I'm not usually one to pay much attention to gaming events. I never sit around to watch E3 or similar things and just read a summary the day after. I don't watch any kind of tournaments for e-sport games or anything like that. Twice a year I do however get quite excited when World of Warcraft releases a new raid because that means there will be a new race to be the worlds first to kill all of the bosses on all of the difficulties. This race is called the Race To World First or RWF for short.
This has turned into quite a huge event the last few years. There's always a lot of guilds competing but there are two guilds who are the definite top dogs in this race. That's Echo from EU and Liquid from NA. Veteran World of Warcraft players probably also remember Method who used to be a safe bet to win this race. They're still in there but for the last few years they haven't even been close.
Echo and Liquid both put on rather big productions for this. In the image above you can see the venue from Sweden where some of the players are meeting up to play the race. They are also joined by several casters who sit and commentate the race all the way through while coming up with all sorts of shenanigans. These are usually some of the top content creators for World of Warcraft like Preach and Dratnos.
I always watch the Echo stream and this is no small production. It's taken the production team three weeks to rig this event and they also have a ton of sponsors. Starforge, Elgato, Displate, Fractal and more well known and established companies sponsor this event. The Twitch stream consistently has 30k viewers through the 1-2 weeks that this event lasts and by the end when they are nearing that final boss kill this easily ramps up to 100k+.
When this race is on I watch every minute of it. At least every minute that I'm able to watch. Sadly, the show starts early in the morning which means I'm at work for most of it. Luckily, it lasts until around 22PM every evening so I'm still able to catch a lot of it. The stream started at 4PM today and I've been glued ever since. I will be pausing my own streaming while this race lasts so that I can watch this.
I am personally a fan of Echo and I hope they win this one. Last RWF was won by Method while the RWF before that again was won by Echo. Echo has also been winning most of them the last few years. I don't have any personal connections to Echo or any special reason to root for them but they are from the EU, same as me, and they do put on one hell of an entertaining show for these 1-2 weeks that the race lasts. They deserve my support for that.
So. If anyone wonders where I am or why I'm not streaming for the next 1-2 weeks, this is why. I'm gonna be nerding it out by watching the RWF while playing World of Warcraft myself on the side. It's going to be great. This event only happens once or twice a year after all.
If you want to hang out then check out the Echo stream down below. It's really entertaining and the casters are such great personalities and know how to put on a show. See you there!
All images in this post are property of Echo.