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Starym

Blizzard "Very Interested" in PvE Esports

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Blizzard esports director Kim Phan talks about potential plans for the PvE scene.

 

Legion's Mythic raid progress race, or rather races, have been pretty popular, especially with Nighthold, and every time the competition gets brought up, it inevitably brings with it the discussion on just how exactly each guild is handling it, who can afford to spend more RL time on the race, who had better luck with drops and who the "real" winner actually is. An easy fix to all that would be if Blizzard stepped in and made and enforced some rules for the race, possibly also adding some rewards and making it all official. There's been talk about something like this pretty much since Vanilla and now there's... well, even more talk. Kim Phan, esports director at Blizzard, had a conversation with PCGamesN in which they talk about the PvE scene in WoW and whether Blizzard intend to do something official with it.

Quote

“We definitely see it as an opportunity. Whether someone calls it an eSport or not is another thing, but there is a competitive element to it and my team is very interested in it.

We have experimented last year and we're going to continue to experiment this year. Now, whether or not we make it a big program with prize money and all of that stuff - I don't think that's the only thing that defines eSports anymore. For me, eSports is just being able to watch to see who the best is at something."

 

So, a lot of interest but not that many plans to share just yet. Hopefully it will be more than just a few more live events a year, as Legion wasn't that great for the raiding top guilds, pushing quite a few more than usual to quit after Nighthold, and many others to consider it. With twitch viewership being quite high during progress, even on much lower ranked guilds as the very top don't stream their progress, there's definitely potential for a pretty popular event here. Even something as simple as tournament servers would greatly help to make the competition more even, as Phan herself pointed out.

In any case, whether it's Mythic+ dungeons or the top end raid race, we hope to see a bit more focus on the PvE aspect of WoW in terms of tournaments and events and it seems Blizzard do as well, even if they aren't quite sure what exactly to do with it just yet.

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I can't believe it took them over a decade to make this decision. :p  Competition for world and server "firsts" has always been popular.  Still, I'm glad they are getting more involved.  Good to see.

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They aren't getting more involved unfortunately... in PVE that is. This was an answer given a million times, to a question asked a million times. I highly doubt we will see anything that brings monetary relevance to PVE any time soon.

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1 hour ago, Sharknad0 said:

They aren't getting more involved unfortunately... in PVE that is. This was an answer given a million times, to a question asked a million times. I highly doubt we will see anything that brings monetary relevance to PVE any time soon.

I agree and they're definitely not giving any money into it, but they could be "trying" new things. From the full interview I'd say at least tournament realms for Mythic progress is possible.

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This would have to go hand in hand with tougher crackdowns on selling runs for real cash, and other techniques Blizzard does not approve of, in order to create reasonable competition. Do that and this could be really interesting, otherwise it's a poor idea.

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On 3/7/2017 at 3:59 PM, Starym said:

I agree and they're definitely not giving any money into it, but they could be "trying" new things. From the full interview I'd say at least tournament realms for Mythic progress is possible.

True. On top of that, they are allowing, or asking, for others to host their own tournaments. Hopefully that takes off with the help of interested third parties.

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