At least it's not as gay as WoW where you actually have to level characters in order to play... A competitive game should never make you have to level your player model in order to stand a chance.
Just look at SK-gaming's WoW team. They're putting up livestreams of them playing the shitty new update. Gayed much?
You NEED to level to know HOW to play. Seriously - the worst players are the ones who ebayed their level 80, since they have absolutely no idea what they are doing.
It is not gonna change e-sports.
Mainly, because it's a quasi-rpg arena game based on magic stuff. It's impossible to spectate it, because you simply don't know what's happening AT ALL if you haven't already learned all the game classes/abilities/etc. The battles look as a bunch of characters chaotically exchanging various coloured glowing lightey stuff. If you're outsider, all you see is "omg! blue lights! wtf! he casted some red stuff! lol! green particles!". You don't understand at all, why this player played better or why this team won, or why this moment was epic, etc., and therefore you just don't get excited. It looks flashy, but gets boring after 30 seconds.
In Quake or Starcraft most of the stuff is intuitively understandable even if you never played the game, because you don't need a description of what a rocket is or what a tank is. Or, let's say, when you see a railgun that you might never seen in your life, it's still pretty intuitive that it fires some kind of deadly ray that does damage, or when protoss cast force field, it isn't rocket science to figure out that it must be some energetic bubble that doesn't let units pass. Moments where someone is on a verge of being killed and escapes with 1 hp in last seconds before overtime or where someone micros marines perfectly to escape damage from those exploding bugs are understandable and exciting for everyone.
Completely not the same with BLC, where abilities differ only by shape and colour of their graphics representation. Why this red stuff deals more damage than that red stuff? What is this blue stuff that doesn't seem to do anything? OMG, he teleported! But why he lets them beat him, why doesn't he teleport again???? Etc, etc, etc.
A game that people don't understand will not change e-sports.
I don't understand a shit of whats happening in starcraft 2 either. It's all blue and red flashy lights all over the place much like this dota-like crap :)
I dunno, I never played SC2 and for me it was very easy to get in. Most of the action is displayed on screen, i.e. when units attack, you can see that they fire guns or some projectiles, or just punch or bite other units; when zerg cast some green stuff, you can actually see its effect that it stops enemy units for a while, because they were moving and suddenly they stuck in one place, etc.
Maybe EVERYTHING is not immediately obvious, but the difference is, you can pretty easily figure it all out by yourself, just by spectating some games. For example, in some game you could see those jumping zerg dogs die in fire from that vehicle with flamethrower and you know that flamethrower is stronger and those dogs are weaker, in some other game you see that this rectangular flying ship fires rays into friendly soldiers and their HP rises and you know it is a healing ship, etc., it's all can be learned just from spectating, because you can see immediately effect of almost any action. While in game like BLC you have to watch 300 games just to finally get that this fiery red glowing cloud can actually be 17 different spells.
i dont know tbh, when i watched streams of sc2 i just saw a ton of fast moving units of different shapes get in a fight with another ton of random units and fires everywhere and i dont know whats happening at all apart from a fight that i have no clue whos gonna be the winner or why.
It sure as hell isnt as instinctive as a FPS or a tekken-like game imo...
Most of you misunderstood him when you thought THIS game was supposed to change e-sports. The bigger picture is beyond this game, and I guess sooner or later it will come out and we'll see how it applies to e-sports in general.
I'm ashamed to say it, but I used to play an RPG years ago with friends called Tibia. Back when I played it, the wars and battles in it were incredibly competitive and I always thought as a battle style RPG it worked great competitively.
I say this because there were only 4 classes (all definable ones as well: Knight-melee, Paladin-arrows, Sorcerer-destructivemagic, Druid-healingandslightlyweakerdamage)
The thing that made it obvious to see what was going on was because the main classes were the mages and they would fire runes called "sudden death" which was just a ball of black energy. You had to actually aim the rune onto the other player though, so there was a large degree of actual skill. You used to have to use a ventrilo to trap and then sudden-death-rune combo the target down.
Problem is, this game got faggy quickly. The creators tried to pander to Xbox kiddies who sucked at aiming runes and shit, and basically gave people auto-aim runes and tons of other shit which made it really easy. They focused way too much on gay RPG quests and shit and tried to make it a 2D WoW. Now it's butchered completely, but playing it back then when I was 12 odd, it was great. As a concept it was the ideal competitive RPG because it was easy to see what was going on, easy to see where the skill was.