Blizzard’s World of Warcraft in development page now has the skinny on all the new features coming with patch 2.4: Fury of the Sunwell, which should be hitting the live servers any week now. Besides the usual additions of new raid content (introduced by a fancy, melodramatic trailer, which sadly fails to explain how someone earns the fury of an inanimate object) and UI improvements, the next content patch will also include support for a new server type. In Blizzard’s own words:

Players will now be able to create level-70 characters with epic equipment on special tournament realms and compete in a new global arena tournament. For more information, details, and entry requirements, please visit the official tournament pages.

You can register for a tournament realm for the low, low price $20 per account (in addition to your monthly fees, naturally), allowing you to create up to three level 70s with full sets of epic PvP gear and participate in the six-week qualifying round of 3v3 arena matches. The top teams from each qualifying round will then do battle in regional live events before fighting in the global finals, which feature a prize pool of $120,000—$75,000 of which goes directly to the number one team.

Blizzard has been pushing to legitimatize e-sports through its games since the original Starcraft, and this should go a long way towards getting a large number of people (about 10 million or so) thinking of video games as honest-to-goodness competitive sports. Expect to see a similar feature incorporated into Starcraft 2’s Battle.net, complete with some sort of pay-to-play model. You heard it here first!