ArenaNet endorsed Guild Wars 2 as an eSport by sponsoring an invitational tournament with teams of five players from around the world.
During the Guild Wars 2 Anniversary Bash Livestream, the finals were played live for thousands of viewers to watch. GW2 is new as an eSport, but with players, the Mist League, ArenaNet, and MMORPG working together, there was some really exciting play in Seattle. Teams played a best of five on different maps. You can read all about the matches on Mist League’s site or watch the game on Twitch, but if you are willing to read some spoilers I’ll give you the skinny here.
Journey to the Finals
The prelims before the two representatives of their continents met were intense. Epic battles like Absolute Legends winning 3-2 after being down by two games set a high standard of play. The two finalists were eventually chosen to be Europe’s team Car Crash which was led by Super and North America’s team Sync which was led by Caed.
In the prelims Car Crash had been using a strategy of having an engineer and elementalist, but once they saw that Sync was using two spirit rangers they decided to counter by adding a warrior. That strategy influenced the winner.
The Winner
Car Crash ended up winning 3-0 because Sync was focused too much on side nodes. Their team kept getting split up and they would get picked off one by one. This sound like it would make for dull gameplay, but Sync was winning all the team fights. It was close the whole time and the last game was 500-449 in favor of Car Crash. This tournament will hopefully excite people about GW2 as an eSport, and show that games can be exciting.
