The average World of Warcraft player wouldn't know how to down a new boss unless they get their strategies, items, and gear choices from websites like Bosskillers.com and other guilds' movies. But what if you’re not one of those players? What if you go into an encounter that no one else has seen before?

The two faces of WoW are the PvE and the PvP, downing bosses and downing other players. Both take a significant amount of team work, strategy, and personal skill to stand out among the best in the world. It would make sense that the formula to make PvP popular and competitive should work for PvE, but it doesn’t. Professional teams try and make something out of a PvE team and toying with different ideas to try and integrate it into esports.

Using World of Warcraft, or an MMO to be specific, as a competitive platform is still very new to us. It’s not as easy as bringing in the next FPS or RPG game into esports and throwing it in the pot where the missing ingredient is a game genre and voila! Soup de jour! It needs to fit the style and, more importantly, the pace of the game. I think that formula has been staring us in the face; we just haven’t picked up on it.

Every time there is new content to be discovered and defeated there is a high level of anticipation. Which guild will be leading the raid race to the last and final boss? Nihilum? Death and Taxes? The guild formerly known as SK-Gaming?

The wheels of the press start turning and the dormant state of the raider community wakes up to ride the wave of new content. For those moments of anticipation when several guilds are competing to clear a raid instance and there is one boss left the momentum that guild brings in when being the first in the world to clear a raid instance cannot be touched.

When the Sunwell content became available for the Public Test Realm, several guilds had the brilliant idea to stream their progress on world first bosses to the public. After watching one guild through their first boss kill it became clear that this is the way PvE needs to be presented to the esports scene.

The stream was broadcasted via uStream with its chat room enabled and I was watching one guild work on the Fel Myst boss. The impressive part of the world first encounter is the learning curve. The ability to go into an encounter completely unaware of the bosse's abilities, strength, and weaknesses and with no strategy at all is what makes it fascinating to watch.

The chat room gave the feel of being in a crowd during a sporting event. Bets were being taken as to how fast the guild was going to wipe and how many tries it would take for them to figure out the fight.

This guild I was watching wiped on Fel Myst as soon as it got to the second phase for the first time. They did not know what was going to happen so as soon as a “lazer beam” shot at their raid and wiped them the chat room was filled with “LOLCats” references, “Owned!”, and the obvious “IMMA CHARGIN MUH LAZERS” which made the entire event enjoyable to be a part of.

The most exciting part of watching this stream was whenever a guild was close to defeating the encounter. An example would be during the first boss of Sunwell, Kalecgos, where the guild I was watching had been wiping for a couple of hours trying to figure out the fight.

When it finally came down to the last 10% of the boss’s health, the chat room flooded with “BURN!!”, “CMON!!”, “You can do it!”, and many other words of support. The moment the boss was defeated the chat room exploded into a sea of “good jobs” and this overwhelming sense of satisfaction and relief. And there you have it, the formula.

The game itself provides the playing ground and with new content patches it also provides a seasonal feel and the press does their part in reporting the raid races. The only problem is: is it spectator friendly?

Entertainment-wise it’s very spectator friendly and is also a different type of spectator game. Instead of watching two teams compete against each other you watch guilds of 25 people progress against a common enemy. However, if you’re in a guild that’s working towards a world first your guild’s strategy needs to be carefully hidden which completely ruins the spectator side of PvE.

The problem is how seriously guilds take their world first progressions. I don’t think we’d ever see a Nihilum stream of their world first progress because of protection of trade secrets, reduced player performance because of the lag streaming would produce, and it would be a distraction that would take away focus from the progression.

SK Gaming headed in the right direction with their “SK-Gaming Does Sunwell” events but it happened too late in the game. By that time many guilds had already defeated Sunwell and after the first live stream each subsequent stream was a broken record. To effectively bring the raid races to esports and have it become a world wide spectator event we would need to use SK-Gaming’s live stream idea, at the correct time, and with a guild willing to participate.

The raiding aspect of the game has a lot to offer as a spectator event. Keep close watch when Wrath of the Lich King raids start because the coverage of world first boss kills will be flooding the front pages of many websites. With Arthas supposedly being the final encounter and being a major character of Warcraft lore, don’t be surprised when you see the spotlight on WoW PvE.