Keystone Masters: WoW's First Competitive Mythic+ Community Event

“If we combine our creativity with a little assistance from both Blizzard and the community, the possibilities are limitless.”

On December 12th, it was announced on Twitter that Keystone Masters will be hosting WoW’s first competitive Mythic+ community event. It will take place this Sunday at 19:00 GMT featuring live casters AutomaticJak, JdotB, Sours, and Xyronic. Today, we are chatting with Executive Producer of Keystone Masters, Cirra, who is giving us a more in-depth look at this tournament.



VitaminP: What is Keystone Masters and how did this idea form?

Cirra: After winning the 2018 Mythic Dungeon Invitational (MDI) with my team Excel’s Angels (formerly named Kjell’s Angels), I felt a drought of competitive content in the game. I was very lucky that I got to compete in the MDI All Stars Tournament at Blizzcon this past November, but we have been dealing with noticeable gaps of time between the MDI 2018, the MDI All Stars Tournament, and the next upcoming MDI that has yet to be announced. This got me thinking about what I could do with the community. The point of Keystone Masters (KSM) is to keep competitive Mythic+ alive in the downtime between tournaments by fostering a culture of fun-spirited competition that gives the audience first-person views of the players they love to watch on stream. It also provides a good setting for new casters to enter the scene and veteran casters to hone their skill.



VitaminP: Didn’t you try out the Keystone Masters tournament once during Legion? What have you been able to improve upon since then?

Cirra: We tried a version of Keystone Masters briefly at the end of Legion, but it was sketchy so we ended up taking the time off to figure out the logistics and technicalities of a project this large in scale. Other than having to reroll keys for days, we also had lag on the one computer that was trying to broadcast multiple people’s streams simultaneously. This time around, we eliminated the stream lag by having the teams pre-record their runs, which we edited into something that we can easily broadcast live. Additionally, it was easier to reroll keys this time around up until the recent patch.



VitaminP: In what ways will the Keystone Masters tournament differ from the MDI? Do you see it clashing with Blizzard?

Cirra: What we are doing does not compete with the MDI, but rather complements it. Keystone Masters is an event of community-run matches, so it’s not a hardcore tournament. If it’s something Blizzard ultimately finds interesting, we’d love to collaborate and see what we can do with some assistance. Every time I ask people what they would do if they had year-round access to tournament realm, everyone throws out ideas they’d love to try out, such as no affixes, Fortified and Tyrannical in the same key, or neither. We can test out any feature or weird idea that we want without the constriction of rules, regulations, or various codes to follow that come with official tournaments. The worst thing that can happen is that we try an idea that turns out to be really lame, someone tweets at me saying it was a dumb idea, and then we never do it again, haha.



VitaminP: Given that the keystone deletion bug is no longer in place, how will you ensure that your teams are able to do the same keys for the upcoming tournaments?

Cirra: The very first test we did in legion was a huge pain, since the keystone deletion bug wasn’t in the game at that time. We all had to play every single day for at least 4 hours a day for a solid week to get all of our keystones to match up with the other team. As you can imagine, it took forever. In BFA, my eyes lit up when we could delete keystones and get the same keys. However, with the new key system, we are looking into matching up teams to compete based on what keys they get in their weekly chest. This will make it easier to let teams compete, but also it will give the audience variety so they don’t see the same teams competing over and over again each week.

In terms of it progressing and going forward with the tournament, we probably won’t be able to go any further than the best of three unless we get some form of assistance from Blizzard such as access to the tournament realm.



VitaminP: What are your long-term goals for Keystone Masters?

Cirra: If we combine our creativity with a little assistance from both Blizzard and the community, the possibilities are limitless. This could be the first community-run tournament series for Mythic+, which would give us so much room to grow the Esport further and be inclusive to more people who are passionate about Mythic+. We don’t fully know how everyone will react to this new project, but we’ve received amazing support thus far and we can’t wait to see how things turn out in the future. With projects like the Gosu Cup emerging now, it seems like a lot of people are pushing for player-led tournaments, so I hope we can spark the community’s interest.



VitaminP: How can people get involved and sign up for your tournament in the future?

Cirra: We're currently finding a happy medium between ease of use for players and for us internally as well. We'll be opening up our discord server to help people form groups and chat about all things related to dungeons and KSM. Please keep an eye on our Twitter page for all of these announcements. Signups are going to become available soon, so get your teams prepared and ready to go for weekly KSM tournaments to come!

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Links

• Follow Keystone Masters on Twitch
  
• Follow Keystone Masters on Twitter
  
• Follow Cirra on Twitch
  
• Follow Cirra on Twitter
  
• Find Cirra on RaiderIO
  

About the Author

Vitaminpee mains a Brewmaster and loves to do competitive Mythic+. She is the Social Media Manager for Big Dumb Gaming and a partnered Twitch streamer who plays all tanks at max level and is excited to have more time now to push for the next MDI with her team: Synecdoche, Oddy, Sham, and Comfykins.