[Announcement] Winners of the WoW 10th Anniversary Contest!

Three weeks ago, we asked you to share your stories of World of Warcraft. We were looking for anything and everything, from entertaining to tragic, from life-changing stories to hilarious guild stories, and everything else in between.

Woooah boy, it has been a hard road judging all of the personal story entries to the #10YearsofWoW contest – but, after consulting with the World of Warcraft Community team, we’re excited to finally announce our winners!

But before we do, we’ve got a message to all of our WoW players who came out in force to participate:

You all Rock.

In a year stained by bad press for gaming and staggering amounts of toxicity, it’s incredible to see so many passionate gamers coming out of the digital woodwork to share such positive stories. The World of Warcraft community has really shown its true colors with so many narratives of support, love, friendship, and recovery.

We’ve been absolutely blown away.

Ten years of gaming with friends in Azeroth has yielded a ton of touching stories (we’ve each got one or two ourselves at GameSkinny HQ), and each one is well-worth a million fist-bumps – but only a select few ended up winning prizes. So, let’s get to it.

Blizzard’s participating judges:

• Danielle “Nethaera” Vanderlip
• Micah “Bashiok” Whipple
• Jonathan “Zarhym” Brown

Our Three Runners Up

Kauket0 with “Be Content Broken: Kauket’s Story“

There were not many lore-based stories, but this was one of the few to plop a player character right into the action and spin a tale of betrayal, revenge, and corruption. Well-written and impassioned, Kauket’s story follows the life of a Death Knight from a low-level chat with VanCleef to showdowns with Tirion Fordring and Arthas.

I slammed open the cabin door. “VanCleef.”

The man started to his feet, chair clattering to the floor, but he managed to turn his step back into a bow. “Dame Kauket, I wasn’t expecting a visit from you.”

“What a coincidence. I wasn’t expecting a visit from assassins wearing Defias masks.”

Fairefaerie with “World of Warcraft Made My Life Better Than I Could Have Imagined“

Gaming has always allowed people a great escape, a way to cope difficult situations, and in this story, World of Warcraft was able to serve as a doorway to escape an abusive relationship for user fairefaerie. From meeting a new friend in /Trade chat to living with her new husband in Victoria, Canada, this is a touching story of new beginnings.

First, what are the chances that, when I created my character, I would choose the same realm as Eli and that we would both be joking around in Trade at the same time and that we would notice the other person.

Second, what are the further chances that, when we switched servers, we would make friends with the exact people who would introduce me to my future husband?

They’re pretty low; they might even be extraordinary, but it totally happened.

Kittin_5611 with “World of Warcraft Made My World Complete“

Like most relationship stories that start online, distance can be a pretty tough obstacle to face… but especially across the Pacific Ocean! While falling off the World Tree in the Night Elf starting zone might be a rough start, this couple’s in-game adventures are reflected with a great globe trotting love story.

We were in Eastern Plaguelands, my priest, and his druid, trying to get me to level cap before the expansion. As usual, we were mucking around with emotes while chatting away on Skype.

We were heading to the mausoleum with the zombie trolls, when he emoted /love. Both of us sat in shock for a couple of minutes, while zombie trolls ate our characters.

Each of our three runners up will receive at $130 3D FigurePrint immortalization of their characters. Learn more about FigurePrints here.

And the grand prize winner (drum roll, please!)

User Kergin with the story “I Was Not Prepared“

Deciding a grand prize winner out of so many great submissions was tough, but in the end the choice was clear. Kergin’s tale could have just been about keeping in touch and the eventual traumatic near-loss of his brother, stationed in Afghanistan, and it would have still made waves. But, the narrative didn’t stop there: later diagnosed with cancer, Kergin’s guildmates banded together to ensure that he was able to continue playing WoW from his hospital bed, showing an immense degree of support. (Besides, as they mentioned by cheeky “get well soon” card: a good warlock is hard to come by.)

I could hear the ensuing chaos in the background through his headset until his connection went dead and his character went offline. For the next several days our family tried to contact him via telephone and email with no success and I couldn’t help but thinking that the very worst had happened.

Finally around three weeks after, we finally got the phone call we had waited for and it was my brother calling to say he was safe and, that while he was playing WoW that night with me in the communications office, the room he would have been asleep in was the one that was hit by the mortar round. 

As our grand prize winner, Kergin will receive a 3D FigurePrint as well as a signed Collector’s Edition copy of World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor signed by Blizzard’s World of Warcraft Community Management team.

Happy 10th Anniversary!

We highly recommend you check out each of the winning stories! You can see all of the entries here.

We’d like to thank you all for participating and we’d like to extend a huge thanks to Blizzard for helping to make this all happen. Congratulations to our winners and congrats to World of Warcraft on it’s 10th year anniversary!

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