WoW’s Biggest Streamer Gets Existential About The RWF

Anyone familiar with World of Warcraft knows that it’s a grind. If anything, the grind is half the point of the Massively Multiplayer Online genre. Whether it’s through items, levels, or pure aesthetics, the grind earns you something that showcases your dedication to the game to the rest of the players. Naturally, WoW’s biggest competition, Race to World Firsts is the ultimate grind — and Max “Maximum” Smith knows it better than most.

If you’re a WoW fan, he needs no introduction, but for those that aren’t: Maxi is the raid leader and guild master of Liquid Guild, the guild that just won their fourth RWF in a row over their eternal rival, Echo. The way that Max tells it, in recent years the race has become about arms, each guild doing everything possible, implementing all kinds of niche tools, to get an inch over the other. The two guilds have honed the grind so well that the margins are razor-thin and any gains left to be made are marginal.

In this kind of environment, both guilds have to pour effort in to win; 16-hour days on repeat, across two to three weeks, a marathon hosted live on Twitch, where the finish line is ever-shifting. If this all sounds exhausting, it’s because it is — the heaviest endurance game in esports. For the fans, it’s a must-watch, but for the players, what happens when it becomes too much? 

When we catch up with Max, he tells us about how he comes to terms with the mental toll of the RWF, how the guild renews itself in the face of the grind, how Echo and Liquid plan to prevent burnout in future races, and why all of us choose to do things that aren’t healthy for us.

Four wins in a row… Pretty incredible feat! How does it feel compared to, say, the first time you beat Method?

That's a good question. The first time we beat Method was a very unique feeling. I had people tell me every day we could never do it. So the first time we dispelled that was great, although I think some people still thought it was a fluke so it wasn't until a few races later that they really saw us on the same level. 

Now, we're just winning all the time. It's weird though, the third and fourth races we've won in a row have been like extremely tight victories. So even though we've won four in a row, which is cool, I don't feel like we're scaling far ahead of [Echo].

You look at the fourpeat and it seems hyperdominant, but do you think that the balance of power is roughly the same or do you think it has shifted some from EU to NA?

No, I don't think the balance of power has changed at all. I don't even know if it's an EU or NA thing. I think both of our guilds are so good and have so much experience now that it's just you know what you're going to come into every race and both teams are going to be really, really prepared and have really good players so it's probably always going to be close.

In the past races, Echo was hot on your heels, but you guys narrowly clinched it. Before the win streak, it felt like it tended to be the reverse. What do you think has changed to give Liquid the extra edge?

The last two races in particular have been significant because there's been three distinct days: the singular day we won the race on Dimensius, the day that we thought we were killing the boss and got the secret phase, and then the day we actually killed the boss. All three of those days we woke up from behind and — just like you were saying, in earlier years it felt like if we woke up behind, we would lose — those three days I knew when we got to the secret phase it wasn't a win-or-lose moment. We woke up from behind and came back and beat them to the point three times in a row.

That, I think, is significant because it means two things: Going into any tier, I don’t think it's possible to convince our players that they can't win if they're waking up from behind. And on Echo’s end, I can't speak for them, but if that's happened to you three times in a row, there's no way it's not going through your head when you when you’re ahead on a boss and you think it might be killable and it's getting late in your day and then we wake up. There's no way it doesn't enter at least some of the minds of their players. 

You have some friends in the Smash community and in Smash people talk about “getting top playered,” where you're really close to beating like one of the five gods and then it gets to last stock and you just choke. Do you think something like that happens in RWF?

So, that's a very good parallel. It's confidence, right? At that point in the Smash game, a top player knows they can still win. You can't ever shake them of that feeling. They know who they are. They've done it before. And the other player has not beaten one of those players so they're thinking, “oh my oh my god I might actually beat this person” and then that gets in your head and you move away from your game plan. 

A lot of times when you start getting ahead by a decent margin and then you start changing the way you play. You start playing defensive. You play to prevent them from scoring, which is not how you got to the point you got to. NFL teams start running the ball more. Basketball teams lock down on defense. Hockey teams change their schemes to prevent zone entries. But if you think about it, there's still a lot of game left and that's not what got you to this point so you could end up choking by trying to play more defensive or thinking I have two stocks remaining and they have one. I don't have to win this one v one. If you're more experienced, you don't do that.

Bringing it back to WoW, maybe they had that confidence before. Maybe they felt like they were the best guild and even if they woke up behind, “We've beaten these guys before by doing this.” And now it's flipped. 

Though, I really do think a lot of the RWF is kind of random. If you were to look at a 400-pull boss and then you were able to drag that slider as to how many pulls it would take for that boss to die, (so you could slide it to 380, to 360, to 340) — I think at a bunch of those different ticks, different guilds would win on the exact same boss.

What do you do to manage that randomness? Or do you just make your peace with it?

Nothing. Make your peace with it.

Also, this isn't something that we talk about in the guild. We've never lost a raid and been like, "That was random." Or, we haven't won and then been like, "Yeah, we got really lucky with timing." I'm pretty sure the narrative inside the guild and out is we were clutch and they choked, but I don't think it's always that simple. There’s a mixture of execution and strategy, but you give away your strategy and both teams are just too good to not immediately capitalize on that, and it happens every day for both teams. So it's very weird.

One of the things you'd mentioned was sticking to your game plan. If you look at different clutch teams, they often stick to what they're doing well even if it might not be the highest percentage play. Do you think that Liquid has improved at keeping on the game plan even if you're sensing Echo might be ahead?

I mean, yeah, that comes through experience. There's six months of preparation, two weeks of playing all day, every day and the only singular thing that matters is getting the last boss to zero percent. Everything before that is exciting but it doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is killing the last boss and who does that first. And when you think that you might be on the wrong side of that moment you're shitting bricks, you’re completely unable to control yourself because you're so rattled by what might happen. 

But if you do that enough times, it doesn't rattle you as much. It’s still pretty wild. I don't know how many other sports feel the way it felt on the final day; feeling like “you could lose at any moment” all day into “you have won” is such a crazy, crazy turnaround.

Emotionally, that has to be a roller coaster. The WoW community and the way that it interfaces with the race, the intensity of the fan bases, does that feed into the emotion?

Oh yeah. 100 percent. What I think of when we lose is all the people that told us we were terrible. It's really hard as a streamer to deal with the most annoying possible chatter, but we do a good job of speaking between the guilds now but before that, the only thing you hear from them is what their most insufferable fan thinks. 

I'm sure a lot of normal people, if we would have lost this race, would have said, “I watched a really good race and Liquid played really well.” But you know it's still just: you fail. You have one goal and you fail and you put so much time into it. 

You know what? Forget about the other things, if we could play again in a month, it wouldn't feel as bad, but it's like it's like six months of, “You are a loser.”

Damn.

It's tough. It's a lot of time; you potentially lose players to it; you potentially lose money over it. There's a lot of things involved, but it’s just a long stretch.

Yeah. It's a real fucking marathon. It feels like that's increased, right? like it's less down to strategy and more down to preparation. With the strategies being equal, you want to prepare as many characters as you can and so it becomes increasingly more preparation. 

Yeah. preparation has increased linearly.  When we're going into the next patch, let's say we have 20 characters. That's not hard. You have the mythic achievement on you have the mythic crest achievement on your account. You're doing farm runs every week. And the ability to go into the patch with a geared character for splits is a really easy thing you can do over a long period of time. 

But when an expansion comes out and you play 20 characters, that means in 3 weeks you have to level 20 characters. You have to do everything you can do at the beginning of the expansion to get them geared. basically doing six months of farming in two weeks — that’s the ridiculous thing.

It has been increasing over time and I think it has gotten to a point that can't continue. I don't think it was healthy for our players to do what they did. They played the game for 16 hours a day for like two months and we had some players with health problems during the RWF. 

I feel like we were asking too much of them. We spoke to Echo about this. Going into next year we're definitely going to come to an agreement with them on the amount of characters we're [both] going to play because we told our players that this won't ever happen again.

I'm pretty sure if anyone quits over the next few years, they're going to cite burnout as part of the reason. If you're going to look at the one thing about this that sucks, it's that. It's just everything else is so great that you put up with it.

I'm curious what happens now. It seems like this is, healthwise, unsustainable. You've had the conversation with Echo, but the pressure of those last few days, it's always going to be there. How do you approach that?

I don't know. Just keep doing it until I die, I guess. It's definitely not healthy, the extended periods of being so stressed that you can't eat. But it's also really fun and really cool. The only reason I'm stressed is because I care about the outcome, right? So, I think it's just being part of something that's really big and that a lot of people care about and that I really care about and that has a lot of weight to it — but that same weight is the reason that people watch, you know?

It's strange and again, it's probably not healthy, but we all do things that aren't healthy for us sometimes.