Lone WoW Classic player beats pro teams to hit level 60 first
The daily grind
Who really has the time to do this? It took me so long to get to World Of Warcraft's mythical 60 level cap that three expansions had passed and I was 20 levels behind the new bar. Didn't even touch a raid until 2 years back, and by then all the folks I started with had quit the game and started real, adult lives. Typical.
Now there are all these new kids, putting me to shame in a videogame I've plonked an embarrassing number of hours into. The absolute state of it.
Getting to 60 first was apparently a big deal for World Of Warcraft Classic players. It's only been a week since the nostalgia-driven MMORPG launched, but the notorious grind has already been bested.
Pro Warcraft raiders Method had a whole thing set up, strapping their best players into their most expensive gamer-chairs in the nicest Los Angeles studio to burn through another world first. But like all good campy action flicks, the plucky underdog nicked the spotlight from under Method's collective noses.
Over on a quiet European realm, a 22-year-old Maltese player named Jokerd was not-so-quietly stealing Method's thunder. Over the course of a 79-hour livestream, the lone Gnome Mage burned his way to the top of the ladder. At 8:40 pm CEST last Friday, Jokerd took the win.
Skip to around 18:19:00 for the (loud-mouthed) moment of truth.
Avoiding dungeons for the most part, Jokerd's regime was largely the joke answer people give when asked what you do in World Of Warcraft. He killed boars. Lots and lots of boars. And bandits, and bears, and skeletons, and cultists, and so on.
There's been a little contention over Jokerd's late-game use of layering - a server-optimising mechanic that sorts players into quieter instances of the world. The champion responded by claiming he'd already won at that point, and wanted to save a couple of hours.
Following the win, dozens of fans joined Jokerd in painting the streets of Stormwind red. And blue, and yellow, and all the latency-spiking special-effect colours of the rainbow. Method even commended the lone mage's win via Twitter. No hard feelings, eh?
Once the party died down, Jokerd then did what anyone with a long-standing Warcraft sub desperately wishes they could do and deleted his account.
Attempted to, anyway. Turns out, World Of Warcraft doesn't let you delete characters with mail in their inbox, and fans wouldn't stop sending him presents. Gosh, what a problem.
It'd probably be for the best, though. There's not particularly much to do at World Of Warcraft Classic's endgame right now - less so without 39 others making the long climb to fill out the raid roster.
Personally, I can't imagine anything more miserable. Even getting my wee gnome to level 20 has been a right chore.