The University Of Silicon Valley Is Offering Scholarships For Gaming And Some Of The Requirements Are Interesting

By now, I assume that most active gamers know about universities giving out scholarships to esports players. Depending on where you go, they’ve been available for League of Legends, Overwatch, and a few others. It makes sense, it’s a team-based activity that if marketed well the schools could probably use to make more money off their students than they’re spending on them.

Of course, there are plenty of games that just don’t fall into that category. Even MMORPGs, which are built around a lot of players playing and working together just doesn’t work in the same way. For one thing, there’s a lot of non-competitive stuff players have to do before they can even begin with PvP or high-end raiding. People who play the games might watch it, but you’re not going to build any kind of college-specific audience out of it. (Mostly) single-player RPGs are even less ideal.

So, as a rule, you’re probably not going to get a scholarship for your Lost Ark or Genshin Impact addition.

Although, there is one exception.

As it turns out, the University of Silicon Valley offers what they’re calling the “Max Achievement Scholarship”. These scholarships reward players-turned-students for “exceptional persistence, systems thinking, and creative problem-solving – even in digital worlds”. There are two tiers of scholarships being offered. The first is Legendary Tier. This offers players up to $5,000 US per term with there being three terms a year. That means players can get up to $15k a year for school.

The list is broken up into quite a few categories, like console/platform specific trophy hunting, Roguelikes & Roguelites, Souls-Likes, Strategy, Survial, and skill-based precision challenges. Considering the focus of this site, we’ll discuss the MMORPGs & Live Service Games category. But know that there are quite a few other games on the list. So, if you, say, have all the achievements including “There is No Spoon” from Factorio, you can certainly apply.

What’s required to qualify for a Legendary Tier scholarship? Well, the website lists several games that students can receive a scholarship for playing. These are RuneScape, Final Fantasy XIV, World of Warcraft, Elder Scrolls Online, Guild Wars 2, and Warframe. Each has their own requirements, but the general criteria is that players have “ultra-rare accomplisments requiring 500+ hours of sustained mastery across complex systems”. The site those that typically less than one percent of a game’s players have achieved this.

For example, XIV players will need to have leveled all of their jobs, combat and crafter/gatherer to 100. (I would guess that requirement will increase with Evercold drops.) Warframe requires a Mastery Rank of 30+ and the completion of all story quests. Oh. And so you know, they’ll be checking your in-game profile via the appropriate methods to make sure you’re being honest about it.

The second tier, Mastery Tier, reward players with up to $2,500 US for each term and requires “significant completist achievements demonstrating advanced skill and persistence”. This is actually where the requirements get a bit funny. The games listed here are RuneScape, RuneScape 3, Final Fantasy XIV, World of Warcraft, Destiny 2, Lost Ark, and Genshin Impact. And the difference in difficulty between at least two of these seem pretty wide.

As a player of both XIV and Genshin Impact, it’s pretty easy to compare them. XIV requires players to have completed all role quests and all 12 extreme trials. Now, to be fair, the role quest thing isn’t that difficult. After a certain point they did away with job(class) quests and shifted to just having a quest for each role. So, rather than having to level 30+ jobs and do quests for each, player can do five combat jobs (one for each role) and 3 crafter/gatherer. The extreme trials take a bit more effort though. Yes, earlier ones can be handled pretty easily as your gear has outpaced it, but you will be spending time learning the later ones.

Genshin on the other hand requires the completion of all Archon Quests. That just means you complete the main storyline. If you’re an avid player, you’ve done that. The other requirement is to have 8 characters at Friendship level 10. That mostly requires you to either just use the character in your party or put them in your teapot with things they like and come back to visit and collect the friendship bonus. You do have to stay on top of it. But it’s not really in the same league as doing an Extreme trial or collecting raid seals. Perhaps a better choice would have been to have players done a certain amount of the game’s various end-game content, or have a number of characters abilities maxed out – something that definitely takes persistence.

All that said, the good news is that there are some scholarships for would-be-students to grab. Of course, that does require you to want to go to the University of Silicon Valley.