Author: vitamiinpee

This week, something rather amazing happened to me. After a year of going trialing a long list of healers for my M+ team that never clicked or stuck around, I seem to have finally found a healer.

In the budding eSport of M+ dungeons in World of Warcraft, it is no secret that one of the main ingredients for success lies in the ability to form a consistent group of 5 capable, hard-working people with whom to strategize, research, brainstorm, and practice with if we want to compete at the highest level. It sounds easy, right? Well, it’s not.

Despite the enormous numbers of WoW players who have flocked back to the game to participate in M+ keystone dungeons with the arrival of its newest expansion, Battle for Azeroth, finding the right people to play with consistently has become the bane of everyone’s existence. Since players can do M+ keys with anyone they want, commitment seems like a far-off dream. It almost feels like the drama of our newest generation with dating where, if we find good players for our groups, we can even be prone to jealousy and confrontation when we see our friends in groups with other people pushing up higher keys than they would with us. We’re all so focused on score and we want the best, but the best brings politics. Many players flit from team to team, almost like freelance musicians. We have to fight to both find and retain the players that we want, otherwise we can spend hours ruining low level keystones, depleting their levels, and spending hours grinding our keys back up only because we didn’t have a good enough group with people we trust and already synergize with.

As a partnered Twitch streamer of M+ content in World of Warcraft, it is no secret to my community that I have had many growing pains in finding a person to fill one particular role: a reliable healer who knows what the heck they are doing and chooses to run with me and not just a tank with a shinier score or more macho personality. I have had a history of finding great healers who are already paired off with other tanks who they joke about being married to, so they don’t feel like “mine” and they certainly don’t make time for me. It feels like they are being rented for a key or two and then my teams go back to failing keys as we try out healer after healer. It has made M+ dungeons feel like a revolving door of the kind of bad audition sequences you only see in movies. 

About a week ago, I was introduced to a healer in a high-end guild called Alacrity. We started running together and the synergy has been like magic. We use our abilities in tandem as if we can read each other’s mind. As a tank who has been through so many healers who let me die or don’t know what they are doing, it has been a breath of fresh air. Each dungeon we do together, we make improvements quickly and it feels amazing. The M+ keystones we’ve done so far and the trust we’ve been building has reminded me about trust exercises we did on my old lacrosse team and in school where you free-fall backwards and hope the other person catches you. As someone playing a discipline priest, he has an ability called “Leap of Faith” that will grip my character over to his location. With this past week’s keystone affixes, it was especially important that a tank can kite away from the mobs in order to drop stacks of the necrotic debuff, so there were many moments where he legitimately saved the day by quickly gripping me to safety so that I could run away long enough to reset my stacks and live.

I can’t wait to see what the future holds for my team. It’s finally coming together and my score is already climbing just by meeting a healer who I can trust. Cheers to finding the first real member of my hero squad! More updates soon to come.

Facebook is definitely a huge platform for both business and personal social networking, but it has also changed a lot in the recent years, making it hard for businesses to continue to thrive on their turf. This week, we read an article by AdAge called “Why Fans Un-friend Your Brand on Facebook”, which delved into some of the key reasons why people grow tired of seeing stories from Brand pages. So what compels people to unfollow our pages on Facebook? Is it on them, or is it due to our own shortcomings as marketers?

The shortest answer is that Facebook brand-followers want interaction and relevance. They want interesting stories and authentic exchanges with brands rather than simply being marketed to. In an infographic we looked at this week, one of the rules for social media is that “Everyone says they don’t want to be marketed to. Really, they just don’t want to be talked down to.” People are looking for products and services, but they want to feel heard and this is where a lot of companies fall short. 

With the introduction of live video now on Facebook, Brand Pages now have a new tool at their disposal. In essence, we can now use Live Video to have information Q&A sessions with customers and fans that allow people to see a face behind a label and ask questions as if they were face-to-face in a store. This is huge because we can now use what we know about the power of storytelling and genuine interactions to stand out from the crowd and create customers for life. Based on the loss of Facebook users in the recent years as well as the drop in interest of Brand Pages, I believe that it is imperative to change approach. I would encourage even a weekly or even daily, scheduled live Q&A. In terms of posting to the Brand Page’s Facebook, I would utilize more daily stories where I show screenshots of customers or give shoutouts to fans rather than directly marketing my product by making timeline advertisements. By giving customer shoutouts and showing screenshots of customers who have posted about our products and services to their social media, it makes people feel special and it fosters as excitement that people could be featured by their favorite brands.

The tools of future marketing are there–we just have to reach out and use them in more genuine, personable ways if we want our brands to stay relevant! Follow hashtags of your brand, see who is posting about you, and give them a nice shoutout. A little acknowledgement goes a long way, so show some fan appreciation and watch as your brand grows!

This past week, history was made when the top North American World of Warcraft raiding guild called Limit went head-to-head with the reigning world champions, Method Gaming, in the world-first race to clear the newest raid instance, Uldir, on Mythic difficulty. In all 22 tiers of raid content in the game since the very first raiding tier in 2004, there has never been such a close race to the top. Rather than being a matter of days in between each top world team, it came down to a mere 7 hours difference between first and second place. While it may not have surprised the the world to see Method come out on top, Limit getting world second and nearly beating Method definitely put a lot of age-old memes about North American raiders to rest.

For a long time, European teams have been considered to be superior to North American teams and teams from all other regions of World of Warcraft. Despite European teams always starting 1 day behind North America due to the release of content on servers, Europe has still always dominated the world first race in the top few spots of the race. This has created a lot of jokes and memes about the caliber of North American raid teams, given that we even have an extra day head-start over European teams and still manage to lose. Additionally, the winners of the most recent Mythic Dungeon Invitational (MDI) were a European team call Kjell’s Angels and most of the top teams in the world for Mythic Dungeon score were from Europe.

However, the U.S. team called Limit came in a very close second this tier for the first time in WoW history. In fact, Limit even had the lead by beating Method to the Mythrax kill (the seventh out of eight bosses in the raid tier), but had an extremely close 1% wipe on the last boss, Mythic G’huun. This means that Limit lost their best attempt by a matter of 639k boss health. While North America still technically had a head start, this is the closest we have ever seen a U.S. team come to beating a European team for the world first title.

Additionally, we saw another U.S. team make it into the top 10 world guilds for the tier 22 race. Wildcard Gaming managed to snag the #8 world spot, securing them the #2 spot in the North American division and their best performance in any raid tier to date. The results of the tier 22 race has definitely put North America on the map as a more serious region to contend in the world race. This tier was a remarkable one, since Method also made history to be the first top world guild to stream the entirety of their world first race progression live on Twitch for everyone to see. By doing this, it allowed another layer of competition since Limit and other guilds were able to watch footage and analyze Method’s strategies in their hours of down-time in order to close any gaps in strategy. Now that guilds are finally streaming this competitive content live on Twitch, I think we will see more teams from all over the world begin to emerge as serious contenders as the race gets closer and closer each tier from now on. Where the world first race has always had a lot to do with strategy, I think it will now ultimately be decided more upon pure performance to see who is really the best WoW guild in the world.

If you’re involved in the Esports scene and watch livestreams of competitive gameplay on Twitch whether it be World of Warcraft, Heroes of the Storm, Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds, Fortnite, or various other games, you know the name Method Gaming. If not, you might know it by its iconic logo of an orange M on a black background.

Method Gaming was formed with the goal to progress Esports throughout the world. Esports are defined as competitive video games that tend to be massively multiplayer online. The popularity of Esports has really skyrocketed in the last decade, particularly since the late 2000’s. According to a segment done by CBS Sunday morning in 2014, that year a League of Legends Esports tournament broadcasted online on Twitch.tv averaged 27 million viewers, yet that year the Major League Baseball’s World Series only averaged 14 million viewers. Numbers have been going up exponentially since 2014, so it’s safe to say that Esports are here to stay and are becoming an even bigger phenomenon every day.  

Method Gaming is an organization that believes in the future of esports and it is their mission to progress this sport the best that they can. Method Gaming was created by founder Scott “Sco” McMillan–a prolific World of Warcraft gamer and streamer on Twitch. Method help Esports grow by sponsoring talented, accomplished gamers of various games, giving them both fame and notoriety as both teams and individuals. Method makes dreams come true for people to become professional gamers and do what they love.

If you buy merchandise on the Method website, you are directly supporting their brand sponsor more and more gamers worldwide: “By purchasing this merchandise, not only do you support Method and its players, you also support our mission: to progress esports. The upwards trend in our logo symbolises this mission of progress and our ongoing quest to make a difference.” By actually stating their motto in the merchandise area of their website, they confirm that what people do helps the Method brand and Esports as a whole. People can click on the “Teams” tab in the navigation menu and see all the teams and individuals who are sponsored by Method with a photo and quick bio on who they are and why they are a part of the organization. If that player is streaming, their stream is embedded in the website so that you can actually see the person behind the biography in action. Visual storytelling is a great way for people to feel involved and to connect with the players they root for. 

Method humanizes their brand by blogging and posting updates/articles directly on their own website, but also by streaming live on Twitch and being extremely active on Twitter, Instagram, and other popular social media platforms. Method has their own official channel on Twitch, but they also have a Twitch Method Community that links all streamers who represent their brand brand so that people can find all Method streamers on Twitch either through Twitch or from the official Method website.   

Method Gaming has really changed the way that the world views Esports in the way that they create interesting content, sponsor gamers worldwide, and turn people’s dreams into realities. By supporting Method, we support Esports as a whole and will continue to watch the sport explode in popularity and relevance in our society.  

This week has been momentous in the World of Warcraft gaming sphere. For the first time in WoW history, the reigning champion raiding guild in the world announced that they would be streaming their raid progress of Mythic Uldir live on Twitch. With the release of the Mythic difficulty of Uldir this past Tuesday, players from all over the world have been racing to be the world’s first guild to defeat all 8 of the newest end-game bosses. Method gaming’s top WoW streamer and co-founder, Scott “Sco” McMillan, shared that he has received over 20,000 new paid subscriptions to his Twitch channel from streaming raid progression just since the launch of Mythic Uldir on Tuesday, which marks a minimum of $100,000 income simply in new subscriptions to his channel alone, not counting all of the donations and higher tier subscriptions he has received in addition over the last few days.

Do these numbers seem completely unfathomable? Let me explain why Method’s decision to stream raid progress live changes everything.

World of Warcraft’s raiding scene has been the bread and butter of PvE competition since the beginning of the game back in 2004. Large numbers of people have tried to quit the game and play some of the newer MMORPG’s to hit the market over the last decade, but almost everyone seems to migrate back to WoW because no other game has ever been able to compete with the popularity and competition of WoW’s raids. WoW was the first MMORPG where people were able to coordinate with one another in large teams of 20+ people to defeat challenging bosses, so it quickly rose to popularity through parodies such as in South Park’s famous episode called “Make Love, Not Warcraft” where all the main characters get addicted to WoW, hole up in their basement, and work tirelessly together to defeat the ultimate foe.

Ever since WoW launched in 2004, its raiding scene has been competitive because it is oriented around each team’s secret strategies to kill each end-game boss in addition to skill and the personal responsibility of min-maxing one’s own character. Raiding is a marathon, but it is still a race. Guilds compete to get server-first titles, region-first titles (North America, Europe, Asia, Oceania), and the ultimate world-first title if they are the quickest guild to kill all the newest raid bosses that are released each tier. However, despite its popularity, raiding has never offered the spotlight in Blizzard Esports, so it has always been a competition with no monetary gain that only die-hard WoW players really understand.

With the explosion of the livestreaming industry for gaming, there are now streamers who reach tremendous viewership in the World of Warcraft section if they are showing progress on the most competitive content in the game, such as Mythic Plus Dungeons or PvP arena tournaments. However, the most hardcore raiders in WoW have traditionally kept away from livestreaming their raid progress, since this could give away their secret strats and allow other guilds to catch up to them and even pass them. For the last several years, the European team called “Method” have beaten millions of WoW players to the “World First” title in nearly every consecutive raid tier, but they have always had a strict no-streaming policy.

On September 6th, 2018, Method shocked fans by announcing on their official website that they had chosen to stream the entirety of their Mythic Uldir raid progress live on Twitch for the very first time. Since then, Method fans from all over the world have been tuning in to watch the world best guild race to the finish line, playing upwards of 20 hours a day from a professional LAN studio with computers set up for some of the most integral players on the team. The viewership across all Method players’ streams has reached somewhere above 60,000 viewers at a time, which is almost as much as the recent  Esports tournament called the Mythic Dungeon Invitational hosted by World of Warcraft’s company Blizzard Entertainment itself. Method’s decision to stream their progress live has opened the door of possibilities to people who have been looking to make a career out of professional gaming but were left out of Esports until now.

While they are now currently in 2nd place in the running, Method has made history and a ton of money in the last few days by being brave enough to show the world their raid progress broadcast live. WoW may be an old game, but its future has never looked brighter.

Good luck to Method Gaming and all the other guilds racing to world first! May the best team win eternal glory.