A blistering photo finish: Final Fantasy 14: Dawntrail's world first race to vanquish the Arcadion's debut tier is clutched with a mere 21 seconds between 1st and 2nd place

Final Fantasy 14: Dawntrail's world first raid race is over. After the release of Patch 7.05 yesterday, teams from around the globe hopped into voice chat, assembled their parties, and wept profusely as dozens of materia vanished into their pentamelds—all to have the honour of saying, "we did it first."

In case you're unfamiliar, Final Fantasy 14 does its raids in tiers, each containing four boss fights. "Normal" difficulty, which releases first, is easy enough to be done with a group of seven randoms, so there's not really a race involved—but "Savage" difficulty is the bulk of the game's hardcore content, making it perfect material for a breakneck competition. Players had two weeks between the Normal difficulty to prep and get their crafters ready for the occasion.

This particular raid, the Arcadion, was absurdly close. As called by Mogtalk, the raid teams Grind and Serenity cleared the last fight in the exact same minute.

In order to call who'd won, judges had to rely on Eorzea Time—an in-game clock that works off a much faster timescale than we're used to in the real world, governing things like gathering node spawns and the like. An Eorzean Hour is roughly three minutes, making this the closest a game like FF14 gets to a "photo finish"—where a snapshot of the finish line is needed to decide a race—and it's supremely cool.

"[Grind] got the Eorzean Time of 3:14," announces commentator Frosty, "Serenity is world second with the Eorzean Time of 3:21." Since an Eorzean minute is roughly three seconds, that shakes out to a time differential of 21 seconds between gold and silver.

In terms of actual completion, the race itself was just as fast—starting and finishing in the same day, with both Grind and Serenity knocking over four fights in 8 hours and 59 minutes from the moment the servers opened. Here's a screenshot documenting the exact clear times in GMT from the Mogtalk site (for context, fight times are marked in order as M1S-M4S). Fascinatingly, neither party was neck-and-neck throughout the entire tier—things only got close towards the very end:

While neither team were livestreaming their pulls, as per MogTalk's kill submission forum, all contestants have to send a screenshot of their video or clear with the UI visible—given that neither contestant had any way of knowing how close the other got, I'm willing to bet the honour system is working just fine here. Grind has also uploaded their kill of the tier's final fight to YouTube.

Orzya, a member of serenity, posted to Twitter: "Lost by about ~20 seconds. GGs to Grind, still really proud of the team." Meanwhile, Grind's Shu Mai celebrated with a simple "I did it!"

I'm struggling to recall—or find—a closer world-first finish in an MMORPG. Considering most races measure themselves in the minutes, or by using boss health percentages, the fact this fight was so cheek-clenchingly close might genuinely have just made MMO history.