Eaple, Officer of Skyline (translated)
From 2017 to now, we have grown from an initial “idea” to the present, from naivety and ignorance to being the ONE. This took us 7 years.
When the Jailer fell, we once said, “We continue for all the next times to come.” After CN’s shutdown, we continued raiding on the TW server. During these 400+ days, we have overcome many difficulties and obstacles. After all this time, we have come to realize that we still have a lot of work to do to compete with the top guilds in the world, and on the other hand, the re-operation of the CN server is still a long way off, the environment and challenges that we will have to face if we continue to raid on TW will only get more challenging and more demanding.
Whether it’s in the game or real life, every train will come to a stop, every journey will end, and everyone will eventually reach their own destination. Although we can’t say that we have created anything or achieved anything significant, but for us, this may be a period of experience that some people don’t even have in their whole life, and this experience can at least prove that “we were here.” Instead of letting our members continue to be physically and mentally exhausted, we want this experience to become a memory and put the choice back in our hands so that perhaps, in the days to come, some of us can have a better life than this.
Anyway, today is the Chinese New Year’s Eve, so I wish everyone reading this a Happy New Year.
The Rise of Professional Raiders
Raiding has always been competitive, but became a big business in recent years, with the popularization of the Race to World First and increased visibility through public streaming. While a few of the biggest World of Warcraft guilds in the west have used this opportunity to start getting into the business of high-level sponsorships, major raid guilds of the east have long been backed by large-scale corporations paying out regular salaries, both during Race to World First events and outside of it – with players engaging in hundreds of Mythic sales across armies of alts each week to earn their corporate-backed paychecks. Make no mistake, this is a big business in the east far beyond petty complaints of guild organized sales or pug GDKP runs, where the idea of spending currency (digital or otherwise) in order to save themselves time is not only an accepted idea, but actively celebrated; where a full Mythic Amirdrassil clear can be purchased for as little as $7 USD each week, an already low price point which is continually dropping.
Even mid-ranked eastern raid guilds regularly sell dozens of Mythic clears every day, while privately logged top end guilds do far more business.
Before their dramatic demise, Team Aster spent a purported $1.85 million USD on the Sanctum of Domination Race to World First event, including approximately $120,000 in salary for around 40 raiders and staff. In Aberrus, Huonguo Hero brought 300+ backup characters to supplement their primary 30-player raid team, alongside 40 staff members handling logistics and network engineering to help optimize the connection to Taiwanese servers from their e-sports hotel in Chongqing city in China. Like many other professional raiding guilds in the east, they pay for this extravagance with piloted sales, purportedly selling all twenty raid spots to piloted accounts during their World 5th finish in Amirdrassil, generating between $1,500 – $3,000 each. Unlike the e-celebrity streamers of the west, these players are first and foremost employees – who care less about their own ranks and character achievements than they do about getting paid.
Pilots and sales are such big business on TW servers that groups maintain constantly updated advertisements detailing the cost of their services.
The most stark contrast between east and west is that these things are considered completely normal, accepted, and even celebrated by a large part of the eastern gaming population, who have a very different cultural approach to the concept of RMT and (somewhat) more socially acceptable gold sales. Though with the cost of the Race to World First continually reaching new all-time highs, many of the major western competitors also spend months doing gold sales to help pay off billions in debt from PvP boosts, raid splits, BoEs, gear trades, crafting, and consumables.
To be clear, there is a noted difference between RMT and gold sales, though they are both symptomatic of the same “business” of world first raiding.
Rather than the job-based salary of their peers, Skyline stood out due to having a single dedicated sponsor paying virtually all of the team’s expenses during Race to World First events; all expenses paid to set up the guild and its support staff at e-sports hotels for weeks at a time. Unlike most of the other top guilds, however, the majority of Skyline players were only paid during Race to World First events; playing WoW wasn’t their full-time job and because of this, the guild didn’t engage in those types of mass sales, resulting in a much more western approach to the game. Despite their raiders not being regularly salaried or even playing with the team under any kind of contractual obligation, Skyline’s sponsor pledged to pay each of their players a Chinese New Year bonus – a pseudo severance package in recognition of the group’s longstanding commitment.
Return to China – Future Uncertain
Despite their prestigious history, the cracks already began to show during Skyline’s disastrous progression against Tindral, with the guild even announcing a step back from their long-hour Race to World First raid schedule after finally clearing the boss. Though they still managed a very respectable World 6th against Tindral and 8th on Fryakk, that strain had taken its toll, with one of their players reportedly hospitalized due to stress and the guild’s longtime sponsor commenting (translated) “I’m thankful for the players that stuck with us this whole time. We used to be good, and we had our glory before.”
Tindral nearly broke the guild’s back, though Skyline still managed to claim World 8th Fyrakk, and their very first 2nd place finish in CN/TW.
While the increased burden of raiding from a different region may have broke them, the real question is what will come next for the raiders of Skyline, as the eastern raiding landscape continues to diminish. There is a potential silver lining, however, as increased rumors that Blizzard will soon be renewing its partnership with NetEase promise to restore service to the millions of players who opted not to restart on brand new Taiwanese accounts in order to continue playing during Dragonflight. Despite the hassle of switching regions for a second time, the restored convenience of lower pings and local servers (not to mention reduced conflict within the player base) could revitalize the player base, offering new opportunities for otherwise displaced world ranked raiders.
