The folks at Guild Wars have posted another edition of their state of the game articles, this time looking at the Guru Challenge.

The Challenge

Earlier this year, after I was fortunate enough to participate on the tournament committee for the 2008 RAWR Cup, it occurred to me: We could do this. After the tournament ended and the committee wrapped up its work, I spoke with Inde, the head administrator for Guild Wars Guru where I am a senior moderator, and suggested that we host a GvG tournament of our own. Armed with my experience on the RAWR Cup committee and Inde's marketing connections, we went to work on building the Guru Challenge. We wanted as many participants as we could get, so we added two more divisions beyond what RAWR Cup had used — a Premier Division for elite level guilds and a Casual Division for players new to GvG. We also added a prediction contest where winners could win real-world prizes.

Getting Sponsors

As long as we had substantial prizes to award, I knew we would get the same level of support as comparable RAWR Cups. That dictated our first step: securing sponsors to provide prizes. As a rule, sponsors love good promotional exposure, so I went to ArenaNet and floated the idea of a Guild Wars Guru-sponsored tournament. ArenaNet's willingness to provide tournament coverage gave us the hook we needed — our tournament would be on the front page of ArenaNet's website and in an in-game URL. Inde sent out 50+ emails to potential sponsors, and we lined up three who were very interested in sponsoring our tournament. The biggest was Electronics Extreme, a new division of a large online retailer, which was willing to provide over $10,000 worth of laptops, portable DVD players, and MP3 players as prizes. (If you would like more information on how to secure sponsors, what information and numbers a sponsor is looking for or have questions on how to start please feel free to email Inde).

Read more here.