GW1 failure: Esport

This is a question that`s been on my mind for quite a while. GW1 was meant to be a CORPG, based on skills, and not on grinding/time played. I wonder why GW was never in big leagues like CEVO and CAL, nor in international gaming events. This is, in my honnest opinion, a failure because GW is much more balanced that other RPG`s which are integral parts of other leagues, and those caracteristics make gw a good canditate to be an esport. I would like to know why, in your opinion, GW remained strictly within the system implanted by ANet.

Also, in an interview, someone asked if Anet would make an effort for GW2 to be more of an esport, the answer was very vague in my opinion. Nothing was answered really, only a general statement was made.

GW has no pro scene really, is this due to a lack of effort from Anet (balance wise and promotion wise), or is this due to a simple lack of interest coming from the international scene?

Which MMO besides WoW has had serious esport attention?

Even GW has had a handful of league play here and there, that kind of thing doesn't count.

didn't they have that tournament in taiwan early on in GW's life? i guess there just hasn't been time to organise the events with all the producing content for every 6 months, then a new game. seems like Anet have been going kinda non stop on their production schedule

imo the main problem (well, not problem) with GW in terms of esports is the fact that one has to play it to understand what's going on in a GvG (knowing the skills, party roles, classes, etc). WoW has serious attention cuz of the large playerbase and it's easier to get into PvP (read: takes less skill), more people get interested. However, the majority of GW are casuals and/or PvE players (who sometimes visit RA/AB), and the situation has been like this since the beggining.
Btw, so far GW2 seems to be a PvE oriented game for me, so it won't make it to be an esport imo.

Cause anet/ncsoft never really wanted third party support (sponsers etc).

Anet seems to be more interested in the fuzzy care bear demographic, pve'ers.

From proph to early Nightfall, there were $100k championships and they were big effin deals. Unfortunately, way more people stayed in PvE rather than move to PvP, keeping the population short once the big declines came. GvG was e-sport worthy, but apparently Anet saw something different. The days of WM Pride and idiot savants, etc, came to a close. Boon Prot meta for life.

I doubt that's true as ANET's primary objective is to make money.

They never wanted to give up their monopoly on GW code and servers, there is a huge difference here. ANet spent significant resources bringing in third parties to host tournaments ($100,000 series etc) and whatnot, but they never evolved because ANet never let third parties make servers, and didn't have the resources (both in prizes and other funding) to support ongoing series due to the semi-F2P quality of the game not providing additional funds.

I actually remember big money tournaments back when Faction was still new. Think it was 100$k and the trophy was of course shown in GtoB.

GW competative used to be pretty damn big (as people said before). Problem why you didn't see it on those general esport websites is because aNet arranged all the esports themselves. Tournaments were promoted on GW's main page and not anywhere else. If you wanted to see a match, all you had to do was hop on to guildwars and use the spectator option (kinda like sourceTV, although this came earlier).

GW veterans will remember names like War Machine [WM], in those days guilds that were big in ladders and tournaments were known all over guildwars. I think the problem is that whenever a guild was good enough to win 1 tournament, that guild basically won everything else as well. The pvp in Guild Wars is kind of like a rock paper scissors system atm, one spike build (lets say ele) will rape through everything untill it meets a counter team (knockdown/interrupt) who will get raped by another spike build that is not countered by their build. Whereas GW pvp really shines when both teams have a balanced build.

From what I've seen in the ele GW2 videos skills (e.g. phoenix) now require more thinking than just using the right pattern (upkeep 7,8 ... spam 1,2,3,4 ... 1,2,3,4 ... etc). So I'm confident that the pvp will be an upgrade to what it is now.

To paraphrase from another forum, hamstorm sounded awesome.

1. No instant unlocks.

2. No PvP rewards.
(by that I don't mean GvG winner reward)



These two combined did a lot of damage to PvP.

If you don't believe me, compare JQ after the release of Factions, and JQ with rewards we have now.


In a game called Guild WARS, doing repetitive mindless tasks in the same corner of the world (= farming) was very productive while winning in PvP was .. 'joy of winning and PvPers should be satisfied with that alone'. Yeah, and PvErs should be satisfied with killing mobs for no reward as well (say that loud and see the rage).


And let's not go into how titles were retroactive due to their nature regarding PvE content, but if you PvPed before titles you really didn't get any benefit unless HAing I guess.

And who, besides the few remaining PvPers, really gives a crap?

/troll

What makes you say that? We're getting what we always wanted: pure UAX for everyone, right from the start, no PvE required at all. Combine that with hot-joinable games a la CS:S, ladders and rankings that you can see in-game, smaller team sizes for faster team formation and more focus on individual skill, and I don't see how you can say that PvP won't be a focus in GW2. Remember, these aren't simply devs going on about how cool the combo system is (hamstorm example is wise to keep in mind), these are confirmed features that the game will have.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72ur1...layer_embedded

This is part 1 of the profesional coverage Anet made of the GW factions championship which they never released for some reason. GW1 as an e sport was a very big thing with some big prizes and im sure anet would of carried on their support had they not decided to make GW2. Hopefully they can put this sort of effort in for GW2 will be awesome.

to anyone that brought the 100k tournament up, i am well aware of the existence of those events, and as for the iQ-WM era rivalty, i was around at that time, so i also know about that. The question that i was really bringing up in this thread was the absence of interest from 3rd parties. GW was never part of multi-games tournament, or third party leagues.

IMO, third party events encourage the pro scene and the development of the pvp scene and the lack of real rewards drove the veterans away and stopped creativity.