wow Uldir World First Race: The Wrap-up

[Starym 3,800]

 

The very top of the Uldir Mythic progression race has been determined a while ago but there are still guilds pushing to get that big work G'hkilled. So far, 33 guilds have finished up their progression in the first raid of BfA and went 8/8, with 8 from the US/OC servers, 5 from Asia and 20 from the EU (although there might be more Asia kills, the tracking falls off significantly after the top guilds finish).

It's been a while since we caught up, but as you can see the rest of the top 10 went mostly to the EU, with two Chinese guilds and one US getting a spot. With the raid lasting only one day after the reset, it was pretty hard for the Asian guilds to catch up with their 1-2 day disadvantage, so their 7th and 9th positions are pretty impressive.

The first race of the expansion proved to be very exciting, and a groundbreaking one as well, with Method streaming their progress to over 200,000 live viewers. Method's GM Sco had 162,000 concurrent viewers for the kill itself, and was the top single streamer on Twitch for that week, besting even Fortnite's Ninja himself. The kill and streaming thereof also made the reddit frontpage (not the WoW reddit, the whole thing), spawned many articles and gave WoW an incredible amount of visibility - with people tuning in that not only don't play WoW, but had never even seen the game before. It just goes to show how popular the progress race can be when shown to a wider audience. It's still a little early to expect Blizzard to organize something around this, and we probably won't be seeing any changes for the next raid, but they might decide to take some action on the popularity of raiding and we may get some MDI-like event in the future (in part) thanks to Method's streaming efforts.

The question now is whether we'll be seeing all guilds streaming the next raid race, considering Method's success. And the biggest question mark on that topic is with Limit, as they've not only shown that they are a threat to Method's dominance, but also basically had the win in the bag until the very end and the fatal decision to extend the lockout. They've also announced they'd be raiding full-time from now on, so the next raid will be an incredibly exciting one and might just bring us the first US endboss World First since Heart of Fear in Mists of Pandaria. If we do get both, or even all top guilds to stream next time, it'll be that much more thrilling to follow the race live, with side-by-side comparisons of the raider's performance.

All in all Uldir has been a ground-breaking raid, both from the streaming perspective, but also from the difficulty one (Fetid Devourer misstep notwithstanding). G'huun managed to stay alive for a full reset, which is a pretty solid way to start an expansion, raid race-wise, as most top raiders will tell you that just over a week is the optimal duration for an introductory raid.

To finish up, we have the 33 guilds done with their progression, on 8/8, while the 7/8 club is significantly bigger, sporting a healthy 62 guilds trying to get that G'hkill. 92 is the number banging their head on Mythrax and trying to Unravel him, with 110 Zuling it up, Reborn style. We then have 433 guilds on 4/8, 806 on 3/8, 2361 on 2 and, finally, 2747 guilds with "only" Taloc down.

In any case, it's been a great race and the next one promises to be even better, so we'll see you there!

[Skayan 52]

Unlike Blizzard, Method did not disappoint me.

[Prophet001 598]

1 hour ago, Skayan said:

Unlike Blizzard, Method did not disappoint me.

Unlike Limit, Blizzard did not disappoint me.

[Demenzel 29]

18 hours ago, Prophet001 said:

Unlike Limit, Blizzard did not disappoint me.

Did you really believe that Limit had a chance?