Top Chinese Guild Skyline Announces Retirement from Race to World First
09.02.2024 - 17:40
/ wowhead.com
Today, the Chinese raiding guild Skyline (天涯) is officially retiring, citing financial burden and general exhaustion over seven years of competitive raiding. Widely regarded as the most accomplished group of eastern raiders, Skyline finished top 10 in every single Race to World First since the launch of Battle for Azeroth, including the #8 spot in Amirdrassil, despite stalling for nearly a thousand pulls against Tindral Sageswift.
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