When you think of World of Warcraft, does it remind you of sleepless nights, energy drinks, and LAN parties with your high school friends? Does it make you think about 4+ hour raid nights multiple days a week with a group of 20+ friends in Ventrilo working together to defeat the most challenging end-game bosses? Does it remind of the old glory days of your childhood but also feel too daunting because it was almost like an unpaid full-time job?
World of Warcraft (WoW) was first released by Blizzard Entertainment on November 23, 2004 and has continued to dominate the Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) market ever since. Many new MMORPG games have come out over the years and tried desperately to mimic or surpass WoW, yet WoW has managed to maintain its foothold as the dominant force in the genre. How does an older game continue to keep fans hooked despite newer games coming out every year that look flashier, better developed, and that promise fans superior modern content?
The answer lies in WoW’s lasting influence on culture, society, ability to evolve, and the rapidly-growing competitive Esports scene for all video games. The newest addition of Mythic Plus (M+) dungeons in 2016 took what players loved about original WoW and gave it a modern spin to fit the limited time investment of adults in video games today. For a solid decade, the primary competitive scene of WoW was separated into two different realms of play: player versus player (PVP) and player versus environment (PVE) content. In PVP, players grind out their characters to make them as strong as possible with the best gear, stats, and talents and then compete in arena matches of 3v3 against other player teams that can take them to international tournaments with large cash prizes. In the PVE side of the game, players work together in guilds of 20+ people to kill challenging end-game bosses in raids that require large groups of different classes/specializations to kill. Everyone has to do their job and coordinate with each other, so when a boss gets killed, a group of 20 or more people celebrate their accomplishment. Guilds also compete against other guilds as to who kills all the endgame bosses in a raid tier the quickest, which can be tracked on external websites such as Wowprogress, but there has never been a large cash prize for PVE content in WoW.
All of this was extremely time-consuming and new games have hit the market such as Overwatch, Fortnite, and Player Unknown Battlegrounds that people can play competitively without spending countless hours grinding out silly quests in order to build up their individual characters. Now with M+ dungeons, players form teams of 5 people to compete in timed PVE instances that scale up in difficulty and change affixes every week in order to force players to work around serious obstacles while keeping the content fresh, new, and exciting. This past year, Blizzard Entertainment hosted an official Mythic Dungeon Invitational (MDI) tournament that was streamed live on Twitch where players from all over the world competed against the environment to beat the dungeons, but also against other teams of 5 players as to who could complete the dungeons quickest. This is the first PVE Esport of its kind and it is by far the most popular and successful feature of WoW that we have ever seen. At the end of the MDI, the winners were awarded $280,000 and a whole lot of glory and gaming sponsorships to go around.
Due to the explosive popularity of M+, droves of WoW veterans are subscribing back to the game to take part in the action. Esports are exploding all over the world, and Blizzard is aware that this is what people want to see, so WoW is now centering more and more around its new Esports scene of M+. According to Lisa D. Jenkins, successful companies are ones that adapt their social strategies around the people adapt their social strategies around the people. It had been a long-time complaint from WoW subscribers and veterans alike that people loved the social and competitive aspects of WoW but didn’t have enough time to invest. M+ dungeons are Blizzard’s way of evolving with the needs of their consumers as well as society. We live in a world where we need things fast and in smaller chunks in order to keep up with the rapid sharing of information through technology. The digital world never sleeps. We want to talk about things through social media and connect to people and organizations who share our interests. Some of the most popular video games across genres today are ones where people don’t need to invest a large chunk of time into it in order to enjoy the game or feel a sense of accomplishment.
People love M+ because they can do it in small chunks of time, but also because it is great content for self-promotion and streaming on platforms such as Twitch and for other social media such as YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit, Discord, and many others. Players can stream their content live and use it to connect to other players to learn new strategies to improve their gameplay. They can Tweet at each other and interact in Discord servers to flex their egos and/or learn tips and tricks. They can even track and compare their scores on Raider.io or compare parses with comprehesive tools such Warcraftlogs. M+ dungeons fit with social media because everyone wants to learn new things, compete against each other, and make unforgettable content on the things they are passionate about. This Esport has given people a new identity and community with which they are forming international reputations with social media profiles that are giving them employment and connections to people from around the globe.
In conclusion, if you miss WoW and love challenging yourself but you don’t much time to invest, try out M+ dungeons and see what all the hype is about. Who knows–you just might become a real-life hero from your own computer!
VITAMINPEE 