www.quakelive.com

In a scant few days the world's best gamers will converge in Europe to decide who the most skilled player in the entire world is. They will not be playing World of Warcraft. They will be playing Quake Live.

You WoW nerds may remember the Intel Extreme Masters. You know, the e-sports organization that used to have WoW as one of its games until it realized how absolutely awful it is for competition. Next week they will be streaming the most competitive tournament of the year. It will be free to watch, and should you tune in, it is guaranteed to be the most exciting e-sports event you have ever witnessed. The evolution of e-sports streaming for you to enjoy.

Why ditch WoW for Quake Live you ask? It's simple.

See, when you have something to prove and you put in hours of effort and work to differentiate yourself from your opponents, you want to be rewarded in the end. WoW arena simply does not reward you for being better than your opponents.

Quake Live does.

Quake Live is the most complex format for competitive gaming in the entire world. It is also one of the most simple to play and understand. It taxes not only your physical reaction time, something almost nonexistent in WoW, but also your mental capabilities: consistent precision timing, adapting to your opponent, OUTSMARTING your opponent. Some of you WoW nerds can't even comprehend the level of skill required to compete at the "gladiator level" in Quake.

Consistent precision timing in WoW? The mods do that for you. After all, you don't want to be distracted with timing when you're spamming frostbolt. It's hard to aim frostbolt in WoW. Oh wait, the game automatically does that for you.

Adapting to your opponent in WoW? You don't. You memorize the same inane patterns and rotations that maximize damage and control and then execute them over and over and over. Ad nauseum the same boring, predictable, and scripted PvP encounters in cramped, boxed-up instances. Beastcleave? TSG comp? LOL WE ARE CHAMPIONS. THANK YOU FOR THE GIANT CHEQUE. A FUCKING PRINCE CLONE WON $25,000 PLAYING WOW. THEY DID THE SAME THING EVERY SINGLE GAME. No adaptation required.

What is outsmarting your opponent in WoW? It's waiting for Blizzard to buff your class after a few months of mediocrity and whining and then abusing the new imbalances that have materialized. It's countercomping your opponent at tournaments. It's doing PvE so you can have advantages that your competitors can't. And after all of that, you pretend it was skill all along.

It's time to leave Blizzard/Activision in the dust and progress into the 21st century people.

At one time Blizzard Entertainment existed to support the gamer. That is no longer the case. Some of you are too young and ignorant to realize it, but Blizzard is now a publicly traded company as a part of Activision. They exist not for the gamer anymore, but for the bottom line. The bottom line being their stock market performance. How much money they can make for their investors and shareholders. That is all they care about now. They don't balance games to make you happy. They pay a lot of very smart people a lot of money to figure out how to keep you hanging around, paying $15 a month just to log in and stare at night elf tits, paying $40 an expansion, paying $25 for server transfers, $10 for faction changes, $10 for name changes, $30 for pewter Tankard O'Terrors, $25 for a spectral mount that took some 3D-artist a couple of hours to create (or reskin...that would be more money effective). Money, money, money.

Blizzard has some of you at the end of their yo-yo. They keep you close to their hand just long enough to feed your illusions of success, and then string you out for a while so the other people (read: classes, factions, races) can have a taste too. A vicious cycle best illustrated by the blogs and comments on this site for years.

It is time to unify and push the future of competitive gaming to the forefront. WoW has no future in the competitive market. No WoW player will ever have the respect of those outside the game. Some WoW players won't even have that respect inside the game, even after winning the biggest tournament the game has to offer. Just look at Zilea. His own teammates disowned him, as if their spamming all cooldowns in the opening moments of every arena game as a warrior and DK was some spectacular display of superiority.

Next week you have the opportunity to see what you have been missing. What a REAL e-sport is all about. What real competition is. What a balanced playing field looks like. What excitement and drama in a tournament feels like. Join us and don't look back.

http://www.esl-world.net/masters

copy/paste to all WoW related sites... www.sixjaxgaming.com/wp/wow is censoring]/