1Now I’m no expert on either World of Warcraft itself2 (nor on the race per se) but I do want to write a little bit about why it’s interesting to me in ways unlike how other sports & esports have failed to capture my attention long term.
I’ve mentioned the World of Warcraft Race to World First (hereafter RTWF) a few other times in several other past bits of writing3. In Copying Builds Is Not Cheating I mentioned the RTWF in the context of high-skill-level collaboration and gave a brief description of the race in the footnotes:
The RTWF refers to the race to be the first to finish each new Mythic Raid that’s released. It’s baseball-esque; the moment to moment is sort of mundane but there are intense periods of excitement and you can also follow along with daily recaps (the races typically go on over 1-2 weeks, I recommend Dratnos & Tettles’ recaps). Mostly these days, I follow WoW via the PoddyC.
In an update to the Skill Issue Issue I bring up a “you need to have had the time and space to develop a top-level skill” addendum:
One element that I think I should/would have included, but hadn’t thought much about before writing this, is free time. I spent a lot of time recently following Team Liquid's 11.0 Race to World First (RWF) and one of the highlights is Maximum’s post-mortem streams and podcasts.
One of the things Maximum mentions when asked about what it takes to get to a point where someone is at a level where they’re capable of competing in a RWF guild is that most players at that level had a time in their life where, by circumstance, they were free to have the time to get really good. He explains that if you’re focused on schooling or have a job that obligates much of your time and attention, you’re just never going to be able to compete with people who don’t, all else being equal.
I’ll have started writing this the same day I published the last post, which is a Thursday, during the first week of the new Mythic raid, Manaforge Omega, which would have been released after maintenance day Tuesday. This will probably end up published around this same time next week, which means it will probably be coming out right around when Liquid and Echo are pushing on to the last few bosses, conveniently when the race might likely be most interesting for the otherwise-uninitiated.
Since the Heroic raid will have been released at the same time as the Mythic raid this patch/season the first 2-4 full days will be splits and thus honestly kinda boring. Raids have three difficulties (from easiest to hardest: Normal, Heroic, and Mythic) which drop progressively better (higher item level or “ilvl”) loot and so the lower difficulties need to be farmed at least a little bit to make the Mythic raid smoother. In some past tiers the Mythic raid has been released on a subsequent week from Normal and/or Heroic, so in those tiers most of splits would have been done over a “Heroic Week” which allows the race proper to start right on patch day Tuesday. “Splits” are also partly explained in the footnotes of Copying Builds Is Not Cheating:
For example, splits are an ongoing arms race amongst Liquid and Echo. Because of the way loot works, each player has to prepare multiple identical copies of the same class and spec (I can’t recall the precise number but iirc the number is something absurd like sixteen), and these characters are rotated through the lower tier raids in order to funnel gear efficiently in a way that maximizes item level going into the mythic raid.
You have to do this since Normal and Heroic raids have lockouts such that every individual character has a limited shot at loot from that raid per week. Most serious high-end raiding guilds do alts and splits; I remember it being a thing back when I played during WotLK. Normally you might have a few alts do this over several weeks to speed things up a little bit but, since it’s a race that will be over in less than a few weeks, Liquid and Echo effectively have just the one week that matters and need to go to such extremes to maximize it. Nobody outside of Liquid and Echo are doing splits with sixteen alts, but if you wanted to actually begin to compete with them it’s something that you’d have to seriously consider doing too.
Their splits are crazy enough that it’s almost entirely the only source of burnout wrt players voluntarily leaving the RTWF. And keep in mind having the characters prepared between patches in the same expansion means having to have best-in-slot gear from the Mythic raids of the previous patch for all of those characters.
The RTWF and RTWF-adjacent content is good for passing time at work and commutes, and good background for the TV or third monitor at home. Else for me a large part of the joy is in vicariously imagining the dream of doing a thing with a large group of friends as a big team with a common goal (in a state-of-the-art facility run by a well-funded multi-game-spanning esports franchise). I imagine this is broadly the sort of aspirational feeling most people get from regular sports, but what I think appeals to me about the RTWF versus regular sports and esports is that the RTWF is kind of mostly about the macro; the team management and preparation and then how that comes together for an interesting slow-burn climax. Also, competition in a primarily PvE game is something that’s kind of novel.
I can’t say all that much about normal sports because they just don’t interest me conventionally, but in most esports you don’t really get to see much behind the scenes team prep4. For the RTWF, even though we don’t really get to see much of what happens during the season in between races, the preparation is relatively front and center to some degree5.
Or maybe it’s just Max, I’ll cop to being basically just a Team Liquid/USA fan when it comes to the race; I don’t really watch any of Echo’s coverage. Maximum is the raid leader & “21st man”6 for Team Liquid and he’s just generally kind of an entertaining dude with lots of free-flowing insights into how people think and act at the extremes of niche high-level performance. That said, Team Liquid’s race broadcast production is consistently pretty entertaining to have around too.
The RTWF is kind of tough to recommend, for one you do kind of have to be fairly familiar with World of Warcraft for it to make any sense at all. Raiding also lacks a certain amount of visual clarity at even the best of times, much less as a spectator. The commentary from the TL production helps but is also pretty heavy on the jargon. The casters are already doing god’s work filling in the downtime when Mythic bosses aren’t being pulled but you can also watch Max’s stream if you just straight want the nitty gritty technical comms only, which can be interesting but are also pretty dry.
YouTube links for those interested, because Twitch is lame:
Team Liquid WoW channel: https://www.youtube.com/@TeamLiquidMMO
Maximum’s channel: https://www.youtube.com/@LimitMaximum
Dratnos & Tettles daily recaps for the current raid: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrr_ukI9KzrhRUK22P4TkA7AuwroChM9r
Raider.io coverage of the race: https://raider.io/rwf
8/26/25 edit: Spoilers for how the Manaforge Omega race ended below.
The race ended mid-afternoon after the first reset Saturday, halfway through my 4-day weekend (the apartment felt so much quieter afterwards!). This was perhaps one of the closest races of all time; Echo had multiple sub-0.5% boss HP wipes while Liquid was at ~3% best attempt. Liquid then took a 4 minute break, came back, and finished the final boss on the first attempt, securing the expansion sweep!
Anyways I wanted to add a little more to point out one other parts of the race that I really enjoy: seeing the players enjoy their hard-fought victory in the moment.
Keep in mind we’re talking months of prep work starting shortly after the previous race ends—to prepare for splits for the first 4 days of the race (they entered the Mythic raid finally on Friday of the first week), tons of research prep and analysis and planning when the raid is first released on the pubic test realms, and 11 days of 14 hours/day progression raiding up to the kill. To have all that hard work pay off in a close win like this must feel fucking amazing and you can see it there in the pure uncensored joy of these absolute king nerds. Good shit.
Can’t footnote the title but it’s gonna be at least a little funny if people misread it as “On Race”.
My personal history with the game is:
Played from very shortly before the launch of Wrath of the Lich King to a little ways into the Icecrown Citadel patch
About a year or two circa 2009—I remember raiding Ulduar from my mom’s basement…when we had to temporarily move in with her during the 2009 flood
I started playing to play with a couple of my old high school buddies (we were now in college) and the guild they were in at the time became my long-running gaming friend group that I still hang out with nowadays
Though despite this I spent most of the patch playing with a different Alliance guild on a PvE server
I remember leveling my first character through the start of Burning Crusade when Wrath first came out, on a PvP server, and constantly getting ganked by new DKs
Very briefly during Cataclysm
Very shortly pre-and-post-Firelands, with the friend group of a guy with whom I’d co-led a launch DCUO raid group
For several months through the first season of Shadowlands
During COVID, with the friend group I’d first met during my original WotLK tour!
Normally I’d say I’m never especially tempted to go back—WoW has never been anything special or unique to me—but these days it’s tempting to be tempted to just from listening in on RTWF content.
I’m not trying to make it a regular thing where I intro posts with bulleted lists of a bunch of previous posts but it just happened that we have a few in a row where I thought to tie together ideas that had been sprinkled around previously. But also, just brazenly linking back to previous thought dumps is part of the joy of having a Substack.
Though from what I understand regular-sports fans definitely get interested in their favorite team’s management and team training minutiae and much of that is true for esports fans too.
Look I don’t exactly know how to reconcile this with “splits are boring” so maybe I’m just straight bullshitting here.
Mythic raids normally have 20 member teams; Max and Team Liquid popularized the practice of having an additional player raid leading and shot calling from outside the 20-man in-game group (by watching another person’s streamed point-of-view) in a manner that’s kinda comparable to conventional coaches in regular sports.