Arena fanatics around the world rejoiced this past month when Blizzard finally announced the Tournament Realm registration and competition.

The Past

If you have had any interesting in majorly competitive WoW Arenas in the past year, you no doubt realize both the scope and success of Blizzard’s initial 2008 Tournament Realm.  From its inception, many Arena criticizers cited the fact that you had to “grind” gear from honor marks/points etc. People did not enjoy the fact that if you wanted to wake up one random morning and go PvP with a friend, if he wasn’t in full Season x gear due to a/b/c reasons, there was no point in playing. Similarly, it became too hard making sure that you had an account with the perfect race/class/faction set up, not to mention on the same server as your teammates AND decent competition.

To solve all of the noted problems and create a buzz for the official Blizzard tournament, Blizzard decided to put out a pay-to-play server just for Arena activities.  People were able to pay a small fee ($20 one time, if I remember correctly) and create any race/class/faction combination that they wanted to. This opened up a whole new avenue of possibilities for teams to practice.

And on February 17th, Blizzard once again decided to bring happiness back to the masses with the reintroduction of the 2009 Tournament Realm.

The Present

So, why should you care that the Tournament Realm is back? To put it bluntly; it’s the best chance you’ve got to practice and you should take advantage of it as soon as possible. For each individual, there are more than a handful of different and applicable reasons that would (should?) entice you to singing up and participating in the Tournament realm. However, as this is supposed to cover the general user base, I will most definitely be applying said reasons to as many of our potential readers as possible.

Teams and opponents: you are able to play with whomever, whenever, against whomever you’d like to. Other than continental differences (obviously), there aren’t dozens of different servers to choose from. No matter where you’re rolling on the TR, you can play with your friends against some extremely high caliber opponents who are interested in taking Arenas just as seriously as you are. If they pitched in x amount of dollars/time to get into the TR, then you know that they’re interested in actual practice (ideally, anyways.)

Opportunity cost: You’re giving up the best chance you’ll have at being noticed and getting meaningful practice by not participating in the TR. You have not only the opportunity of seeing how well you fare against teams who are already known, but you have the opportunity of succeeding against them and having it genuinely mean something. I’m not guaranteeing instant celebrity status or sponsorship here, but being able to claim a top x spot on the TR is at least somewhat credible. (Note: depending on how cynical the individuals are this time around, people may call it the “fluke of the 3.x patch” but who knows.)

Free reign: You have the ability to choose your precise arena composition concerning faction, class and race. Rarely does this happen on live servers as finding two teammates who are a) both skilled enough and b) have the right combination of class and faction is a pretty selective process. However, on the TR you obviously don’t have to worry about this. Not liking how your team is dealing with fears? Switch over and make your classes Undead. Having problem with snares? Roll some Gnomes! Want to be completely useless? Toss yourself a Blood Elf! Effectively, you finally get to be the kid in the candy store you’ve always wanted to be.

The Future:

The one question that I still have yet to have a definite answer on is: what do you want changed for the future? We’ve already been through one successful Tournament Realm, and there were definitely improvements that could have/should have been made.  Now we’re entering the era of TR 2 and I’d really like to take a look at what happens at the end and reflect on it. We have the chance to make our voice heard, in a personal sense as BlizzCon ’09 is in the near future, and we could definitely try to set up one on one time with a PvP/eSports designer.

Do you have any comments about the way the TR is handled? Do you not like the procedures, or is there something missing that you hope to see in the future? Let us know in the comments!

2009 Tournament Realm, World of Warcraft, WoW, WoW E-sports