by The third race to be first in the world in WoW Dragonflight will begin in the next few days. Both top guilds, Echo and Liquid, managed to win a raid level each and the two are also expected to fight for victory in Amirdrassil – although Method still wants to have a say.
One of the points of contention in recent races has increasingly been the different start times. NA servers (North American servers) will come online on Tuesday evening our time, while European players will have to wait until Wednesday morning. This gives NA players a clear advantage – especially since they can get new gear right after changing their ID and defeat the final boss immediately after. The main guilds have long been in favor of a global release. But at Blizzard this falls on deaf ears. They are still sticking to the staggered release, as was reiterated at BlizzCon.
The boys at the EU’s top guild, Echo, have had enough. They switch to NA servers to be able to start at the same time as their competitor Liquid. Guild leader Scipe announced this in a tweet.
Echo is moving to NA servers – but for how long?
Gingi also confirmed the change on his stream, but without going into details. However, it is unlikely that Echo will actually run the Race to World First on NA servers.. There are many arguments against this. And Gingi, who was temporarily slowed down in his statements by Scripe, repeatedly emphasized the “tomorrow” in “tomorrow we will hack the NA servers.
It sounds like you want to decrease the wait time for the EU servers to come online by playing on the NA server. Until now, all you could do during this period was sit back, wait, and see what the competition was doing. So now you have the chance to go on the attack and test the tactics you planned there.
Everything else hardly makes sense. Of course, switching to the NA server would result in a simultaneous start, which could also please viewers. But the disadvantages far outweigh the disadvantages.
- Echo is already in Sweden, where its event is taking place. From there the latency is around 150ms.
- Character transfers from EU servers to NA servers are not possible. Players would have to reload and equip all of their main and youth characters.
- Most fans (and therefore potential helpers) play on EU servers and could no longer help on NA servers.
- All guild gold reserves are on EU servers and cannot be transferred either.
So it probably won’t be a long-term change. But it’s interesting to see what tricks guilds resort to to take advantage of every advantage, no matter how small. Something similar happened in the past when guilds collectively changed races or briefly switched to alliance to obtain a single item.
