I keep paying on my monthly subscription, but I haven’t logged into World of Warcraft in a couple months now. It was this Gamespy interview with Tom Chilton that really changed my mind about WoW,
GameSpy: The World of Warcraft Arena Tournament has been a great excuse for us to transform the WoW players on staff from emoting clickers into full-fledged PvPers. It’s been a difficult transition to say the least. It’s a whole new game for us. So let’s talk about the Arena Tournament, and what it means for World of Warcraft.
Tom Chilton, Lead Designer: The big objective is to build WoW into a viable eSports game platform. We feel like with the introduction of the arena team and the arena system, we’ve got a way to set ourselves up for competitive eSports. We’ve been pretty happy with how the system has been turning out, it’s a very popular system within WoW. It’s fostered a strong sense of competition and community within that. It’s turned out as a real sub-game within the game.
GameSpy: Why eSports and why now?
Tom Chilton: Before this, we didn’t really have a good forum for competitive eSports. WoW PvP was just kind of there. For example, our battlegrounds always had the limitations of the Horde having to play against Alliance, it was very themed toward the conflict within the game itself. So it didn’t lend itself all that well to an eSports kind of setup. It works with arenas, and we feel like arenas can break through that.
I play on a PVP server and the main thing I’ve enjoyed about WoW, aside from leveling, is world PVP. I’ve even enjoyed it when some Horde toons mercilessly ganked me repeatedly (it pisses my wife off, but I can have grudging respect for, and learn from, people who are better at it than I am).
But it is very clear that for Blizzard PVP=Arenas and the entire PVP experience is being driven by considerations for the Arenas. I suppose if you like Arenas that’s great, but personally I can’t stand them. Playing dozens of battles over and over again on the same small handful of maps is not my idea of fun — it’s like everything annoying about the Battleground system raised to the nth power.
And Chilton’s idea of WoW as an e-sport “platform” is just loopy. I’ll probably keep my account and log on once in awhile until the expansion comes out, but IMO they’re really sucking the fun out of PVP with this single-minded obssession on arenas and e-sports.