Complexity-Limit has raced to pay off their debts from the world first race

The most recent Mythic world first race was also the most expensive. Guilds like Complexity-Limit and Method went massively in debt to other players buying crafting materials for potions and flasks and more importantly corrupted gear that was bind on equip. In total Limit spent around 257 million gold! Now — just seven weeks later — they’ve earned enough gold to pay off all of their debts.

Seven weeks!

That’s less time than most prestige television shows air for. That’s earning 36 million gold a week — or five million gold a day! It’s hard to conceptualize just how much gold that is. Or even how many characters and guild banks you’d need just to store it all.

The amount of gold that each raider who was there for the N’zoth kill would have to earn to pay down that debt individually is 12,850,000. That’s enough for two Mighty Caravan Brutosaurs each, and they’d have enough left over to buy one of the Bloodfang Widow mounts from Legion with 850,000 gold leftover for walking around money.

Now I don’t expect that each of them became professional auction house moguls in their spare time. This gold was probably made with a combination of selling carry runs for people to get their Ahead of the Curve and Cutting Edge achievements, and doing a lot of Horrific Vision and Mythic Keystone carries. Working with providers like The Gallywix Boost Community — who only deal in gold — it’s easy to see just how the best raiders in the world could stand to amass a fortune of that size quickly. Right now they’re advertising a guaranteed on-time Keystone level 15 for 330,000 gold. If you’re able to provide that service you’re looking at massive piles of gold per hour. That’s not even looking at selling Mythic raid boss kills, which I’m sure that top-end guilds like Limit and Method could do easily. The first three bosses are only 1,350,000 gold each. Positively a steal!

The power of the almighty gold coin

Spending massive amounts of gold in a race wasn’t unique to Ny’alotha. It happened during other raid tiers in Battle for Azeroth and has probably been happening even further back. There are usually BOE items that drop in the raids that can be used to raise the ilevel of your top tier raiders, and all of the materials needed to level crafting don’t come cheap. But Ny’alotha was special because of the Corruption system. Corruptions can be overwhelmingly powerful, and you couple that with the randomness and difficulty in getting exactly the powers you wanted. Those early pieces were worth several times their weight in gold, with a Rank Three Infinite Stars or Echoing Void probably fetching a million gold or more during the race. Even in its post-nerf state, my rank 2 Infinite stars can still wind up being 20% of my damage in a single target raid encounter.

I think we’ll be unlikely to see such powerful items dropping so easily in raids in Shadowlands. Blizzard has always tried to tamp down on anything that can be seen as pay-to-win. We’ve seen guilds who’ve faction changed to take advantage of raid lockouts getting reset to get twice the gear get hit with resets and had their achievement stripped. More recently during the lead-up to the Battle of Dazar’alor Limit faction changed to Alliance in order to take advantage of a War Mode bonus that gave them a guaranteed piece of gear that was as powerful as the loot from Heroic Dazar’alor. They didn’t end up winning the race, but after that Blizzard did lower the strength of the reward to disincentivize anyone else from pulling the same stunt.

I do wonder if including some sort of gentleman’s agreement going forward to try and rein in how much gold is spent on the race would make things more interesting. I doubt that the guilds would go for it though. With how big the race has become as an esports event getting any advantage over your rivals could lead to fame and glory — and sponsorship deals.