Echo Claims World First Mythic Raszageth - Vault of the Incarnates

[Mendzia]

Mark my words: Max will announce his retirement from raid leading after their kill OR some core raiders will try to start new guild after another loss.
Just my hard guess.

[antelope591]

Watching the race felt pretty disappointing this time around - all the bosses before Raszageth felt like an afterthought, and the final boss had a super anti-climactic ending. Ok for an entry boss I guess, but hopefully complexity of bosses will ramp up in the next few tiers.

Pretty funny how people can say this stuff after watching these guilds play 24/7, do countless splits and spend millions of gold on BoE's. Even right now there's barely 50 guilds that are 3/8. Sepulcher being so hardcore was a massive failure on Blizz's part and they don't want that repeated. Its not that hard to understand.

[Caprias]

Not making up numbers. Only about 20k players will clear mythic. Half of them won't clear it regularly, they'll just do it once or twice. Mythic population is incredibly small.

First of all the 1k guild number is sepulcher level which was an anomaly and sure as hell won't be repeated by Blizzard.
And now also count the guilds that might not clear but still are pretty engaged with 4;5;6;7 or so Bosses out of 8.

Suddenly it's more like 50k+ players that do stuff in mythic, and if that is the oh so low 1% you morons whine about it would mean WoW sits at 5 million subs+ which to me seems like they're doing everything quite alright if that'd be the case.

[Biomega]

Mark my words: Max will announce his retirement from raid leading after their kill OR some core raiders will try to start new guild after another loss.
Just my hard guess.

Big doubt.

The guild may be forever the bridesmaid never the bride, but I bet it's profitable. They have a big org on board, and big Twitch numbers, too. The fact that they're #2 and not #1 isn't nearly as relevant as people think to their profitability. Sure it'd be better, but not winning doesn't mean they suddenly fail or fall apart. Hell no.

Max isn't a great raid leader, but he knows how to sell and market himself. I don't know the actual numbers, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if Liquit is making more money than Echo on the race, despite (nearly) always losing to them. I wouldn't even be surprised if it turned out they made substantially more money, given that they're the face of NA and that's a pretty damn big and important market.

[Darsyek]

No... they wouldn't. That doesn't even make sense. Blizzard (and any software) builds patches/hotfixes based on bug-reports/manual inspection/and monitoring the software. Blizzard would still be doing some bugfixes, but not the ones we are seeing.

I see you're not familiar with the practice of WoW GMs flying around raid instances invisible monitoring raid encounters on new patches. They've done it for over a decade now. There are numerous examples of them doing it and the images of them doing so have even appeared in interviews.

For example, this GM observing a raid team fighting The Butcher in Highmaul;


There are examples of this throughout the entirety of WoW's history. When a new raid launches, you can be absolutely certain there are GMs scattered about various instances watching and looking for bugs, even long before Race to World First events were a thing.

If they wanted to actively stay out of it, and not participate they could choose to do that. But that would be them releasing mythic, and NOT touching a single thing about it until somebody cleared mythic. Specifically tuning the mythic version of any fight, then deciding when to release the hotfix, is absolutely taking part.

Ah, I see you did understand my point, though chose to completely ignore it because you wanted to prove a point I guess. You are correct, if they were involved and invested more heavily in the RtWF, they'd put much more emphasis on keeping a perfectly even playing field with no fixes that might give an advantage to a team coming in later. But they choose to continue to do bugfixes and hotfixes like it's just any ordinary day, because it is to them.

It's also weird that you are trying to separate "race to world first" from the game itself. The "community event" is literally the coverage of the in-game event that is controlled by blizzard. Last time I checked, those "world first/server first" chimes that pop up aren't controlled by the community...

Sorry you have to reach so far, but at no point have I tried to separate the event from the game. I've been separating Blizzard's involvement with the game from being directly tied to the Race to World First. They absolutely are observing the race, but my entire point is that even if the community event didn't exist Blizzard would still be observing the top mythic guilds anyways. They aren't looking at these raids because of the RtWF, they're observing despite the RtWF.

[iperson]

Mark my words: Max will announce his retirement from raid leading after their kill OR some core raiders will try to start new guild after another loss.
Just my hard guess.

/crosses fingers

[Dawon]

Grats Thunderca.. I mean Echo! Awesome performance really, everything was stellar and well deserved! Good job EU!

[netherflame]

any source on this? i see chat meming about it but is it true

Yes, Max even said it on his stream before they started pulling, that its frustrating there was no communication and the nerf happened while they were sleeping. If they had known they wouldve gone to sleep early last night and woke up early this morning.

Nerf timing soured the race, it really should just be on daily reset that these things are applied especially for a final boss.

[charizma]

Damn liquid just got outplayed this whole tier, every major boss took Echo WAY less pulls then them.

[iperson]

Yes, Max even said it on his stream before they started pulling, that its frustrating there was no communication and the nerf happened while they were sleeping. If they had known they wouldve gone to sleep early last night and woke up early this morning.

Nerf timing soured the race, it really should just be on daily reset that these things are applied especially for a final boss.

He probably should have waited to say anything, watching them wiping for hours on the nerfed boss takes some of the air out of the sails of any argument that things would have been different.

[Nerph-]

And liquid lost again! What is that number 4? I think it's about time they give up and go outside! lol

Thing is, it seems to me Liquid are the only real contenders to Echo. If Liquid called it quits or whatever, who would Echo have to race against? Method, BDGG, Skyline etc don't seem quite at the same level at this present moment.

[tomten]

Thing is, it seems to me Liquid are the only real contenders to Echo. If Liquid called it quits or whatever, who would Echo have to race against? Method, BDGG, Skyline etc don't seem quite at the same level at this present moment.

Considering 50% of liquids lineup is actually EU players, i'm sure they could come back and make/join another, better guild, that is able to actually compete.

- - - Updated - - -

He probably should have waited to say anything, watching them wiping for hours on the nerfed boss takes some of the air out of the sails of any argument that things would have been different.

Remember when they went to bed last tier, saying its over tuned and impossible and blizzard should just learn to tune things?
Only for echo to kill it like an hour later? Yeh, we all remember.

[SinR]

Now we wait for the true World First Race:

World First Alliance Raszageth kill

[Sanguinerd]

Wow amazing they killed it first! Awesome!!

[slickyjohn]

My issue is frustration with tier after tier of easily clearing heroic, then having mythic be a brick wall

heroic is probably too easy. pugs shouldn't be able to one shot bosses the first week of release.

[Azerox]

Europe F2W!

[Hitei]

Damn liquid just got outplayed this whole tier, every major boss took Echo WAY less pulls then them.

I mean, that's what happens when you're the second to reach the boss. You see all the things that have to be dealt with beforehand and get to skip a bunch of pulls where you don't exactly know what is going to happen.

[fiffer86]

I see you're not familiar with the practice of WoW GMs flying around raid instances invisible monitoring raid encounters on new patches. They've done it for over a decade now. There are numerous examples of them doing it and the images of them doing so have even appeared in interviews.

For example, this GM observing a raid team fighting The Butcher in Highmaul;


There are examples of this throughout the entirety of WoW's history. When a new raid launches, you can be absolutely certain there are GMs scattered about various instances watching and looking for bugs, even long before Race to World First events were a thing.

This IS my point you goof. Those GM's are being PAID to do that. In these instances, many of those acting as "GM's" are people that aren't actually "GM's" (on your general day to day). Those are actual dev's investigating and watching how mechanics are being handled.

Which is the entire point. Blizzard is involved regardless of any other organization hyping it up. The world first race has ALWAYS existed because WoW is a game, and by design, is competitive. And has been a trend long before WoW even existed.

Blizzard is making a choice to be involved. They just as well could have, out of fairness, launch the content and ONLY make changes after the world first was obtained. In fact, that was more similar to how OG WoW used to be. Since Blizzard used to be ok with guilds not clearing raids for many many weeks/months. https://www.method.gg/raid-history is a great source for this. If you can't see the difference in a more hands off aproach of a raid going 150+ days without being cleared, to the now modern design of forcing a raid to be cleared in the first 11 days... you are arguing in bad faith...

No matter how much you try to dodge it, Blizzard first and foremost puts on the world first race, they design it, they promote it, they create the Twitch drops and cross promotions, and they are the ones that intentionally set it to last until the 28th. You can't just hand wave that away just because you refuse to admit that they are 100% in charge, and take part in the race as well.

Ah, I see you did understand my point, though chose to completely ignore it because you wanted to prove a point I guess. You are correct, if they were involved and invested more heavily in the RtWF, they'd put much more emphasis on keeping a perfectly even playing field with no fixes that might give an advantage to a team coming in later. But they choose to continue to do bugfixes and hotfixes like it's just any ordinary day, because it is to them.

You literally italisized a non-argument. It has nothing to do with it being "them". It has everything to do with "them" making an active choice to put resources, and pay people to involved in running and managing the world first race in a DIRECT way. They aren't just sitting on their hands watching as the community clears the content like you are pretending. Your quote is nonsense, it should read "You are correct, if they were MORE involved AND WANTED TO BE FAIR"

Sorry you have to reach so far, but at no point have I tried to separate the event from the game. I've been separating Blizzard's involvement with the game from being directly tied to the Race to World First. They absolutely are observing the race, but my entire point is that even if the community event didn't exist Blizzard would still be observing the top mythic guilds anyways. They aren't looking at these raids because of the RtWF, they're observing despite the RtWF.

This is one of the single most contradictory statements I've ever seen... How can you admit that Blizzard has GM's floating around watching the raid attempts, with the explicit purpose of gathering information and potentially make tuning changes, or fix bugs... and then in the next breath go "oh, but Blizzard isn't involved or taking part".

They are observing it because they WANT to be involved with their community, and want to be a part of the raid world first. And want to see it cleared in a pre-set time. It's not just designed that way, but advertised, and promoted, by blizzard...

RtWF (external coverage) existing or not has absolutely nothing to do with Blizzard taking an active roll in the world first raid clear. Which they have an entire history of doing (as you have shown and argued for). Which is even silly to consider because Blizzard DOES have an active roll in promoting the "RtWF". Or did you think Twitch and content creators tripped down the stairs and magically created the twitch drop asociated with it?
https://news.blizzard.com/en-us/worl...ates-has-begun
What do you think that above link is?

[Chilela]

Now we wait for the true World First Race:

World First Alliance Raszageth kill

I believe you mean "World First Raszageth kill with one or more Feral druids in the comp" :^)

[Vakna]

I mean, that's what happens when you're the second to reach the boss. You see all the things that have to be dealt with beforehand and get to skip a bunch of pulls where you don't exactly know what is going to happen.

What about Raszageth then? The only thing they saw from Liquid was phase 1, they got to every other milestone first and did it in way less pulls and far cleaner in general. Fact of the matter is Liquid was outplayed at every turn. There's no shame in being 2nd best.