Once again, the pink gnomes in WoW ran against breast cancer. This time, the fundraising goal was exceeded fourfold!
In World of Warcraft, there is a lovely tradition on the American server Scarlet Crusade that captures attention year after year. The “Running of the Gnomes” event is being held for the 8th time and aims to raise awareness about a serious issue: breast cancer.
The whole thing works like a charity run in the real world – you create a small gnome and run the predefined route together with many other players. At the end, you make a donation that is then sent to the Cleveland Clinic and benefits research on the Tuohy Vaccine.
More than $16,000 for research
This year, the goal was to raise at least $4,000 – that was the target for the event. Last year, they achieved impressive earnings of $5,500. However, the actual result this year was much higher! With $16,295, they set a new record.
The number of participants also increased drastically. In 2016, there were “only” around 2,900 gnomes who embarked on the pilgrimage, while in 2017, the number jumped to more than 7,000 pink heroes from Gnomeregan. This also caused the server Scarlet Crusade to experience temporary outages – so many players in such a small space was simply not planned.
In 2017, the event was honored by Blizzard for the first time. The developers turned the event into a micro-holiday that could be experienced on all servers. Like in the original, there were several checkpoints leading from Dun Morogh down into the Stranglethorn Vale. This was accompanied by hundreds of NPCs standing along the way cheering on the runners. However, there were no actual “in-game rewards” for this – as is the case with almost all micro-holidays.
Did you participate in the Gnome run, even if it was just at the micro-holiday? And what do you think of such events? A good thing or does it have no place in games?
Have you seen what will happen to Silithus soon? There are some changes coming…
