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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/Notmiefault on 2025-04-03 18:02:56+00:00.
What is the difference between cheating and optimizing? It’s a question that plagues a lot of competitive videogames, but none more so than World of Warcraft’s Race to World First, the weirdest esport on the planet.
Exploits have always been a controversial part of the Race since its inception, but over the span of two races across 2023 and 2024, they became a central point of contention among fans. Settle in, grab a drink and maybe a snack, and enjoy the petty minutia of the lives of World of Warcraft’s most elite players.
But first, for those new, a little background:
Background (you can skip this part if you’re familiar with WoW / Race to World First)
Released in 2004, the MMORPG World of Warcraft (WoW) is one of the most successful videogames of all time. Players create characters to do battle in the fictional world of Azeroth, a kitchen-sink fantasy setting where players fight dragons, gods, lovecraftian horrors, and each other. The game is heavily multiplayer focused, with pretty much all of the most difficult content in the game requiring a coordinated group of players to participate in. One of the most popular activities in World of Warcraft is raiding.
A raid, in simplest terms, is a mega-dungeon consisting of a series of bosses that are designed to be tackled by groups of ~20 players. There’s a variety of difficulties of raid, the highest of which is called Mythic - Mythic raids are nightmarishly hard, and are only even attempted by hardcore players, who generally put hundreds of hours over many months just to clear a single Mythic raid. Raiders typically organize into Guilds, groups of players who work together over months to complete the raid.
The Race for World First (RWF) has been an unofficial event in World of Warcraft since 2018 (actually since the game’s launch, but 2018 is when Guilds started streaming). Whenever a new raid is released, members of the top raiding guilds will take time off work to play World of Warcraft 12+ hours a day, 7 days a week, to rush through the new raid to try and be the very first guild to complete it on Mythic difficulty. Each race generally lasts 1-2 weeks.
A number of Guilds compete in the RWF, but the top two teams for years have been Echo and Liquid. All you really need to know about these guilds is that Echo is based in Europe and led by Scripe, while Liquid is based in the US and led by Max. As a result, the fanbase that follows the race is divided large across geographic lines, with European fans cheering for Echo while US fans cheer for Liquid.
Let’s Talk about Exploits
At the highest level, World of Warcraft is a game about optimization. Top players make an art out of extracting every teeny tiny ounce of value out of every facet of the game to complete the most difficult content possible, as fast as possible. However, the line between “optimizing” and “cheating” can be a surprisingly fuzzy one. Take split raiding, for example.
In WoW, you can only kill raid bosses once a week for loot, and bosses generally drop one piece of loot for every five characters in the raid, to divvy up as they see fit. That means, in an average clear of 10 bosses, each character can expect to get around two pieces of gear. However, top players figured out that if they make a bunch of extra characters they don’t care about, and run the raid multiple times with just a few “mains” and the rest “helpers”, they can funnel all the gear onto those few mains, getting way more gear quicker…at the cost of all those helper characters getting nothing, and having to run the raid over and over and over again. It’s nightmarishly boring and tedious, nobody likes it, and yet they do it, because it’s the fastest way to get strong and, if they didn’t, someone else would and would beat them.
The developer, a small indie company called Blizzard, never intended split raiding to be a thing. It certainly goes against the spirit of the law - characters aren’t supposed to be able to get so much loot so quickly. However, no single thing they’re doing breaks any particular rule, and the developer hasn’t found a way to stop them from doing it without making the game worse for all the normal people who raid as intended. As a result, Split Raiding is considered by both the WoW community and Blizzard to be legal. In this case, it’s an optimization.
The issue of “Optimization vs Cheating” are a recurring issue in the Race for World First. It came to a bit of a head, however, in the wake of Amirdrassil.
Amirdrassil, the Dream’s Hope
Released in November of 2023, Amirdrassil was the final raid of the Dragonflight expansion. Leading up to the race, a bug was discovered that allowed players to, through an excruciatingly boring grind, get a lot more reputation (an arbitrary score awarded for doing various mundane tasks in the game world) with the newest faction, which rewarded them with a moderately powerful item they shouldn’t have been able to unlock for at least another week. Similar Reputation grinds in the past had slipped by Blizzard unchallenged. This time, however, Blizzard put their foot down, reverting the gains, taking away the items, and giving a (very minor) time penalty to everyone who exploited it.
Why was this an exploit rather than an optimization? When it comes to bugs in the game’s code, the litmus test has historically been “is this a behavior that would occur in normal play?” In this case, the bug involved spam-clicking an object as quickly as humanly possible. That was deemed not normal behavior, so Blizzard brought down the hammer. Players on both Liquid and Echo had exploited the bug and were punished, though many more on Liquid than Echo.
Echo would ultimately win the race, but since the win it has come out that Echo used an extremely suspect program to accomplish it, much more controversial than the reputation exploit, involving an AddOn.
What the hell is an AddOn?
If you’ve read any of my previous posts, you know I’m a sucker for weird deep dives into mind-numbing game systems. The thing is, you don’t really need to understand what I’m about to talk about in exhausting detail, but I want to talk about it anyway. As a compromise, I’m putting all the boring stuff in a quote box like this:
this
If you aren’t interested, just skip the big box, I’ll do a quick TL;DR at the end.
AddOns are user interface mods for WoW - programs designed by third parties that alter the visual experience. This might seem like a minor thing, but they are exceptionally powerful - they can do anything from telling you your character’s exact map coordinates, to scanning the game’s player-driven auction house and building a trendmap of prices to help players manipulate the economy, to reminding you to drink water every 30 minutes. AddOns have been with the game since its early days and are deeply ingrained - it’s rare to find a player who doesn’t use at least one or two.
One of the most popular types of AddOns are called WeakAuras, collections of mods that feed the player important information about a particular boss fight, often going so far as to make strategic decisions to help bosses be easier to manage. [Nerd note: WeakAuras actually do a lot more than that but that’s the important bit for this story] An example:
Say there is a boss who, at certain points in the fight, will randomly select two players in the raid and place a bomb on them, making them each glow. One player needs to stand still while the other moves away in order to defuse the bomb, otherwise it explodes.
Let’s say on one particular attempt, the players selected are a hunter and a paladin. The way Blizzard intends such a mechanic to be handled is as follows:
- The raid leader looks at their screen and observes that it’s the hunter and the paladin who are glowing.
- The raid leader strategizes, determining that hunters are more mobile than paladins and that the hunter should therefore be the one to move.
- They then communicate that strategy to the raid: “Hunter move out, Paladin stand still.”
- The hunter and paladin each execute the strategy, moving or not moving as the raid leader instructed.
Observe, Strategize, Communicate, Execute. This is the standard means by which a lot of boss mechanics are intended to be solved. Now, however, let’s include an AddOn. The mechanic goes out:
- The AddOn observes that the hunter and paladin have been selected.
- The AddOn consults a table that was programmed into it, ranking the specs by mobility, and sees that the hunter has a higher mobility than the paladin and should be the one to move, thus strategizing instantaneously.
- The AddOn communicates this information to the players - on the Hunter’s screen it suddenly pops up in big letters “RUN AWAY” while on the Paladin’s screen it pops up with “STAND STILL”.
- The players, quite possible having no idea what mechanic is even happening or why they’re doing what they’re doing, follow the instructions on the screen, executing the AddOn’s strategy.
Of the four steps, three of them - Observe, Strategize, and Communicate - have now been done by a program in a split second, completely …
Content cut off. Read original on https://old.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/1jqpgvn/video_games_the_top_world_of_warcraft_players/