Gaming
esports
Invested in the Future of Players, WGL Expands
With WGL getting bigger and bigger, Wargaming is putting more focus on player development.
Victor Kislyi in a 2015 interview
© PwC
In a time where being a full-time professional eSports athlete is beginning to become more viable with each passing day, it’s easy to forget the reasoning behind it. Players often earn their living through sponsorships, tournament wins, streaming on Twitch and MLG, and putting up videos on YouTube, but we still haven’t reached the point where most players are earning an actual salary just for competing in their chosen game.
Riot implemented salaries into the LCS early on, and most professional teams pay their players a salary for being a part of the organization, but it still isn’t commonplace amongst most outlier games. Wargaming is attempting to change this for World of Tanks by revolutionizing the way that they support competitive players of their game.
Tiers Tiers Tiers
This all starts with a three-tier system they’re implementing in the newest World of Tanks Wargaming League competitive season. In most leagues, the highest tier is really the only place you’ll get any kind of support outside of a nice opportunity for league promotion. Wargaming League’s Gold, Silver, and Bronze tiers operate slightly differently and all offer different levels of support that help to advance teams to the next level, no matter what their current level of play is.
For Bronze tier, support starts simple. It’s mostly general advice with how to create a team, do organizational stuff, and learn the essentials of what it takes to move to the next level of play. Then there’s Silver, where Wargaming works to help teams with the next level of running a semi-professional team, whether this means sponsorships or just anything else they need help with; Wargaming is available to help with that and offer advice where necessary.
Gold, comprised of just 16 teams, is where the program really shines and makes unique opportunities available for players as Wargaming begins to provide regular salaries for Gold-level teams and players.
Wargaming League Prize Information for Gold
© Red Bull eSports
Over the course of the next season, somewhere around $26 Million will be spent to make sure that Wargaming League is bigger and better than ever, with $3 million going to Gold player salaries globally. That’s a ridiculous amount when you compare it to the $300,000 prize pool that Wargaming just gave out for its 2014-2015 season Grand Finals in Warsaw, Poland last month.
For Victor Kislyi, Wargaming’s CEO, this is one of the most important things they could be doing to further their eSports initiative; supporting players when they need it most. He spoke at length about this during the press conference and Q&A session that preceded the Grand Finals in Warsaw, but he managed to boil it down to one simple ideology later in the day.
“It's a business. If you're playing at this level, it's not very easy for you to have a day job. You have to train, you have to travel. It's a real profession,” he said, his passion showing through. “This is exciting. This is about games; this is about competition; this is about playing.”
Love for the Players
This love for the players shines through to all aspects of how Wargaming operates their eSports division of about 50 people worldwide dedicated to making sure that both players and spectators alike have an enjoyable time with professional World of Tanks.
The changes to the World of Tanks rule set is the prime example of this. Players came to Wargaming after the Grand Finals last season and voiced their dismay with the tournament format. They claimed that games were too slow and passive, which made for a lot of camping, draws, and tie-breaker games. It made the games go on for far too long, “embarrassingly long, sometimes,” says Kislyi.
They took the feedback provided to them by the players and community to come up with something new that serves as a major collaboration between publisher and players, something that you don’t see very often in major eSports titles.
Wargaming's Grand Finals in Warsaw Poland
© Red Bull eSports
Kislyi is happy with the new format because players and fans are happy with it. “It resonates with the players. It's fast: lost of fun, lots of action. This is your business, and you cannot tolerate 30-minute reshuffles and one battle after another end up in a tie with not much action,” he says. “Now it looks good. You see action. You see energy.”
He’s right too. The crowd is electric. Thousands fill the seats to watch the best teams in the World compete in Warsaw. It’s the culmination of what Kislyi wants so badly: just to prove that what they’re doing isn’t just talk, but actionable.
“At the end of the day, it's not only about talking. Yeah, some talking like this you have to do to spread the idea, but at the end of the day you have to walk the talk. You have to demonstrate with your organization, your tournaments, with your budget, with your people, with your commitment, with your Twitch record numbers that, ‘Hey! This is working, and that's how it's done.’ You have to do it.”
He knows that Wargaming isn’t the biggest company in the eSports space, but that doesn’t matter to him. He’s happy for Riot, Blizzard, and everyone else doing eSports right out there. He just wants to do Wargaming right and let the rest take care of itself. “We're happy for their successes,” he says. “I hope they're happy for some things we do nicely in Wargaming League.”
With as much attention as they’re putting on player-focused interactions, it won’t be long before other leagues take note and start to do the same. Until then, Victor and Wargaming will keep on doing them, and that’s more important than worrying about what everyone else is doing. “So far, it's looking meaningful and good.” And that’s all he really wants in the end.
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