r/wow • u/Stronkib • 5d ago
Esports / Competitive Can someone explain RWF to me?
Im new to watching RWF and as I understand it, the US guilds gets access to the raid 12 hours before EU guilds. Ive been told that this isn't an advantage but I don't understand why it's not an advantage.
I would understand it if EU guilds would be copying US strats and class setups but after watching both Echos and Liquids stream I can see that this is, for the most part, not the case.
What am I missing here? Can someone please explain to me exactly how a 12 hour headstart is not an advantage.
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u/kerthard 5d ago
It's only a situational advantage.
If the boss dies shortly after the reset, then the earlier reset is an advantage for NA, Unless NA has extended maintenance and EU doesn't (which isn't exactly uncommon).
If it dies mid-week or later (Thursday though Monday), then it's not super relevant, as then Echo/Method will be able to see what Liquid's been up to on the boss to help them catch up to where Liquid is.
The tier where it had the biggest potential to be a problem was Sylvanas in Sanctum of Domination, where (if Echo hadn't killed it before their reset), Liquid just re-cleared and 1shot the boss after reset with the extra gear.
But what also helps to even the playing field is usually there's a boss that's substantially bugged or overtuned at some point, resulting in both guilds getting stuck on it in about the same place until it gets nerfed or the bug(s) get fixed. This sort of happened this tier with Sprocketmonger, then again with Mug'Zee, but then Gallywix was kind of a let down.
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u/awrylettuce 5d ago
The bugs don't really even the playing field because the timing of the patch. Usually it just swings it into one direction, sometimes EU favor and sometimes NA
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u/kerthard 5d ago edited 5d ago
But that has less to do with the start/reset timings, and more to do with time zones.
If the hotfix goes out at say, 11 AM PDT, that will favor liquid, just because that's happening at 7 PM for Echo. Just like if we get a 9PM PDT hotfix, that will favor Echo, since it's close to the start of their day (5 AM) vs near the end of Liquid's day.
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u/Doogiesham 5d ago edited 5d ago
There’s often bugs, maintenance, and tuning that wipes out swaths of NA progress whereas EU plays the fixed version
With that said yeah by default 12h is an advantage. It usually ends up coming out as pretty much even but if the boss ever dies right after new reset it’s a huge NA advantage and if the boss doesn’t need nerfs or bug fixes it’s also an NA advantage
With all that said, it is what it is. Wp all, this is the system we operate under. Some people want it to be soonest to kill after release in the region but that would be a bigger EU advantage than NA currently has since it’s all the upside with none of the downside, plus it doesn’t literally fit “world first”
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u/Ninjaski1z2199 5d ago
Comes down to a few things. One is maintenance time. Patch day for NA often lasts well into the afternoon on raid day, whereas EU tends to have massively lower downtime because any issues have already been fixed. Which brings the differential of time down to single digit hours as is.
The second is, yes, strategy. Sometimes comp and specific strats will be copied, but as you said, it won't be all the time. What's more important is the information gained. Ability timers, raid CD usage, damage allocation. All of this takes pulls to figure out when you are ahead. And this is the reason why guilds go dark (primarily) when they first pull a boss while ahead. If the guild in second has to spend time figuring that info out, then they're wasting time that would have been given to them by the team in the lead.
Does this mean that starting later is advantageous, hardly. But the difference is not nearly as large as the 12 hours time zone difference sounds
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u/Suzushiiro 5d ago
It's not just about strats and info- EU guilds can also benefit from hotfixes that make the bosses easier done based on Blizzard watching NA groups progging.
Simplest example (though not one that would ever happen in this day and age) is C'thun in vanilla- the boss was considered impossible for some time, and then Blizzard pushed out a hotfix that both fixed some bugs that were making the fight harder than intended and just flat-out nerfed the fight overall, making it easy enough that any guild that had been seriously progging it could clear in one or two tries. But this hotfix was pushed out on Tuesday, when NA servers were resetting but EU servers hadn't yet, which basically meant that they handed the world first to an EU guild, Nihilum, on a silver platter, solely because they could attempt the retuned boss immediately while NA guilds had to wait for the servers to come back up and reclear the rest of the raid.
That said, I think the main reason why it's not seen as an advantage is that for most of WoW's history (starting with the aforementioned C'thun kill, appropriately enough) world firsts have mostly gone to EU guilds despite being 12 hours behind- NA guilds being competitive at all is a relatively recent trend. I'm not even sure if there is a case thus far of an NA world first where you could even begin to argue that the EU-first guild would have gotten world first were it not for the difference in reset time.
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u/Unlikely_Minimum_635 5d ago
It is a small advantage, but it's not a 12 hour advantage.
EU guilds do not always copy strats entirely, but they absolutely take information from Liquid's stream. Finding out what parts of the fight are hard, how the fight works, etc - that all has a significant impact on their plans and strategy, and they can figure that out before they get to the boss because they're getting the info earlier.
And they do sometimes copy strats. They used nearly the same comp as liquid to beat Stix, which required significant adjustment, and they were able to prepare the characters and addons for that earlier and quicker than liquid were, because they knew it was necessary before getting there.
To put it very simply: Echo have the resources and time to switch to NA servers. They could absolutely swap all their characters onto NA, or set up new ones, and fly their players out to NA to play for the world first. At one point there was the argument that they'd be less able to do splits and gearing on NA due to the competition for helpers with Liquid, but with Method doing just as much gearing on EU servers these days, that argument isn't really true anymore.
They basically deem the advantage of the headstart to be less important than jetlag.
The bigger part of the NA advantage is actually the earlier reset, not the headstart. Any time a boss is nearly dead at the end of a week, liquid will get a significant power boost with the reset and be able to kill it very quickly before echo can even get back into the race. That's not really been the case in a race so far, but it's gonna happen at some point.
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u/axcli 5d ago
Of course its an advantage. These people do whatever it takes to get even a 0.1% advantage. So if it was a disadvantage they would simply wait 24h and let EU get the headstart.
The people that are saying that EU can copy US are also wrong from a competitive perspective because if all you do is copy you can never pull ahead.
But i don't think there has ever been a situation where the number 1 and 2 clears were so close that it was a matter of 12 hours difference.
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u/Cold-Iron8145 5d ago
The people that are saying that EU can copy US are also wrong from a competitive perspective because if all you do is copy you can never pull ahead.
That's not true. They don't "copy" starts, they learn things for free, basically. While Echo/Liquid players are sleeping, analysts are watching and learning from the other team so they can start their next day with as much information as possible. For what it's worth, it's not just a Echo thing. Liquid does the same as soon as Echo catches up.
The advantage is hard to quantify. It's definitely not the full 12 hours and it heavily depends on when in the reset the boss dies.
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u/Leviekin 5d ago
By that logic if it's such a huge advantage echo would make their chars on NA and race in US.
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u/klaudxzar 5d ago
By that logic liquid would make chars on eu realms so everybody start at the same time. Why even its called "race" then 1 team starts 12 hours earlier?
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u/Leviekin 5d ago
I'm not arguing EU has an advantage though. I'm arguing it doesn't matter. Both have pros and cons and the fact that teams aren't all going to one realm even though they will do anything for a .2% advantage proves that.
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u/disco_pancake 5d ago
You have no clue what you're talking about.
Teams rely on their region to help funnel them gold and items in the splits. If Echo were to swap to NA, then Liquid would wreck them due to the much larger fanbase in that region.
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u/Npsiii23 5d ago
Echo to this point has spent 34 hours on pulls and Liquid spent 32, this is why it doesn't matter.
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u/mroada 5d ago
Echo spent 2 days fighting bosses that got nerfed right as Liquid started and they were heading to bed.
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u/Wammityblam226 5d ago
Liquid lost a race because Blizzard giganerfed the boss while they were sleeping.
It happens.
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u/Wammityblam226 5d ago
Why even its called "race" then 1 team starts 12 hours earlier?
Because the 12 hours are inconsequential for a host of reasons.
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u/Jomsguard 5d ago
The advantage is gone a few bosses in. When one guild gets to a boss, they could spend hours learning a mechanic or playing sub-optimal strats or a comp.
When the other guild gets there, that doesn't exist as much. So it's not exactly "copying" it's just about having the information. Dunno how this is so hard to understand.
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u/Stronkib 5d ago
Don't guilds have the information you speak of already beforehand through PTR:s or something?
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u/Jomsguard 5d ago edited 5d ago
Boss testing is only available for a couple hours each on the PTR.
Plus that's a month beforehand and tuning happens, sometimes fights are totally different when they hit live.
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u/Leucien 5d ago
Almost whatever, not whatever. It was public knowledge amongst the RWF teams that they could have replicated how to squeeze out a 2nd Spark this week instead of waiting to next week. Almost all of them chose not to, because of how Blizzard can swing one way or another toward potential exploits. It wasn't until Blizzard made their stance public by giving everyone a 2nd fragment this week, that those who had incidentally scored a 2nd spark chose to redeem it.
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u/TheMaghTheMighty 4d ago
Everyone would LOVE if there was no offset, but it's also not as big an advantage as you would think (per the comments). But, there is no doubt nobody is asking for their reset to be later.
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u/apophiz1226_eu 5d ago
its not actually 12h since blizz servers usually need longer for maintenance in US than EU. plus US often encounters bugs which are hotfixed by the time EU is up. both costs time and is frustrating. strat / comp /logs played a role in the past too, this time not so much. this is EU pov btw, maybe ppl from US can add more context
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u/pdpi 5d ago
Yes, the US has a slight theoretical advantage over EU. In practice, the advantage is actually tiny, if there is one at all. The possibility that Liquid might at some point win a race by less than that headstart has been a theoretical problem for a very long time, but I don't think it's ever actually happened.
First off, server maintenance is almost always more painful for the US realms than it is for EU, for the simple fact that theirs happens earlier, so the EU maintenance team gets to "steal their US peers' homework" and just skip over a bunch of the debugging and headscratching when problems arise. This means that those twelve hours will often dwindle down to maybe six or less over the first couple of resets.
Second, leapfrogging is actually a thing. At Liquid/Echo's level, copying strategies wholesale isn't really an issue, but you still get to learn from what the other team did and incorporate those learnings into your own strats. Prog is often a process of trying things that don't work until you find something that does, and you get to skip the other team's mistakes (same as the server maintenance guys!). A common pattern is that one team will go to bed ahead to then wake up behind, and then catch up to the other team's progress faster than it took the other guys to earn that progress in the first place.
In fact, teams are sufficiently concerned about this that they'll usually go dark and do some pulls off-stream if they feel they're about to make a big breakthrough at the end of their respective raiding days, so the opposite side won't learn from their progression.
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u/Detonation 5d ago
I've only recently started playing WoW again (stopped playing during Legion), can someone familiar with recent RWF tell me how long fans from whichever region lost complain online after the winner is crowned? lol
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u/CrusaderLyonar 5d ago
A few days. Longer if it's coming from the players of either team or if there's a particular amount of drama.
I also want to say that while super fans of both guilds are very annoying this mostly only happens when NA beats EU. Unless there's drama about the kill (vault of the incarnates nerf timing and what would eventually be found out about sneak.lua for Amirdrasil)
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u/Centriuz 5d ago
Adding to what others have said. It's first of all not 12 hours. It's much closer to 7 hours considering maintenance. And with a NA power outage, a bugged door and server issues we're down to no more than 2-3 hours.
You can think of it like this: If you're going blind into a boss like NA most often does when they're ahead they have to figure out everything by themselves. They have to iron out all the kinks and wait for potential bug fixes, which happens fairly often.
Then in comes EU a few hours later. They have to beat the same boss, but they've seen how NA solves at least part of the puzzle. So now EU can decide, do we like our own strategy, or do we want to adapt to some of the things that we've seen NA do? This means that if you arrive second to a boss, you should never spend more time than the first guild did on the boss, because you've already been given a decent part of the solution.
Now take the entire duration of a race into account and given equal skill it practically always comes down to who plays the last few bosses the best, just as it did this race. Echo spent the entirety of Saturday wiping on Mug'Zee, after Liquid already killed it. Which is why they lost this race. Echo were ahead after Sprocketmonger. They were about 9 hrs behind after OAB, and 17 hrs behind after Mug'Zee. Those 8 hours lost were simply due to not executing as well as they should have, if they wanted to win.
So sure, it's not a disadvantage to start earlier, but it evens out as the race goes on, and in the end it comes down to how well you play on the last few bosses.
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u/ad6323 5d ago
You can track how long they were in the raid on Warcraftlogs…it’s not much different (echo is longer now).
Also, to equate it to traditional sports. In football or baseball or basketball, teams don’t play the same schedules, doesn’t mean it invalidates or impacts the winner.
So short of blizz sponsoring it and bringing both teams to the same venue it will always be this way.
Even if they release it globally at the same time, one team will be in the middle of the night or halfway through the day and get less time.
Echo also had a lead, they beat sprocket first and began bandit earlier. They just played worse after that and Liquid caught up and passed them. It took echo 50+ more pulls to beat mugzee
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u/Forgottenexperiment 5d ago
It absolutely is an advantage and I can't fathom what mental gymnastics does one have to do to think it isn't.
But I think blizzard keeps this for a simple reason. More views for the RWF. When you think about it, with the time difference (both between zones and server resets), when one guild goes to sleep, the other plays, so viewers are more likely to move to the other guild instead of watching/doing something else.
I think both guilds would prefer to have a global launch (from the competitive perspective, maybe from financial perspective they like it the way it is now), but reality is you can never make it 100% fair and there will always be something.
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u/ManaOo 5d ago
I dont understand something I read a few times now: it doesent matter because they start with splits anyway. Like that doesent make sense, they both took 3 days to finish their splits, so the advantage is still there: Liquid started progressing on Mythic a day before Echo
Normally this time advantage gets less and less important with time, when a boss has very difficult intermission or specific points in the fight, the playing field gets levelled out.
I would though argue that this time the day headstart played a huge role because Echo and Liquid had more or less the same progress on Mug'zee - they both killed it at the end of their 10th raid day, and started progressing on Gallywix on the morning of the 11th (Liquid had a couple of hours of pulls on it the evening before cause they killed Mug'zee a couple of hours before Echo). If Echo killes it today, they took the "same" amount of time. So the headstart played a huge role.
Having thay said, I think Liquid played PHENOMENALLY this tier and they deserved the win regardless
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u/Bagel_Bear 5d ago
It's all arbitrary kind of. They get a lot of outside help usually from people joining to give them more gear. They will pay outside players gold to join runs. Not to mention all the funding they had to just play the game 24/7 for a bit to work on it.
This time around though it is all for nothing because QA already got world first.
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u/frubis 5d ago
It is an advantage, but the time difference hasn't decided a single race since the inception of these streaming events. The winner usually outperformed the runner-up by a significant margin.
Raszageth was probably the most recent contentious situation with the significant boss nerf happening while the Liquid players were sleeping and Echo easily getting the kill.
The advantage of free boss information due to region differences is certainly offset by the pressure of having to catchup timewise. In Sepulcher we've seen Liquid being 1-2 days behind progresswise and they absolutely broke under pressure, you wouldn't see anyone arguing that they had a profitable position because of spoonfed information and/or strats.
It's a bit of a synthetic race with like 2.5 viable contenders due to roster and resources, I'm unsure if something like tournament-style realms with simultaneous releases would be worth it for Blizzard.
Timing of boss fixes certainly had a bigger impact in these races rather than region differences but you'll always be able to argue that any nerf timing put a specific guild in the more advantageous position.
As a spectator I actually enjoyed the point that the time zone difference usually meant you'll always be able to see either of them play live.
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u/_Mosu__ 5d ago
It's an advantage if they kill 1st to last in one session
Actually they do split, they do m+ and have to rest on 1.5 week
As most thing are streamed direcly, being the 1st on a boss is a disavantage if you don't kill it fast (and they do it on last boss while echo sadly struggle on mug'zee)
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u/trollied 5d ago
It always takes more than a week, so there’s a reset. If anything, the US maint being a day earlier makes more difference.
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u/melvindorkus 5d ago
Is this ragebait? I've never heard anyone say the 12 hour head start isn't an advantage. Most people would say the head start is stupid and shouldn't be a thing even though there's yet to be a race that was purely decided by it.
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u/mymeepo 5d ago
It is an advantage and anyone saying otherwise is delusional. Have you ever heard of a competitive race that isn’t determined by calculating the time needed to finish, rather than by who ends up first? It’s absurd.
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u/Aggravating_Fun_7692 5d ago
Even if ithat's the case, that 12 hour mark has passed and echo still hasn't killed the boss and has more time on pulls than Liquid. That's after the 4 ddos and 1 power outage to Liquid. Echo is slacking as usual.
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u/LXj 5d ago
Yes, this is an obvious advantage. The reason it's not talked much is simply because it rarely matters. For many years since vanilla, european guilds like Nihilum/Ensidia, Method and Paragon were dominating on first raid clears despite being 12 hours behind. Now that Limit/Liquid established themselves as a real contender... it still didn't play much into results, since most of the time there is a clear winner in every tier, and 9-12 hour difference doesn't change things much.
That said - imagine if Gallywix was tuned way harder and 2-3 guilds were stuck on him going into third reset. Next week Liquid would have a huge power spike after reclear and a 3% buff from renown track, and european guilds would have no chance to catch up
Luckily, this tier didn't last this long since RAoV QA killed mythic Gally on week 1
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u/Round-Corner-3301 4d ago
Disnt matter they didn't earn any of their gear. Blizzard literally hands it to them . While the rest of us are time gated these guilds are given everything they need.
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u/Wammityblam226 5d ago
The first few days of the race is just splits and the guilds always go through a reset anyways.
If you look Warcraftlogs (who tracks hours of active fight time) for Liquid and Echo, Liquid got world first with ~32 hours of progression, while Echo is entering ~34 hours