In an interview with PCGamesN, Kim Phan, Director of ESports at Blizzard announced that she wants to see raiding in World of Warcraft make it into ESports. Which, in this player’s humble opinion, is a terrible idea.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m a 10-year veteran WoW player myself, but I abhor PvP (mostly because I’m terrible at it), so I am a PvE player through and through. I have been inside countless dungeons and raids over the years. And to make them part of a competitive ESports event is a waste.

Making raiding an ESport event just doesn’t make sense. Raiding is a difficult and tedious process at the highest levels, most certainly that will never be disputed. The argument comes down to the fact that each fight is a repeat of the same mechanics. No one is saying it is easy to defeat a mythic-level boss. But those boss mechanics are the same every time.

One other issue about making raiding an ESport is what would they include? The majority of raids have anywhere from 10-12 bosses, sometimes even more. Raids also take hours to complete. It’s difficult to imagine getting that many people to sit down and watch the same group of people raid. Maybe if they only include certain wings of a raid and compete to see who has the best time.

Now, PvP combat is very much a “fly by the seat of your pants” style of fighting. There are 14 battlegrounds, 6 different arenas, 13 different races, with 12 different classes, that have hundreds of spells between them all. Just adding those all up gives close to 4 million different possibilities. However, that number is ignoring when, how, or why and in what order they would be used in. The ability to critically think and adapt on the fly like that is something that could very well be argued in favor of incorporating PVP into the ESports world. 

Players can look to the likes of; Overwatch, League of Legends, Starcraft, etc. as a point of reference to PvP combat being labeled an ESport. Having so many other MMO games in the ESports spectrum, not including WoW PvP would be a grave oversight. There is a hole that exists in the world of ESports that is just waiting to be filled by WoW’s PvP. Now if they were adding both PvP and PvE to the ESports world, then sure. Just PvP? Sure, but not just PvE.

While waiting for a decision; WoW players can enjoy the most recent patch (7.2) Tomb of Sargeras. The new patch will give players a whole new island to explore and fight on, and also includes the raid by the same name of the patch itself. This is the largest patch Blizzard has ever released for WoW. The patch is extremely similar to that of the Fury of Hellfire patch Blizzard released during the Warlords of Draenor expansion.