Arena PayperviewFollow

Fun idea I had. I have no idea if it has been said before. But, I think it would be cool if you could "sit" in the stands and observe areana fights. I have no clue how it would get decided what battles get to be in the spotlight. I just think it would be kinda fun to pop over to Nagrand and catch a fight or two.

Discuss? Maybe?

Hyrdophobia

Interesting idea...

They'd obviously have to make it so spectators couldn't interfere in any way, including communicating with the combatants... I could just see someone trying to buff their buddy, or /w smack-talk or helping find a hiding opponent... :P

There was something similar in a MUD I used to play, way back in high school. There was a coliseum, and when two people dueled the other players could be "spectators." (Not literally spectators, since we're talking text-based here, but you get the idea.) It was quite entertaining, really... :)

Well, there would virtually be no way to stop the spectators from communicating with the players. Sure, they can control it in game, but there's ventrilo plus simply being in the same room... too much room for people to get outside help.

BUT, it's still a stellar idea. I'd watch as much for fun as I would to learn strategies.

I just thought it would be a cool idea. I didnt even think of any stipulations or rules. I would just like to be able to watch arena fights.\

I guess there would definately have to be rules about communicating with the players in the arena and all kinds of crazy stuff like that.



Yea I know this is the hunter forum. Most of my posting is done here though, force of habit.

This is how alot of Q3A and UT matches was recorded. Apart from merely decreasing the amount of information saved, it also allowed the demo to be played back (spawning players with this and that skin and so on, and then merely replaying the console log) repeatedly, allowing the spectator to move his/her camera freely around the match. It's how they made some of the finest "pvp" movies known to man, by storing and sharing demos instead of actual movie files.

Once the demo is playing back, you can fraps or export into movie files from within the game itself, and start the whole editing and production process.

So, in short, that's actually a viable solution. There's actually less advanced logistics and moves available to six-ten WoW players than there is for a full Deathmatch run in Unreal Tournament. Thus, delaying the match by say... 20-30 seconds shouldn't be a problem.

Of course, this would be hell to code, and test. And to be perfectly honest, Blizzard has more important stuff to deal with at the moment. Fixing the damn snake traps, taking another look at the Nagle algorythm, giving me back my 200g for the Gem/Headpiece I got for Ghost Wolf taming, get rid of AV leechers/bots and balancing said BG so Horde won't be at such a disadvantage. Even though Horde reigns supreme in all other BGs in my Battlegroup, it doesn't mean that the Alliance sucking so hard shouldn't have consequences in AV as well.

Off topic (but then the whole post is off topic) :
It's interesting to me to see the differences in environments people can have in the same basic game. In my battlegroup the Alliance win 80+% of all AVs. The Horde always have at least 10 afk leeches, and unlike all the other BGs it seems nearly impossible to get the remaining 30 people to agree on what is a winning strategy. So we'll have scattershot groups running all over the place with no coordinated strategy in AV. In the other BGs it's far more easy to chivvy the group into a winning strategy, and we have a much greater than 50% win ratio. But the Horde just seems to have thrown up it's hands in despair at AV. Pre-BC I got to Honored before winning a single AV match, and while the ratio has gotten much better than that we're still well under a 50% win ratio.

In theory, since all we are doing is sending packets back and forth to a server, an arena 'match' could be 'captured' and saved for later viewing. You'd need a snapshot of the combatants at that time (character, inventory, etc.) and the actual database of the fight. Combine them and any PC could recreate it 'live', so you could ghost move your character around (your character would just be 'dead' to the replay) and you could watch fight in 'real time'.

We had something similar to this in "Starfleet Command II". You could save the fights (several starships) and replay them later with your own interface. You could even 'download' them and share them around. Since the starships were a common database, they didn't change much from encounter to encounter, but in WoW, the toons change a lot so the snapshot would have to at the time of the contest.

Any fan of the old pre-internet revolution shop based "Virtual World" sims also got a replay and a blow by blow interplay of the combats after they were complete.

It's entirely do-able, data is data, but there would need to be a will for it. Agreed, it would have to be done 'after the fact' to eliminate auxillary forms of communication between the players and the viewers.

There are already screen cap videos out there of fights. Obviously, there's only one POV in that case though...

Hmmm I really liked the idea about having the opportunity to look at other teams playing style and matches until I realised: they will be looking at yours too....


And I am sure we have all had one or two matches where (for whatever excuse, lack of sleep / coffee etc) we had that one total noob moment and pressed the wrong buttons breaking cc at just the wrong moment, sent the POM PYRO right into the pally's bubble which somhow you failed to see though it was up already for couple of seconds etc.

Are we sure we would like others to see and maybe posted on youtube as hilarious mistakes.....(just a thought). Or maybe we should just be a man about it and laugh at our own moments of total failure as well...