Hello,

I started adding this on same article as Storm’s Q&A/Misc but it got too long, Ectar, a EU EN Community Manager answered a couple questions about E-sports:

-“Offer much better and more frequent goodies to people watching your e-sports streams, goodies that are really worth something and elicit people to remain watching the stream.”

Having players turn up just for goodies doesn’t keep people watching the stream. It makes people wait for a giveaway then leave. It also makes chat a very polluted place with lots of people just spamming “When is giveaway?” etc. On top of that many people also seem to expect giveaways to happen during the matches (when we’d rather everyone was paying attention to what’s happening) rather than during the downtime between matches when any production normally loses viewers for various reasons (as people go to the toilet, get food, get up and walk around etc etc). I’ve moderated high volume twitch chats in the past and the minute you get over 2000 viewers in a chat stream it moves pretty quickly and becomes very spammy in general.

-“Increase the WoT knowledge between your streaming production crew and your commentators. Why cant we see the face of the players in real time when they are hitting or missing the decisive shot?”

Decent suggestion but not always easy to have the set up of face cams for everyone. LoL does it for example but the images are normally quite small and the players are 100% focused during the matches. It’s nice to see players getting emotional however due to the nature of playing in LAN finals most people remain calm and composed. It’s not like CoD on consoles where they’re all shouting at each other. You’re also limited to what’s available in the studio and not all WGLEU games are played in the studio like for example League of Legends. Stuff like that may feature in the Grand Finals however.

-“Your commentators need to be entertainers too, why not dressing them with WW2 uniforms and having them to be more enthusiastic and knowledgeable?”

For EU you have Mitch “Ubershouts” Leslie, Oliver “Laughter” Maxfield and Lauren “Pansy” Scott. As for Laughter he is an ex pro player and his stats more than speak for himself. He’s normally doing the colour casting. Both Mitch and Lauren normally do the play by play casting and have fairly extensive casting experience from other games, Mitch does CSGO, League of Legends and Overwatch. Lauren is well known in CSGO circles for her casting. Play by play casting and colour casting are 2 very different skills and not everyone can switch between the two. Hosting a show is also a very different kettle of fish.

-You need to have more girls/women in e-sports, both as players and as commentators.

Your earlier statement “I have seen screaming girls speaking about a game that they do not understand and know nothing about” doesn’t make sense. There is only Lauren as a caster, she does the play by plays and is pretty dam good at it. The only other female in the WGEU casts is Melly who does social media and she doesn’t commentate on matches. She occasionally talks about what happened after a match but she doesn’t go into in depth details. She more really commentates on the teams as she knows the teams really well due to interacting with then daily/weekly.

Casting is very very difficult to do and whilst more female casters would be nice, it’s sadly something that the majority viewing public find hard to adjust to. There is a lack of female casters for any top level sports in general, never mind eSports. That’s mainly because many sports are still male dominated or are male only (Football, Basketball, Rugby, F1 Racing etc etc). Regarding players you’ll notice a lack of female players in the top teams for any major online game like League of Legends, Dota2 and CS:GO. Why? Because there simply isn’t a lot of female gamers good enough to be at that level. If someone is good at a game, they’ll get in a team. It has nothing to do with their sexuality, hair colour, skin colour, nationality, religion etc etc. I’m aware there is female pro teams for different games and I’m not taking anything away from them. I personally wish however that there wasn’t a separate tournament/league like that as the last thing eSports needs is to segregation based on something. Everyone should be entitled and able to get on a team so long as they’re good enough.

-100% agree on the presenters in suits thing, the few times I’ve watched WGL or anything like that wargaming have had random dudes in suits with really really really really terrible commentary.

You say “random dudes” when Oliver has been known in the World of Tanks eSport team for some considerable time. Who else would you expect to see casting the games and how do you know/what area of influence/what current role do those people have,that you feel would be more suitable to commentating the matches?

If you watched the recent WGLEU finals last weekend for example I was one of the people on the analyst desk along with 2 pro players Kevin “The Deadzone” Van Huit who plays with Penta and “Still_Mojo” who used to play with Kazna Kru. The Analyst desk was also hosted by Luke “Dorjan” Kneller who is known to a lot of viewers who already watch any eSport stuff from Wargaming and is also the voice behind The “replay of the week” video series that we do.

-On the idea of adding 15vs15 format:

15 v 15 also becomes a potential logistical nightmare. Offline tournaments/leagues have bigger potential for players to have connection issues, online tournaments need more space and cost is increased to bring and support at least double the amount of players you have now. It’s not just the space required on stage/in studio, you need to have practise area’s available, hotel space, double the amount of shuttles/taxis etc etc. Everything quickly adds up. That’s not even considering how many sub players teams would be allowed/expected to bring on top of the normal 15 members.

–ESport is getting a lot of focus within the company and making it more accessible is certainly something which is on a lot of people’s minds. To take LoL as an example you can jump right into the 5v5 gameplay that the eSport scene has, however you won’t be fully “ready” as such until you’ve got to level 30, unlocked/bought all your masteries and have a good champion pool available. Character are rotated usually about every week with only 10 out of about 120+ champions being available. – In saying that however I totally agree that the core of what you see on the eSports and what you play in game are the same with regards to LoL. (I watch a lot of LCS).

I can say that the shift from 7/54 at tier 8 to 7/68 at tier 10 is most likely to happen for Team Battles in the future. Sadly I can’t give a specific time scale as it’s something which would come with a content patch.

-“I think this will be a massive mistake. Tier 8 is way easier to get started with, everyone owns an IS-3 and many people have a AMX 13 90/T37.”

Well there is maybe ways to help alleviate that. There are rental tanks for rampage so why not have a system for rental tanks in 7v7 or tanks you could purchase with credits for a limited time period to use in 7v7? I know people may worry about the skill factor of some players but a ranking system for 7v7 would help avoid that. What if after a season the top teams who’re playing 7v7 and not in the gold or silver leagues are able to progress into silver? (So in-game 7v7 becomes a sort of bronze league) – It’s definitely something getting a lot of focus/thinking right now within Wargaming. Note that these are just a few ideas off the top of my head for making the 7v7 content more accessible.

-“Please add the WGL team camos ingame for everyone available for gold! That would be really cool and i know there is a demand for more camoflague patterns! Skip team names but keep the camo because teams come and go, but the pattern can stay in the game even after teams have left.”

I love the camo’s too, but think it’s perhaps a bit too much for random battles. For the 7v7 it would be awesome and I recently suggested this to see if it’s possible to have certain camo’s work in specific game modes. Same with team emblems and team names as inscriptions

That’s all folks!