I just finished watching the last matches in the current Major League Gaming event for World of Warcraft 3v3 Arena, and I have to admit I felt like it was overall fairly awesome really!
7 of the best 3v3 teams in USA and 1 of the best from Europe battled in a 3 day event to determine the winner of this tournament, and every match was streamed live with comments and everything. I found it to be a lot more fun to watch than I initially had anticipated, mainly due to being able to see exactly what the players were planning on doing through Blizzards “Arena Viewer” screen-system setup, as well as getting a much better feel for what the teams were doing and trying to accomplish due to having the people commenting the game lay out some of the strats and pinpoint key points and critical twists and turns of the matches. This being especially useful for the classes I was less familiar with coming into the tournament.
One of the interesting things to see is how a team plays in a “random type” match, there are a ton of videos out there which basically are highlights with like 1% of the actual gameplay being done. Although it’s fun to see those at times, for my own “progress” I’m more fond of checking out what people would do in a live setting where they can’t edit out all their crappy messups.
The lineups were fairly “interesting”, with 4 teams playing Rogue/Mage/Priest, 2 teams mainly playing Rogue/Warlock/Shaman, 1 team playing Paladin/Hunter/DK and one mixing it up and playing just about anything, I think mainly Rogue/Ret/Priest though. With 3 of the RMP teams going on to the finals, along with the “PHD” team, I guess it shows what a fairly strong combination the RMP is. I suspect it’s the most versatile combination really, just changing strats for the different teams, able to do just about anything, yet, probably the combination requiring the most individual skill along with team synergy to play successfully.
I think if you have some interest in WoW in general, you should try to check out one of these events being streamed really – it will most likely surprise you in a positive way if you’re sceptical. Unfortunately, the next MLG tournament will not be until August, I just hope the RMP setup will remain relatively strong, as it’s really entertaining for me as a priest-main to see the mirror matches here, and really makes me want to see if I can get around to sort out some decent 3v3s with people on my server.
Also looking forward to more awesome comments from the IRC community who I was “watching” the last day of streaming with, the anonymity of an IRC-nickname surely brings out the politically incorrectness in people, all good fun!
Until then, for arenastreams, arenajunkies usually have some neat ones up at http://www.arenajunkies.com/streams/ – unfortunately, the quality of these streams vary immensely, whereas the quality on the MLG stream was absolutely amazing, near-TV quality really.
Oh, and grats to SK USA for picking up the win in the end, if only the matchup vs Ensidia had been a best out of 30 match… mmmm, could’ve watched those matches all day! :D