So saddening:

Tom Chilton, Lead Designer: The big objective is to build WoW into a viable eSports game platform.

And then worse:

Tom Chilton: Before this, we didn’t really have a good forum for competitive eSports. WoW PvP was just kind of there. For example, our battlegrounds always had the limitations of the Horde having to play against Alliance, it was very themed toward the conflict within the game itself.

So the “eSport” is a way to surpass the “limited” form of factional-themed PvP.

This is surely a new drift that wasn’t there in their original plans. Subjectively: for the worse.

Tom Chilton: I’ll tell you, it’s been a slow evolution. When WoW first came out, we didn’t really have any semblance of organized PvP. We had Tarren Mill versus Southshore…

GameSpy: Which was awesome!

Tom Chilton: That’s nostalgia speaking! I remember you were interviewing me at E3 a couple years ago and you not thinking that it was so awesome.

We kind of slowly went from there, to trying to bring some organization to it with the Battlegrounds. Giving the game a little more capability for players to feel like it was a fair, controlled encounter. Then it was (the arenas) a natural evolution from that.

Natural evolution.