OTK’s World of Warcraft event was a triumph
One of the most impactful creator + game events in the history of our industry happened this week and not enough people are talking about it.
OTK and TipsOut announced the $100,000 Mak’Gora tournament for World of Warcraft hardcore on October 4th. It would be a month-long open tournament where players signed up, leveled characters, got gear, and ultimately competed in a 1v1 duel format.
This was a magical event for a few reasons:
The size of the prize:
The first-place winner would get $50,000, half the total prize pool. The rest would be split up to whoever did the best for their class ($50k / 8 = $6,250 per top performing class player)
The format:
This is the first wide-scale PvP event in the new hardcore mode.
Hardcore means that when your character dies, it’s gone. You cannot resurrect. You cannot go get your gear to help out. You’re done — start over from nothing.
Additionally, there were very few limitations. Generally, in WoW tournaments there are a ton of restrictions on what items you can use, what strategies you can deploy, etc. — for this event they really leaned into the spirit of hardcore and said ‘basically anything is allowed, figure it out’
The duration:
It takes on average ~10 days of played time (240 hours) to go from level 1–60 when you’re a pretty advanced player. Some folks can do it in half that, some folks take 2–3x that. So if you have 25 days to level up, get gear, and fully prepare — you’re spending nearly half of that on simply leveling.
To level and get all your gear you have to group with other players (unless your name is Zeroji, check out his stream — the guy was solo’ing every piece of content in classic wow).
So for nearly a full month, you’re making friends with, bartering with, and getting to closely know all of the people you’re going to eventually have to literally kill their character to win the tournament
The experience of the competitors was utterly unique. The amount of hype and expectation that was built up for the qualifiers (and ultimately the finals) was profound. It translated to the general World of Warcraft community, to players and streamers, and YouTubers alike.
For the day of the qualifiers, the main streams reached over 40,000 concurrent viewers — quite strong for any esport event, much less a World of Warcraft esports event. Additionally, restreamers (particularly Asmongold’s alt channel Zackrawrr) started covering the event as well.
The qualifiers went absurdly smoothly. Remember that there are HUNDREDS of individual competitors having dozens of contiguous matches and there was near zero downtime and near zero drama/incidents.
I’ve been a part of competitive gaming and esports events for fourteen years (yeah I’m old) — I literally do not think I’ve ever heard of much less experienced an event that was smoother or more well run.
So yeah, the event’s well run — the production arm of OTK is super impressive, so what?
Well, that in itself is excellent, but they also happened to be world-class for promotion.
Arena World Championships, Blizzard’s own official competitive PvP event, had its finals on August 13th this year.
The peak concurrent viewers for World of Warcraft on August 13th was…. 50,698.
The peak concurrent viewers for OTK’s event? THREE HUNDRED AND TWO THOUSAND, FIVE HUNDRED SEVENTY EIGHT PEOPLE.
If you asked any competitor, staff member, or hell any of the viewers — they would immediately tell you this was one of if not the most legendary World of Warcraft events of all time. Which is really special for a few reasons. The version of the game this is being played on isn’t the most recent expansion, it’s the original classic vanilla that launched nearly 20 years ago. The team that put the event together have been lovers of the game for nearly twenty years. Their careers as streamers and industry professionals were launched from this title, and they were able to give back to the game in a way no one else has.
I guess if you’ve read this far it’s worth mentioning that I performed really well myself. I’m proud of how I placed not only because of the amount of energy and thought I put into it, but also because this was a solo tournament. I’ve performed well in WoW tournaments before (even winning the last OTK event!) but I’ve always been able to convince the literal best players in the world to team up with me. For this one it was just myself, and I leave with awesome prizing as the top shaman but more importantly with a quote from the great Asmongold himself: “That guy is a god” in front of his 100k+ viewers
Tips and his team are building one of the most important organizations in our industry, and are the people to look at for what the future of creators in gaming will be.
