Countdown to Warlords : Blizzcon Tournament

Last night, I watched some Blizzcon, most notably, I watched the PvP-tournament. Two teams of three people slugging it out in an arena. I got a beer, and just watched the stream. This stream is free, although the finale may not be?

Just to give it some background, I suck at PvP...or at least I think, because I never actually do it. For me, PvP is like a LFR-raid, only with more people just minding their own business, once in a while you may get a good team, but mostly, it's everyone for themselves.

All my honorpoints on Argent Dawn.

So, last night I watched the matches, and I found it mildly entertaining. There is one huge problem, without the commentators, I had no idea what was going on. And I have a reasonable understanding of most classes, being an altoholic and all.

But just looking at the screen, with the sound of, most of the time stuff happens so fast. And it all comes down to cooldowns. Now some of them you could see coming. Manatea-stacks you can count, the trinket-cooldwon was on screen. But to really fathom what was going on, as a spectator, you really need to see all the cooldowns.  Luckily the commentators apparantly had that info.

With that in mind, half of the kills, came completely sudden. In playback, you could see what was going on, and most of the time it was because the commentators where talking about another player, and suddenly, boom, dead player.

It's like in football, when a player just kicks the ball towards the goal from midfield, and it miraculously finds the goal. There was no real attack play, it just happened. Now, if we, as spectators had all the information, we oursleves probably could see it coming, although so much is happening.

I wonder if it is really feasible as an e-sport. Even with my knowledge of classes, I lost track. And most of the times, I was actually looking more at the health-bars, then at the screenplay.

What I mostly remember from last night was Lore. The community/manager from Blizzard, sitting in the middle of the commentators. Now, I have known Lore for a long time. He once had a blog, which is still buried deep down in my follow/list, which concerned Paladins. He stopped blogging, and starting to do ´The Weekly Marmot´, him ranting about stuff. In about three years, he made a lot of show, also combining with gamebreaker, doing stuff, and then he went to work for Blizzard.

At the beginning he seemed a little bit flustered, but he came into the groove later on, but really, that working for Blizzard really exploded the hair....