Bracketing and seeding has been refined to an art and tournaments have a standardized format involving Pools, a double elim bracket (also what is with Single Elim in GW2? why?), and seeding considerations which include region conflicts and strength of player, as ranked by previous tournament results. In contrast to the ToL and other past tournaments, everything is run with a completely objective criteria with full transparency in a very efficient manner.
There needs to be a earnest willingness to truthfully and effortfully come up with a plan to growing the GW2 community, and also to conduct tourneys in a professional and streamlined way, to encourage GW2 as an e-sport. Without that, I can see this game completely dying after this tournament.
-Haley
/rant
/posting on forums ever again
So I’m going to be the first of probably many to complain. I’ll try to keep the criticism constructive, otherwise this would just be a rage filled post.
First of all, the format of this tournament from the start was completely under-planned. You open up a tourney to which the prizes for many of the teams are PVE items worth hours and hours of grinding and other PVE activities. Anyone could have told you dozens (I guess hundreds, actually) of unknown players would enter, particularly those who don’t really participate in sPvP that often. This is great in terms of PvP activity, pretty much exactly what we need to get people interested in PvP in the first place.
However, this PvP tourney is the only event that ANet has organized in a long time, and probably for a long time, directly for competitive PvP. I’ve been waiting for about a year for an opportunity like this, since PAX and since my last real team, LXR. I’ve queued with many PUGs in the last year, consisting of old teammates and in game friends, keeping my skills sharp and trying to keep my interest alive since there has not really been a competitive scene to speak of, and because of this I’ve been unable to put a team of 5 dedicated players together.
Now, upon the announcement of the Tourney of Legends, my friends and I had our interests piqued. This led to Jsu and I formally making a team with dedicated members, when for weeks or months beforehand, we had queued casually with old teammates, unable to find dedicated members for a team or even a reason for us to be motivated to do so. We’ve now been practicing for weeks and discussing strategies, as any competitive gaming team would.
My enjoyment in this game, as well as my personal skill, is probably at its highest point right now, and it’s all thanks to the Tourney of Legends. This was a great attempt by ANet to foster competitive growth in the PvP community, and judging by the hundreds of teams who applied, it seems they reached their goal. Yet, what about the rest of the competitive PvP community?
As far as I can tell, 8 teams (a couple of which I don’t even know, which is ridiculous considering how much I’m online and how many competitive players I know) of competitive PvPers were guaranteed entry to this tournament, yet the reasoning for those teams is indiscernible. There are 8 teams that have been deemed qualified to be guaranteed entry into the ToL, and after that, all teams are treated equally. How can this be fair? Much more than those 40 players have been active in this game, waiting for an opportunity like this, waiting for any kind of revitalization to the competition of this game. Yet, anyone outside of those 40 lucky players gets to be entered into a lottery to see if they are allowed to compete; a group of 5 PVE friends who perhaps decided to enter for the chance of winning prizes worth lots of gold, perhaps with an average of rank 15, is given the same weight as my team, a team of 5 dedicated players who have put thousands of hours into PvP.
I hope that there can be some reconsideration into how this tournament is seeded and has selected its entrants. In my opinion, the best way to seed this tournament would have been by recognizing any names who have previously been active in PvP in any of the team rosters (by which I mean having had competed in a past tournament), ranking those teams accordingly, and then continuing with the rest. I’m sure that would have been more work, but there is no way that more than 20 or so teams (NA) would have members who have competed in tournaments in the past. It’s ridiculous for the last dozen or so of these teams to be totally neglected in terms of seeding, especially when there are 64 teams allowed to enter.
This doesn’t exist.