Over the years the huge allure of the monumental titles in the gaming space, the MMORPG market, has started to shrink with an aging audience and a time commitment to the game that many aren’t able to give, the premier title in the genre of World of Warcraft is still thriving. Whilst there are official events like the Arena World Championships and the Mythic Dungeon Invitational, the true success of this games competitive nature can be found in community driven events, and the large number of passionate fans keeping these games alive.
There are two major community run events to speak of, one that has had a number of recurring events and one that has just recently taken off with the promise to deliver more events with direct support from Blizzard. We’ll take a look at the two big community driven events in World of Warcraft, and how important they’ve been for the growth of the game.
The Race to World First – The first event comes as the longer running of the two events, and one that has been a huge success without any support from Blizzard at all. This race is a Player vs Environment focused event that pits the best groups of players in the world against each other to be the first to clear the hardest raid content in the game for the current tier – what would take most guilds weeks or months to complete, these guilds go through a level of preparation and structure that allows them to complete this content in just a matter of days instead.
Whilst the event isn’t officially sanctioned by Blizzard, it draws a huge audience including Blizzard employees too and shows what players at the cutting edge of the game are able to do. Whilst it’s mostly a two horse race, it does allow fans the ability to bet on esports through the race too as one of the unique events
OTK Mak’Gora – OTK is an organization run by a number of different content creators with many having World of Warcraft and World of Warcraft Classic as their core game, with the release of Classic being so successful to this core community, it comes as no surprise that the org wanted to launch an exciting event, and they certainly succeeded at that. Whilst there’s little in the way of PvE challenges in Classic, PvP is another story and the focus for the OTK event.
Offering a $100,000 prize pool, the organization hosted the event on the Hardcore Classic server, giving players a month to level and gear their characters as efficiently as possible, and then a play to the death bracket where players would lose all progress if losing their PvP duel. The event brought in a huge number of viewers and brought a lot of excitement to a niche community.
For an aging game approaching twenty years old, it’s fun to see community driven events that bring excitement to a huge audience still, and that there’s still a lot of creativity in the space too. With the recent announcement for three expansions launching in quick succession over the next few years too, there will be plenty of opportunity for other big events to grow and succeed, and opportunities for community driven events to shown how important they are to the community too, and with season of discovery already announced for classic and the release of Cataclysm classic just around the corner too, for fans of the older game there are even more opportunities for this audience too. If the OTK Mak’Gora is anything to go on, these community run events still bring a huge amount of excitement to a game quickly approaching its 20-year anniversary.
