Blizzard extends World of Warcraft maintenance, stalls Race to World First again

Complexity-Limit’s defense of the World of Warcraft Race to World First throne is getting a little bit of a delay today. Blizzard has extended its server maintenance, keeping North American guilds offline until 3pm CT.

Maintenance is regularly scheduled for servers on Tuesdays. Today, it was supposed to take place from 8am to 1pm CT. But as the time to log in approached, Blizzard sent out a tweet saying it needed more time. 

“We apologize for any disruption and hope to restore service quickly,” Blizzard said.

The delay in the servers going up today is significant because when a raid is released, North American guilds get access to the instance nearly a day before European servers. 

This isn’t necessarily an advantage for a guild like Complexity-Limit, which broadcasts all of its communications and raid attempts. Though the group always goes into the first Wednesday of a raid tier with a notable headstart over EU guilds, that margin is often chewed into quickly.

Because guilds like Echo and Method will be able to watch everything Limit does, they could potentially pull vital information from Limit’s day one stream, making it so that they don’t need as much time to clear the bosses that Limit has passed. 

During the last RWF in Battle for Azeroth earlier this year, a similar delay took place that caused frustration for Complexity-Limit raid leader Maximum, who slammed Blizzard for a lack of communication. 

With January’s experience under his belt, Max doesn’t seem nearly as frustrated about the delay today, though.

Meanwhile, today’s extended maintenance hasn’t slowed viewership for the event early on. Asmongold leads the WoW category on Twitch with more than 80,000 viewers watching his streamer group One True King give a roundtable discussion about the race. 

Max’s stream has the second-most concurrent viewers with more than 40,000, far higher than the last race’s viewership on day one. 

“This is the strongest narrative ever going into the Race to World First,” Max said on stream. “I have 40K viewers and I’m looking at a login screen. Just for reference by the way, we averaged 40K viewers when we were ahead on [the previous raid’s final boss] N’Zoth. That’s what our end boss view counts were on average.”