Don't get me wrong, ANY new tournament is great for
pushing forward WoW as an eSport. However this newly announced 3v3 tournament
at Dreamhack is not progressive for the development of the European PvP scene.

Before I discuss the ESL tournament, I'm first going to talk about some of the setbacks that the Euro PvP scene has. To understand the problems, firstly you must look at the root of the issue: We have no BG9 equivalent
in Europe, the best players are scattered over many different battlegroups, and
although some people have suggested that Stormscale and Cyclone are the most competitive
battlegroups, usually those claims are made by players ON those particular BGs.
5v5 and 2v2 qualifier results on the event realms would speak otherwise.
Players from Blackout, Reckoning, Rampage and the French battlegroup Cataclysme
have all produced some monster teams.

Another setback we have in Europe is the language
barrier, while most Europeans can speak good basic English, it is only natural
that communities form between players from the same countries. Given the plethora
of different countries and languages we have in Europe, You end up with
communities forming between Brits, Russians, Swedes, Danes, Fins, Norwegians,
Italians… the list goes on. German, Spanish and French players tend to play on servers
designated for their specific languages. Many talented players favor playing
with those who speak the same language as them over better players from outside
of their communities, for obvious communication reasons.

Now we’ve discussed the core problems with competitive
European PvP scene, let’s talk about the problems with the WSVG and this new invite
only tournament.

Firstly, due to the nature of the WSVG and their points
system, it was obvious that the only European teams that would get to compete with
the American teams at the finals in Dreamhack were those with sponsors that
would be willing to fork out thousands of dollars to fly their players out to
the WSVG stops in Dallas, Toronto, LA and Louisville. Some of the strong European teams were planning to attend
the WSVG stop in London, many players were committed enough to fund the trip
out of their own pockets, but 1 stop wouldn’t have given enough points to
qualify for the finals in Dreamhack EVEN if a European team ended up winning it.

Now we come to the
fundamental problem with this tournament, sponsorships. You would assume that
only the very best European players would end up getting sponsors who could
afford to send them to the U.S? When the WSVG announced Warcraft 3v3 as one of
their official games, several big gaming organizations including MYM and SK ended up throwing money
at the first teams that managed to get a top 3 placing at the 5v5 Regionals in
Hamburg, an event that was totally flawed right from the start. If you think
that the American event was flawed because of Pandemics disqualification, the
European event was a hundred times worse. All of the top 4 teams from the
qualifier server lost key players due to disqualifications. If that wasn't enough, several teams were known to have farmed rating or avoided teams that were stronger than them on the qualifier server in order to obtain a top 8 ranking.

Unsuprisingly, the
teams that qualified for Blizzcon 5v5 finals and recieved sponsorships were the only 3 European teams in the tournament that
were able to play with their normal setups.

Providing Blizzard
continues to push WoW as an eSport, it will be months, maybe even a year before
the very best European players are able to compete against Americans on an
equal playing field in 3v3 and 5v5. It is a dire shame to see so much great talent go to waste.

Tags:

DreamHack, Electronic Sports League, ESL, PvP, warcraft, World of Warcraft

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