The coronavirus pandemic did not prevent the new season of Mythic Dungeon International from happening. While one of the main WoW tournaments took place, it still received certain adjustments. Let us tell you how these have influenced the championship's popularity.
Unlike many other disciplines, WoW possesses a peculiar strength. Amidst the pandemic-stricken world, it provides a series of PvE tournaments that's not tied to the battles between teams. Instead of a 3x3 arena-based encounter, we are instead looking at the fastest dungeon crawl competition. This eliminates the need of holding the competition on a single server – a necessity that can be found, for example, in LoL or CS:GO.
Overall, MDI 2020 has featured six qualifiers: three for Europe and Asia, as well as three for America. Each of these has ended either with a victory or participation of one of the rosters of Method. Still, the organization itself didn't make it to the finals. MDI 2020 EU & Asia Cup #1 became the most popular out of the six qualifiers, based on all the key indicators. Meanwhile, the most recent North American championship was the one with the fewest viewers.
The championship itself turned out to be somewhat ambiguous. The most popular moment of the event was the match between the Golden Guardians and WUNDERBAR, with the latter team achieving the victory.
The English-language broadcast brought the most viewers, contributing an incredible 84% to the total hours watched. Understandably, the owners of the following three spots have contributed much less: 4% by the French broadcast, 3.6% by the German one and 2.3% by the Russian one.
It should be noted that, unlike MDI with its support of nine languages, Arena World Championship had only English, Portuguese and Spanish broadcasts after switching to YouTube.
When the final tournament enters the comparison, it leads to negative connotations. By the key indicators, the recently held MDI 2020 Global Finals was outperformed by the World's finals of 2018. Still, the result is an improvement from that of MDI 2019.
The change of platform is the reason for the particularly large decline since MDI 2018 Global Finals. We already talked about the Hearthstone tournaments few months ago. At that time, the last of them was heavily outmatched by all the previous events. This was caused by the contract with YouTube for the exclusive rights to broadcast all esports from Blizzard.
Blizzard fans are extremely used to Twitch. In part, the company itself has contributed to this by providing unique events, esports passes, and much more. Therefore, part of the audience decided not to follow the esports activities of studio's games after the sudden switch to YouTube.
The involvement of the Method organization in the recent scandal may have affected the views as well. Without going into details, let's just say that the team lost all its squads and the right to participate in the championship as a result. It's no secret that Method is quite iconic to the professional WoW – as confirmed the constant appearance of organization's two rosters in the finals. Therefore, the team's absence is more a minus than a plus.
