Method’s World of Warcraft Mini-Raid Race Streams Deliver Sustained Interest on Twitch

Credit: Blizzard Entertainment

World of Warcraft’s  raid races have quickly become one of the must-see competitive video gaming events on Twitch. Even though, the most recent raid release, Crucible of the Storm, only serves as a smaller, intermediate raid, there was no shortage of viewership on Twitch for the race to complete it.

In the fall, esports organization Method was the first high-profile group to stream its race to become the first guild in the world to complete a WoW raid on its highest difficulty. For an introduction to raiding and the mechanics of the world first race, review our coverage of last year’s event.

Following Method’s success in generating reach and hype for the raid race, the organization upped the ante for this year’s first raid, Battle of Dazar’alor, with its own professionally broadcasted event. With an increase in production quality as well as broadcast personalities and sponsors, Method showed the true potential a raid race has as a commercial form of competitive gaming.

Crucible of the Storm was a different raid though. Unlike the other recent raids that have been streamed generating tons of viewers, this one was small in size and content. Instead of having eight or nine bosses to defeat, there were only two. While most raids come at the beginning of an in-game “season,” this “mid-tier” raid came in the middle of a season that was already happening.

Due to the nature of the mini-raid, some guilds approached the race for world first with a different attitude than they might otherwise by making the grassroots event its own unique, but smaller, competition. Additionally, the race for world first is sometimes a short one, only lasting a few days.

Despite increasing its production in January for the last raid race, Method decided to take a step back for this mini-raid and instead just allowed its players to stream their perspective.

“The last mini-raid lasted only about 24 hours,” said Method co-owner Sascha Steffens. “So for us there was a similar expectation, maybe not 24 hours, but at max three to four days. There was the fear that it could be just 24 hours, and we didn’t want to do a whole lot of preparation and do a live event, and then the raid’s over within one day.”

Crucible of the Storm proved to be much more difficult than anyone had anticipated though as some Method raiders spent more than a week broadcasting progression from their personal channels from April 24 until May 3, when the guild finally killed the final boss and finished second.

While Method didn’t complete the raid first, the guild that won the race to world first, Pieces, did not stream its attempts as a way to protect its strategies and maintain as much of a competitive advantage as possible.

Even though Method didn’t win, viewership of attempts on the “MethodJosh” Twitch channel peaked as Method founder and co-owner Scott “Sco” McMillan took a leave of absence for the final few days of the raid due to a family commitment.

During the days before Method ultimately killed the final boss of the raid, the channel was averaging more than 20K concurrent viewers for streams that ran more than 12 hours long, peaking just above 35K CCV.

For comparison, “MethodJosh” and McMillan’s channels averaged 9K CCV and 19K CCV during the Battle of Dazar’alor raid in February even though Method was streaming live coverage of the raid with commentary, interviews, and analytics. The main Method broadcast averaged 29K CCV for its week of broadcasting the race.

Even though Method opted against putting together a live event for this raid, Steffens said that a live event is in the works to celebrate and cover the upcoming raid in the summer. He added that the organization didn’t have discussions with sponsors regarding this mini-raid, but they’ve been working with companies to solidify plans.

However, as Blizzard  continues to fine-tune WoW in a way that makes these smaller raids more difficult and competitive, Steffens didn’t leave out the possibility of doing specials for a future mini-raid.

“Now that we saw that Blizzard created two bosses that were actually fairly challenging … we might look at these new mini raids in the future very differently,” Steffens said.

Battle of Dazar’alorBlizzardCrucible of the StormmethodPiecesRaidstwitchViewershipWorld of WarcraftWorlds First