Short version - Wow was never meant to be viewer friendly.
“Pve e-sports” is just stupid, watching people rush through dungeons is the silliest concept for a tournament, especially in a mmorpg.
Arena e-sporsts also doesn’t work, there is a LOT of fundamental information that is simply lost to the avg viewer, juking kicks, things like using shadow word death on blinds, etc, are simply not a visual spectacle unlike other games where even a rookie can understand what’s going on.
Design Wow to be a good mmorpg again instead of this e-sports stupidity, ty.
I think the real issue is why are you paying a sub to watch someone else play? I mean… … … That’s like paying for netflix and then watching me watch netflix.
There are few issues to this, I will name two I think most important:
Representation - It’s hard to care about a competition where no one plays what I main. The top key meta is so set in stone these days compared to early days of MDI(s). Back then, the competition is wild wild west, players are often specialist that play what they main instead of everyone rerolling to THE META.
MDI is a worse format than TGP because they play weird, no one plays like that in live keys. TGP to a large extent is more relatable because our team can actually mimic some strategy for our team’s highest key, it may not be a 20 but some strategy is reusable in a 16/17.
Tournament integrity - incident like how Gingi winning the plunderstorm tournament with a blatant exploit shows Blizzard has 0 care about competitive spirit. This is not the first time, previous plagueborer incident was exactly the same, team abuse a strategy and won the competition because they have access to direct communication with organizers, and organizers said Ok. ???
We should continue to ignore Blizzard tournaments until they address the basics of a competition, competition integrity.
I’ve never had any interest in Mythic+, whether it’s me playing it or watching someone else play it. I don’t watch the Classic stuff either. I’m more interested in playing the game than watching it.
Certain people enjoy specific aspects of m+; however, m+ as a whole is detrimental to the player base.
We saw delves surpass m+ in popularity, so it’s pretty obvious what people want.
What players enjoy is bite-sized content that provides rewards without requiring an entire evening in a raid or forcing them to bang their heads against a wall in m+ over the tiniest mistakes.
I just think its boring to watch wow group content in general.
I also dont think the fact mdi and awc exists is blizzard tying to e-sport it, they just supporting a thing hardcore fans enjoy, that’s not trying to make it an e-sport. E-sport in fact would have plethora of people financing it whitout the need of them financing it, check SC2 for example.
Thats literally all that reacts are about and people love them lol.
Most people don’t play high M+ keys, so they don’t even understand what they’re seeing. It’s like only watching some people kill trash in a dungeon. And most of the time it’s not even like these groups get creative and do some wild stuff, it’s just the same meta picks over and over again. It’s so boring.
How? Players who aren’t competing for spots with the top echelon of other players can completely ignore M+ if they don’t enjoy it.
Are there any numbers to actually show delve popularity?
But even if it’s true, this isn’t the slam dunk you seem to think it is. The more difficult content becomes, the fewer people will participate in it; the fact that delves can be soloed in 20 minutes at a much lower item level than it takes to get similar gear from M+ is going to have more players than M+. Also, delves offering as good of gear as the bottom 5 levels of keys means that by the time many players are going to jump into M+ at points where they can get rewards, they’re at a +7 in difficulty which is already going to price a lot of players out.
Many players want this, sure. But many players also want challenging content they can progress through. There’s a reason Blizzard has only added more ways to engage with the game and more difficulty ranges to the existing modes. There are enough players seeking both that designing for just one would leave a lot of players without a home (in terms of the game design they want).
In the case of MDI, it’s also completely unrecognizable to how every key most players will ever run. The entire format centers around putting players in key levels that are as much as 50% of the levels they’re capable of running to see just how much they can pull together without being overwhelmed. How many players on live capable of running +12s are spending significant time running +7s as fast as possible?
M+ is the most popular form of endgame in any mmo, ever. By participation numbers, by satisfaction surveys, by engagement. Even in a bad season like this one, nothing else comes close.
If you wanna convince anyone that moldy-candle torghast “surpassed” m+, I’m gonna need some numbers.
I like M+, but I have zero interest in watching people stream video games. Different strokes for different folks, but watching people play something instead of just doing it myself never resonated with me.
They have been trying to turn arena into an e-sport since TBC. MMORPGs don’t lend themselves to e-sport nonsense, especially not completely unwatchable wow PvP.
People dance around a pillar, while a healer makes everyone immortal until someone makes a mistake or the healer runs out of mana. All while random abilities happen, which would require you to be very familiar with the class using those abilities to even know what’s going on.
Compare that with league of legends. Characters have an auto attack, they have three visually identifiable normal abilities, and a visually identifiable ultimate. It takes much less understanding to know what’s going on, especially in the 1v1s that happen throughout a match.
Edit:
To the main point of this thread, most people don’t watch other people play mplus when they can just go play mplus. Worlds is slightly more likely to have an audience, because it’s significantly harder for someone to just “go do mythic raiding”. Much more barrier to entry.
People are watching classic for the streamer drama, not the game itself. Also the guild has a bunch of people who never played WoW before streaming it so that’s bound to inflate numbers.
I play and enjoy M+ but don’t watch MDI. The novelty of watching some absolute sweats do +19 keys kind of wears off after the first one. It’s not a fun spectator event.
I don’t play Hardcore at all but it’s fun to watch. It’s just fun to watch some unhinged maniacs screaming as their 500 hour /played character dies over something stupid.