Blizzard Entertainment's World of Warcraft is comfortably sitting atop the PC gaming scene, with millions of players worldwide taking part in online adventures every day. Blizzard has recently opened up participation in its global Arena Tournament, inviting players to join a special Arena Tournament realm to compete with the greatest players across the globe in the hunt for fame, fortune, and in-game immortality. We recently had the chance to sit down with Blizzard's Lead Designer Tom Chilton and eSports Manager Joong Kim to talk about the Arena Tournament realm, and to gain some additional insight as to what Arenas and PvP mean to the future of World of Warcraft.
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.
GameSpy: Arenas definitely turn WoW into more of a competitive game, but the Arena Tournament realm has a wildly different approach from the live realms. You can avoid the leveling and PvE game entirely, and start off with a full set of competitive PvP gear. Do you feel that players will want to have this kind of approach available at all times?
Tom Chilton: We don't really intend for the Arena Tournament realm to replace WoW. We do feel like the arena games are a game within the game, a meta-game of WoW. We don't necessarily want people to feel like WoW is no longer a game to them. Also, within that, it kind of makes sense to structure the tournaments in a way we're doing. They're not something we can run all the time, so we've broken them into this seasonal concept, allowing us to pace how often we have them, and to make sure that they're as well-supported as we can support them.
GameSpy: Have you worked out how often that you'll be running these arena tournaments?
Joong Kim, eSports Manager: We have two qualifiers for this year. The online portion of the tournaments will last until July. We're looking at this, and seeing how well it runs, so we can evaluate where we go with it for next year.
GameSpy: Is there any specific metric for success that you're looking at for how you'll end up pushing arena tournaments in the future?
Joong Kim: Participation is a big thing. Everyone seems to be having a really good time, and that's a very positive indicator for success.
Tom Chilton: I don't think we have any particular kind of number of players that we're trying to achieve. It's more that we have this goal that we want WoW to have eSports representation. There seems to be a demand for it. When Joong and the tournaments team talk to different companies that are interested in broadcasting, they're very interested in WoW, as far as eSports goes. We want to try it out, see how it pans out.
GameSpy: What do you think of the current state of eSports? Some of the original eSports leagues have recently closed operations.
Joong Kim: We definitely want to grow within the eSports community. We're working with ESL, the Electronic Sports League in Europe, they're big Warcraft III tournament guys. In the US, you have CGS, they're running tournaments, and of course in Korea, eSports is huge.
GameSpy: What are the different breakdowns worldwide? Are arenas very popular in Asia or North America versus Europe?
Tom Chilton: They seem to be very popular pretty equivalently. Obviously that's according to population ratios. Where we have the most players, we have more players doing arenas. But the ratio seems to hold up very well.
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