It's just like sports. A mediocre club signs a player that turns out really good, and you know they're gonna leave for a top club at some point. Although in this scene it's a lot easier to jump ships, as there's no big factors like moving countries.

if money won the race, Liquid should be winning it every time tho. They have by far the more money to back them up

This is why it needs done on a tournament realm like MDI to be “legitimate.” Give all guilds the same ilvl gear to pick from and see who plays better. It’s probably still Liquid and Echo but then people would stop saying it’s money related

its still a race between the two of them so what you're saying is nonsensical as an argument

Competing to be the first to clear has ALWAYS existed. The difference is once guilds decided to stream their raids instead of releasing the kill videos after. Just because streamers figured out how to do what they love AND make a living at it doesn't means it's rigged. The reason it's down to only a couple guilds is because they are the small handle of players capable of killing the content while simultaneously creating the strats, creating weak auras, crunching the numbers required to maximize and having the dedication to play 16 hours a day until its cleared.

@@johnwarner4178 naww man, we gotta sell WoW tokens

@@johnwarner4178 it would still be about the money. You have 2 guilds getting decent money to play in a "tournament" And the rest gets bleh money. The RWF is boring and have been for years. Its just about the general public have less to do and have nothing else to grip into. But these players fall off one by one. Soon the entire RWF is just a commercial.. More then it is today.

This is every raiding guild. IF you get better players, the guild progresses more, but better players means also (comparatively) worse players "getting carried". And the goal post gets moved. People on both ends of this deal get burned out for either feeling held back or feeling like they are holding their team back. So people stop raiding and then more players get recruited and the cycle continues.

Had the same experience. Its basically impossible to get 20 people with alligning goals and commitment. Good players will move on to better guilds and some players lacking commitment to put in enough effort to prog. And it always feels like the team is hanging on by a thread. Way too much work for leadership replacing people for no return.

Ion and the WoW Team refuse to change the arbitrary bullshit rules regarding 20m Mythic. Therefore the raiding scene in general just becomes smaller and smaller. It needs to be nearly dead before they are willing to change it. So be it, I quit CE raiding in BfA and it was the best decision of my life. Some of the decisions are pure incompetence up there.

I vibe with ya. Had a similar scar after Nathria. Tho back then we didn't even go for myth, just lots and lots of vipes on Heroic and people not willing to put in minimal effort as well as my working schedule being horrible for raiding. Gladly, my current guild despite classifying ourselves as casuals have been able to ammend it. We raid like 2 days per week, do full clear of HC, always welcome everyone from our guild, gear them up, teach em and even then it's like 8 people at best. The rest? Well, we just cycle through pugs xD We're in to have fun and vibe, while also getting some loot on the side. So glad I joined them edit: I should probably note that by "casuals" our guild means, is that we're not focused on prog or gear acqusition. Everyone does their best, sure, because everyone wants to gear or prog, but we don't really sweat if something goes sideways

This is like the average experience doing M. The same thing happened to me, I remember getting really tired raiding with some guys, really nice and cool people to chill doing other shit but god awful for mythic raiding. By the next tier I just stop caring and I dropped, and since I hang out for a bit the same experience was for others, good players complaining about others, and not so good players being benched forever to use better players, thing that does make sense if that's what you apply for but feels different if you're a chill guild that went try hard on mythic from one day to another, and failed at the end.

cant hate them for that I mean its a race and echo liquid go hard

@@gregsimard-ol1hr I mean it's also a bit hypocritical to then pretend that there's a crisis going on at the top level of mythic raiding that you care about and needs to be resolved when you're the exact root cause of it. Sure, you can't 'blame' these two guilds for y'know, competing to the best of their ability. However it's still seriously ironic to talk about issues that need fixing that you're directly responsible for. That's the truth of the situation nobody seems to want to talk about or seems to preferably sweep under the rug with thought-terminating clichés like your comment.

@@QPoily It's a bit disingenious to frame it as if "the two guilds" are responsible for it. Liquid caught up, they didn't help create this problem. I don't mean this to say that I think it is right to blame Method either, but it is factually not the case that this situation was caused by both of the guilds. It wasn't. Method had monopoly on all of the money, and then Complexity caught up.

​@@QPoilyI mean he knows hes the problem but what incentive does he have to become the solution, not only is he improving the odds of everyone who looks up to him but he offers opportunities to the people that come in from yhese lowwer brackets. Its not selfless but its not selfish either, it just is what it is, meritocracy be like that

@@QPoily There's no incentive for them to change though. The system just simply doesn't allow for them to, unless they want to give up their own sponsors and chances at world first. Sponsors will simply sponsor a team that will do what's necessary to win so they can get their viewers. Blizz needs to change the ecosystem to make splits and gold farming irrelevant, or else this is the natural outcome.

"They" ? Its there format why should they change that because some other guilds dont play they stuff beside that? It its liquid vs echo so be it.

@@Blackbirdone11 they as in blizzard the way the format works now it will always be echo vs liquid unless one or the other blows up, nothing wrong whit that I enjoy it but it sucks for other guild trying in the top 10 trying to be viable when the logistics to raid rwf keep gettinng higher and higher

The game isn't designed around skill. It's designed around who is willing to invest (waste) the most time. If you removed the litany of barriers to entry, then skill expression could shine. This is what makes games like chess & sports like soccer impressive in terms of high level play since the barrier to entry is relatively low. WoW is closer to a sport like Polo where you need a literal horse to be able to play.

​@@michaelharbach1987 that's the comment of someone that sucks at the game.

@@sil3ntearth2013 You must be dense.

@@michaelharbach1987 possibly, but I could put all the time in the world into basketball and I’d still never be Michael Jordan or Lebron. Saying all you have to do is spend a lot of time to get good discounts the talent these guys have, and anyone that’s really good at something. Unfortunately despite what you were told you really can’t be anything you set your mind to, at least not the best at it.

@@sil3ntearth2013I see the point is still flying over your head. I'm not saying that there aren't any talented players that would be able to hang if the game had significantly lower barriers to entry. I'm saying that we have no way of knowing who the Jordans/Lebrons are in the first place due to the barriers to entry. There is a vast difference between being a top competitor in a game/sport that is widely accessible versus being the best in a game/sport where it takes a ridiculous amount of time/effort/resources just to get your foot in the door. Are you able to understand the concept of a barrier to entry? Are you able to understand the concept of barriers to entry limiting the access that potential players have to participating? Are you able to understand that this implies that there is a very real chance that the Michael Jordan of WoW, in terms of raw talent, may never even reach the top to begin with due to all the barriers to entry? Perhaps the better question is this: Are you able to understand anything at all?

That's the reality of every CE guild outside of world first contenders honestly. Poaching is inevitable. Every guild, even the world first, needs new players. They all pull from one level down.

It must be pretty hard if they aren't streaming individually and earning income that way.

and also no matter how much they put into it, they will never have the money that liquid and echo have to keep it relevant. like RWF is mostly pretty well creator driven which is why it works. ( as opposed to events lik eELague LCS which is hosted by riot) BDG having no funding liek that means they can never compete nor can anyone who isn't top 3.

Raiding overall feels like a job, even heroic ones, you have to work your ass off with other 19 people just to get oneshoted by someone that does a bad job, i already deal with that stuff in my real job, and thats why a hate raiding tbh, its not fun and feels pointless imo.

Max has a tendency to throw slight jabs at echo, not a great characteristic but i get it. In the end, they are competitors

what makes you think he meant as in when they disbanded? The way he said that in that context made me think he meant it as in During their time actively being a serious guild, and not regarding the people they took in when the guild disbanded.

Echo "turbo farmed" Pieces when they were active, and a part of why they disbanded. This was a 100% true statement by Max fwiw - Pieces was a huge feeder guild for Echo when it was active. Taking players after the guild disbands is a good thing because it gives those players a home to keep raiding at a high level.

Thinking there will be rwf in 5years is wild

So you mean no progress raiding at all because they have no gear?

Or they could make world first easier, the fact that in order to be a world first candidate you need to not only be a good player, 95+ parser, multiclasser*/multispec and, above all, be able to commit 2 weeks to 1 month of pure raiding, meaning no family, no job, just gaming is what makes poaching exist. Let's say Mythic raiders are 5% of the server pop, people that get CE are 1%, people that get into the top 200 are 0,1% and people that can world first are a small percentage of even that. The more people into high tier raiding, the better for all guilds involved. I believe that lowering the difficulty might help get more people into this, maybe make the boss last a week on mythic. Also, a lot of the time are spent on doing splits, which aren't directly the race. We know for a fact that heavily nerfed bosses can still be struggle for most guilds, so why keep the barrier so high?

@@fabianpino4910 I actually agree. Should just be easier and it'd open it up for more people to try

@@fabianpino4910Sometimes content doesn't exist for everyone to complete and that's okay. There'd be no prestige in world first if it was a cakewalk. Most people don't have what it takes and that's okay.

RWF turning into F1 lol

If its easier, liquid or echo just win faster.

Blizz would need to somehow stop splits from happening. Also stop Vault gear being so valuable week 1 because PvP and m+ boosting for loot is crazy too. Until that happens Liquid and Echo will continue having to do degenerate shit like that every time that other guilds can't compete with.

Its the same in any other sport. You know the 3 nfl team? No. The 3 placed f1 driver? No. Because it dont matter. If you not 1 or 2 you do t matter

​@@Blackbirdone11 1) that's not true at all and you'd realise that if you weren't america-centric probably 2) even if I accepted your premise if coming 2nd / 3rd / 4th isn't financially viable in a sport then that sport has a huge problem. Every successful esport (even fucking Call of Duty) it is more than ok financially not to win. MMOs are not inherently competitve so even with WoW's 2 million ish active subs it's nowhere near enough to sustain an esport and the difficulty of the content being completely unrelatable to most of the playerbase (albeit not people in youtube comment sections who will inherently be the "sweatier" players). If you simultaneously decreased the barriers to entry (which incl. difficulty) and increased the player count WoW Esports would become viable quite quickly.

Bingo

Hell, just make the "normal" difficulty what heroic is now, and make "heroic" what mythic is now, and let "normal" be infinitely farmable. If you look at kill logs, anyone who goes into normal comes out killing the final boss. If normal isn't a challenge at all then it doesn't need to exist.

@@_d0ser Uh. Normal doesn't exist for a challenge. It exists for friends and families of people who wanna drink beer and YOLO every boss in the raid. It's basically organized LFR. It serves it's purpose.

@@MmrraazzThen those people should just do LFR. Those same people can also drink beer and yolo in heroic. Heroic isn't exactly hard either and can easily be done while screwing around. Normal is a useless tier.

@@_d0ser You can't queue a 15 person premade into LFR. I'd argue the useless tier is LFR. Regardless of what tiers should or shouldn't exist, they should be infinitely farmable up through heroic.

​@@_d0serthat's the dumbest take I've seen in a long time. You clearly have no idea what's really going on in wow

Some get paid. Some do it for free.

idk about Echo, but Max has gone over Liquid pay on his stream. Every player on the liquid roster gets a monthly payout. Plus Max splits the money he makes from his stream during the race with everyone on the roster.

it would be so amazing to see a team come and dominate, it would be so much better than the same old same old

yep no one gives a crap about it anymore cause its the same team winning everytime. its boring.

Yeah is it really a competition if the same team wins?

There’s no barriers to entry in the MDI, compared to rwf though ? Not Echo’s fault that they’re just better than everyone at running dungeons

@@anthonytgameaddict yup. RWF is only worth watching if you're interested in echo vs liquid otherwise it's a fucking joke lol if either of those teams breaks up it's not worth watching anymore

@@Azzaaah6no barriers, except of course, for the ability and requirement to play the game as a full time job. Whilst not as high as RWF, genuinely competing to win the MDI is not remotely possible for 99% of wow players. If you think anyone outside of playing the game full time has a chance at beating echo, you really underestimate the time they put in and how good they actually are.

Commenting here so I can see what people have to say to this. I've seen this comment so many times and people always find a way to disagree with it.

Max explained this, I maybe misremember something cause it's been years, but basically the race without gearing is not something people playing would actually want as it eliminates the rpg element of the game. Nothing matters except individual performance and raid comp. What I think. Every single boss will have the best raid comp with little to no variation, because any character can have any gear. Just play what's best. Gear that you dropped from previous bosses or from weekly chest doesn't exist. Do people that make boss encounters now also have to make a gear template for every single spec and every boss and have the ability to change it on the fly in case the tuning is not quite right? Or do players just get gear from vendors and it somehow updates to account for the number of bosses killed to emulate natural mythic drops from already killed bosses? Or do they have access to heroic gear only or only mythic, do they have to then balance bosses differently for these raiders because of the kind of gear they have access to? If bosses drop loot like regular and you can equip it then there's not much point to all this thing is there? Since the gear is not really normalized for everyone, like in regular game. The barrier is now lower and more people can play, but when everyone play the same thing with the same gear it really boils down to skill, which is also experience therefore the ladder would barely change because Liquid and Echo have the most experience and the most important kind of experience like creating strategies and not copying them like place 3 and lower do. That would be the case for a time until more people gain enough experience to compete and it'll turn into literal MDI, a game of strategy and skill. Now the most important, if there is a tournament realm where people compete for RWF what happens to regular game? While they play tournament their real regular realm characters just don't progress. There will still be people trying to get RWF in regular game. There are now two races. Wonder which one people would choose and which one everyone would count as a real one. For that to not be the case do you forbid access to last boss until it dies on tournament realm? Possible solution to that is heroic week lasts 2 weeks and the second week is Tournament RWF that lasts a week. Although after it ends regular mythic launches putting competing players at a disadvantage because the could be split farming heroic instead to play an actual RWF. Imagine Liquid wins Tournament RWF while Echo wins Regular RWF with no competition in either realms. Best case scenario, people play Tournament RWF for fun, learn strategies there, complete it in 2-3 days and then go to normal game and play like they always have, but with strategies already there and experience necessary to oneshot the bosses, the only hurdle is farming gear. Tournament realm = test realm with extra steps. I'm dumb though, so maybe someone much smarter can cook up real way to implement Tournament RWF that works as people think it would work. They still didn't though, they can't make US and EU raid release at the same time to eliminate 16 hour gap despite how long people ask for that to happen.

Except rwf is a community event. Would anyone "accept" a world first mythic kill on tournament realm as world first? Probably not. It needs to be live to have any legitimacy.

​@@_d0serthey talked about it you have two rwf than. On reall and on live. Would not change anything

why so liquid and echo can just run both brackets? they will just pay for players like they do now. there needs to be a non sponsored bracket somehow (impossible)

​@johnsmith-tw4kv who cares what the top guilds do. 10 man should come back for the health of everyone raiding outside of HoF. Its exhausting keeping 20 people together long term. Most guilds raid team needs rebuilding of 25%+ every single tier...

Yes they would.

That makes zero sense. rtwf provides them a huge audience, even as a two team race. Why would blizzard give that up?

This wont solv ethe problem. It will kill it. Maybe the raids has to be super hard the first 2-3 weeks, and getting massively nerfed. That way you get the viewrs / free advertisemnet for Wow (biggest according to every metric). And every guild can clear Mythic without needing to play that amount time per day.

@@dimitrisionas9566 They don't have to give that up. Just that shit to tournament realms and stop tuning retail mythic around 100 people on the planet.

@@kor8513 The actual solution is obvious, only requires a little common sense. Blizz can appease both camps. They can tune it for the race then immediatly install diffrent versions of the fight after, or major nerfs. No one outside of the race has any chance to see those fights the first couple of weeks anyway. The lesser skilled guilds still spend more time on the "easier" bosses. It's only been a big problem when Blizz has been slow to change the fights. This tier for example. Had they taken swifter action like in SFO for example where Anduin received weekly nerfs it wouldn't be a problem.

Mythic is not designed for world first guilds. Its designed for casual mythic raiders to give them content for months. The wfr is designed for them, because these guilds design it in a way to benefit them

No, just your social skills are

Do you know how much money has been spent and earned in the recent RWF? Yeah, you shouldnt talk if you dont know the facts.

Uh…what? Are you ok bud? Nobody is fighting the same bosses these guys fight. They are nerfed to be half as difficult if not more by the time your guild gets to it. If a guild decides they want to raid crazy hours to reach those bosses while they are still RWF level that’s on them. Nobody is forcing that on them.

​@@Cornincarnatethat's what he's saying. They make a raid that they know only 2 raid team have a reasonable chance at clearing. He's correct they should have a raid that is literally made on a different server that has nothing to do with the current wow while also having the raid that is in the game go live at the same time so they have to play what was made for them and the rest of people who wanna play the game and feel competitive don't have to compete with their money.

What? I feel my brain cells decaying reading this. The race for all intents and purposes might as well be on a different server as it is already. By the time your guild gets to the bosses they are made for your level of play, not theirs. If you think Echo and Liquid just...wouldn't hop on to demolish everyone in an hour if they only release baby raids on retail idk what to tell you. You're just wrong. If you're trying to stick up for the other 8 top 10 guilds they raid those hours because they WANT to face the bosses while they are still extremely difficult. They don't want to prog mega nerfed fights. Anybody else is never fighting them anyway so it's irrelevant.@@trentongardner2106

Except raiding was an order of magnitude easier back in the days of guilds like Nihilum & Ensidia. Echo only "replaced" Method due to a drama explosion causing most of the players to jump ship.