Tyrian Chronicle: Is sPVP Ready for eSports? .

I’m back, I’m married (thanks for covering for me last week, Ardua), and it’s time for another installment of Tyrian Chronicle!

When anyone mentions PvP in Guild Wars 2, it seems that 9 times out of 10 they’re referring to World vs World. And why not: the WvW maps are something almost totally unique to modern MMOs and support both serious PvP players and folks who mostly stick to the PvE side of the game. With the release of Heart of Thorns, however, it seems that ArenaNet is pushing structured PvP into the limelight with the hopes of turning it into a full-fledged eSport.

Earlier this week ArenaNet announced that they are “relaunching Guild Wars 2 as an eSport”, and introduced a new Pro League series of tournaments and a new competitive leaderboard, called the Guild Challenger League. Structured PvP teams will have the opportunity to participate in the first Pro League series by participating in an open qualifier in mid-November. Once a Pro League season has finished, the lowest-ranked teams will have to defend their position against the highest-ranked teams at the Guild Challenger level.

It’s easy to understand why ArenaNet wants to increase their visibility in the realm of eSports. Games like League of Legends and DOTA 2 have become not only huge money-makers but also cultural touchstones in large part because of their competitive circuits, and entire careers have been built on streaming and commentating the matches. eSports is one of the fastest-growing sectors of modern entertainment, but is sPVP really ready to join the action?

Ready to Rumble

To be fair, Guild Wars 2 is a great PvP game, and definitely the cream of the crop when it comes to player vs. player combat in an MMO. The character designs were clearly designed from the ground up to support fluid, action-packed encounters. You can run and dodge and shoot (arrows, pistols, spells, whatever you have!).

If almost any other MMO announced that they were making a serious push towards eSports it would be laughable, but coming from ArenaNet… well, it seems much more viable.

However, that area of the game has languished a bit in the last few years, receiving little attention and resources. Although the PvP features of the game were heavily promoted at its launch, the PvE aspect is what keeps the bulk of the game’s players logging in on a regular basis, and correspondingly where most of the post-launch time and effort has gone.

The elements of a great competitive structured PvP game are contained in Guild Wars 2, but it’s going to need a little polish and attention to be ready for an influx of eager players.

Do You Like to Watch?

Of course the real popularity of eSports isn’t in the playing, oddly enough – it’s in the viewing. League of Legends finals can fill entire sports arenas with spectators, and Blizzard’s WoW arena matches and Hearthstone tournaments are routinely some of the most-viewed streams on Twitch. Unfortunately, Guild Wars 2 may be ready to join the eSports community from a player and mechanics perspective, but at the moment it falls short as a viewing experience.

All of those spell effects that make the game so fun and pretty for players are incredibly distracting for third party viewers. Even worse, they can obscure moves and cause spectators to miss the game-winning dodge in a sea of lights and sparkles. Watch a LoL stream, and you can see that the spell effects are much more functional than fashionable.

Additionally, it’s challenging for people who are not already structured PvP players to understand the nuances of any fight. Even dedicated Guild Wars 2 PvE players won’t be familiar with some of the moves and strategies, much less any tricks of the current map. DOTA 2 players, for example, play on the same maps as the tournament players, and use the same characters with the same skills. It’s a lot easier to take that hands-on knowledge and use it to understand what’s happening at any given moment in a tournament game.

Adding to the difficulty is the fact that currently structured PvP is more about consistent teamwork than any flashes of brilliance. Again, that makes for a fun game for players, but less of a bombastic viewing experience for spectators.

If sPvP is actually going to gain traction as an eSport, ArenaNet will have to build a better spectator mode and think about turning down spell effects at the very least.

Jack of All Trades, Master of Some

It seems particularly challenging to push for eSports credibility at the same time as the game is also adding raid content in PvE. Structured PvP tournaments and bleeding edge raids are two demanding areas that have almost completely different needs when it comes to profession and item balance.

I wrote here a couple of weeks ago that the tight DPS needs of hard raid content will require plenty of profession tuning by the ArenaNet team – now imagine trying to balance THAT tuning with the needs of a competitive structured PvP game where potentially thousands (if not hundreds of thousands) of dollars hangs in the balance!

It’s not an impossible task, but you can ask any serious WoW PvP player how they feel about their abilities being nerfed to fix a PvE problem, or vice-versa, and you’ll probably get a pretty tart reply. ArenaNet has already announced that sPVP profession balance will be tweaked on a 3-month schedule, and while it’s a good sign that they have a plan, it remains to be seen how they’ll balance those changes with the demands of cutting edge raiders.

Getting structured PvP to the same eSports prominence as, say, WoW’s arena matches seems a lofty but reasonable goal. The game already supports high quality PvP encounters, and ArenaNet has a pretty talented team with a history of solid PvP design.

However, the game is pretty seriously lacking from the perspective of a non-playing viewer, and making a push for both hardcore PvP and hardcore PvE at the same time is a lot for the studio to tackle. It remains to be seen how these changes are practically implemented in Heart of Thorns.