The launch of any new World of Warcraft expansion, Classic or not, always begins with the fastest players racing to see who can reach the new level cap first. For Mists of Pandaria Classic, which dropped earlier this week, players competed to see who could blast through level 85 to 90 before anyone else.
When Twitch streamer Lmgd1 saw the “Realm First! Level 90 Monk” achievement pop up on his screen, he nearly jumped out of his chair in celebration. The past few hours of non-stop grinding had paid off.
“Back-to-back world champion, boys!” he yelled, referencing the world first level 85 achievement he earned last year while standing over one of many piles of enemy corpses he used to level up.
And then his chat started buzzing about a rumor that someone else had actually beaten him just a minute earlier. The other player wasn’t streaming when they did it so there was no evidence other than a screenshot posted in a Discord server by a third-party. Lmgd1 inspected it and saw that there was indeed a timestamp that made it look like they had hit level 90 about a minute before him.
Lmgd1 spent the rest of the stream suspicious of this mysterious other player who only had a cropped screenshot for proof. But while he was offline, a user over in the comments on a Wowhead post decided to check the only unassailable way of knowing who had won: the official WoW API.
“Samdxdx was 2 mins and 22 seconds before lmgdmonkas you can check the battle.net api for the timestamps” user okdruid wrote alongside two screenshots of the API readout for when each player earned the realm first achievement—which multiple players can technically earn if they’re within a few minutes of each other.
And they were right: Samdxdx hit level 90 just a little earlier than Lmgd1, according to the “completed_timestamp” section of the API.
When Lmgd1 went live the next day, he still wasn’t convinced. “If you don’t stream [the] world first are you actually world first?” he asked, grilling his viewers on the validity of what, frankly, is the closest thing to concrete proof as you can get. Lmgd1 argues that nobody knows if Samdxdx was cheating or not, but I think if that was the case Blizzard would’ve said so in the two days since the debacle.
With nothing on the line but his ego, Lmgd1 should probably just take the L and be proud of the fact that he’s still one of the fastest WoW players in the world. That’s impressive in its own right, if you ask me, and there will always be another expansion to try for the world first again.
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