by JR Cook - 9 years ago     show comments

During her busy schedule at the America’s championships for Heroes of the Storm in Las Vegas, NV we got to sit down with Kim Phan, Senior Manager of eSports at Blizzard Entertainment. We asked about why Rexxar was allowed into the tournament, what it was like to have Gillyweed as a caster at this event, and we asked her to look into her crystal ball and let us know what is in store for the eSports side of things for Heroes in 2016.

BP:  What was with allowing Rexxar because it was the day, or two days before a no-go with him in the hero pool and then Thursday he’s in? What brought about that decision?

KP: The reason why we had decided to, and any time we decided to ban a hero, is if we think there are bugs or issues with it that could be exploited and so there were some concerns around Rexxar of whether or not he was in a good state to play. and so after kind of reviewing the issues that we were seeing we made a decision that it would be better to not have him in play and then we shared that feedback with the teams and their feedback was that they felt like he shouldn’t have been banned and so we went back to see what kind of fast fixes we could put in place because most of the teams were not happy to hear about him being banned and then we were able to patch some fixes in to help alleviate some of the concerns around the hero itself and when those fixes went in we went back again and asked the teams ahead of time if they wanted to include him back in. So this was kind of more of an exception for this tournament as a whole just because of it seemed that a lot of the teams had already been practicing with him and training with him so the teams all agreed that they wanted to have him back in. So that is how we brought him back.

BP: So then did this event actually speed up the Rexxar bug fixes?

KP: Oh no, they were actually already in place, we just didn’t know how those fixes would turn out. Because once you fix something, you don’t know if there is going to be more issues from that and so it’s just an amount of time we would see whether or not those fixes were indeed fix.

BP: Personally, since you were a WarCraft 3 caster, what is it like having Gillyweed up there as a female caster in the scene and just being able to bring her onto the Heroes team for this event and scene. What does that mean to you?

KP: It means a lot to me because I think it is important to be able to grow women’s participation in eSports and I think Gilly is a wonderful role model, we are happy to have her here we’re happy to see the amount of time she has put in to be the kind of caster that she is. Me personally I am very VERY proud of her and proud in general that we have a woman representing Heroes of the Storm as a caster. I think anytime we can make the game more accessible to our players and to show how diverse not only our game is but how diverse our community is I think that’s awesome because I want to promote that level of comfort for other people to come in and to play the game as well and it’s great to have her here she has worked extremely hard and she knows the game very well so she deserves to be here just as much as any of the other casters that are also casting here.

BP: The last couple of games that have come out like Hearthstone and Heroes have been very esports friendly. How much of that is a conscious design decision to make games that have a strong esport presence (or can) or how much of it is just a result that they are good games and people want to play them, is that something you intentionally tried to focus on?

KP: I would say from an eSports perspective I certainly think about that often. We want to make it E for Everyone like we want everyone to participate and compete and be a part of eSports so I think it is a conscious decision from a lot of people who have the ability to influence we also really believe in our core values when we talk about every voice matters, it really does matter there are a lot of people outside of the dev teams who are very vocal about what they think the game should or shouldn’t have or what would make it even better so we are always pushing ourselves to be more accessible to grow our community to be welcoming and i think that really holds true to everyone at Blizzard.

BP: As far as the tournament as a whole, the whole Road to BlizzCon, what went into the decision to for the North America region to be kind of a catch all for everyone else that didn’t strictly fit in Europe, China, etc. I know some of the community felt that some of the North American teams got a bit shafted because they just couldn’t get a spot in it.

KP: The way we approached this year, it being a pilot year for us, we wanted to do enough to be able to help cultivate the scene, help it grow and at the same time we really wanted to make sure that we were focusing on the game itself and that it was fun to play and everybody was able to play the game. We take a look at a few things like the in game population of the game, how many players are playing in the regions whether or not we think that the tournament structure can support that region as well and so with that in mind we think about what regions where people are playing from so those kind of the decisions, and the thinking behind how we make our decision. We want to be able to create a pathway for Latin America, Australia and Southeast Asia so that they have their path to BlizzCon but at the same time we want it to be realistic to the level of competition, the skill level of those regions we’re seeing and so that’s kind of all part of the reasons why it was structured that way.

BP: What are Blizzard’s plans to support the community in non blizzard tournaments or non wcs tournaments just to help give them tools to help them run tournaments?

KP: Those are great things, from our collegiate standpoint we have announced a complete platform, to help or collegiate TeSPA chapters to run tournaments online we are looking into ways to do some more things like that in terms of just supporting community tournaments as a whole, as much as we love the pros scene and want to help that grow were certainly have plans or ideas on how to extend that on down to more amateur tournaments and also ways to help our partners there is a lot of people love from Dreamhack and ESL. They love all of these partner tournaments and so we are certainly looking on ways on how we can better support them too because I think eSports ecosystem as a whole consists of so many different players from teams to players to partners and so forth and Blizzard we are always trying to look what role we should be playing and where and how much we can support in what areas because at the end of the day the eSports scene is built by the community and we don’t want to disrupt that too much we really want to respect the community and the work that they do so we are careful anytime we introduce something that is complementing the scene or helping grow the scene.

BP: How much of a strain is on the esports team because you guys are supporting 4 different games right now: WoW, Hearthstone, Heroes, and StarCraft 2 how do you guys keep track of all that? It is just incredible the amount of work you guy are putting in

KP: It is a lot of work, and a lot of work that we welcome it is extremely rewarding it’s just we are very fortunate to have a passionate community that really loves our games and that want to participate and I think it’s a good problem, I consider it a problem but I think it’s good, we’re obviously trying to expand the team and grow and better support all of our products and so it is challenging because there is so much going on but it is good at the same time.

BP: Where do you see heroes going from here, It’s a game that’s going into a fairly crowded market with League and DotA already in big positions there but I feel Heroes sets itself apart from them, it’s the same genre but a totally different game, where do you see 2016 taking Heroes of the Storm in eSports?

KP: I see it being that we’ve ran programs that have introduced it to a wider audiences like with Heroes of the Dorm,  but our heroes of the dorm program was collegiate focused and it was amazing to see the reception around that program and how many people we reached over ESPN2, people who have never even heard of eSports before let alone heard of Heroes of the Storm it was great the conversations were great and so it was a great test pilot for us to see how accessible Heroes is and having seen that and having seen how the scene has grown leading into BlizzCon I think 2016 is only going to get bigger and better for Heroes and it will be more exciting as more and more people get exposed to it.

BP: I was going to ask about Heroes of the Dorm because it did such a great job at engaging the viewers and the community because people love fantasy sports and being able to fill out brackets and so with dorm you could do that a lot of sites had different places where you could fill out your brackets. Do you have plans to try to bring more engagement from the viewers with eSports and what kind of things are you guys trying to work on for that.

KP: Yeah there are things that we are thinking that we are doing another thing this weekend with Twitch where if you link your battle net account and you watched the Heroes of the Storm stream there’s engagement there. There’s a lot of ways we can engage with our community not only from eSports to the community and so forth so there’s a lot of efforts that are being looked at on how in different ways that we can engage with our players not just within the game but outside of the game.

Thank you Kim Phan for your time with us here at BlizzPro and the entire eSports, production, and PR team for the excellent weekend in Las Vegas!