Tarren Mill
Blizzard put two enemy villages close together in a contested zone and accidentally created years of unrewarded, unstructured, enormously popular fighting. Alterac Valley battles could run for days, handed between shifts of players. The company spent the following two decades trying to formalise that into something a spectator could watch, arena brackets, championship circuits, a dungeon league, with mixed success.
Part of World of Warcraft
21 moments in this segment.
- - The AFK problem. Players standing idle in Alterac Valley to farm reputation, recorded in 2005. Every large-scale PvP system the game has shipped since has been designed partly around stopping this.
- - Tarren Mill and Southshore. Two villages placed close together across a faction border, which produced years of unstructured, unrewarded, enormously popular fighting. Blizzard never designed it; players simply went there.
- - Alterac Valley, June 2005. The original Alterac Valley, which could run for days. Battles were handed over between shifts of players; some ran so long that the same match spanned a weekend.
- - Alterac Valley on Warsong, 27 June 2005. Raw fraps footage of the original Alterac Valley on the Warsong PvP realm, three weeks after the battleground opened. This is what the first version looked like before it was cut down: matches running for hours or days, with NPC commanders and objectives most later players never saw. Primary footage of the vanilla battleground is close to unfindable.
- - War in Silithus, Blackmoore 2006. Vanilla-era PvP footage from the realm Blackmoore, shot on the day the Ahn'Qiraj gates opened, when the Horde spent the whole day hunting Alliance players in Silithus instead of raiding. World PvP of this kind had no scoreboard and no reward, it happened because a server-wide event put both factions in the same zone. The maker states a March 2006 release; the 2017 upload is a re-post.
- - Two versus two at BlizzCon 2010. An arena match played on stage. Arena was Blizzard's attempt at a spectator format: small teams, short matches, and a result a viewer could follow without knowing the game.
- - Three versus three. The three-player bracket, which became the competitive standard and remained so for the life of the tournament circuit.
- - Arena at BlizzCon 2013. The Arena Global Invitational final. Arena was WoW's attempt at a conventional esport: small teams, short matches, a format a spectator could follow.
- - Greg Street and Brian Holinka answer PvP questions. WoW's lead systems designer and its PvP designer take questions on a player's Twitch stream in August 2013, with arena players in the chat. It is a developer interview conducted on the players' own turf rather than a stage, and it captures the period when Blizzard designers argued about balance in public and under their own handles. Recorded live and reuploaded the next day.
- - A competitor interviewed. A player interviewed after the Arena Global Invitational final, professional competition in a game most of its players used for something else entirely.
- - Arena Global Invitational final. The 2013 grand final. Arena esports peaked around this period and contracted afterwards, while the dungeon and raid formats grew.
- - Tarren Mill again, ten years on. Blizzard restaged the Tarren Mill and Southshore fight as a tenth-anniversary event, which is as close as the game has come to admitting the accident was the best thing in it.
- - Arena World Championship final. The tournament circuit at its most formalised, with regional qualifiers feeding a BlizzCon final.
- - Arena World Championship 2017. Rockets Eclipse against Panda Global at the world championship, the tournament circuit at its most formalised.
- - Southshore versus Tarren Mill, on Elysium. Hours of unstructured world PvP between Southshore and Tarren Mill, recorded on the Elysium private server at level 60. The original battles had no objective, no scoreboard and no end; this recreation is the closest thing to a long-form record of what that actually looked like.
- - Method Black at the AWC. A lower-bracket final from the 2018 season, when raiding guilds had begun fielding arena rosters under the same banner.
- - Mythic Dungeon International. The other competitive format: five players, one dungeon, against a timer. MDI rewards route optimisation and pull planning rather than reflexes.
- - Arena World Championship 2025 grand finals. The full first day of the AWC 2025 grand finals, broadcast by Blizzard, with eight teams playing for a $200,000 prize pool. Arena esports had by this point been running for close to twenty years, long outliving most of the games it started alongside. The broadcast is the event, so the stream date is the right date.
- - MDI global finals. Teams pushing the highest keys live. The scene it grew out of, friends timing a dungeon for a weekly reward, is still the most-played endgame in the game.
- - MDI 2026. The competitive dungeon circuit still running in 2026, well after the arena scene it once shared a stage with had contracted.
- - Arena World Championship 2026. Championship Sunday, twenty years after arena was introduced in the first expansion.
