Guild Wars : Guru Challenge 2008

A game observer participated on the tournament committee for the 2008 RAWR Cup. And finally he had achieved this tournament.When he talked with the the head administrator for Guild Wars Guru where he is a senior moderator, and suggested that they host a GvG tournament of their own. They are spare no effort working on this game. And go around to invate everyone he could get. And they  finally added two more devisions- a Premier Division for elite level guilds and a Casual Division for players new to GvG. The next step is to find sponsors. Big award definitely can attract more gamers. Then ArenaNet's willingness to provide tournament coverage gave them the hook we needed - our tournament would be on the front page of ArenaNet's website and in an in-game URL. They sent out over 50 emails to potential sponsors, and lined up three who were very interested in sponsoring our tournament. The biggest was Electronics Extreme, a new division of a large online retailer, which was willing to provide over $10,000 worth of laptops, portable DVD players, and MP3 players as prizes.

The Guru Challenge had five divisions: Premier (for top 50 teams), Gold (for rank 50-200), Silver (for 200-700), Bronze (for 700+) and Casual (for teams new to GvG). They provided these rough guidelines for teams to self-select their own division.

The Guru Challenge didn't use a special token for registering for the tournament with Tolkano, as previous RAWR tournaments had. On the day of the tournament, 172 teams registered in-game on Tolkano.  Online Gaming Radio was used to radio broadcast coverage of the tournament. The broadcast had a peak live listener audience of nearly 300, and to date the recording of it has been downloaded 200 times.

After the tournament committee had its final review and discussion, we went about distributing the prizes. We had required each member of each team provide valid email addresses. Most posters would like ArenaNet to increase their support to include special tokens for each of the different divisions for future tournaments. Overall, the Guru Challenge was a huge success. Over 1,000 players actively participated in the tournament, over 1,000 also participated in the prediction contest, and hundreds of others listened in on the broadcast.