As the end of 2024 is quickly approaching, nearly every major video game franchise is having their Global Esport Championships. Upcoming events include League of Legends Worlds, Valorant Champions, DOTA 2 TI, and more, but today we will discuss a very different Esport that is starting soon. The World of Warcraft Race to World First (WOW RWF) has been steadily growing over the past five-ish years and is now the largest World of Warcraft Esport that rivals the biggest tournaments that were mentioned above. The RWF is very different from traditional Esports though, so this post will discuss the main differences and what viewers can expect from this awesome event.
The RWF Main Difference
Unlike most other Esport events, the RWF is not sponsored and put on by the developers of WOW (Blizzard), but it is supported by them. This means there is no cash prize or trophy for winning, only a unique in-game achievement and bragging rights. Despite this, millions of dollars are poured into the RWF every by third-party organizations who want to take advantage of the advertisement opportunities in front of hundreds of thousands of viewers.
Another big difference between the RWF and other Esport events is that it is a player verse environment (PVE) based competition, not a player verse player (PVP) competition, making the RWF the largest PVE competition in the world. This means that the players participating in this event are fighting the hardest versions of the developer-made non-player-characters (aka raid bosses) instead of against other players. Now, these raid bosses are no walk in the park; Blizzard has even admitted to making some of them so hard that they didn’t even believe they were numerically possible to beat, yet time and time again the teams (aka guilds) defy Blizzard’s expectations. The objective of the RWF is for any guild team to defeat all the raid bosses on the hardest difficulty (mythic) as fast as possible.
A final big difference that the RWF boasts is the guild team sizes are at minimum 20 players and the best guilds have 30+ player teams to be able to mix and match team composition needs. During the RWF, all these players are put up in 16+ hours days until the end of the race, which generally takes between one and two weeks. These numbers don’t include the dozens of support staff who make sure the players stay comfortable and healthy during the race. The three front runner guilds in last several RWF, Team Liquid, Echo Esports, and Method, create huge events out of the RWF where all the players play in the same giant room together, hire staff and casters to commentate 24/7 over the RWF coverage, and broadcast nearly all their progression to hundreds of thousands of viewers worldwide. Of course, there are many other guilds that try to keep up with these other guilds, but it is almost always one of the three guilds mentioned above that wins.
Expectations from the RWF
While these guilds have been preparing and setting up for the RWF for several months now, the actual race will start on September 11th, 2024. The mythic difficulty of the raid won’t open until September 18th, but the 16-hour days for the players start on the 11th because heroic raids, tier 8 delves, and mythic zero dungeons open on that day. This makes the 11th the best day for all these guild teams to start their final preparations, which is gearing their many characters for the mythic raid in the following week.
During the week of the 11th, the players will be running normal/heroic raid (raid name: Nerub’ar Palace) splits, where the raid teams split up into two or three raid teams, invite other players not affiliated with the team, and funnel gear into affiliated players’ characters. During splits, players like you and me can actually help with splits if you can get invited to the group. While you will not be getting any gear from it, it’s a good way to help your favorite team, get early kills on heroic bosses, and fill your weekly vault with heroic level gear. The best way to get into these groups is to have a high item level character (590+) and watch the affiliated players’ streams to know the exact times they are starting their new split groups. These splits will likely run all week and there will probably be around 30 raid runs per guild, so there are plenty of opportunities to get in if you have the time.
Once the mythic raid opens on 18th, there might be a few more splits but most teams will go right into the mythic raid. The front runners will kill the first several mythic bosses very fast on the first day so that they can reach the harder bosses, which tend to be the last few bosses of the raid. Those last few bosses are where the bulk of the RWF will take place. The guild teams will try out different strategies, try and fail on the bosses hundreds of times, until finally one guild team beats all the bosses.
Each guild has had the chance to test every boss in the raid on mythic difficulty except for the last boss. Despite that, the last few bosses are still extremely difficult and very exciting to watch, but the last boss is definitely where things get the most interesting. What strategies will these guilds cook up? How will they overcome the obstacles the last few bosses present? Will the last boss have a secret last phase? All these questions and more will soon be answered, but only after these guilds face off in an intense PVE battle in World of Warcraft, The Race to World First in Nerub’ar Palace.
