Competitive MMOs, Where Art Thou? Written By Sean “Blazek” Emes, Edited by Jerry “LordJerith” Prochazka
There is no doubt that the popularity of competitive gaming is on the rise, and surprisingly, many companies have been giving their support for our scene. The entirety of the Multiplayer Online Battle Arena, or MOBA for short, has made a huge ruckus in the community recently. Valve announced a 1 Million dollar Defense of the Ancients (DotA) 2 tournament prior to the game even being released; and just recently Riot Games made a claim for a $5 Million overall investment for the second season of League of Legends. While possibly a bit excessive, it is proof that the competitive scene is growing at an exponential rate… yet there is one genre that seems to be struggling in the mix: MMOs.
Trying to one up me Riot Games?
In recent years, there have been several attempts to popularize the idea of competitive MMO gaming, most notably the arena system in World of Warcraft. Unfortunately, the game constantly had balance issues, and the Cataclysm expansion has yet to provide a balanced PvP experience. A minor attempt was made in Aion with a player run tournament, which involved an interesting team based 1v1 game, but with a declining player base this tournament hardly made it outside of Korea. The closest thing to successful was Guild Wars, and while the game is a bit dated, the entire user experience was built around an arena system with PvE and story as more or less an option. It still holds a decent player base and remains one of the few “successful” competitive MMO games.
Guild Wars 2: It's Go Time Baby!
With that in mind, a glance into the future shows us that there is only one potential option for competitive MMOs for 2012: Guild Wars 2 (GW2). With the success of the previous game and its numerous expansions, the GW2 developer, ArenaNet, has the opportunity to build on the launch title with improved graphics and a very experienced design team. This may have been what prompted the exciting and frightening announcement that Guild Wars 2 would take a step away from the holy trinity of character class archetypes: tank, healer, DPS.
While unfortunately, my PvP brethren, we have very little to hope for in terms of a competitive scene on any main stages or LAN tournaments, it may just take one very successful game to push other developers towards what we truly want: competitive MMO games. In a sense, our eyes are on you Arenanet… no pressure!
Article reproduced with permission of vVv Gaming and the Author
