Another week, another wonderful reading experience with The Structure! I hope everyone’s dealing well with their GW2 withdrawals! Just remember there’s the stress test on Wednesday (June 27) from 10am to 2pm PDT (1pm to 5pm EDT, 5pm to 9pm UTC)! This week, we’re going to talk a little bit about eSports and Guild Wars 2. I’ve written about GW2’s eSports viability on my blog before, but this time I’m actually talking about what kind of stuff we’re seeing already that makes it fully-castable.

Naturally, there are the essentials that you have to mention every now and then but shouldn’t talk about much. How much time is left in the match? Who’s ahead in the score? What’s the point-lead like? Which team has which objectives? At the current rate, who will win? Who’s favored to win? They’re really obvious, but we still have to mention them.

It’s also a little bit obvious, but you can talk about the teams in the match. Eventually, certain teams will be known for certain tactics. Certain players will become known for playing certain professions. As the game progresses after launch, we’ll see a lot of different team compositions coming out that will offer a variety of things. Supposedly, five-mesmer teams were ROFLstomping during the last beta.

I would certainly hope someone can tell who’s winning here.

Most of the stuff about the teams in a match are things that should be discussed going into the match and at the very beginning of it. During the match, there are a lot of different map tactics we’ve already seen going on that become crucial. Skills that give Swiftness in an AoE are already becoming a thing, and when it comes to high-end competition post-launch, they’ll be huge. Getting to your first objective and beating the other team to the first objective by two or three seconds could be the end of the match.

Think about it: two very even teams are lined up with almost identical compositions and the entire match is very even. But, the red team got both their objective and the middle objective two ticks earlier than the blue team in the match. That’s four points that the blue team shouldn’t have lost by. If you start thinking about being seconds early on killing Svanir or the Chieftain, you’re really thinking about a huge difference. There are a lot of matches in the hot join SPvP scene that end with a kill on one of the two Forest Creatures. If both creatures spawn when it’s 450 red to 470 blue, but the one nearest the red team spawns two seconds earlier, it’s game over if the blue team can’t somehow steal the kill.

If the other team had a creature kill instead of us, they wouldn’t have won here, but they’d at least be caught up to us.

Much as how you split your initial workers in StarCraft 2 is a huge deal, it will be equally important how teams split up at the beginning of matches. Is it better for their comp to send just one person to the objective nearest their base or will they need two to defend it if the enemy sends one over at the beginning? How many should they send toward the middle and how many should they send toward the Forest Creature or trebuchet or enemy’s objective?

On each map, there will be significant things to look at. Trebuchets can be very effective at killing enemy players out of the clock tower, so it will eventually be necessary to have someone destroy the enemy’s trebuchet. But, when will be the best time to do it? When will we see the time allocated for it? There’s a lot of things that, when you really get into high-level competition, will make some teams look like utter noobs, even though the majority of players will be wondering why it’s bad.

I personally thought this was the best time: when there was nothing else to do.

Here are a few things you could do when you get really picky with people. Blind condition only causes the next hit to miss. If you see someone get blinded and waste their big attack on it, they’re being noob. It also doesn’t stack, so if you see a player blind a player that’s already been blinded, the blinding player is a noob. If you see a player take a jump from one roof to another when it would be a second faster to drop to the ground, that player will be a noob.

Casting obviously isn’t about calling all of the players noobs. Casters have to be good at the game, sure, but many of the players in the matches are going to be better than the casters. But, when you really stop and think about a lot of what we’re already starting to see developing in tactics, and start looking at a lot of footage, there’s a ton of stuff out there that we’ll be able to fill matches with for commentary without digging into pointless things.

Casting isn’t about calling people noobs, but bunching like this deserves it.

Not having a spectator mode obvious puts a huge damper on all of this and puts eSports on the back-burner. ArenaNet knows the necessity of spectator mode to eSports, though, and they’re going to get it to us after launch (building a good PvP system is first priority). In the mean time, go look at some PvP footage. There’s a lot of PvP footage in the GW2WvW video gallery to go through. While you’re watching it, think about them critically. Put yourself in the place of a caster: what would you talk about? What do you see people doing that’s exceptionally good or pathetically bad? What do you see people doing that gives them a clear advantage over others?

Sorry this is coming today instead of last night. My friend kept me out a bit too late. Anyway, today let’s talk about eSports. Everyone else has been talking about it. ArenaNet has been talking about it. Now, it’s my turn. ANet has said many times that their goal is to get GW2 accepted into the eSports community, but it’s not an automatic thing by any means. I want to take a look at what they’re doing right so far and what they’ve still got to do.

What Will Make GW2 An eSport Thusfar

First off, I firmly believe the game has more than the potential it needs to become an eSport once they finish everything they’re working on. Why? Let’s look at what we have first. To begin with, we’ve got beautiful maps in Structured PvP, beautiful effects, and beautiful characters. It’s not as important in an eSport (look at SC2), but being eye-catching does at least help if someone else walks by and sees it. The maps are fairly good size. You’re not wandering around without ever seeing people, but you’re not all stuck right on top of each other the entire time like WoW’s arenas. The objective style also forces combat to take place all over the map rather than becoming about one or two bottlenecks where all of the action takes place. Capture point objectives are also easy to understand and easy to show progress of the game via score. The action stays fast paced with the short duration and recharge of skills and the dodge mechanic. But, at the same time, it doesn’t become the boring “kill the enemy in three seconds” type of deal you see in other MMORPG’s PvP scenes. It’s something that’s easy to watch, understand, and get excited about.

Here’s one of the other, incredibly important aspects to GW2’s Structured PvP in regards to eSports: match setup. They’re giving us a lot of control in setting up matches for PvP. When you’re just joining a regular match, you can choose a lot of things even down to what size team you want. Tournaments, however, are all 5v5, which is good for consistency. The better part, though, is players can organize the tournaments and send invitations to it. This means that if GW2 were to be picked up by an outside eSports organization, like MLG for example, they’d be able to set up their tournaments in game without any extra hassles or need for private servers. At the same time, ArenaNet will run their own tournaments much like they do in GW.

Lastly, this game isn’t even out yet, and it already has a following. Getting fans for GW2 as an eSport won’t take much. Over one million of us signed up for the beta in just over 48 hours. I’d love to get a number of how many people have pre-purchased by now, within roughly the same time frame. I’d be willing to bet it’s even more. Getting a fan base of viewers won’t be a problem for GW2. Half of the battle is already done.

What GW2 Needs To Become An eSport

Other than needing to be released, GW2 needs two things to work on becoming an eSport. The first is that it needs an observer mode. Eric Flannum recently told us that we wouldn’t have it at launch, because they want to develop the rest of the PvP system into something good first. It’s a logical philosophy: what good is an observer mode if what you can observe isn’t worth observing? Some people have been making a big deal over this, but it’s really not a big deal. GW2 is a completely different playstyle from what any of us are used to. It’s not like other games. Not only that, but a lot of the professions have new or different mechanics from what even GW players have experienced. It’s going to take everyone a bit to learn the playstyle of the game, learn their profession, and become skilled at PvP. Sure, there will be some people at the start that know how to do it, but for the most part no one is going to actually be good enough for an eSports community to care at the start.

There are a few things I’d like to see from the observer mode. Naturally, the scoreboard and stuff need to be there. So do all of the health bars. I’d like to see a camera set up similar to what they did for GW. For those who don’t know, observer mode in GW featured a camera that you could center around several places across the map or around any player and it would follow them. Totally free control of the camera is something that’s a lot harder to do in an MMORPG than it is in a RTS like SC2. As long as there are enough places you can center the camera around the map, in addition to the players, I feel this gives more than enough ability to view the game. Also, I really want to be able to target another player without focusing the camera on them. We can’t do this in GW, and it sucks. Another thing I’d also like to see is a skill monitor in observer mode. We don’t have it in the game normally (at least thusfar and they haven’t mentioned it), but it’s pretty important in observer mode to be able to tell who is doing what for an eSport. I’d also like to see a smaller skill/health bar pop up when you’re following a player. I basically want it to feel like I just stepped into their shoes, you know? I want to be able to see what’s on cooldown, what they’re casting, what they’re holding, etc. I think if ANet could give us this in an unobtrusive style (easily done), the observer mode would be a great success.

The last thing we need for GW2 to be able to become an eSports is a set of casters. Not casters like the professions in the games: we need casters that sit in front of their camera and roll footage and talk really fast about what’s going on. We need guys that can make it sound really exciting and that can learn everything there is about GW2 PvP. Think about watching European or Latin-American soccer. Think of those casters. That’s what we need in GW2. Those guys know soccer in and out, but when something happens they’re screaming “GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAL!!!!” at the top of their lungs. If we can get a bunch of guys like that into GW2, we’d be set the moment we have an observer mode.

Nightly video to make up for last night is pretty interesting to check out.  Gamebreaker TV takes a look at GW2’s chances of becoming an Esport.