WoW - eSports Platform?

Interview @ Gamespy with Blizzard's Lead Designer Tom Chilton and eSports Manager Joong Kim.

GameSpy: The World of Warcraft Arena Tournament has been a great excuse for us to transform the WoW players on staff from emoting clickers into full-fledged PvPers. It's been a difficult transition to say the least. It's a whole new game for us. So let's talk about the Arena Tournament, and what it means for World of Warcraft.

Tom Chilton, Lead Designer: The big objective is to build WoW into a viable eSports game platform. We feel like with the introduction of the arena team and the arena system, we've got a way to set ourselves up for competitive eSports. We've been pretty happy with how the system has been turning out, it's a very popular system within WoW. It's fostered a strong sense of competition and community within that. It's turned out as a real sub-game within the game.