In World of Warcraft, mythic raiding is widely considered the hardest content and the absolute endgame, reserved almost exclusively for organized groups of players called guilds. Guilds have always competed to be the first to conquer bosses in new raids, but with the addition of Mythic tier raids back in 2014, the races have become more organized and later evolved into the Race for World First (RWF).
RWF is an event that usually takes place after the release of the new WoW Mythic raid and features some of the world’s top WoW guilds in an attempt to claim the prestigious title of the world's first guild to clear the newest raid.
However, these guilds are not just casual groups of players, but rather fully-fledged esports and entertainment organizations. Some of the best WoW guilds include Team Liquid (NA – Illidan), Echo (EU – Tarren Mill), Pieces (EU – Stormscale) or FatSharkYes (EU - Kazzak).
The most recent Mythic raid and the final raid of the current Shadowlands expansion named the Sepulcher of the First Ones was added to the game at the beginning of March, launching a grueling RWF race that took 19 days to finish. The Jailer (the final boss) was defeated on 26th March, with Echo becoming the first guild in the world to do so.
The event was broadcast on numerous Twitch channels, with the Total Air time amounting 441 hours. During this time, the event generated more than 34.7M Hours Watched and attracted over 78.6K Average Viewers.
Expectedly, the highest peak of 253.64K concurrent viewers occurred during the last boss fight at the end of the event. However, the second-highest peak viewership was reached on March 14th, when 176.1K concurrent viewers tuned in to the triumphal kill of Halondrus by Team Liquid, formerly known as Complexity Limit. It took the guild 357 pulls to kill Halondrus, the fourth boss in the instance and the raid’s first “boss wall”.
For the duration of the race, WoW jumped to rank six of the most watched categories on Twitch, surpassing Fortnite, Apex Legends and CS:GO.
Some of the channels that covered almost the entirety of the event included TeamLiquid, Method, Echo_Esports and skgaming, with the highest contributor to viewership being Echo. The channel’s broadcast was the most popular stream of the event in both metrics, totalling 9.64M Hours Watched and 163.12K Peak Viewers. The victory over the Jailer marks Echo’s second consecutive RWF title after the guild became the first to clear Sylvanas Windrunner during last summer’s Sanctum of Domination race.
Among the most popular channels that streamed WoW during the RWF event were also Maximum, TeamLiquid, Method and GingiTV, while the most popular WoW twitch teams included Echo, Team Liquid, Liquid Guild, Northern Gaming and Level Up.
Despite its venerable age and the recent loss of popularity among players, World of Warcraft continues to maintain its relatively high viewership. In 2021, the title ended up being the 13th most watched Twitch category, with more than 360.78M Hours Watched accumulated throughout the year.
