WoW game director Ion Hazzikostas optimistic about big experiment coming to Race to World First

World of Warcraft’s Race to World First (RWF) is among the biggest grassroots competitions in esports. And with the release of Dragonflight coming near the holidays, its timing will have a notable change.

Vault of the Incarnates will start on the week of Dec. 12 on all difficulties, including Mythic, which is a shift from previous tiers. Prior to Dragonflight, the first week of a WoW season included the release of Normal and Heroic raids, but Mythic wouldn’t come out until a week later.

With Dragonflight’s release coming so close to the holidays, though, WoW game director Ion Hazzikostas and his team have decided to drop Mythic a week early in hopes of avoiding any issue with the RWF keeping people from their families on Christmas.

But is there a reason that Mythic raids aren’t released this way every season? In an interview yesterday, Hazzikostas admitted that this seemingly temporary holiday adjustment could become the new standard for WoW raid releases.

“I’m hopeful that if this experiment works well it’s something we would continue even without holiday conflicts,” Hazzikostas told Dot Esports. “It’s always been a little bit odd to have that first week where Mythic difficulty wasn’t available, but also loot from some sources as a result was arbitrarily gate. … That kind of felt broken.”

For Hazzikostas, removing a time gate on the first week of the season has the potential to create a situation that is the best of both worlds for top guilds and casual players. It will likely intensify the Race to World First and get rid of the week of heroic split runs that top players typically loathe.

Meanwhile, other players will have all their options open as soon as the raid releases, and they won’t need to fret about having a cap on the gear they can obtain from running Mythic+ or doing rated PvP.

“If a player asks, ‘wait, why am I not getting rewards for doing a really hard dungeon right now? I did a 13, why do my rewards stop getting better?’” he said. “The answer was ‘oh, because we want to be fair to the World First raiders.’ That’s not a satisfying answer.”

Additionally, the move makes life easier on Blizzard’s raid design team, which is tasked with one of the toughest balancing acts in gaming. Along with creating a Mythic difficulty instance that is enjoyable for the casual two or three-day guild, they also aim to give top competitive guilds a Race to World First level challenge.

With a week of highly organized Heroic split runs prior to a Mythic raid release, top guilds in the world like Liquid and Echo can reach gearing levels that most players won’t be able to make for a long time.

This makes it incredibly difficult for Blizzard to tune an instance that accounts for top guilds in the world and casual players simultaneously. 

“They’re achieving item levels that ‘regular’ mythic guilds wouldn’t be able to get even six weeks later,” Hazzikostas said. “So they’re not just out skilling the rest of the world. They’re also out-gearing the rest of the world, which makes it exceedingly hard to tune things to be interesting for them without being frustrating for the majority of players.”

Oftentimes, the way that Blizzard manages that degree of gearing by top guilds is to initially tune an instance for the RWF, and over the course of a season, the developers will go back and nerf some bosses that are especially troublesome for your typical casual guild.

Hazzikostas is hopeful that by getting rid of this extra week of gearing for the RWF, top guilds will find challenges in Vault of the Incarnates without it coming at the detriment of other players. While bosses will likely still end up getting nerfs, Hazzikostas showed optimism that this scheduling change could help prevent what he referred to as the need for “heavy-handed” nerfs and a “frustrating experience” for players.