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How A Top ‘World Of Warcraft’ Guild Reached Its Breaking Point



What does it mean to be at the pinnacle of World of Warcraft? There are several markers of success within the most popular Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG) in the world. A player could be the best at player-versus-player combat, as judged by the regular tournaments hosted by Blizzard, the game’s developer. They could also be among the best theory-crafters in the world, which means diving into the game’s systems to optimize performance and then sharing their findings with interested parties. Perhaps most famous, though, are the players at the very top of the Race to World First.To get more news about Buy WoW Gold Safe, you can visit lootwow.com official website.

As covered before on this very website, the Race to World First is a community-run event that occurs every time there is a new content release in WoW. With each major patch, Blizzard adds a new raid: a 20-player dungeon with the hardest bosses in the game, tied thematically to the patch’s storyline. As soon as one of these new dungeons hits the game, a set of the highest-level player guilds embark on a non-stop race to become the first group of players to complete the dungeon. The most recent of these releases came on Feb. 22, when patch 9.2, called “Eternity’s End,” came out with Sepulcher of the First Ones, an 11-fight dungeon that culminated in defeating The Jailer, the Big Bad of the Shadowlands expansion.
While a certain subset of players simply wanted to see how the twisty and oft-reviled storyline of the Shadowlands would wrap up, and others, like my own guild, geared up for months of slow progression at their own pace, those at the peak of the game came into this new patch prepared to participate in what would turn out to be the most grueling Race to World First since the event became a widely recognized, and widely watched, phenomenon.

Most Race to World First events last up to two weeks. For reference, the last one, in the Sanctum of Domination, ended after just seven days. The Sepulcher, however, took 18 days to fully clear after everything was said and done, as guilds ran into a variety of roadblocks that pushed the race length past any reasonable predictions.

One of those guilds was the newly renamed Liquid, which finished second in the last race under the banner of Limit. The guild joined Team Liquid—one of the biggest e-sports organizations in the world, dipping into WoW for the first time—between races. With that came expectations: Liquid is a recognizable name in video games, and it was expected that with the support from such a big organization, the players would be put in the best position to take back the crown from European guild Echo.

Though Liquid started the race on fire, picking up the world-first kills on seven of the first eight bosses, the guild ran into the brick wall of exhaustion around day 10. Combined with excellent play from Echo, their biggest rivals, the exhaustion led to Liquid making the unprecedented decision to stop playing on day 18, just minutes before Echo won the race.
The decision to stop while so close to the end of the race was one that had not been seen from a top guild in a race for as long as the event has existed. There were many factors, some obvious to viewers and some that occurred behind the scenes, that contributed to the decision, one that led Liquid to drop from its first- and second-place finishes so far in Shadowlands to fifth in Sepulcher. I spoke to Royce “Bubbadub” Newcomb, Liquid’s head analyst, to figure out what exactly happened, as well as what made this race so different than previous ones.

These races are supposed to be mad sprints to the finish, with guilds competing to play at maximum levels of performance for a short period of time. The Sepulcher of the First Ones edition, however, turned into a marathon, and it turns out that most players, at any level of the game, are not built to play for hours upon hours for almost three weeks.