I've been having a jolly old time with World of Warcraft: Forever—for the most part, it really does just feel like an alternate universe where the Cataclysm world revamp never happened and, instead, Blizzard simply funnelled more quests into the old world. There's still plenty here that's familiar, but there's just enough new stuff to do to smooth over the levelling and questing experience.

A questing experience that is otherwise unchanged. If anything, the oldschool-ness of it is actually elevated by the changes, reflecting some of WoW's best questing areas. It's as though every single zone has become The Barrens, flooded with lots of little tasks for your dopamine-starved brain nugget.

And let me tell you, I've been staggered at how much fun I'm having. Not just in a "nostalgic oldschool rose-tinted goggles" sort of way (although I'll concede that is part of it) but from a genuine perspective of someone playing a modern videogame. Because the quest design that captured an entire generation of MMO players back in the early 2000s? It holds up.

Not in terms of the "collect five bear arses" thing, but in terms of how it's all structured. See, in the good ol' days, WoW had questing hubs wherein you'd flood your journal with anywhere from five to fifteen tasks, some of which had their own branching storylines and quest chains.

You were then faced with a map and a decision of how to complete them—okay, clarification time, the quest markers on a map ARE new, but it's not like we didn't have quest helper AddOns back in the day. Anyway, keeping that decision-making interesting are what I'm gonna call the three layers of questing friction: Ordering, travel, and level variety.

'Ordering' is the most straightforward—simply put, the player has to decide what the most efficient way to do these quests is with limited information. Sometimes, you might finish your batch of quests, only to discover that if you'd turned in a different one first, you'd be able to be far more efficient. Womp womp.

'Travel' is the idea that quests shouldn't be within a convenient distance of each other all of the time. Sometimes, you should put a quest just far enough out of the way that the player is encouraged to go: Ugh, I might as well. The journey to these quests is often just as interesting as doing them, and you can put even more quests on the other side of that journey to make them feel worth it in a surprising way.

'Level variety' is the fact that quests should have a small variation in both enemy level and location—Zalazane in Durotar's a good example of this. He's a couple levels higher than everyone else (level 10, compared to level 8) and is a bit of a pain in the arse to kill. You either need to group up with folks, come back when you're a higher level, or develop some kind of cheese strat to make things easier. Or hey, maybe you're just a class that has an easier time soloing and you're fine. That's good too.

You'll notice that retail WoW has cast all three of these things aside entirely. Modern WoW questlines are often delivered in batches of two to three quests which are turned in as small parcels, usually while following a character through a linear narrative, so no ordering required. Travel is nixed because you have a flying mount—one that's become far faster with Skyriding. And level variety isn't a thing anymore because everything scales.

There is a reason why this approach was adopted, don't get me wrong—it's smooth, a nice little breadcrumb trail of dopamine shots to keep you blissed out in a "numbers go up" loop. But it's trading ease and comfort for satisfaction, because… I mean, look at this.

I think I speak for us all when I say: God. God yes. Ugh, that's the stuff.

What makes Forever so delicious to me is that it eases up on the friction a little bit by giving you more to do, but it still keeps that core satisfaction of coming up with your own routes. In my recent quests through Tirisfal Glades, I had one quest send me way far afield, up a mountain, and across a lake. And I still chose to do it, because I was already halfway there and my hearthstone was almost off cooldown.

The level variety thing also encourages you to group up more often, too—sure, you could come back and knock Zalazane over later. Or you could ask if anyone wants to kill the guy now. Grouping in this case isn't a strict requirement, like in the case of an "elite" quest, but it saves you time in the long run.

Vanilla WoW was by no means perfect—sometimes all that friction gave you ropeburn, feeling more accidental than deliberate. But that's kind of the exercise that Forever's attempting, here. Rather than tearing out the old world entirely in favour of more modern quest design, there's been a considered effort to polish out the friction just a smidge. Plugging holes and gaps in a zone's quest design while keeping the overall structure the same.

And in the same vein as my love of tab-target MMOs, I think it's nice to see this oldschool technique be given a second swing. You can improve an old formula to bring it up to date without ruining what made it special, and gosh, I think Blizzard really might be achieving that here.

I've been getting stuck into World of Warcraft: Forever's beta—though I'm a little less levelled up than I'd like to be. Initially, I just chalked this up to launch-day queue problems, but as it turns out, there's a little more to it than that.

See, I live in the UK, and Blizzard rarely does beta testing with EU-region players in mind. Forever's no different, the servers appear to be located solely in the US. Which isn't too much trouble, mind, I can deal with playing on 100+ ping for a beta test. What I can't deal with is logging in, having 300 ping, suddenly spiking to 2000 world MS, and then disconnecting.

The solution? A VPN. The moment I set my VPN to a US region, I received a cosy 100 ping and zero disconnection issues. As I quested through Durotar during EU times, I was able to corroborate the fix with plenty of other EU players who were experiencing the exact same thing with the exact same solution.

The EU WoW Forever beta forums are on fire with (understandable, though perhaps overexpressed) outrage: "We shouldn’t need a VPN service just to get a playable connection to a game we already paid €60 for," writes one player. "Can confirm VPN fixes it, I have <100ms ping on VPN and basically don’t feel lag. But obviously, [I] shouldn’t have to do that," adds another.

If this were, say, simply a closed-invite beta, I wouldn't even blink at this issue. But the fact of the matter is that Blizzard has used the beta to sell the Skyborne Epic Pack, it's pretty rough. Here's the store page for the EU: While the pack is keen to mention beta access, I can't find any mention of the beta's server locations on the page—just a notification of the dates it's taking place.

On the other hand, this is clearly some sort of network issue that Blizzard will doubtless fix. VPNs aren't magic, they can't make the internet go faster. What they can do is reroute your internet connection in a way that can skip routing issues—as is the case with me, and other EU-based players.

From what I can see, these connection problems aren't a known issue on the forums. As such, I've reached out to Blizzard for comment, and will update this article if I receive a response.

WoW: Forever, Blizzard's modernized twist on WoW Classic, launched a beta today, but most people have only experienced a login screen so far.

Following a live Q&A, Blizzard turned the WoW: Forever beta servers on. The queue times weren't too bad to start: I had about a nine-minute wait when I first logged in. But once it finished, I was disconnected and kicked to the back of the line for another, even longer queue.

It appears I'm not the only one who has made it past the queue only to be disconnected and prompted to start the whole process over again. Players and streamers are all reporting similar issues, although some people have successfully made it in.

Blizzard acknowledged the issues on X: "We're working through some final issues, and we expect the doors to open soon."

There doesn't seem to be any trick to the queue. You just need to wait it out and pray that it lets you past the initial login screen.

WoW: Forever is the first version of WoW that doesn't use realms, or servers, in the same way as the others. Instead of picking a realm, you pick a ruleset (normal, PvP, or Roleplay) and join the same server as everyone else. Blizzard did it this way to help preserve the social aspect of the original MMO. This might also be why the queue times are so rough.

Wowhead and others have been busy datamining the game's files for new details. You can already go through all the new class talent trees and peek at some of the reworked armor sets. It might be worth taking a look while you wait to get in, or, if you're like me and don't want to spoil everything, cross your fingers and hope you can play a little before the risk of long queues gets even worse on the weekend.

There will be plenty of time to play the WoW: Forever beta, however. It'll stick around until October 21 before Blizzard fixes it up for its November 4 launch.

World of Warcraft: Forever's beta arrives today, but the dataminers are way ahead of us, having ferreted out all sorts of new details. WoW Forever's still around a month and a half from launch day, so this should be considered a work in progress, but it's still interesting.

As datamined by WoWHead, Forever will be bringing all sorts of unique set bonuses to the game as an incentive to actually go out and farm. The Postmaster set, a level 56 kit, now nets owners Return to Sender, which gives you a free spell reflect after falling to 25% health. The Necropile's Raiment, meanwhile, has a chance to steal life from spellcasting, and the Bloodmail's Regalia can bleed enemies that attack you.

Even low-level armor sets have cool bonuses now, like the Defias Leather set, which, at four pieces, has a chance to make your melee attacks bleed the target on a 5% proc chance. The Embrace of the Viper five-set bonus seems wild, too, giving you a chance to just outright stun your targets for 1 second.

I think it's neat as heck and a good sign that Blizzard intends to keep up this whole horizontal development thing. The fact that even lower-level gear is being treated as more than just a stop-gap makes me more excited for the entire exercise.

The max level dungeon sets are interesting as well—like the Warlock's Dread/Deathmist raiments, which have a chance to fear attackers when they strike you on a 60 second cooldown. Raid sets, which should come from the new raids added to Forever and have bespoke set bonuses, are also cool.

For example, the feral tanking set, Grovekeeper's Rage, lets you cast Rebirth while in bear form. And a lot of these sets provide damage bonuses against certain creature types, like a rogue set that adds attack power versus humanoids, or the warlock's Demonheart Raiment, which gives spellpower against demons.

And while not all of these datamined sets are made equal, they're also not made finished, so I anticipate a few of them getting a heck of a lot more interesting when the full game comes out in November.

World of Warcraft: Forever is a new branch of the MMO that's making its debut this week in a month-long beta before the whole thing drops in November. It will be the first opportunity to experience some of the new quests, dungeons, and class abilities that Blizzard has added to a version of the MMO that will never move on past the original game.

Here's everything you need to know about the WoW: Forever beta, how to get access, and what's available in it.

When does the World of Warcraft: Forever beta start?

The WoW: Forever beta begins on Thursday, September 17 on PC. Anyone who has preordered the Skyborne Epic Pack or the Warcraft Forever Collection will have access as soon as it opens.

Blizzard says the WoW: Forever beta will go live after the live Q&A at 10:30 am PT. It's unclear how long the stream will go, but I'd expect it to last around 30 minutes.

Here are the stream times across regions on September 17:

• 10:30 am PDT (Los Angeles)
• 1:30 pm EDT (New York)
• 6:30 pm BST (London)
• 7:30 pm CEST (Berlin)
• 3:30 am August 29 AEST (Sydney)
• 5:30 am August 29 NZST (Auckland)

You'll have about a month to try the game out before the beta ends on October 21.

How to access the World of Warcraft: Forever beta

There are two ways to get into the WoW: Forever beta. The first requires purchasing one of the two premium versions of the game from Blizzard's store. Both the Skyborne Epic Pack ($59.99) and the Warcraft Forever Collection ($79.99) will grant you beta access. Alternatively, you can leave it to chance and sign up for it on the WoW: Forever website by clicking the "Beta Opt-in" button at the top of the page.

You can check if you have access to the WoW: Forever beta by opening the Battle.net launcher dropdown menu under World of Warcraft and selecting "World of Warcraft: Forever".

What is available in the World of Warcraft: Forever beta?

The WoW: Forever beta will be split into two phases. At the start, you won't be able to go past level 20. Then, after two weeks, the level cap will be raised to level 30 and will stay there until the beta ends.

Every race and class will be available to play, including the new Skyborne elves (if you preorder).

Here's how each phase will work:

Phase 1 (September 17)

• Level 20 cap
• New class abilities and talents
• New Profession items
• New dungeons: Hall of Thanes, Ruins of Lordaeron
• Legacy system

Phase 2 (~October 8)

• Level 30 cap
• New class abilities and talents
• New Profession items
• New dungeon: Excavation Site: Wetlands
• Legacy system

World of Warcraft: Forever's an interesting pitch—instead of no changes, it's an all-changes version of vanilla WoW. Updated talent trees, new quests, essentially an envisioning of the OG game where, save for the new sky elves, all of the fresh additions are horizontal. New dungeons and raids all packaged within that original level 60 cap in good ol' Azeroth.

But given Blizzard just did Season of Discovery, at least one question was brewing in my mind—would the developer add some of the wilder class designs, like healing mages and shaman tanks, as optional skill trees or playstyles?

Sadly not, says senior game designer Josh Greenfield in a recent GameSpot interview: "[Season of Discovery] was always meant to be ephemeral, and it allowed us to take some risks that we probably wouldn't really take in a 'forever' game. A lot of the changes, I think, in spirit—a lot of the lessons we learned—are carried over. But some of the more out there things that weren't originally in original WoW, we toned them back a little bit."

I already had a feeling, given a lot of the preemptively put together talent calculators—but these were assembled from a beta version of the game, gathered together in snippets at Blizzcon. By no means were its prophesied talents final. However, what I did see had me leaning in the way of playing it safe.

Aside from a few very cool additions and redesigned specs, a lot of the changes were simply bringing class design elements from modern WoW back into its vanilla age. Take combat rogues, for instance, which enjoy an equivalent of the outlaw rogue's central trick, lowering all of their cooldowns by a few seconds when they use a finishing more.

That's not to say that there's no experimentation in Forever's future, mind. Greenfield continues: "It's one of those things—it's in the name, it's forever, we can do a lot of things over years, but we wanted to start from a place where the soul of the class is very coded and original WoW-centric.

"But there's still meaningful changes and really exciting ways to play your class … But some of the Warlock tank, Shaman tank, not quite yet? But never say never, y'know." It's a bit of a shame, given Forever is sort of meant to be Blizzard's replacement for a WoW 2, but I can at least understand why the studio's starting off a little less experimental than it could've. And that's not to say the boat isn't being rocked at all.

It's been a meme for eight years—where's the sword, Blizzard? At the end of World of Warcraft: Legion, the big bad Sargeras tried to punch a big, corruptive sword into the heart of Azeroth. For years—eight years and nine months, to be exact—it's been a big, hanging question mark over the game's lore.

Especially given that, up until the Worldsoul Saga, Blizzard has been a little scattershot with its expansion ideas. The current trilogy is the company's first real, proper attempt at a multi-expansion storyline, à la Final Fantasy 14's 10-year epic that carried it from A Realm Reborn to Endwalker.

Which is why I'm a little bummed out, man. In an interview with WoWHead, associate game director Paul Kubit says that in the Midnight: What's Next recap, a screenshot of Azeroth's worldsoul with a jagged spike pointed towards it? Yeah, that's the sword. No—really, Kubit said "Yeah, yeah. That's the sword." Look:

"Yeah, yeah. That's the Sword. Eagle-eyed viewers have identified that, and yeah, we've been thinking about the Sword and it should become very apparent to people as you play through Eclipse that we haven't forgotten about the Sword. This is not something that is going away. Also, how tragically close it came to the Worldsoul is a testament to how close he came, but also maybe the power of the Worldsoul herself."

I'm bothered, somewhat, because on paper this is a super cool detail—look at that thing. It came literally feet away from punching into the centre of the world, which would've corrupted the entire planet with fel magic. Per WoW cosmology, it would've also stopped the void lords from turning it into a Dark Titan, which was kind of Sargeras' whole deal. But it also would've killed everybody, so—too many eggs for that omelette.

I'm imagining a world in which I dropped into this zone for the first time, saw that sword-tip inches away from Azeroth's soul, and went: Oh, crap. We were this close to the end of the world.

I'll keep things vague for spoiler reasons, but Final Fantasy 14—which keeps story elements under wraps before the patch or expansion they're due comes out—is really good at this. At several points in its winding 10-year story, a vista or an environment pulls double duty as part of the narrative: Like an impossible glimmering city under the ocean, or a heartachingly gorgeous faery landscape in a dying world.

But WoW doesn't do this. It tests patches for weeks on the PTR with preview cutscenes and, as mentioned above, it reveals huge overarching narrative beats during interviews and press conferences—which robs Blizzard of a pretty solid tool in its arsenal: Letting the environment show you the story.

Rather than having an "oh, shit!" moment when I saw this sword while in Midnight's final raid, and slowly piecing it together, I have instead been told in a quote by a director that I will, in a handful of months, see exactly what he said I'd see. And, listen—even though I've been impressed by some elements of Midnight's story, it's not exactly gripped my heart like FF14's did. And as long as we live in a world where big reveals like this aren't treated with much sanctity, it's probably gonna stay that way.

World of Warcraft: Forever, in case you missed the wild news that came out of BlizzCon over the weekend, is essentially Classic+. A reimagining of vanilla WoW with updated talent trees, new raids and dungeons, more horizontal progression, and some shiny, glossic graphics thrown over the top of the whole thing.

Given it's aping a more friction-filled time in history, you might be wondering if it'll be offering a Hardcore mode: The answer, per the "What's Next" panel, is a resounding yes. Production director Clayton Stone, who was the associate production director on Classic itself, took to the stage to profess his love of the hardcore mode:

"Hardcore represented a turning point for us as a team. We had tried a few things before it, and as [Ian Hazzikostas] covered, we have absolutely tried new things since. But hardcore represented the moment when Blizzard and the community came together, and showed not only why World of Warcraft is one of the greatest games ever made, but why that original adventure still holds so much promise for where we could go in the future.

"Which," he continues, "Is why I am also so proud to announce that Hardcore will be coming to WoW Forever as well."

While this isn't all too surprising on the face of it—Classic Hardcore proved to be incredibly popular—it will be interesting. One of the reasons why Hardocre mode became so popular was because, well, Classic is a "solved" game at this point. Chances are if you're going for a hardcore run, you already know every nook and cranny of Azeroth, which is 20 years old at this point. And if you don't, you can open a guide somewhere to maximise your chances.

But Forever will be adding new dungeons and raids, new quests—surprise encounters around every corner that could kill a Hardcore run deader than dirt. Which is likely why it's not coming out on the game's launch this November—instead reserved for the winter season.

That'll give more time for Hardcore aficionados to map out every inch of Forever's alternate-reality Azeroth and plan the best strats. And we know how WoW players love their min-maxing.

World of Warcraft has a long-standing tradition of datamining and min-maxing. So it should come as no surprise that, despite only just being shown at Blizzcon, World of Warcraft: Forever now already has online talent calculators available, assembled from a delightful tapestry of streams and ravenous info-gatherers.

There's the old reliable that is WoWHead, but I want to shout out Reddit user Baldwinbuilds for their version, which not only collects all of the currently-known info about the Classic revamp's talents, but also has a handy button that tells you exactly how they were changed. It's a tremendous bit of work.

I've had a skim through, and assembled a list of some of the wildest additions—now, keep in mind, WoW Forever's not coming until November, so all of these are likely to change between now and its debut. But it still gives you an idea of the sorts of design philosophies that Blizzard's gearing up to apply:

• Arms warriors get a new ability called Searing Strike, which does an 80% extra damage against Giants, Dragonkin, and mounted targets—knocking them off their steed to boot.
• Retribution paladins have an interesting talent called Holy Twist. This debuffs an enemy whenever you replace your current seal on them with an echo, which then re-triggers it on your next melee attack. Basically, you'll be cycling through your seals.
• Survival hunters seem to be dual wielders now with Predator's Edge, which increases your offhand damage by 10% per point, along with a bunch of new abilities that make your Mongoose Bite more effective.
• Combat rogues borrow some tricks from retail's outlaw with Relentless Blades, which reduces their cooldowns whenever they use a finisher. This is a pretty big change, given it changes the flow of combat rogues completely.
• Shamans get Totemic Projection, a huge quality of life buff, letting them take their totems with them on the move—as well as Call of the Elements, which lets you drop a full set of totems in one cast.

Other than that, it's a lot of popular snags from retail. Mages, for instance, get talents like Hot Streak, Arcane Blast, and Ice Lance, destruction warlocks get immolation, restoration shamans get Water Shield and druid healers get Wild Growth, and so on. Honestly, while it's early days, I'm surprised Blizzard hasn't gotten weirder.

But the Blizzcon demos only went up to level 38, and these are by no means finished. Searing Strike, in particular, feels like a stand-out to me, given how weirdly niche it is. And given how Blizzard's already bragged about Forever's unique, hyper-specific gear items, I'm looking forward to seeing how the studio experiments.

World of Warcraft: Forever looks—well, pretty interesting, all told. Rather than just being a Season of Discovery-style reimagining of Classic, Forever promises to be a full-on remake of classic-era WoW. Reimagined class trees, new raids, and $30 elves. Don't think about the $30 elves too hard.

But it does beg the question, why is Blizzard doing this rather than, say, developing WoW 2? It worked out swimmingly for ArenaNet's Guild Wars series, after all. Speaking to IGN, Forever's principal designer Kris Zierhut says: "I think one of the things that's singularly great about WoW is we have this game and this world and this design that has been continuously developed for the last 25 years.

"And we keep making it better. We made the graphics better, we made the rendering better, we made the lighting better; all that new stuff we showed on stage today."

That is, in fairness, true—and true of retail, as well. Part of the reason why Classic works as a concept is because modern WoW is almost straight-up a different game—new models, animations, completely reimagined class designs, and a visual aesthetic that still holds up. Forever looks to be taking full advantage of retail's steady march of progress.

Zierhut says as much: "We've also made the way the engine draws things move more efficiently. The way the server runs, handling players and moving them around, and all the things that handle spells and combat, all of that's been made more efficient and better over the years. We have this incredible engine and server infrastructure driving the game that is second to none. Why would you throw that away and start over?"

I maintain that a WoW 2 wouldn't be superfluous. With all of that progress comes a lot of technical debt (see: player housing getting borked by fixing an elevator in a 13-year old raid), as well as a ton of design choices. A direct sequel's a chance to start over and challenge basic assumptions about the game's design—the Guild Wars series becoming an increasingly action-focused game, for instance.

There's also a second argument—and this, I feel more torn on—that Forever is trying to re-capture an outdated design. On the one hand, the cynic in me understands that modern MMOs are a hell of a lot different for good reason. We datamine new information about new patches weeks ahead of when they come out, we optimise everything down to the last, minute detail. We hug these games so hard that we wring all mystery out of them.

On the other hand, there has been a yearning, a rumbling. Our own Lincoln Carpenter said as much in our MMO column: "It's hard to argue that the MMOs of today aren't better designed than their older iterations. And yet, it's the moments when I step off the treadmill where they still feel the most magical." If Forever offers an alt-history not just of WoW, but of modern MMO design in general? Then I'm on board.

World of Warcraft Forever might be stuck in the first year of the MMO for the foreseeable future, but it's going to draw from future iterations of it to freshen up the experience.

Blizzard held a panel at BlizzCon today where WoW Forever developers dug into the crucial design changes that will differentiate it from the WoW Classic we already have. This version of the MMO doesn't sound like it'll be as much of a grind as the OG with its revised classes, talent trees, and all-new mechanics for pulling strangers together in the open world.

Many of the changes seem to fill in the gaps of the original WoW experience so that there's several things to chase as you explore Azeroth. Developers broke down how the MMO will bring players together, how the new "Legacy" progression system works, and how new and old items will influence combat.

Here are the big takeaways from the WoW Forever panel:

• You pick a ruleset (e.g. normal, PvP, hardcore)—not a realm—to play on, which means you'll run into a lot more players on your journey than the other versions of WoW
• Changing the appearance of your gear to look like other gear (transmog) is now a global setting you can turn on or off for you and other players
• Looting most gear will grant everyone the transmog appearance automatically
• Everyone can set up a campfire where other players can craft or rest for exclusive buffs via their professions
• Each profession has over 600 new recipes across all level ranges
• New race/class combinations include: Gnome priests, Human hunters, Dwarf shamans, Orc mages, Troll warlocks, and Undead paladins—and more are coming in the future
• As you progress, you'll earn Legacy points to unlock various perks that alter how certain mechanics work, like removing the materials you need to cast major buffs, and obtain cosmetics
• Most items in the game have been reworked (or new ones have been added) so that they're useful to all classes and roles
• All bosses have better loot overall
• The unique racial abilities for every playable race have been improved, and new ones have been added as well

There are a lot more details, especially for how popular abilities will work, explained in the panel. Part of the goal, Blizzard said, was to "unsolve" the game and give players a reason to experiment again.

It won't be a long wait to see how it all comes together. WoW Forever will launch on November 4 and will be playable under the same subscription as regular WoW. A beta will go live on Thursday, September 17, which you can access by purchasing the game early.

As noted by MMORPG.com, World of Warcraft: Forever is coming with a peculiar economic proposition: Most of the new fork of the MMO is included in your normal WoW subscription (rad), but the new Skyborne Elf race (and its corresponding starter zone experience) is gated behind a separate, $30 purchase (sad).

While "$30 elf" might be a somewhat uncharitable characterization, there's not much else that really lights my fire in the $29.99 "Skyborne Hero Pack." In addition to the titular elves, it comes with a mount, cosmetics, housing decorations, and early name reservation.

Compared to the bleeding edge of Overwatch, League of Legends, and Diablo premium cosmetic pricing, this is just keeping pace. But with many of the best new games on Steam coming in at $20 or less, I'm feeling sticker shock.

$30, for my money, is the cost of an expansion pack under normal economic conditions, though WoW's most recent retailed for $50 MSRP. Speaking to my WoW consultant and on-the-ground BlizzCon contact, PCG contributor Tyler Colp, he wagered that any new classes coming down the line in Forever will likely be similarly monetized, and argued that this sort of monetization is less in the spirit of classic WoW than the rest of the Forever project.

Looking at it from the outside, getting so much of the rest of Forever with a normal WoW subscription strikes me as an excellent bargain, but it only throws the $30 elf into even sharper relief as a consequence. Personally, I'd be more amenable to a $15 elf as a matter of principle, but I've been out of the MMO/live service game for some time. Do you think this is a fair market value for an elf? Sound off in the comments.

The rumored game known to World of Warcraft fans as "Classic Plus" is real, and it has a proper name now—World of Warcraft: Forever is a new branch of the MMO that once again resets the clock to 2004, the year WoW first launched.

But unlike WoW: Classic, the goal of WoW: Forever isn't just to take a trip back to the MMO's origins to relive those heady early years. WoW: Forever will explore new parts of Azeroth, telling stories that weren't told during the MMO's original progression.

PC Gamer was briefed on the announcement before the reveal at the BlizzCon Opening Ceremony. Here are the biggest takeaways:

• WoW: Forever will be set in the first year of WoW with a level cap of 60 "for the foreseeable future"
• New stuff won't just be for max level players; it will span all levels
• Three new zones
• "Several" existing zones overhauled, "filling in the blank spaces of the vanilla map"
• Nine new dungeons
• Two new raids
• New race: Skyborne Elves
• New race/class combos: The trailer seems to show a Forsaken paladin, dwarf shaman, and orc mage

It's a strategy reminiscent of Old School RuneScape, which treats the 2006 version of the MMO as a jumping-off point rather than a specimen to be preserved. It's worked out well for Jagex: OSRS is bigger now than it was during the original run.

The existence of three different Worlds of Warcraft might risk diluting the playerbase, but if any MMO is big enough to sustain three official forks—and if any studio has the resources to support them—it's probably WoW and Blizzard.

WoW: Forever will be playable at BlizzCon this weekend, and a beta starts this Thursday. The full launch isn't far away either: Forever is set to release on November 4. World of Warcraft: Forever is covered by the pre-existing WoW subscription, but upgrade packs with features like the Skyborne race are available on Battle.net starting at $30.

I don't envy the position of being a game developer—especially not an encounter designer in something as complicated as an MMO. You might have an idea of how a mechanic's gonna go, but there's just absolutely no way it survives contact with 40 motivated, mid-2000s era hardcore WoW players.

Former game director at Blizzard Wyatt Cheng, whose delightful TikTok channel has been giving free wisdom and anecdotes for some time now, says that exact agony happened to him around 20 years ago with the release of Ahn'Qiraj. Particularly with The Prophet Skeram boss, which splits into illusions at 75%, 50%, and 25% health.

"There's one part I never got right," says Cheng. "I really wanted the only way to tell the difference between the real Skeram and the copies to be that the copies have half the health. So under even DPS rates, the illusions would drop in health faster."

"I pictured raids spreading their DPS and calling it out on [Ventrilo]: Which two are going down quicker?" The idea being, if you didn't kill the illusions first, you'd knock the main Skeram over into his next health threshold and take on additional copies before you're ready: "Now there are five Skerams, and you wipe."

Alas, "that is not how it went. There were so many easy ways to spot the real Skeram. My first version literally had 'Pet of Skeram' written under the copies' names. Oops! In testing, we found more, like UI mods reading creature IDs, or mismatched localisation strings."

While Cheng doesn't remember the exact play-by-play, what followed was an arms race where he was "constantly trying to describe the real Skeram." However, "looking at guides online now, I see sending a hunter pet after Skeram before the split results in the pet staying locked into the real one. Or some people mana-burn him, because the copies spawn with full mana, and he doesn't! Ugh! All that work, and there was still an instant tell."

Still, he's humble about it, saying that while "if it's a real bug or an exploit, sure, we'll fix it. But players outsmarting the designer? That's just one for the history books."

World of Warcraft housing has become an amazing spectator sport, with dozens of streamers and creators entrancing players and viewers with their amazing works of art.

With WoW's new patch 12.1 adding piles of new housing decor items, rooms, house exteriors, and tools to use them with, it felt like the perfect time to ask those artisans for a little help. Without further ado, here are five top tips from those pros about how to get started in WoW housing.

(For suggestions from World of Warcraft's own lead design and principal artist in housing, Jay Huang, see this companion story.)

1. Don't forget to turn on the lights

(From Megan James, aka MeggoArt, streamer and host of the WoWKEA Discord server)

Megan James is the creator of one of the classic tutorials for WoW Housing, and she says one of the things new players tend to overlook is lighting.

"If it seems really dark in your house, that's because it is!" she says. "WoW houses default to being unlit, so if you place some lighting decor around it can really help you see what you're building."

2. Add clutter

(From BuildingMouse, video creator and maker of housing masterworks including her kitchen tutorials playlist)

A mathematician in real life, BuildingMouse is one of the most popular housing video creators, bringing with her an audience from her award-winning days in Elder Scrolls Online housing. She's the author of the Van Gogh painting in WoW housing that Blizzard's Jay Huang refers to in our companion story.

Her builds are particularly well-known for feeling lifelike. The secret, she says, is clutter.

"Scatter books on tables, dishes left out in the kitchen, magnets on the fridge, or pictures on the walls—it instantly makes the space feel lived-in," she says.

3. Explore the housing controls in detail before you get started

(From Cottage Wizard, streamer and creator of wonderful style sheets to get new players started making houses in the styles of different WoW cultures)

Cottage Wizard's background is in 3D art and digital illustration, and it shows in her cozy, detailed creations. It's much easier to build when you know all the tools you have at your disposal, she says.

"Take your time going through every nook of the housing UI. Some features may be easy to miss, such as the small button for Placed Decor that appears only in the Advanced Mode," Cottage Wizard says. "There, you can select and remove placed items from a list, which is super handy if you clipped something behind a wall or ceiling and it becomes untargetable!"

4. Give your build a storyline

(From GP@Home, streamer and creator of huge spectacle pieces, which he gives away to all players via the 12.1 patch's new blueprints feature)

GP is the creator of some of the biggest spectacles in WoW housing. He's recreated the city of Nazjatar in miniature, made a the Blizzard World theme park, and put Cyberpunk in WoW. His suggestion is to do what he does so well in his builds: Make sure they have a narrative.

"Make sure to tell a story, to support your build's immersion," he suggests. That will also help drive a focal point for your set pieces. "Builds feel confusing with nothing guides the viewer's eye."

5. Build the big lines before starting in on the details

(From Synthex, a professional games environmental artist and level designer, whose builds have been featured in official Blizzard videos, including his rocket house.)

Synthex is a pro as well as a creator, so he brings his professional knowledge to his passion for building. It's important to get the big stuff right in a build before you start adding details, he says, and you shouldn't be afraid to delete things and start over—he does, even with his years of experience.

"Start with the big strokes, by blocking out the core shapes of a room," he says. "Try to get the overall vibe and feel established. It's really easy, and fun, to get carried away with minute details in your house that can really suck up hours. While those details are important, do them last."

Blizzard is scrubbing through its new World of Warcraft Mythic Plus Dungeon top-1% rankings for people who paid for carries, World of Warcraft game director Ion Hazzikostas says.

The timed dungeon mode offered its first-ever rewards at that level this past season in the Midnight expansion, which ended August 11. Unlike similar high-end rewards in PvP combat, this ranking level in Mythic Plus dungeons was a flat percentage of players, rather than a set score they had to achieve.

Some players paid for the privilege, and the glowy red-and-black bird mount that came with the title. These boosts were particularly controversial, as the percentage cutoff meant that every successful carry removed a player that legitimately earned the score.

"The team is doing a thorough scrub of this for Season 1 and will share more with the community soon about how we approached that review, as well as the final results," Hazzikostas said.

A constant grind to keep a reward in sight

"I hit 1% M+ rating yesterday and it lasted for 5 minutes," wrote one typical person on Reddit just before the end of the season. "The 1% cutoff is going up by about 2 points every day. Ninety percent of +21 [level] groups in the group finder are 'note' keys where you need to pay the keyholder to be invited. People are also buying actual boosts en masse because of the new 1% title and resilient keystones making it possible. Playing organically is no longer possible."

The 1% rewards have not yet been awarded in game. Hazzikostas and associate game director Paul Kubit said they are popular and will continue.

Blizzard recently removed the Mythic raiding mount from the accounts of players determined to have paid for them in the game's large-group content, primarily with real-money transactions, which are forbidden by WoW's terms of service.

Carries paid only in gold to specific guilds or individuals appear to be legitimate, based on past Blizzard posts and enforcement actions, but some players caught by the corrective wave in raids say they paid in gold and had their mounts removed anyway. (That's happened in the past when the sellers who got people a ranking or reward took in-game gold in some cases and real money in others, or when cross-server boosting communities were involved.)

Sales are not the only part of the new Mythic Plus rewards that players are heatedly discussing. The decision to make the cutoff a percentage rather than a fixed rating means that people near the cutoff had to play nearly continuously at the end of their season to keep their ranking.

A percentage cutoff to keep things exciting—but did it work?

Kubit, who is in charge of the Midnight expansion, said making the cutoff percentage-based keeps people playing even as their numbers increase over the course of a season.

"This is aimed at the 1%, which is by definition pretty elite, one of those people who really like to push the upper end of what mythic plus gameplay is all about," he says. "We want to make sure that you do truly feel like you can do that, as opposed to laying off the gas."

Numbers suggest that goal may not have entirely played out as expected, however. Raider.io, which tracks Mythic Plus Dungeon statistics, shows that more people played Mythic Plus dungeons at the start and end of Midnight's first season than did the first season in The War Within expansion (about 5.2 million, compared to about 2.5 million), but the drop-off at the end of the season was actually steeper in Midnight than it was in War Within.

Just 12.3% of players were still doing the dungeons at the end of Midnight Season 1, versus 16.8% in War Within. Those numbers of players remained fairly static for the six weeks at the end of both seasons.

Players enthusiastic about a new reward, but mixed on how it was awarded

Players' reactions were decidedly mixed.

"That uncertainty makes the end of the season feel more stressful than exciting," said one typical poster on Reddit.

"The reason a percentile is used is because it correlates with season difficulty. In this particular case 3900 is feasible this season but may not be feasible in others," countered another in the same post.

The addition of "resilient" keys, which don't drop in level once you've completed that difficulty in all available dungeons, has made pushing ever-higher levels—and selling those timed dungeons—easier.

Player versus player rewards were initially based on percentage, as well, near when World of Warcraft first launched. In the Burning Crusade, the top .5% of PvP arena players were awarded Elite mounts. After players complaints about the grind and rampant sales, that was changed to a fixed rating in the Mists of Pandaria expansion, then eventually to the modern system, which requires a fixed rating plus a number of wins above that rating, to help keep the number of sales down.

Class balance makes earning the bird tougher for some players

The composition of groups that are successfully timing Mythic Plus dungeons has also become more homogenized than ever before. While Raider.io charts show a broad variety of the 40 possible character classes and specializations, the vast majority of Mythic Plus keys over level 20 (required for the 1% title) contain some combination of the same seven "meta" specs in each five-player group: guardian druid, unholy death knight, devourer demon hunter, mistweaver monk, augmentation evoker, restoration shaman and retribution paladin.

The top tank specialization, guardian druid, was seen 518,467 times in dungeons recorded on Raider.io at that level over the course of the season. The bottom tank, blood death knight, was seen 7,635. Since many keys are run over and over again by the same players, that boils down to an even tinier number of players who actually completed dungeons at this level.

"When we're thinking about world record folks, then some of the fun of that gameplay is identifying, 'What if I switch to this character in this particular spec, and solve the puzzle that way?' But when you get closer to the 1%, ideally for anyone there, we want you to play the classes and specs that you like playing, that you feel like you're good at," Kubit says. "You shouldn't feel forced into any particular meta spec."

"Obviously players are going to gravitate toward certain specs when we're talking about the 1%," says Andrew De Souza, lead encounter designer. "Ninety-nine percent of players are able to get to Keystone Myth [3400 rating, compared to about 4000 for the top 1%] with any given comp."

Dungeons are designed for all classes to play, but 1% mounts may get more specific

They do watch dungeons to make sure they don't require a specific class, he says.

"In some cases that's going to naturally fit—poisons and curses in Altar of Fangs [dungeon], that's probably going to lean towards [having] a shaman," he says. "We are saying okay, but what if there's not a shaman? What does this pack look like? So we're absolutely making those considerations. It's okay if this class dunks on this trash mob. They're allowed to be awesome here—just within reason. We are trying to serve the largest audience possible."

Blizzard is now figuring out how to implement specialization-specific 1% cutoffs, Hazzikostas says, though it won't be this season—Season 2 just began—and the details remain to be hammered out (including, for example, whether it would still be the top 1% in that scenario). He mentioned the possibility in an interview with PsyBear that ran earlier this week, then kept an eye on the discussion.

"While the spec-specific title reward is something we're excited to explore," he tells us, "there are still a number of logistics, factors, and scenarios we'll need to account for as we build out that capability, to ensure fairness across the board. But it seems from our initial discussion of this idea that this is something the community is equally excited about, so we'll share more when we can."

World of Warcraft's developers are making some subtle shifts in dungeons and raids to help players with its more-difficult content, in the hopes that a variety of knock-on effects result, including increased participation in the game overall and a better balance of tanks, healers and damage dealers.

In the case of WoW's timed-dungeon Mythic Plus mode, it was a matter of making it just a bit easier to get to the mythic-level rewards of the weekly vault, says Paul Kubit, associate game director in charge of the Midnight expansion. The team tested it out in the first season of Mythic Plus, which just wrapped up.

Reducing Mythic Plus difficulty to entice support players

Players are often less-willing to queue for dungeons as tanks or healers because the level of responsibility is much higher—taking the big hits, keeping the group alive, directing where the party should go—and other players can be swift to judge when things go wrong.

Hopefully the reduced difficulty for the weekly "vault filler" keys, where players are typically looking to complete the minimum level of Mythic Plus dungeons that will get them the maximum level of gear available, helps with those stressors, Kubit says.

"We saw a lot of success in season one making it just a little bit easier for you to get into higher difficulties of Mythic Plus, and get the loot which comes from it," he says. "People are a little bit more willing now to say, 'Well I'd like to try out tanking. I'd like to try out healing.' Some of the inherent stresses are cut by the approachability of the mode itself."

Giving players easier, and more flexible, Mythic raids

In the case of raiding, Blizzard is giving players another one-boss instance where they can get their feet wet in Mythic difficulty in a variably-sized group that can even be done with strangers. Midnight's first season was the first in a long time to offer not one, but two different one-boss raids that many players successfully did in pick-up groups even on the highest Mythic difficulty. One of them offered variable raid sizes, allowing groups of 15-25 characters to enter the fight.

As part of this month's 12.1 patch, developers introduced a new raid instance type, called a Lair. Lairs take the place of world bosses, which were simple to kill and could absolutely annihilate the frame rate in the zone where they were being fought as full 40-man raids of players jumped randomly from layer to layer depending on where their members were located.

Lairs are in instances, to solve that problem.

"A giant dragon, or bird, or Ettin just wrecking the side of your zone has always been really cool," Kubit says. "But as gameplay has evolved, world bosses haven't as much. World bosses can fight a lot of players, an uncapped number of players in a lot of cases, and that can cause lag."

Lairs may branch into more difficult territory in the future

Lairs are also available on world difficulty—the same difficulty level as world bosses—plus the typical raid Normal, Heroic, and Mythic Difficulties. Like the Sporefall raid in the first Midnight season, this season's Tidebound Grotto Lair offers flexible sizes that make it easier for guilds that can't field a full 20-man Mythic team (or pick-up groups looking to tackle the content).

"You'll often see us, in .7 patches looking at where we have some ideas, but we'd like to get a little more data, test players' appetites before we commit fully," Kubit said. "Sporefall was a great example, where we were able to test flex Mythic and say, 'How is this going to work out?'

"It's been a good response from players. This has allowed more flexibility for folks to be able to get into that Mythic level of difficulty, without that strict restriction. That's something that we're happy to carry forward into Lairs."

The Tidebound Grotto is about as hard as the early bosses in the Venomous Abyss, which is this patch's traditional eight-boss raid, requiring a full group of 20 to tackle on Mythic difficulty. (Normal and Heroic difficulties remain flexible for any group size from 10-30.)

"It's on the more-approachable side. But who knows? If more Lairs show up in the future, we may find the Encounters team wants to explore a bit more, with more difficult Lairs as well," he says. "I'm really curious to see where we go on this journey with players."

Blizzard principal artist and lead designer Jay Huang used to make his living creating the "props" that make up World of Warcraft's living spaces. Now he designs the systems that allow players to do the same thing with WoW's new player housing feature.

The game's recent patch 12.1, The Curse of Ula'tek, added a huge pile of new housing decor and features for players to create with. For example, it added the ability to use "blueprints," saved rooms or house interiors or exteriors, to allow novices to copy the work of player designers to use in their own spaces.

But getting started as a new creator can be intimidating when people are making literal works of art in WoW housing. Below, Huang offers his best tips for getting started as a newbie.

1. Start by finding a reference image

"Even artists like to know what something looks like," Huang says. "What exactly do you want to make? Find an example of it. Even spaceships have structures, and reasons why they're built that way." The image will help you figure out what pieces of decor you might be able to use to replicate what you see.

2. Don't judge yourself based on others' work

Blizzard's housing team has an internal sharing channel where they pass around people's amazing work, he says.

"Daily, minute-ly, people are just dropping, 'Did you see this??' We see tutorials. We see posts we can't even read, because they're in a different language. It's just awesome, and we love it," he says. It's also sometimes intimidating.

"I see a lot of TikToks where it's like, 'I liked my own build, until I saw this build. Now I feel like I want to throw my build out.' Or people are saying, 'I don't even know where to start.' Just look at a building or something that you like the vibe of, then just start trying to copy, then add your own flair to it."

Some of the rooms provided in housing are enormous, Huang says.

"Break up the space. Don't just go, 'It's a square, thusly, I need to decorate it as a square.' That's not necessarily true," he says. "Decorating an empty concept is harder than a room that's already got all these nooks and crannies that you can just put something in. It doesn't feel like you're starting from square one, a blank slate."

Some of the new artisan rooms for sale for neighborhood endeavor-task coupons in patch 12.1 help that problem by providing rooms with smaller niches to decorate. Creators have also been sharing blueprint codes usable by other players, which launched as a feature in 12.1, to create the bare bones of rooms that are already divided up or styled in a particular way.

3. Pick smaller rooms to start, and break bigger ones into smaller spaces

"Use partitions and pillars and platforms," he says. "It's thinking like Lincoln Logs or Legos—how do I use these things to break up that open-concept space? There's no wrong way to decorate, but I think sometimes it makes it harder if you go straight to the details right off the bat."

Picking smaller rooms definitely helps. "It's hard to slap in a big room and go, 'It just feels empty.' Well yeah, because you put in an auditorium, and you put one bed in there," he says.

4. Look at your reference image and figure out proportions

"If you're building a gnome house, things shouldn't feel all crazy, bulky and huge, with large open spaces. It should feel like it fits a gnome." Your image and those proportions can also help you figure out the right lighting, he says.

5. Add layers easily with repetition

"Repeating elements are a really quick way to add detail without overthinking," Huang says. "When you think of cathedrals, is it a giant empty space? No, they have pillars, and those pillars repeat, and repeat, and repeat. Where are the patterns, what are the proportions, how is it lit to get that vibe, and then what are the general colors?"

6. Limit your color palette

Speaking of colors, Huang recommends 2-4 colors maximum.

"It's really easy to just rainbow vomit all over the place, and then be like, 'Hey, why doesn't it feel cohesive?' It's because you're probably using too many colors at first. It's better to get two or three or four colors working. Then you kind of sprinkle in some of the other rainbow colors to add in that variety."

7. Even as you limit the colors, don't be scared of variety in style

"When you decorate your own house, you're not buying all your furniture from Crate and Barrel. Something's from IKEA, and it's not all the same style," he says. "They don't need to be. When you're building, they don't need to be all of the same culture. When you're decorating a Kobold space, throw a Naga thing in that Kobold thing."

8. Turn your decor upside-down

One way advanced housing players create their masterworks is by kitbashing, or combining different pieces of decor together to make new things. In Advanced Mode, you can embed objects within objects to use just the bits you need. Huang uses a statue he once created as a prop designer, now available as decor, as an example. It's a statue of a pandaren on a turtle, with a fountain.

"Somebody might go, 'Okay, this is what it is,' and they'll just slap it down as a statue," he says. "But somebody might scale it or shrink it, flip it upside down to just use the water. Look at every prop for not what it is, but what it could be. You can clip things. We gave that to you on purpose. Something clipped into something else, looks like something else."

The easiest way to start seeing what the possibilities might be are to turn decor items over and look at them from all angles.

"Use the backs of things, the bottoms, flip things upside down," Huang says. Kitbashing gives player-creators more freedom than even the game's own designers have. If designers smash things together, it's considered an "art crime"—something that takes away from the intended vibe of an object, he says.

"But our players, they can do whatever they want, because honestly—I mean, just look at the stuff they've made! It speaks for itself," Huang says.

Sneak peek: He says that developers have seen how often players like to use water effects in their creations, and they're looking for ways to make that easier.

9. Use dyes

Using the dye system lets you change the color of objects, and as a bonus, they mostly work on cheaper neighborhood-vendor items.

"Dying adds an extra element to the props, changing how they look," he says. "I've seen people take doors, mass dye them all the same color, and they turn them into wall panels or stoves."

Sneak peek: Huang says developers are looking into a way for players to turn off the interactable qualities of items like doors, so that people can make them static for uses like these.

10. When you're ready, think about turning housing into an art medium

Huang says he's incredibly impressed by the mural work that creators have made, turning WoW housing into a literal canvas featuring everything from South Park to KPop Demon Hunters, Michael Jordan to villain Xal'atath's feet.

"They're literally using it to paint things. I saw a Van Gogh. I saw the Mona Lisa. Very awesome," he says, and he encourages people to break things. Past bugs that players have exploited went on to become housing features. "We're lucky enough that this feature is not player-power driven, so we don't have to be the fun police. We're trying to always remain open."

One last sneak peek: More holiday decor is coming, he says. "We know that it is awesome to see you guys make the Christmas trees, but we have one. It's coming."

Disconnects are an unpleasant fact of life in an MMO, and if you play WoW long enough you'll start to recognize the telltale signs indicating one of your adventurer colleagues has fallen afoul of a network hiccup: They might simply halt in place mid-combat. If they were moving when the connection dropped, their character might proceed to run directly into a wall, or get caught in a brief loop of stuttery motion until the server has enough and logs them out.

Since WoW: Midnight's 12.1 patch dropped, however, players have started reporting some uncanny behavior from their disconnected fellows (via Kotaku). Rather than the expected unresponsiveness, disconnected characters have seemingly started to move and fight on their own.

The best available look at the phenomenon comes courtesy of redditor Stuperstrong, who shared a YouTube video on the WoW subreddit that they'd recorded of their Evoker friend disconnecting and continuing to participate in combat. In the clip, embedded above, you can see the dragon-winged Evoker exhibit the typical signs of a mid-encounter connection drop on the left side of the screen at around 39 seconds—and then they start fighting again.

The video is surprisingly unnerving: Speaking as someone who's played WoW on and off for over 20 years, there's something instinctively unsettling about seeing a player character performing actions when you've received all the visual signals that they absolutely shouldn't be. It feels wrong—and the stiff, robotic cadence of their inputs doesn't help.

Stuperstrong isn't the only one who's witnessed it. Other players responded to the thread with their own eyewitness accounts, like the brother of a warrior player whose game crashed while they were in a Discord call:

"He hung there through almost the entire boss fight we were on and then like 30 seconds into his [disconnect], his warrior charges the boss and starts hitting it," says redditor shlomo_baggins. "My brother was actively narrating his re-login. According to him his game hard locked, froze, and he ALT+F4'd and relogged in. Suuuper weird."

So who's playing when the player isn't? While this could all be an elaborate hoax, the best theory so far is that we're seeing an early manifestation of some sort of unannounced disconnect protection feature.

For a few years now, WoW has used NPC dungeon follower tech to let players run through casual content with a party of AI-controlled player characters who are—in most cases, anyway—surprisingly capable in combat. If disconnected characters are indeed starting to fight on their own, it's not unthinkable that Blizzard might have reworked that tech to keep a dropped connection from ruining a dungeon run or raid attempt for the whole group.

Either that or WoW's haunted. Blizzard hasn't yet acknowledged the phenomenon; until there's some sort of official explanation, all theories are on the table.

World of Warcraft: Midnight's first season has been… well, a bit of a mixed bag. While the launch-day offerings impressed me, patch content—the major thing that gets remembered in the expansion pack history books—has ranged from rather quite good to downright confusing (I still do not like the Folio).

And, to be fair, Midnight had a ton riding on it. It's the middle child of WoW's ambitious Worldsoul Saga and the first expansion where combat AddOns have been heavily hamstrung. As a consequence, every spec in the game was redesigned in some way. After 20 years of waiting, we even got player housing.

I have not envied Blizzard's position as much as I've raised my eyebrows at its choices, on occasion, and I think it's a marvel that things have pretty much gone fine. I like Prey, I've missed AddOns less than I expected, the remade Silvermoon is downright beautiful, and player housing has knocked it out of the park, bar some microtransaction nonsense.

I recently sat down with several developers from WoW, including lead encounter designers Taylor Sanders and Andrew De Sousa, as well as associate game director Paul Kubit and lead quest designer Rachel Vought, to ask them how they thought Midnight's first season had gone.

Broadly positive, is the answer—with the devs citing Mythic+, solo content such as delves, and Prey as bright spots. Kubit says: "I'm having a great time with season one. I am still this last week rounding out some of my own personal Mythic+ goals, trying to get my numbers as high as possible. But things that have been just a joy for me this first season have been—playing through Delves again, having another season of Delves to explore with a new follower Valeera … and also the addition of Prey alongside it.

"I think that the new feature of Prey, while not technically part of the traditional season, does have some seasonal elements to it, and it sort of played nicely hand-in-hand with how progress went through through delve."

That's something Vought echoes, too: "Having the Prey overlay, just doing outdoor activities, has been like such a delight—because we talk about optimizing the fun out of it, but it's like no, actually, I kind of do want the extra challenge while I'm doing my world quests, and it's a lot of fun."

Though she has been naturally psyched to revisit Silvermoon for the first time since the Burning Crusade, as well: "Going back to Silvermoon and getting to see [it updated], and getting to play through the story and all of that has just been incredible for me as a player. I've also surprisingly been enjoying delves and getting to play local stories, and obviously we're going to get more of those in Curse of Ula'tek as well. Continuing the story, the campaign, and also getting to explore the island."

While, to me, these all track as reasons to be satisfied with the current state of things—after all, I've written positively about them on this site—there's also the other side of the coin, the idea that Blizzard's breakneck pace has given players too much to do without a stern direction: Too many currencies, too many dailies, too many reputations and void assaults and delves. Kubit says:

"We always try to listen to as many players as we can in our game, and we find that—you all as players are not a monolith. You have vastly different play styles and vastly different preferences, and that means that—for as many people as who do feel that strange feeling, like 'there's too much for me, there's too much going on', there's just as many folks who are like 'I wish there was something new happening this week'.

"What we try to do on the reward side and incentive side is make sure that folks who are hungry for lots of new things to do," be it grinding or stacking cute furniture, transmogs and mounts in collections.

And, listen—while I empathise with Kubit here, with MMO audiences being particularly hard to please, I'm not all that sure this works as a simple case of taste. I've played other MMOs that simply give you a wide breadth of things to do, but WoW places a lot of these activities in a package of seasonal pressure. Daily and weekly checklists that will, at some point, become undesirable or even unattainable. The wider systems might be evergreen, but Midnight's also been laden with its fair share of FOMO.

An AddOn-less world

On the encounter design side of things, Sanders and Sousa are both enjoying getting to play in a space where a WeakAuras tech won't be able to code out a solution to everything—allowing them to rely more on memorisation, positioning, and communication-based mechanics.

Sanders tells me: "I think the encounter design team has been learning a lot as we try to design mechanics, in this new paradigm where players have, in many ways, less computational help in terms of the information they're getting in real time, and trying to understand what types of new mechanics players might enjoy in that world.

"You saw us experiment with this a little bit in the L'ura encounter, the final boss of Midnight, with the runes and the symbol mechanic," Sanders is referring to Death's Dirge, here, where L'ura marks players with an order of symbols that have to be struck by a laser in the correct configuration.

"It was fun for me as a designer (and as a player) to see different social groups that I played with, whether it was a pug or my standard raid group, develop different strategies to that. Each group had their own personalized way of handling it … I did hear about a group that had five different people remember the different symbols and repeat them in order. That blows my mind. I can't believe that that worked for a group. A friend of mine told me about that. I'm not sure I believe him."

That same design technique's going to be used for patch 12.1, as well: "We have a couple new places where we're experimenting with this in the Curse of Ula'tek update in the new raid, the Venomous Abyss, and as well in the new delves nemesis boss … You're going to continue to see us explore that a little bit as we try to find new ways to engage players in an AddOn-less world."

Sousa, meanwhile, says that the amount of players trying Mythic+, which has reached new records during Midnight, is also down to the lowered barrier to entry: "That's really affected even our core design for something like dungeons and Mythic+.

"You know, as you're aware, Mythic+ was very, very accessible in Midnight season one. Players are jumping in and really enjoying it. And in a world where we've pulled these things back, our design has allowed for us to emphasize some core skills, and not worry about the delta between folks that have complex add-ons and people that are playing with the base game, so we're seeing people engage a lot deeper as those (perceived or not) requirements have been lifted."

Sanders agrees, saying: "We've seen the package that players felt like they used to need to be able to, baseline, raid or do competitive PvE content shrink or or disappear entirely. So the base UI for the game is better than it's ever been, and we're very excited about continuing to develop that in the future."

Ultimately, the new state of affairs that WoW has laboriously constructed seems to be working for its development team—and while I'm not entirely convinced it's been all sunshine and roses, speaking as someone who has felt the exact opposite in my other MMO of choice, I can't say I prefer it when a developer plays it safe. On balance, I'm still glad WoW's been shaking things up, and I'm keen to see if Blizzard can keep refining its flagship MMO going into Curse of Ula'tek next week.

World bosses have been a part of the World of Warcraft player's diet since classic—in case you haven't played the game, what separates a world boss from any other raid encounter is the fact that it's (self-explanatorily) out in the world, something you need to party up to defeat without going into a cave somewhere.

That's changing with WoW's next patch, Curse of Ula'tek, as world bosses are shifting to a "lair" format. Essentially, they'll function like one-boss delves with larger groups—that also gives them the benefit of having scaling difficulties, all the way up to 15-25 man Mythic. You can queue up for them like you would any other dungeon.

I got to speak with lead encounter designer Taylor Sanders about plans for patch 12.1 about why Blizzard's chosen to experiment with world bosses in particular: "So historically, world bosses go all the way back, right, to like the green dragons and the Lord Kazzaks and stuff that many players know and love from Classic and beyond.

"Lately, we found in recent updates and recent expansions that these experiences have really been a little bit lackluster… A lot of players just cluster into a boss. It drops in a few moments. In the worst case, you might have to hop between servers to find a group where maybe the boss is up or the boss is attackable."

I can't say I disagree with Sanders, here—while there's a simple joy in joining an ongoing zerg rush, it's not as though I'm engaging with the games' systems beyond just pushing my buttons when I'm whacking one of these things. There might, on occasion, be an AoE I need to dodge or something, but I couldn't tell you one modern world bosses' mechanics from another.

That's mostly because of changing assumptions about difficulty. Some of those classic world bosses are iconic because they were allowed to be tough, or have punishing mechanics that required coordination to avoid—but because world content in WoW has now become part of casual play, those mechanics just wouldn't work for folks trying to get their dailies.

Imagine if, for instance, a world boss in retail had Lord Kazzak's "Capture Soul" ability, wherein if he kills anybody he heals for 70,000 HP—around 10% of his health. You'd never kill the dang thing.

"Going into the Curse of Ula'tek update," Sanders adds, "We really wanted to reimagine what a world boss could really be and try to make sure that if you are engaging with a world boss, you're having—not only an accessible experience, but you're also having a reasonable combat experience and you have a fun time fighting a boss."

The experience of finding a group itself has changed, too—again, back in the day, you'd meticulously recruit folks from either your guild or general chat. Your average non-Classic MMO player doesn't have the appetite for that sort of thing anymore, so modern WoW uses a streamlined looking for group interface where you can register for groups.

Only, the depersonalisation of that means, as Sanders points out, you can join just as a world boss is dying, or when it's at 5% HP, or something—it does, admittedly, feel janky: "We're hoping that this can get players out of the interface of trying to find a different group … To help players through that process, so they can just get in and get fighting the creature and get their loot faster."

Not that it doesn't have trade-offs. Again, there's something pleasingly chaotic and distinctly MMO about joining a mess of particle effects, or stumbling across a group already doing a raid boss—and that'll be lost if lairs become the way of doing things: "It's very rare that when you're designing something new, or trying to create a new experience for players, that you don't have trade-offs. One of the trade-offs is that sense of coming upon something where you're in the midst of the action, right? Or you're coming upon an event that is in progress.

"But we really felt like that was a good trade-off for us to make, to lose that aspect of it, if players are going to have a better combat experience against the encounter."

It's always a fascinating bit of tension, to me—MMOs are in their nature an evolving genre, mostly in how their playerbases evolve with them. The rigid hardcore/casual divide is a thing of the past, and it seems to me that the state of WoW's world bosses were a symptom of that—an attempt to make something that was for ambitious raiders part of casual content. Now it's all on a sliding scale.

World of Warcraft calling curtains on combat-based UI mods (AddOns) has been a bit of a mixed bag—while I'm personally more than fine having a class I don't need constant auditory pings and klaxons to play, there have been some missing functionalities and hiccups along the way.

One element of this is, at least, somewhat understandable: Blizzard isn't able to pre-empt every customization desire of its playerbase with nearly the same rapidity that an enthusiastic modding community will, which was one of my fears back when Blizzard first announced it.

The tuning-down has been twofold: Firstly, Blizzard's been gradually adding extra utilities to its new base UI offerings—for example, the upcoming Patch 12.1 will let you keep track of potions and trinkets with its cooldown tracker. But other changes create a lot more leniency with what mod authors can do.

As explained here by WoWHead, Blizzard's API—the set of functions the studio purposefully provides to mod authors in the client itself—will be allowing AddOns to "read" buffs and debuffs. This means that WeakAuras—a widespread AddOn that was discontinued after Midnight took the axe to it—is back. Well, in spirit.

The mod allowed players to create a set of custom alerts that could trigger on a programmable set of "if > then" statements. For instance, my Outlaw Rogue's "Roll the Bones" ability had a bunch of optimisations that a WeakAura automated for me, making a loud bleep whenever it was time to push the button again.

It'll be much diminished from its former glory days, though. Players will only be able to track debuffs on enemies, and buffs on allies—as opposed to the pre-Midnight state of affairs where you could track buffs and debuffs on anybody. This should, in theory, prevent WeakAura-style mods being developed to solve boss encounters.

Still, it's a major jump in power for what post-Midnight combat AddOns can do, and it's one of Blizzard's biggest concessions yet. Now, that could just be based on Blizzard's own objectives with its UI shifting—a hint that we might be getting more powerful Cooldown Manager options natively that simply didn't make it in time for this patch.

But it does grind up a little against the mission statement of these changes. That being, not giving AddOn users explicit advantages over players using the vanilla UI. Like it or not, what'll now be offered by WeakAura-lite addons, such as Northern Sky Raid Tools, will give you finer control over the alerts displayed on your screen—which could make the management of a lot of classes a lot easier.

In its 22 years since launch, WoW has gradually accumulated an elaborate ecosystem of metrics and simulation tools allowing players to analyze and optimize their combat performance. That ecosystem grew so elaborate, in fact, that Blizzard ultimately opted—with somewhat mixed results—to restrict how much combat data community developers could access so the studio can design encounters around the capabilities of its players and not their addons.

But according to former WoW designer Wyatt Cheng, not even Blizzard had a good way to know what peak player performance data looked like in the MMO's early days. In a YouTube short, Cheng said designing vanilla WoW raid bosses in the absence of comprehensive player combat data required the tried-and-true method of manually grinding training dummies. And then rounding up. Just to be safe.

Cheng outlined the design process for Patchwerk, the flesh golem boss added as part of the Naxxramas raid in June 2006. Patchwerk, Cheng said, was inspired by ex-Blizzard director Jeff Kaplan's fondness for the Avatar of War raid boss in Everquest—an encounter that was, essentially, just a test of fundamentals.

"As Jeff remembered it, [Avatar of War] wasn't too fancy. It just hit you really hard," Cheng said. "Tanks tanking, healers healing, DPS doing their thing—all the excitement of the Avatar of War was based on how tightly it was tuned. And he had a theory that a boss like that in World of Warcraft could be really exciting, too."

Cheng added a little bit of variety to that core concept, designing Patchwerk to alternate his attacks between main tanks and off tanks to keep healers on their toes. Unfortunately, that produced an issue: It incentivized raid groups to trivialize the fight by stacking as many healers as possible and slowly whittling away Patchwerk's health bar.

Thus, the Enrage timer was born. Patchwerk, Cheng said, "was the first time we used an Enrage timer as an explicit DPS check." Players had to take Patchwerk down before a fixed amount of time passed or he'd start pumping out lethal damage and wipe the group—a mechanic that's now a fixture of WoW boss design.

The Enrage mechanic, however, introduced another complication: To know how much boss-killing time to give players, you have to know how much damage they're capable of. And Blizzard, well, didn't.

"Back in those days, there just wasn't robust data on how much DPS a player could realistically put out. This was before World of Logs," Cheng said, referencing an early, now-defunct destination for WoW analytics that's been followed by generations of successors.

Without a corpus of player combat data, Blizzard worked out its DPS threshold with some manual number collection and a bit of napkin math.

"We had top players in the company test every single class against target dummies to try and put out as much damage as possible," Cheng said. "And then, because we knew that serious raiders always find clever ways to push the game to its limits, we padded Patchwerk's health by an extra 30%, just for good measure."

Evidently, Blizzard's estimate was on the mark. Surviving threads from 2006 have raiders describing Patchwerk as "a pure mathematical gearcheck": punishing if your raid group's gear or DPS was lacking, but straightforward if you could keep the pace.

2006 was a simpler time—but I'm sure Blizzard has built their own tools for simulating the necessary metrics in the years since. For their sake, if not ours.

Dungeons & Dragons has been publishing rules for other settings going way back, with Conan adventures in 1984 and Lankhmar – City of Adventure in 1985. Even further back in 1980, the first printing of Deities & Demigods included stats for gods from Michael Moorcock's Elric stories and H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos. It's even collaborated with Blizzard on a line of Diablo supplements to tie in with the release of Diablo 2.

So it's not too shocking that the first official Dungeons & Dragons crossover book released as part of its Universes Beyond line (borrowing the name from Magic: The Gathering, where crossovers have been big earners) will be about World of Warcraft. Especially since the news already leaked over the weekend.

The announcement was formalized at this year's Gen Con, where Wizards of the Coast put on a D&D Vision Keynote 2027 presented by Theo Solomon (who played Wyll in Baldur's Gate 3). We'll be getting a 256-page hardcover book with rules for 11 new species, 9 subclasses (6 of them new, 3 updated versions of existing characters), 50+ new monsters, 60+ new spells, 23 factions, 7 dungeons, 26 magic items including artifacts, and stat blocks for various popular characters from across Azeroth.

Which sounds like everything you need to play World of Warcraft with your friends in the absence of an internet connection. Preorders for the book open on July 30, and it'll be available in early access from November 3 and in wide release on November 17.

If you're a WoW Classic player, you might want to tread carefully if you're leveling in certain parts of Kalimdor. As reported by players over on Reddit (via WoWHead), the latest patch seems to have caused piles of bugged enemies to spawn beneath the ground in a specific spot in the Stonetalon Mountains, posing a lethal threat to unsuspecting players.

It's particularly dangerous for unaware hardcore players like redditor Party-Signature-8700, who uploaded a video of their undead warrior nearly meeting a permanent end by straying too close to the hidden pileup of bugged assailants and escaping with just a sliver of health. While the bug might be threatening players in 2026, we can probably blame it on a quirk of WoW's programming that's over 20 years old.

If we look closely, we can find some details that indicate there's more going on here than a mundane case of a few mobs inadvertently clipping through the geometry. In the cluster of nameplates captured in the redditors' videos and screenshots linked above, you'll see mobs that you typically wouldn't find in the Stonetalon Mountains—mobs like Drywallow Daggermaws and Muckshell Clackers, which spawn in the higher level Dustwallow Marsh region.

So how did they end up underground in Stonetalon? For some WoW veterans, the location of the bug might serve as a tip-off. For the rest of us, understanding what's likely happening will require a brief lesson in WoW's design history.

While later iterations introduced all sorts of server sharding architecture, each server in WoW's early incarnations operated one large, shared instance for each of its continental landmasses. That's why, once you logged in, you could walk from one end of Kalimdor to the other without hitting a loading screen.

For the game to function, the server had to know where each of its NPCs were at any given moment, tracking their position on a massive, continent-wide coordinate plane. But what if there's a hiccup? What if the server loses track of where an enemy or entity is meant to be? In WoW's case, it would simply dump that entity at the region's point of origin at coordinate (0, 0, 0).

Before it was blown up, spliced back together, and revised across expansions, Kalimdor's point of origin happened to be just below the ground in Stonetalon Mountains.

That's why there are plenty of surviving posts online from players who inexplicably found their characters placed near a Stonetalon Mountains graveyard after suffering a disconnect during a zeppelin flight over Kalimdor—a familiar memory for those of us who played with less-than-stellar internet service doing WoW's early years. Because the character was in motion and airborne during the network hiccup, the server wouldn't gamble with trying to guess where they're meant to be, and instead shoved them to a safe spot near (0, 0, 0) on the coordinate plane.

On WoW Classic servers today, the latest patch is likely creating some sort of fumbled positioning logic or networking errors, causing its servers to lose track of where mobs across Kalimdor are meant to be and punting them to Stonetalon as a fallback. And when that keeps happening, you end up with an underground pile of angry crocodiles and lobster men waiting to ambush unwary characters.

A hotfix and server reset will likely clear the whole thing up soon. Until then, if you're passing through Boulderslide Ravine, make sure you've got a defensive cooldown ready.

This year's Gen Con event is one Wizards of the Coast has said it's "pulling out all the stops for", with a keynote to be hosted by Theo Solomon (who played Wyll in Baldur's Gate 3) including a bunch of announcements about what's coming up for Dungeons & Dragons. One release seems to have been leaked early: a crossover with World of Warcraft.

According to a news post on virtual tabletop Roll20 that has since been removed (you can find it on RPG site EN World), we can expect Warcraft to get at least a setting book for D&D 5th edition, as a couple of Magic: The Gathering worlds have previously.

This wouldn't be the first collaboration between Blizzard and D&D. Around the time of Diablo 2 there were several official books by Wizards of the Coast adapting the world of Sanctuary to D&D's rules. Later there was a World of Warcraft RPG using D&D's 3rd edition, though that was published under the terms of the Open Gaming Licence by White Wolf, the publisher responsible for Vampire: The Masquerade (which also has a D&D crossover in the works).

I can see why die-hard WoW fans might enjoy having a version of D&D with rules for playing a tauren or whatever, but Warcraft has always been so close to D&D I'm not sure I need a whole rulebook explaining its slightly different version of elves and whatnot. At least Diablo's heavy metal vibes made for a different-feeling kind of fantasy, but Warcraft is as generic as they come.

Gen Con runs from July 30 to August 2, and I'm sure it'll include some announcements more interesting than this. Maybe this will be the year they finally pull the trigger on bringing back Dark Sun or Birthright, or even give us an Al-Qadim book?

The Blizzard developer who was caught using World of Warcraft game master (GM) abilities to insta-kill two bosses for some friends has been fired from the studio.

Earlier this week, a Reddit user posted combat logs of a Mythic+ dungeon where a boss with almost full health died instantly to a GM ability. Not long after, another Reddit user found evidence that the GM did the same thing to a boss earlier in the run.

One of the players who was present for the unauthorized intervention then went onto a Twitch stream and admitted to asking their GM friend to cheat so they wouldn't have to redo the dungeon: "I go to my GM friend and I'm like bro please can you do me a solid? This thing has 20 million [health] bro, can you please just one-shot it?"

The only way for the GM to kill the bosses on command would've been if they were spectating the run, which is pretty uncommon these days, to the point that most people were surprised GMs still existed when they heard the story. Most customer service problems are solved on Blizzard's website instead of in-game. The only times GMs need to be on-call like this is when players are testing raid fights on PTR or competing in the world first raid races.

Because of this, many people were speculating that this wasn't an isolated incident and worried that GM friends could've been secretly assisting with other Mythic+ runs. According to Blizzard, that's not the case. "We can confirm that this was the action of a single Blizzard employee, in violation of our Code of Conduct," community manager Randy "Kaivax" Jordan wrote in a forum post today.

Blizzard says it will also be "taking action against the player accounts that were complicit in this violation." There's been a lot of speculation from the community, but it is not clear how many people were aware of the GM in the group.

"It has always been the case that a small number of Blizzard employees can use developer tools and spells on live servers: this lets us test and make urgent fixes to the live game when they’re needed," Kaivax says. "Every use of these internal spells and commands on live realms is logged and shared with our Platform Security team to help ensure that the occasional use of this access is warranted. The use of development tools for anything other than development work is against company policy. It's because of the process we have in place around use of these tools that we're confident this incident was isolated to one individual."

Even though the Mythic+ dungeon wasn't a particularly notable one—the players just wanted to finish it for a title—the record of it has been disqualified by ranking site Raider.io. You can, however, still go and look at what went down.

A cheating scandal has erupted in the World of Warcraft community after a Blizzard developer was caught using special game master (GM) abilities to kill two bosses for some friends. The GM seemingly didn't realize that one of the players was recording combat logs of the whole thing.

Late on Tuesday, Reddit user Acrobatic_Pianist688 posted evidence of the GM's meddling on the WoW subreddit. Their post links to a combat log that shows a non-player ability called "Area Death (TEST)" being used to instantly kill a boss with nearly 90% of its health left. Not long after, a commenter on the thread found the GM using a separate insta-kill ability on a boss earlier in the run, too.

Surprisingly, one of the players from the accused group went onto a Twitch stream to talk about what happened. When streamer Yumytv asked them to explain, they said they were just short of finishing the Mythic+ dungeon in time to get a seasonal title when they called for help from their GM friend: "I go to my GM friend and I'm like bro please can you do me a solid? This thing has 20 million [health] bro, can you please just one-shot it?"

The player went on to say that they don't care if Blizzard disqualifies the Mythic+ run and revokes their title because they believe "it was harmless."

"I didn't expect him to do it," they said. "In hindsight, he shouldn't have done it. He was just doing me a solid."

World of Warcraft community manager Randy "Kaivax" Jordan acknowledged the situation in the original Reddit thread, saying Blizzard is looking into it. "Thank you to those who flagged this," he wrote. "We are reviewing and will take action as appropriate."

The dungeon run has been disqualified on Mythic+ dungeon ranking site Raider.io, but can still be viewed for posterity.

Part of the reason the player thought it wasn't a big deal is that it's a relatively low-level Mythic+ run, which they referred to as a "homework key". They seemingly thought it would go unnoticed, but didn't account for the fact that many Mythic+ players regularly record runs to compare them online.

Many WoW players are skeptical that the full story has been told. The WoW GM had to have been spectating the run using special tools to be able to kill the boss on command. WoW GMs aren't supposed to watch runs casually; it's normally reserved for PTR raid testing and world first races, where Blizzard developers can fix bugs directly to keep things moving.

I've asked Blizzard if it's made any progress on its investigation and will update this post if it responds.

Original story: I'm pretty neutral on World of Warcraft's current in-between patch content—this sort of thing isn't necessarily Blizzard's strong suit, and you get losers and winners. I'm already deeply ambivalent to the Omnium Folio, but I've been having an acceptable time in its void invasion zones. Sometimes it's nice to just turn your brain off for a few quests and scrape some hyper-specific currency together.

Well, except for one feature—the Lighthook Grapple. Being an MMO, my action bars are already flooded with mounts, transmog outfits, potions, and my actual abilities. So imagine my surprise when I zone out of Naigtal, and the big, obstructive "put this on your action bar" button for the Lighthook Grapple is still staring at me.

If you put it on your action bar, the button vanishes. If you dare remove it from your action bar, however, it returns like a scorned spectre from beyond the grave. This is the first time I've ever felt "Just Monika"-'d by a user interface.

I should note, for the uninitiated, that this ability is pretty much useless anywhere that isn't Naigtal, a middle-of-the-patch cycle, optional quest zone with zero bearing on the rest of the game. There's basically no reason for this thing to be on your UI if you aren't in Naigtal, it can't be used anywhere else.

And yet, it insists—as has Blizzard on the game's forums, with one developer writing: "After investigation by the development team, this is apparently and technically working as intended, and we do not plan on changing how this works at the moment."

Which is a little baffling. Nothing game-ruining, mind. I can deal with it—but it raises a few questions. If these void invasion zones aren't time-limited (and it's likely they won't be) will the Lighthook Grapple go away, or will it be in my spellbook, and my action bar, forever? And if so, uh, why. Why are we doing that?

Salvation for your action bar real estate might be in the future, though, as a follow-up post by another dev in the very same thread reads: "While we have no specific details or ETA to share, I’d like to inform y’all that the team is still looking into this situation and possible changes/fixes to the Lighthook Grapple action.

"So while what Yryadorne mentioned above still applies, please rest assured that your feedback is heard and options are being evaluated to address your concerns and reports." As to how this happened, I've got some theories. The first is that a developer did indeed look at this and go 'yes, this is good', which I honestly think is unlikely.

My money's on the idea that this is a band-aid solution because for some archaic reason, having it work the other way messed something up. Like that time a fixed elevator from a 13-year-old raid broke Player Housing. And, at some point in the process, a developer went 'this is good enough, we've got a patch to ship' and put a more reasonable grappling hook on their to-do list.

One of the most controversial bits of World of Warcraft: Midnight was Blizzard taking aim at UI mods (addons) that impacted combat, with the idea that you probably shouldn't have to make your game look like an airplane dashboard designed by a drunk person just to play a videogame. Something that I've come around to, for the most part.

In a recent interview with PCGamesN, game director Ion Hazzikostas has affirmed Blizzard's choice to revoke addon author's access to combat information (with a few exceptions): "I know this may be a controversial statement, but I will say that, overall, [the new UI] has been successful so far. It's not done, it's not perfect; there's more work to go, and we are continuing to undertake that work."

"Controversial" is somewhat correct, mind. While I've been handling the shift absolutely fine, I'm also primarily a DPS guy—during the last raid tier, healers were suffering due to a complete mismatch between Blizzard's encounter design and their UI's ability to track dispellable debuffs.

Essentially, while Blizzard has touted that it's designing its encounters with an addonless world in mind, a raid encounter in Midnight's first season, Crown of the Cosmos, had a debuff called Null Corona that needed to be dispelled. However, because the studio's changes made it impossible to track dispels, healers were forced to squint at their party member's health bars to find a tiny purple jpeg.

This was eventually hotfixed, but that's far from the only issue. The homegrown DPS meter could, er, be better. It's missing a huge amount of functionality that was there with meter addons before, a step back by pretty much every metric. And it's not like Blizzard isn't working on it, but it's easy to feel salty about a sweeping lack of convenience—the rapidfire development cycle of hobbyist mod builders absolutely beats the often-complicated and difficult tasks of a major development studio.

"I think that, by and large, the vast majority of people are completing the same level of content that they were before, and far more are doing it without feeling like they need to seek out external tools. There have been some exceptions to that where the community has figured out ways of making some computational logic work, and we didn't want to keep breaking things in the middle of a patch."

That's another asterisk to the whole thing—many high-end raiders have figured out ways to gain the same functionality they'd lost before, but because of both the new rules around addons and the usability lost from the death of something like WeakAuras, these addons mostly aren't accessible to the general public.

Hazzikostas says that patch 12.1 should iron out a lot of those kinks, though: "The 12.1 update has what we think is a more comprehensive overhaul of the security backend of our addon interface, which should make it a little easier for addon authors to write addons, but also close some of the loopholes we've seen pop up here and there. Alongside that, we're continuing to improve our base user interface."

Ultimately, Hazzikostas says that "I think, while it's certainly been a transition with its challenges, we're excited to have this new baseline and foundation, and things will only continue to get better from here, both as we continue to add functionality to the base UI, and we continue to empower addon authors to add customization options.

"And as we, frankly, internally relearn some aspects of how we can build encounters in this new world. I think that's going to open up new doors and possibilities for players in raids, dungeons, Delves, and everything in between."

No matter how good at questing in World of Warcraft Classic you think you are, I'm pretty sure we've found someone better—a singularly determined madlad has hit level 60 on every single class in the game's hardcore self-found mode.

For the uninitiated, that means that they've gotten to level 60 without dying and without any outside help, as self-found players can't trade with anybody, send or receive mail, or use the auction house. Essentially, any gear or materials have to be found or plucked from the earth with your own bare hands.

But user Foxdog175 on the r/classicwow subreddit has done it. As a matter of fact, they've done it 11 times (thanks, WoWHead): "If I'm being brutally honest, only three of my toons should have made it to 60. I've had razor-close calls on just about every class to 60," they write.

For instance, their Warlock nearly died in the ocean to Stranglethorn Vale boat captains on a HP so low they couldn't see their health bar, their rogue barely survived a disconnect in Tanaris, and their paladin was saved from a pack of bloodthirsty elites by an aggro reset bug.

This is my favourite anecdote, though: "On my paladin, I told a hunter I was with in Searing Gorge that we could jump down the hole as long as I BoP'd him, to quest in the caves below. Before I could even say 'GO', he immediately jumped. I jumped in after him, got the BoP off mid-air, and was able to bubble myself milliseconds before I hit the ground." I think we should all aspire to this level of heroism in our day-to-day lives.

Foxdog achieved this feat by seemingly following the adage 'slow is smooth, smooth is fast'—for example, they start their characters off by levelling in two 1-4 starter zones, hoofing it on foot to another race's spawning area: "This step sounds silly to some; it's not. Every level you gain on mobs compounds from the first level. Remember, every level you are above a mob, you gain hit, crit, and dodge and they lose that amount on their end."

And, hey, you can't argue with the results—Foxdog hasn't just levelled every class to 60, but has done a naked fire mage run as well: "Naked fire mage had a TON of close calls. Near-deaths in Ashenvale aoe'ing furbolgs with another mage, in Southern Arathi under water getting netted and beaten on near the boat quests while collecting those crystals (was saved by my group member who just happened to be close enough to get to me in time).

"Had an elite rock-giant beating on me when I ported down in Azshara using the NPC teleport, had a near-death helping a warrior kill furbolgs in Northern Felwood when the denwatcher called about half a dozen other furbolgs at low hp. Warrior bailed and I was on my own. Barely escaped. Naked fire mage was a damn cat with nine lives."

Godspeed to everyone attempting this challenge, whether via a completionist, all-classes route or by doing it on a DDR mat. That annoying minimap orb in retail (that I hate) doesn't seem anywhere near as bad, now.

World of Warcraft's had another brush with a digital plague—on the Moon Guard US server, capital cities were overcome with waves of toxic activity that saw vitriol line the streets. But enough about trade chat—there was also a debuff spreading around and killing people.

The incident occurred late last week, when Stormwind was suddenly assailed by AoE markers and explosions of green slime—captured here by meggoart on Bluesky, you can cleanly see the debuff melting the faces off innocent players by the Trader's Post (thanks, WoWHead).

uhhh corrupted blood 2.0 is happening on Moon Guard right nowwww.reddit.com/r/wow/commen...

— @meggoart.bsky.social (@meggoart.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2026-07-06T12:39:44.900Z

The culprit? Withering Contagion, which occurs in the Brackenhide Hollow dungeon from Dragonflight. The debuff is a DoT that can spread to players within five yards of the victim. How exactly it escaped the dungeon seems unclear, though I'm sure the discovery of the glitch has something to do with the current timewalking event, which is encouraging players to run Dragonflight dungeons.

Regardless, it swept through popular social hubs—including the, er, rather infamous inn Goldshire, which you can see exploding in a splatter of goo (and not the usual kind) in this video by ParallelGTA on YouTube. Here's a longer video by Starry where you can see a tide of pus nearly drowning Stormwind's Cathedral Square.

Blizzard's swiftly hotfixed the bug, and while that means I've missed out on the fun, though, I can't help but get flashbacks to a plague I actually was there for—the Corrupted Blood incident of 2005. Almost 21 years old at this point, the plague (obtained from Hakkar the Blood God) swept across the game in such a widespread and persistent way that it was actually studied by researchers, who would then go on to fight Covid-19.

No, seriously. Speaking to our own Wes Fenlon back in 2020, Eric Lofgren said: "It was a good illustration of how important it is to understand people's behaviours … And also that these things are very chaotic. You can't really predict 'oh yeah, everyone will quarantine. It'll be fine.' No, they won't."

As it turns out, noncompliance and laissez faire attitudes to quarantining and disease spreading is somewhat analogous to the kind of griefing that goes on in MMOs—after all, both this buff and the corrupted blood incident were continued by people deliberately spreading it for a jolly.

If anything, I'm just sort of sad that modern MMO hotfix cycles mean the Withering Contagion debuff didn't get a chance to really thrive. Not because I'm some kind of plague-obsessed Nurgle-worshipping scientist (I am, but it's entirely a coincidence), but because these sorts of emergent sandbox events are pretty lacking in today's seasonal MMO structure.

World of Warcraft's no stranger to borrowed power—after Blizzard learnt its lesson making borrowed power features the entire focus of an expansion's progression, it instead started to weave them in as seasonal patch incentives. Broadly optional mini-grinds that were good if you wanted a cheap boost and something to do, or were hankering for best-in-slot gear, but nothing that'd hoover up all of your time.

I've been middling on these—the Reshii Wraps, the DISC belt—but I at least think they've been broadly interesting so far. For instance, the Reshii Wraps gave you some extra bonuses while you were phase-diving. And, for the most part, getting a new shiny bit of gear's cool.

But the latest one, the Omnium Folio, is kind of baffling—to put it bluntly, I kinda don't really get why it's there.

For the uninitiated, the Folio is a borrowed power system that sees you jaunting to the arse-end of Silvermoon every week to complete a quest chain that, so far, has been mostly filled with the same weekly activities I was doing anyway.

Most features like the Folio have had some degree of interactivity—take the Onyx Annulet ring from Dragonflight, which had a bunch of gems you could find in the Forbidden Reach. And yet the Omnium Folio is just sort of… there. Take a look at this talent tree.

A single lonely line, a linear path, filled with abilities such as "sometimes, you do more damage" and "sometimes, you do more healing". Three weeks in, I cannot say I've felt a single one of these abilities impact my time hitting stuff in WoW one bit—beyond a flat numerical increase. If there are fiery explosions happening, they're blending into the overstimulated machine of gunshots and big smoke clouds.

It's not interacting with any of the weekly activities beyond a quest to go and do them, sometimes. It's not making the routine of hitting enemies feel any different. It's not impacting my rotation in any way. And it's not interacting with any patch-specific mechanics. It pretty much just makes me hit slightly harder, and if I don't do my weekly quest, I miss out on a power boost until I get around to handling it.

You can make the argument that patch 12.0.5 has been—to a detriment, one might argue—rammed with so many optional activities that the Omnium Folio is just a way for Blizzard to get you to try them all.

There's (deep breath) ritual sites, abyss anglers, decor duels, the voidforge, void assaults, void invasion zones—along with the usual weekly activities of prey, delves, dungeons, raids, so on and so forth. The Omnium Folio forces you to interact with some of this stuff—ritual sites, void assaults, and void invasion zones—but only for a little bit, once per week.

Which means that whenever I log in, I'm staring at this great big orb Blizzard's stuck on my minimap and thinking: Man, what's the point?

It's true that I'm being the kind of overly cynical that comes with sticking with an MMO for a long time—the Folio is inoffensive and basically does its job, but it does its job in such an archetypal, bland way that it invariably represents the worst aspects of itself. I think these sorts of optional grinds can be a great time—and I'm broadly in favour of patch-specific mechanics (I loved drifting in my car in Undermine).

But the Folio feels like the most boiled-down, reduced-to-formula version of a borrowed power mechanic imaginable. It is ostensibly just there, it gives you incremental increases just powerful enough to make participation mandatory, while not being visible enough or interactable enough to feel satisfying to get. It's not a gear piece, so it's not even part of the core item level dopamine grind. It hangs on your navigation tool like a limpet, saying "hey, remember when you had to do some ritual sites to fill me out? Wasn't that neat?"

This lonely-looking talent tree will just sit on my minimap for the next two patches, a reminder of the set-and-forget nodes giving me a 2-4% damage boost—and while Blizzard might expand on it in the future, I don't really get why it's there now. Especially in a patch filled with so many little checklists to tick off? It's making me resent my weekly marching orders from Umbric. And I don't want to resent Umbric. That's my guy.

World of Warcraft's ramping up to its first major "big number" patch, Curse of Ula'tek—in addition to some interesting changes to how world bosses work, Blizzard's also taking aim at some quality-of-life features. And while these updates haven't all exactly been frictionless, I've gotta tip my hat to Blizzard, here—a lot of these are major plusses.

A recent blog details what Blizzard's already implemented, as well as what's to come. The most notable items here are fixes to auto-looting and area looting, but there's also been performance upgrades to the very-pretty Silvermoon City, faster Prey hunts, EXP buffs, and—in a move that's genuinely really important for the hardcore raiding scene—reduced repair costs.

But Curse of Ula'tek's got a few big upgrades to come, too. Profession knowledge points can now be reset once per profession, crafted housing decor should be cheaper, and the Voidforge will be accessible from Silvermoon City.

There's also UI improvements—and while I'm excited about certain bumps to the experience, like finally being able to see map coordinates without an addon, the most vital by far is the auto-loot setting, which no longer resets when you make a new character.

For those of you who've never had to experience the utter existential horror that is figuring out where a setting in an options menu is more than once, it was genuinely kind of annoying—WoW has a setting that lets you automatically loot everything from a monster with one click, instead of shift-clicking like some sort of peasant.

However, this option was character-specific for some arcane and unknowable reason, meaning any time you made an alt, you'd have the experience of looting your first monster, wondering if you were having a lagspike, remembering that you don't have auto-loot on, and then spending five unreclaimable minutes of your life finding and enabling the option again. No more.

There are also some bug fixes, the one I'm most excited for being: "a number of recurring patterns that could cause players to become stuck in outdoor world combat far longer than expected. This will not address all of these situations, but it should be far less common in Curse of Ula’tek."

I am not kidding when I say that 90% of the reason I play a rogue is to be able to Vanish my way out of combat without having to wait for whatever's chasing me to stop locking me out of my mount. That, and the big annoying smoke cloud I can ruin people's day with as part of my rotation.

World of Warcraft caught some heat earlier this year for a messy patch that broke a whole lot of stuff. Patch 12.0.5 was a bit of a disaster, taking an accidental wrecking ball to multiple systems and allowing some long-flagged issues to sneak their way into the game.

The takeaway that I—and many other players—had was that Blizzard's rapid patch cadence was impacting its QA, and while I still do partially wonder if that's to blame, at least in the case of problems that were long-flagged, Ion Hazzikostas has peskily introduced some nuance to my grand narrative. Gee darnit.

That's per an interview with YouTube channel Psybear_tv, where the director speaks on what went wrong with Patch 12.0.5: "If it ever feels like something is rushed, or half-baked, that's not something that we're gonna take lightly—I think we wanna understand what more players were hoping for from a given system or a given feature, take that to heart, and do better the next time."

Hazzikostas is proud of the "faster patch cadence from Dragonflight onwards," one that he says lets the team get out a wider spread of content for folks with different tastes. However, he emphasises that "just because we move faster doesn't mean that we are sacrificing quality—we are never going to put something in a patch if it's not ready."

Which might come as a bitter draught to players who were impacted by 12.0.5, though Hazzikostas says "It's obviously not lost on me that—pretty recent was 12.05's release, and a lot of understandable consternation among players about like: 'Wow, this seems really buggy, is Blizzard moving too quickly, are they sacrificing quality for speed, for quantity?'"

Speed isn't the problem, says Hazzikostas, but a hiccup in logistics: "If anything it was actually us being a bit too aggressive in trying to fix bugs very close to the patch release time."

One example he uses is the fact that player housing got disabled for a whole day: "Not a good look, right? … What happened was, what we discovered during our internal checks that day, the day the patch deployed, was that people who zoned into their houses [who] had any decor that was off the ground in any way? It snapped to the ground, and did so in a way that permanently changed their placement in their house, destroying a lot of people's setups."

The culprit? An elevator from 2013. No, seriously: "This is going to inspire some spaghetti code memes, but … There was a last-minute bug that we found with the Siege of Orgrimmar elevator, where players would fall through the elevator. It was like 'well, okay, we should fix this bug, it's legacy content but there's people still mount farming and stuff.'

"That bug fix went in just a few days before 12.05. Because of the complex interdependent nature of 20-25 years' worth of code, aspects of what controls how a player attaches to an elevator object also touched on some aspects of how different objects can be parented to each other or stacked in housing placement."

Ultimately, Hazzikostas cops to the fact that "We did not go back and check housing during that final day and a half before the patch went live. Until, of course, it blew up."

Hindsight is 20/20, though Hazzikostas admits that "we should've gone ahead with the stable build, released it, and then rolled that out as a hotfix later on with not the same immediate short-term risk. It's that sort of thing—it's lots of moving pieces."

While I'm still not certain the developer equivalent of putting 'I work too hard' as a flaw on your CV is entirely the truth, it does explain some of the more baffling glitches that came with the wonky patch in April—and why some of them might slip the net, despite being so completely major.

Hopefully, Blizzard's been able to sort out its bug-fixing engine to dodge most future snafus, especially given patch 12.1 has some interesting new challenges I'm keen to tackle, hopefully without my character's head popping off because somebody messed with the ground geometry of Molten Core, or something.

Inside me, there are two people. The first, a rational adult, understands the legalities of private servers, and how typically incompatible they are with… well, existence. I can't say that certain servers, like TurtleWoW, played it safe either—while you do need to pay developers, opening up a cash shop for a game you're running off a stolen IP isn't smart.

The second has a grim understanding of the state of the genre by virtue of writing this very column. Not only have I personally observed that MMOs are an aging genre with very little in the way of newcomers, but I'm also not the only person who has identified a problem—I spoke to Raph Koster (Ultima Online, Star Wars Galaxies) earlier this month about the miserly state of things. Jack Emmert of City of Heroes fame also thinks there are huge problems. It's not just me getting nostalgic and misty-eyed.

Regardless of the cause, one thing is true: New MMOs aren't surviving, or they're being shut down. There are a couple indie outliers like Project Gorgon that're doing just fine for themselves, but we aren't getting the big hitters anymore.

And while I might not mourn servers like TurtleWoW or Project Ascension quite like I might, say, wince in sympathy for poor Matt Frior—who made Project Blackbird for years only for it to be slain in the cradle by Microsoft—I still feel a little sad to see Blizzard folding in on them, even if they're well within their rights to do so.

Because it's not like Blizzard isn't taking pointers, right? Of course, Ion Hazzikostas isn't gonna walk out one day and say "yeah, we were inspired by the private server we shut down". But there's absolutely a pattern. Blizzard will muscle in on a private server, and then a year or two later, come out with their own version of what that server was doing.

The original example is, of course, Nostralius, which Blizzard came for in 2016. The server reached a major height of popularity as a version of oldschool World of Warcraft maintained by passionate fans, something Blizzard had previously rebuffed with the now-infamous quote: "You think you do, but you don't."

Two years after Nostralius shuts down, Blizzard opens up World of Warcraft Classic, an experiment so successful it's still working through expansions today, both in the OG Classic and in Anniversary servers that are doing the whole time loop again.

I also don't think it's a coincidence that a lot of these servers were offering Classic-adjacent experiences with clever twists around the time Blizzard put out its Season of Discovery servers or Remix events, either. Or, indeed, that Blizzard has a mysterious "Project Camelot" on the horizon in the wake of these C&Ds.

I'm not accusing Blizzard of copying homework, mind. These versions of WoW are very much distinct from the dying servers—whether that be Project Ascension's ability draft or TurtleWoW cooking up entirely new classes. But they were made in an environment where there was concrete proof that an appetite for interesting, experimental takes on the good old days are incredibly popular.

To be clear: I'm certainly not in the business of defending Microsoft, and I don't think Blizzard needs defending when it comes to what it's done. Stating that Blizzard has a right to shut these servers down is an outlining of the facts, rather than what I purposefully believe should be the case in a utopian society. The law and what I want are two different things.

But the facts are: We do live in a capitalist society with copyright laws. Blizzard is legally obliged to snub these things to protect its IP. There are alternatives, such as NCSoft's treatment of the City of Heroes server Homecoming—but that was achieved under years of meticulous and very, very careful manoeuvring by the private server's devs, who never once accepted donations beyond what they required to run the server.

They certainly didn't open a cash shop. Again, TurtleWoW did itself absolutely no favours, even if I think what it was doing was rad in a vacuum.

So why am I still sad? Well, two reasons.

Well, in isolation, I think these private servers are often just doing cool stuff. I think it's neat that Project Ascension had an ability draft version of WoW. I think it's neat that TurtleWoW was cooking up entirely different classes and zones—just as I thought it was neat that Homecoming made new archetypes and story arcs.

While the scale of passion projects to actual illegal business varies from server to server, the MMO genre is a space that's in dire need of innovation. And if Blizzard has been taking notes, it's these servers we have to thank for a lot of the precious scraps of invention the company has been allowed to make.

Not necessarily because the devs have been nicking ideas. As a matter of fact, I think they're plenty creative—but they're bound to the laws of capital in a way these private server mavericks just aren't, and they can't just disagree with management because… well, it's their career. A private server getting popular, however, means developers can point at their playercounts when pitching to the people with money.

I am willing to bet that we probably wouldn't have WoW Remix or SoD without some of the servers that're getting shut down. We certainly wouldn't have had Classic without Nostralius.

But I'm also sad because, in a healthier videogame industry, with fewer layoffs and studio closures, might some of these private server devs have found positions within actual studios? In a world where companies aren't obligated by copyright law to send cease and desist to fan projects, could these private servers tick along just fine?

And more to the point—in a world where the MMO genre wasn't suffering from companies hounding after the next quarter (and, to be fair, ballooning development costs)—would these servers even exist in the first place?

It's a pipe dream, I know. But I think private servers are a symptom of a wider illness, not a disease—and I have watched genuine creativity and effort be poured into them by people I can't rightly blame for being unable to find legitimate work in this utter hellscape of an industry. It's a sorry state of affairs, one I doubt will change in my lifetime—but I'll quietly wish it would.

Patch 12.1 is on the horizon, and it looks like we were right—that ominous monologue Zul'jan had during World of Warcraft: Midnight's main story quests was absolutely a setup for the next major patch. Curse of Ula'tek is going to take us to The Coiled Isle, where we'll be digging further into the troubled history of the Amani trolls.

One surprise from the patch is the inclusion of Mythic+ world bosses via lairs, as explained in the overview video below.

Essentially, a lair is a one-boss delve-like instance that plucks out the usual world bosses that'd be prowling a patch zone like this and places them in an instanced, delve-like arena with some variable difficulty settings, all the way up to "flexible Mythic" 15-25 man groups, which'll presumably have the same bite as the other Mythic content in the game.

I'm of two minds about this, honestly. On the one hand, I think it's really neat that WoW's continuing to add varying difficulty to all of its activities—using the whole buffalo is the smartest way for MMOs to design their encounters, and I was a huge fan of the Prey system on launch for making my open world activities spicier.

And yet I'm not too excited about them being instanced. Part of the appeal of a world boss is… well, that it's a boss in the world, and the MMO feeling of piling onto some schmuck with a gaggle of strangers in a chaotic melee of spells is more appealing than this alternative from a community perspective.

The patch also includes, naturally, more story quests, an in-zone talent tree, a new dungeon, delves, a raid—all that good major patch stuff. As well as some much-needed brush-ups to the cooldown manager, the ability to add pets to housing (score!) You can read the full details on the official website,

Life is about to get much easier for World of Warcraft players tired of having to track down guildmates to get a group together for a raid. Blizzard is officially acknowledging that Discord is the most convenient solution to this problem and will be integrating its chat directly into the MMO in the next update.

Blizzard announced that patch 12.1, Curse of Ula'tek, will bring cross-platform chat between Discord and WoW guild chat. Messages will show up in the MMO and in Discord, and can be set up so it's all-in-one combined chat or separated into individual channels.

The only requirement is to link your Battle.net and Discord account and have a guild leader or officer adjust how they want the chats to work. Once that's done, you'll be able to see people chatting directly from Discord with the logo next to their messages in-game.

This is big news for guilds with hundreds of players across different time zones. WoW's in-game chat just isn't equipped for that, especially without an easy way to scroll through an archive of messages across multiple days. I have two monitors so it's not particularly hard to swap between Discord and a game, but I'm sure solo monitor and laptop players will be relieved to hear they don't need to stop doing their dailies to answer a ping.

This does make me wonder if we're about to see Discord chat show up in more games as a replacement for developers having to build a guild or clan chat system. It's not just MMO players who need to wrangle people together; I could see this being useful in other multiplayer games, like Arc Raiders or Overwatch.

All of this might be moot by the time Discord gets around to rolling out its extremely unpopular global age verification, which is supposedly happening sometime before the end of the year. If that goes awry, WoW players might be back to juggling chat apps trying to see if enough people are online to run some Mythic+ dungeons.

A new version of World of Warcraft was just discovered and it's called "World of Warcraft Camelot". Instead of some kind of Arthurian spin-off, however, the dataminer who found it theorizes that it's just a codename for an enhanced version of World of Warcraft Classic.

Dubbed "WoW Classic Plus" by hopeful players over the years, this hypothetical version of the MMO would branch off from the original and become something new based on something old—just like Old School Runescape.

Wowhead dataminer Stiven found licenses for two versions of "World of Warcraft Camelot" on Blizzard's servers, suggesting that it will have multiple editions available to purchase. They also said that this branch of WoW is on the July 2006 patch that introduced a raid you might remember from the viral Leroy Jenkins video.

That happens to be the same patch a version of WoW was mysteriously running on last year. With BlizzCon coming up in September, it would make sense for Blizzard to start testing WoW Classic Plus so that it's ready to be playable on the show floor. Not to mention that it recently invited a bunch of WoW Classic streamers to its offices in Irvine to see something new under an NDA.

Blizzard has a track record of letting things slip by way of their internal server updates. Most WoW players know to start preparing for a new patch when a PTR server shows up on there. And sometimes big announcements, like Diablo 4's new paladin class, are accidentally leaked by poorly named internal builds.

At this point, WoW Classic Plus has been talked about so much that it would be hard to imagine Blizzard won't give it a shot. It already dabbled with the idea of mixing things up with the original MMO via Season of Discovery, and it's hinted that something similar could happen again.

With WoW Classic's popularity waning these days as the MMO gets closer and closer to catching up with the regular version, a WoW Classic Plus could be Blizzard's solution to the problem. I'd like to see it try because playing a version of the game without the conveniences of modern WoW always puts me off of it. I'd be way more inclined to try something that isn't so beholden to the kind of suffering players went through a decade ago.

Earlier this year, the private World of Warcraft server Turtle WoW announced it would shut down after Blizzard served it a cease and desist and filed a copyright infringement suit. Second verse, same as the first: Project Ascension, a different private server project with several realms, is the subject of a new suit filed last Friday (thanks, Aftermath).

"The defendants … have built an entire business on large scale, egregious, and ongoing infringement of Blizzard's intellectual property," the complaint reads, noting that Ascension is "among the largest private WoW servers available today … with 'over a million players.'"

If you're unfamiliar with the fan server, it's a modded, classless, free-to-play version of the game where you stitch together existing and custom spells to fashion unique playstyles. "Build the character of your dreams," the website beckons. It also looks like there's a different project in development which adds new ideas to World of Warcraft's classic incarnation, not unlike Turtle WoW or that secret thing Blizzard seems to be working on.

Also similar to Turtle WoW, the server allowed players to buy in-game items with Donation Points—the complaint alleges this has made the Project Ascension team "millions of dollars." The complaint also says the game's pirate servers are "hosted on 'bulletproof' servers associated with the Russia-based Aeza Group," which the U.S. Department of the Treasury has targeted for "enabling cybercriminals and technology theft"—an association which allegedly "signals willful intent to engage in unlawful activity."

While the team behind Turtle WoW initially urged Blizzard to consider an official licensing framework for fan servers, no public word has come from Project Ascension just yet. Fans of the server are not hopeful: "Welp, we're fucked," reads one thread from Reddit user AnaTheSturdy.

User micro_Ampere replied, "Thanks for the memories. I had a better time here than I had on any other [private server] currently out there. Shame to see all that creativity gone to nothing. Good luck devs, but surely you knew this was coming."

In a downright intriguing turn of events, it looks like real money trading (RMT) gold sellers—whose peddling of gold for actual cash is against World of Warcraft's terms of service—have taken to the streets of WoW Classic Anniversary to advertise casino games as a way of raking in cash (thanks, WoWHead).

These bots, boosted to level 58 (presumably because doing so via the store gives you 25 gold to play around with—and to protect themselves from ganks, more on that later) have been standing on street corners in major cities and trying to lure players in with the promise of gambling. Which—and I write this with pride—has led to players devising new and inventive ways to kill them.

Take this example posted by Reddit user Purple_Resident2930, which suggests players travel to the Netherstorm, pick up a debuff that spawns a monster on expiration, Hearthstone back to the city and run at the casino bot in question. This is a little like voluntarily letting an Alien-style chest burster sit in your ribcage so you can sic it on a spam caller

This doesn't work as well if they buy the aforementioned boosts, mind, but there are other ways of gambling-based murder—for example, kiting a level 60 elite over from Ashenvale to squish them.

Anyway—anti-casino arms races notwithstanding, Blizzard has marked, recognised, and promised to do something about these yapping slot machines. Tom Ellis, a senior game producer on World of Warcraft, writes via his personal X account:

"The casino thing that's vogue right now. Just to confirm we're aware, it's still against policy to advertise a casino, so keep reporting them (or dropping infernals on them). Digging in, it looks like the RMT crowd (that's gold sellers) have realized this is an easy way to make gold quickly and cheaply, which has driven an uptick in the behavior.

"You caught Watcher's attention so we have a few folks looking into ideas on how we can make getting these people out of the game much faster so the activity is less lucrative and in turn, they will hopefully piss off."

It's a fascinating little development, all told—though it makes a certain kind of sense. Casinos in real life operate by tipping the odds in their favour, and drawing people in with the allure of being one of the rare lucky winners that makes it big (this is where the saying "the house always wins" comes from).

In other words, it's absolutely a smart, albeit ToS-violating, strategy to encourage people to gamble with a game of chance because, writ large, it will make you more money than it loses you. Unless, of course, you get repeatedly murdered any time you try.

"Don't expect any sort of big fanfare 'Mission Accomplished!' banner for this one," Ellis adds, "This is one of the ones that you hopefully don't even notice stopped happening if we get it right."

The saga of TurtleWoW was perhaps inevitable—operating pretty brazenly under the nose of Blizzard, the World of Warcraft private server featured bespoke content for its own vision of the game, and advertised itself as an actual game might.

It also featured in-game microtransactions, and while some private servers for other MMOs (like City of Heroes) have received official permission from the developers to keep operating, they've usually done so via years of muddling by on strictly-documented donations that only cover server costs.

In other words—regardless how neat the work of TurtleWoW's developers was? Legally-speaking, that's cruisin' for a bruisin'. In October of 2025, Blizzard filed a lawsuit against TurtleWoW, and while the team behind it put on a brave face, it didn't matter. Come April 2026, TurtleWoW was given a cease & desist and announced its closure several days later.

Well, as per the TurtleWoW (now Moonwhisper Games) Discord, its developers have said they'll make their own MMO: "This isn't the end of our journey together, but rather the beginning of a new one! We'll be transitioning the team into a game development studio Moonwhisper Games.

"... We've decided to begin work on our own MMO! We know this is an enormous undertaking. MMOs are among the most ambitious and demanding projects in game development, and we're under no illusion that this is something that can be built quickly or easily."

However, as the team points out, it's also sort of been getting in a lot of practice with TurtleWoW itself—regardless of whether the server was playing stupid games and getting stupid prizes, the amount of work put into its extra content was commendable. We're talking new zones, classes, dungeons, the works.

"At the same time, we're not starting from scratch completely. We have spent years building MMO experiences, managing communities, creating content, and learning both the strengths and shortcomings of the genre. We know how challenging this road will be, but we also know it's a challenge worth taking on."

Honestly? Bully for them! While I wish we'd all live in a world where IP laws allowed people to make cool stuff, I do absolutely understand why Blizzard had to put the screws on, here. TurtleWoW was playing with fire—but that doesn't mean its devs shouldn't get to keep making cool stuff. I'm excited to see what Moonwhisper Games'll put together in the coming years. God knows the scene could use an injection of new talent.

World of Warcraft: Midnight seems inclined, like its past couple of expansions, to be less demanding of entry-level requirements for Mythic+ and high-end raiding—there's more ways to gear up a character solo than ever via activities like Prey, and there's no mandatory Torghast-esque chores to tick off or borrowed power item to grind out points on.

And yet, some players have found themselves on an economic treadmill—as broken down by this solid analysis on WoWHead. This had mostly passed me by, given I'm not pushing keys—though I'd been aware of shield-wielding tanks getting shafted.

The issue? Repair costs. Now, repair costs are important to your average MMO—see, MMOs are technically printing money all the time. Every mob you kill, every bit of trash you vendor, every dungeon you complete, adds some form of money into the economy.

And if there's too much cash going around, then inflation becomes a major problem. And you can't just make non-player sources of gold generation more generous, because that'll only make it worse.

Still, when you look at WoW's repair costs for the highest-end players, it's nasty. Gear quality (what "track" it's on) makes a large impact, with Mythic gear being around 67% more expensive to repair—WoWHead compares a Mythic-tier two hander (523 gold) to a Champion-tier one hander (93 gold) to demonstrate.

Overall, WoWHead puts the average cost of a single death for a Mythic at 250 gold—if you want to kill the latest Mythic boss, WoW's Progstats puts that at an average of 343 pulls, rounded down. That's 87,750 gold to clear one boss—and that's not even including the extra gold costs required to raid at that level.

As a matter of fact, let's figure it out with the prices on my current server, even being charitable and assuming I've got a crafting friend who's willing to foot the bill for my gear and gems and enchants. WoWHead's Outlaw Rogue BiS for consumables suggests the following:

• Flask of the Shattered Sun (917g per hour).
• Thalassian Phoenix Oil (40g per hour).
• Void-Touched Augment Rune (846g per hour).
• For a total cost of 1,803 gold per hour of progression.
• (I've not put the recommended food here since it can be shared with the whole raid.)

That's just the hourly stuff—Light's Potential, a combat potion, and the SIlvermoon Health Potion can be added onto that per-pull cost, a combined total of 585 gold on my server. Using progstats' average progression timing of 29 hours (rounded up), we can actually figure out how much it costs to beat the Midnight Falls raid, purely in repair costs and consumables.

• Repair costs are 87,750 gold (250 gold x 343 pulls).
• Per-encounter consumables are an eye-watering 200,655 gold (585 gold x 343 pulls).
• Hourly consumables are 52,287 gold (1,803 gold x 29 hours).
• 52,287 + 87,750 + 200,655 = 340,692.

So if you're a Mythic raider, being as tryhard as you possibly can, it costs 340,692 gold to prog and clear Midnight Falls. Now, that number's probably a little high—that Light's Potential and health potion are by far the biggest cost factor, and you might not be using a per-encounter consumable on every pull if you still haven't seen enrage.

But even without them, repair costs being significantly more expensive than your hourly consumables budget is wild, and players are feeling the sting in their wallets. As one player pointed out on the WoW subreddit this month, it all adds up very quickly: "I as a Warlock am paying 20 THOUSAND gold in repairs and APPARENTLY I am on the LOWER END. The Protection Warrior is allegedly (in his words) paying over 35k a raid night."

Which is rough. I can absolutely see why some costs are there—again, MMO economies do need gold sinks, or stuff gets out of hand real quickly. You don't want a SWTOR situation circa 2023 where a level 24 accessory is being sold for 49 million credits.

But it does seem countermand to WoW's anti-busywork philosophy in recent years. Sure, you can get gold from just about anywhere, but demanding players foot a steep bill just for the honour of hardcore raiding does seem like an extra layer of unnecessary punishment.

I'm thinking about Final Fantasy 14: Evercold's keynotes, and something in them's been rattling around in the back of my skull—during them, Hikaru Tamaki (who was affectionately coined as Mr Prime live on stage)—revealed that the design team was considering making the new version of Dragoon, which'll be arriving in the expansion, have a 90% damage reduction buff while using its new Sky High action.

Since I've been playing it (circa Shadowbringers), FF14 has been praised for having an almost pitch-perfect balance between its jobs. We're talking separations of a few percentages between the DPS of different classes at the highest level. That's in part to having no talent tree system to speak of.

But it's also led to one of the biggest criticisms of the game: Homogenization. Every tank plays the same, every healer plays the same, every DPS hits its burst windows at two minutes. It's something that the developers are directly taking aim at. Whether they will is another question, as my colleague and fellow FF14-head Mollie Taylor rightfully pointed out earlier this week.

But it got me thinking: What did perfectly balancing those jobs in that way do? Who did it serve? And there are a few good arguments in favour of that. Even in a purely PvE context, MMOs aren't balanced like singleplayer games. They're social activities, and class balance matters not just for competition, but for cooperation.

If your class or job is underpowered, people aren't gonna want to take you on diddly squat in higher-end content; Learning how to master a class can feel like a waste of time if some guy on the flavour of the month out-damages you with two buttons; And MMOs are grindy, which means jumping to those new classes can take multiple hours.

Heck, even if you're just a filthy casual, it can feel pretty crappy to see your name in the muck at the bottom of damage meters. If there's something MMO players don't like, it's a sense of inefficiency.

So why is FF14 moving away from that and tipping the scales? Why do people still play classic WoW servers, where Feral druids, for instance, had to grind out inventories full of Manual Crowd Pummelers if they wanted to be fully-optimised because of a weird interaction with their weapon scaling? Why did Star Wars: Galaxies die by trying to bring its professions in line?

Because perfect balance is bad for MMOs. That's the hand-on-heart truth.

What makes you special

One of the main draws of the MMO is the idea of inhabiting a character within a wider world—and inside of that draw, being able to exist in a space in a community where your contribution is valuable. This, as we all know, is an unattainable fantasy and only possible in videogames.

Anyway, the memories that stick with me aren't the ones where I had an internal itch for justice scratched by the meticulous numbers balancing of a developer team—they're when I saw certain classes being unique. WoW understood this very well back in the day.

Hunters could kite raid bosses halfway across the continent, rogues could pick locks in dungeons to bypass lengthy attunement questlines, warlocks could summon players to raids, which meant something before the advent of LFR and dungeon finder.

These things are still present in modern WoW, sure, but they're less relevant. You don't need to bring a rogue to unlock a shortcut in a Mythic+ dungeon if you want a fast time. Hell, sometimes five bears can cut it.

City of Heroes is another example I like to trot out, because it's even more granular, down to not just your class choice, but your selection of "powerset"—having a kinetics character on your crew gave you a massively impactful roster of buffs unmatched by other powersets. Some archetypes and builds were such team players that they were basically useless on their own—while others could be custom-built to solo challenges meant for full teams.

Being able to provide a specific service, or bring a certain ability? That made you feel special. The iron grip of the holy trinity is probably inescapable, sure—but that doesn't mean it has to puncture every aspect of play.

The worry is, of course, what I mentioned above: That certain unique skills or talents or abilities might invalidate some classes for some raids or dungeons—and I am painting a very rose-tinted picture here. It's cool that, say, fire mages in WoW were useless in Molten Core, but better in Naxxramas—right until you have to respec or regear them.

But I honestly think that's a price worth paying, especially if you can build intentionally around it.

Built different

Evercold's also taking steps to accommodate this new philosophy, which is great, because FF14's already got the foundations of a game that can support more whackadoodle job design.

In the game, you can play every job on the same character, switching between them just by equipping a new weapon. You still need to level them up and gear them individually, but that doesn't take all too long in the grand scheme of things—it's something you're able to do passively just by ticking boxes on your roulettes.

With Evercold, Square Enix is taking that one step further by letting players "sync" their highest item level to other jobs. If you want to fine-tune your stats and get best-in-slot gear, you'll still have to grind for it—but if you suddenly need to swap jobs to bring a better-suited one to a boss, you'll be able to have a statistically viable version of that. Just a little weaker than a specialist.

In other words, if it ends up that certain jobs excel in certain fights, it's basically not the end of the world—players won't be given an unreasonable amount of work to have a swiss army knife of viable picks ready to go at any time.

In much the same way I feel about tab-targeting MMOs, where it feels as though MMO developers could improve the system that's already there rather than trying to reinvent the wheel, I feel as though class balancing teams could take on all their knowledge of modern MMO design and apply them to this "purposefully imbalanced" template, too.

Much of the interesting friction and complexity of these older games was almost an accident, and they left unviable classes in the dirt for months, if not years. Modern-day balance and design schedules are both far more reactive and are done with deeper understanding of their own systems. Developers are more transparent, posting breakdowns of their choice-making. Even if those breakdowns are sometimes a little baffling, at least they're doing it.

I think there's a world in which a developer finds the right version of that oldschool, Star Wars Galaxies-esque formula—where every class, profession, or job has something it excels at, but needs help from others—that'll actually stick with modern audiences. And I think that MMO will be better for it.

Y'know. If a new MMO can actually be developed and made in the first place. Which isn't a sure thing.

World of Warcraft: Midnight has had some trouble with its class balancing—some of this is fair enough, given Blizzard completely redesigned the game's specialisations (there's close to 40 of them) to better suit a world without UI mods. This had, uh, some consequences.

Consequences like, for instance, five bears rocking up to your dungeon and flattening it with absolutely no regard to the holy trinity. See, the Guardian druid tank spec received some buffs to help it maintain threat, as bear players were struggling to keep mobs hitting them as nature intended (thanks, WoWHead).

About two weeks ago, Blizzard wrote: "Guardian Druids have continued to overperform in single target contexts, while experiencing difficulties with threat and sustained damage outside of cooldowns. With these changes, we’re aiming to reduce burst potential and transfer some of that power into more reliable and consistent abilities to aid in generating and maintaining threat."

That's all well and good—Midnight's also been struggling with a burst-based meta that saw a lot of classes' power being funnelled into big damage spikes, which doesn't feel great in solo content especially.

The buffs, largely to the spec's damage with Thrash (200% to its direct damage, 100% to its bleed damage) quickly resulted in five Guardian druids rocking up to a level 20 Mythic+ dungeon key and managing to "time" it, which just means beating the dungeon within the stringent time limit. For context, gear rewards cap out at level 10.

Just hopping on over to the warcraftlogs of the run, and oop, yep. There's Thrash on the top tank of the group accounting for 59.38% of their damage. Anyway, Blizzard quickly stepped in to revert the change yesterday, with community manager Kaivax writing:

"Our recent adjustments to Guardian have made the Elune’s Chosen build stronger than intended. We’re going to take steps to bring this back in line with realm restarts during scheduled weekly maintenance this week."

Reactions have been pretty funny, all told. Here's a thread on the WoW Subreddit directly blaming these five bears for getting the class nerfed:

Honestly, while WoW's recent problems with its latest patch have been… let's call them not great, I think this sort of chicanery is to be celebrated. Not on Blizzard's part, but the players'. I just think it's neat to see folks trying absurd things just because they can. And also because Blizzard buffed one of their abilities by 200%. That also.

Ever since Blizzard released World of Warcraft Classic (and maybe even before), players have been begging for it to take a version of the old MMO and experiment with it. This proposed "WoW Classic Plus" wouldn't follow the timeline of updates the original MMO did, but veer off in a new direction as if it were a modern game—much like Old School Runescape.

With no major WoW Classic releases announced, WoW Classic Plus believers are convinced their time is almost here. Blizzard recently invited a bunch of well known WoW Classic creators to California for something none of them can talk about until an NDA is lifted. As far as I can tell, this hasn't happened before and is, at the very least, compelling evidence that Blizzard is working on something that isn't just another expansion re-release.

"I did just get approval to say that I will be gone a little bit next week," WoW creator Xaryu said during a recent Twitch stream, smiling as his chat exploded with "Classic+" messages. "Because I am visiting Blizzard next week—good news—for something that I cannot say, but I will be there."

If it wasn't for the fact that Blizzard specifically picked WoW streamers who focus on WoW Classic, like Sodapoppin and Esfand, I would've written this off as wishful thinking. But you don't invite these people to see the next release of an old expansion early. It might not be Classic Plus, but it's gotta be something new.

Even though Blizzard has never said it's working on a WoW Classic Plus, there have been a couple signs that it's interested in doing more with WoW Classic as a format. Chinese players currently have access to a version of WoW Classic that remixes old raids, and it doesn't seem to have an expiration date. And a 2025 wrap-up post teased that the team has been "cooking on the long-term future of WoW Classic," with a bunch of plus signs drawn below it.

It's possible the streamers are seeing the result of Blizzard's only WoW Classic Plus-like release, Season of Discovery. A seasonal version of the MMO that let you bend the rules with things like healing mages and tanking warlocks, Season of Discovery was an exaggerated version of the old MMO that didn't quite satisfy people who want a permanent version with new material. However, Season of Discovery's surprise success could've sparked Blizzard to start working on a Classic Plus for real.

Given how much nostalgia there is for playing with WoW's old systems in its old world through the likes of WoW Remix and Season of Discovery, I think a WoW Classic Plus, be it limited-time or permanent, is inevitable. BlizzCon is in September, which makes this seem like the perfect time to start teasing a new-ish version of WoW.

World of Warcraft's player housing feature is great—the microtransactions involved? Not so much. To be clear: There's a huge list of decor you can get in the game without paying anything other than your usual subscription, and the system has enough freedom that you can absolutely build your own treehouse, if you wanted.

But it still doesn't smack of great optics when Blizzard trots out housing packages like the Cosy Treehouse Retreat bundle, which costs a whopping $75 in Hearthsteel. Yikes.

That is, for context, more than $25 more expensive than the Midnight expansion itself, and $5 more than the Heroic Edition. Now, the bundle itself does have some cool stuff in it—two treehouse variants and a bunch of secondary decor items, and you can grab just the treehouses themselves for $40—but still. Yikes.

That's not to say nobody's going to buy these. Back in January of last year, it was estimated that a $90 dinosaur mount raked in a cool $15 million for Blizzard. Developers don't just put packs like these out for no reason at all, and I've no doubt that the Cosy Treehouse Retreat will be seen as a very nice uptick on Blizzard's balance sheets.

However, it's pretty clear that this pack really is just oriented towards "whales", a somewhat derogatory term (nonetheless applicable here) used to describe the small section of any game's playerbase with deep enough pockets to be just fine dropping a cool $75 on whatever they'd like.

Your average player with a normal salary and bills to pay, even if they are very invested in Player Housing, isn't going to be taken by any of the offers Blizzard's putting out, here—the people actually using this system would likely go in for cheap, affordable kits full of miscellaneous items that'd help construct what they're actually making. Like a Star Destroyer.

That's not really a thing on the Player Housing store. The closest thing is this $35 starting decor pack, which gets you… uh, two gazebos and $25 of Hearthsteel, which you could use to buy a handful of items, I guess.

I think it's ostensibly whatever for Blizzard to be offering microtransactions for player housing—it's still adding decor items that're available through play, and if it wants to charge for prefabs designed for players who aren't artistically gifted enough to cobble sculptures together out of a dozen rugs, fine.

But it does dim my opinion of the entire feature to see the store so cynically angled towards the portion of the playerbase they can milk for dosh, rather than the humble proletariat that might be actually invested in the system they're making this stuff for. As one player on the game's subreddit puts it: "You can buy real trees for less."

World of Warcraft is one of those old, dogged titans that've been trudging on in the MMO industry for over two decades, now—and even in a genre where the success stories are mostly ancient, that's some going. In its golden age, WoW was the game that all of its contemporaries were trying to dethrone. And even though it's been through several severe wobbles in the past few years (see: Shadowlands), it's not going anywhere any time soon.

But there is an alternate universe in which it might have at least diminished while its team focused on bigger and better things, per former Blizzard president Mike Ybarra, who has had a lot to say about the game recently after a disastrously buggy patch has put things on thin ice.

Ybarra took to X to write that, during his tenure at Blizzard—which ended when the company was acquired for $68.4 billion from Microsoft in 2024, leading to 1,900 layoffs across Xbox and Blizzard and the closure of several studios to help foot the bill—he had quite a few ideas about the direction WoW should take.

This includes a "WoW that is about WAR" and an expansion "about how there is always a Lich King" after Arthas' dethroning at the end of WoTLK. He also advocated for "spending far more time on raids and new ideas for the CORE gaming audience vs. the casuals."

Quick point of order—while I can see a continuation of Bolvar Fordragon's story being interesting, I'm not sure the idea of focusing on that "core gaming audience" is necessarily the way winds have blown. Most successful MMOs, WoW included, have accepted that there's not a hardcore vs. casual divide anymore, while the ones catering to hardcore audiences are either niche or killed in the cradle (rest in peace, Wildstar). But I digress.

The biggest eyeraise is that Ybarra was also apparently advocating for a sequel to WoW: "WoW 2 instead of the same WoW 1 expansions over and over re-skinned."

He states, however, that he wasn't necessarily able to make that happen—that would've been a call by current game director Ion Hazzikostas: "The President of Blizzard doesn't pitch game ideas. He/She has little influence on the games themselves other than input at various stages and random ideation usually directly with the Game Director (who owns the creative vision for the game).

"The President is just one channel of input they can completely ignore if they choose. Ion did not ignore [me], he balanced a lot of things and ultimately decided where he wanted to take the game."

MMO sequels aren't entirely a crapshoot. Final Fantasy 11 and Final Fantasy 14 both co-exist in their own spheres of success, while Guild Wars 2 was a solid move for ArenaNet. But would it have worked with WoW?

I mean, maybe. But when I look at the time period where a sequel would've made sense—probably 10 years ago—I can't really think of a good stepping-off point. Either you're ditching the game in some of its most beloved eras (Mists of Pandaria and Legion, respectively) or you're moving on without any goodwill from the playerbase. Maybe you could've done it instead of revamping the old world for Cataclysm, I dunno.

But otherwise, would Blizzard have been able to convince its subscribers that WoW 2 is a good MMO to hop to during the content droughts of Warlords of Draenor, the systems headache of Battle for Azeroth, or the catastrophes of Shadowlands? Probably not. And you can't stay sticking with WoW didn't work out.

Yes, it is a deeply inconsistent game, and its latest patch is a bit of a disaster. But it's still here, ain't it? In a genre filled with bloodbaths, WoW stands stubbornly profitable—at least, enough to cause Microsoft to spend billions on it. I don't know if anything short of a meteor hitting Earth would put it down for good.

Former president of Blizzard Mike Ybarra has entered the phase of being a videogame executive that involves, among a lot of things, some very unfiltered posting on social media. Like arguing with other CEOs over New Years, or telling people they need to "man up" over AI use.

Anyway, World of Warcraft: Midnight had a really rough patch, recently, and given his understandable investment as the former captain of the ship, Ybarra has taken to his X account (thanks, GamesRadar+) to comment on the state of the game once more:

"Unfortunate. WoW has to reset and the commitment has to be clear and firm or it will continue to decline."

As someone who has been keeping track of WoW, I am going to take a moment to quibble, here—"reset" is a big word, and not necessarily even what's in order. The baseline offerings of Midnight are good. Player Housing was a great success, the new Prey system has a lot of promise, its raids and dungeons are all solid and interesting, its zones are jaw-droppingly gorgeous. There's a lot to like!

There's also the point of order that WoW has actually shaken things up considerably already, completely overhauling the game's class design to better suit a world without UI mods (addons).

The issue is that the train's moving so fast the wheels are threatening to come off of the dang thing. I actually wrote about it this weekend—while I wouldn't call the game perfect, the problem isn't with the MMO itself, it's with Blizzard outpacing its own quality control. Either the developer needs to slow down, or it needs to get a better handle on proactive bug fixes.

But "reset" implies a bigger scrapping and starting over—and trust me, compared to WoW's lowest low-points? We don't have it nearly as bad as we did back then. Need I remind anybody that this is an MMO that used to have 400+ day patch droughts.

Now, to Ybarra's credit, he did oversee the start of that turnaround. World of Warcraft: Dragonflight released in 2022, and Ybarra left Blizzard in 2024. Dragonflight itself was a genuinely solid start to a revitalisation of the game, one that saw Blizzard start to stick to roadmaps at an even tempo, focus on evergreen content, and hit the reset button on its story.

But he was also present for Shadowlands, one of the game's most disastrous expansions, and he also oversaw the $68.4 billion acquisition of Blizzard that resulted in 1,900 employees laid off across Activision-Blizzard.

While I wouldn't put much stock in the argument that follows—it's a slapfight on X—Ybarra does respond to some criticism over his tenure and where it led Blizzard: "You'd have to blow the team completely up to course correct. We did what we could under the circumstances, but clearly did not succeed."

Anyway, I'm not convinced that Blizzard needs a complete overhaul. There's a lot of work to do and good will to scrape back, but one bad patch doesn't make a dying MMO—I mean, unless you're Star Wars: Galaxies. Bugs can be fixed, and Midnight's not going to sink the ship just because of one sketchy update.

Is the studio at risk if it doesn't turn things around in the next few major patches? Sure. But we're seeing signs of ill health, not a game on life support, and WoW's a stubborn old beast. If it can make it through Shadowlands without exploding, I'm pretty sure a buggy patch ain't gonna do it.

World of Warcraft's experienced a self-resurrection after the foibles of Shadowlands six years ago, and that's due, in part, to Blizzard worshipping at the altar of the roadmap—as opposed to past expansions, where content droughts could last into the hundreds of days, Blizzard has stuck to its plans with a religious strictness.

It's not hard to see why. MMOs are a difficult beast to wrangle, and being able to hit a consistent rhythm of patches is a great way to keep players subscribed. It's also something all the big live service games—which MMOs first inspired, and now have to draw from to keep current—hold as part of their core model.

And hey, it's worked. Dragonflight, The War Within, and now Midnight—while certainly not immune from criticism—have done a lot to build up goodwill. Especially when you combine them with the successful experiments of Season of Discovery and Remix. It's something I've complimented WoW on before.

But the latest patch, 12.0.5, shows the other side of this coin: It's become quite clear now that Blizzard might've needed a few more weeks to pull everything together. It's an update that's rife with bugs and design issues—some of which were called out on the PTR weeks in advance and were left unaddressed.

You can safely write out the devs burying their heads in the sand—no one's more aware of a game's bugs than the people trying to fix them. So the question is, why weren't they given the time to sort it?

I think it's due to that dogged adherence to the schedule, one that permeates the live service, roadmap-drowned structure. Releasing something a little under-tuned, or—as per Ion Hazzikostas—starting conservative with rewards and then tuning things up later? That's far, far more preferable to the horror of a delay, or so Blizzard's implied by its actions.

Water, water everywhere

It's almost hard to blame Blizzard for being afraid of this, because WoW's droughts have been some of the worst in MMO history. 6.2 for Warlords of Draenor was the last major patch before Legion dropped a whopping 400 days later. Mists of Pandaria saw another lull after the Siege of Orgrimmar—a teeth-grinding 14 months before WoD came out the following year.

I'm certain nobody wants to go back to those days, but there's something to be said for flexibility. If 12.0.5 needed a few more weeks, would anyone have complained? I mean, obviously they would have. It's World of Warcraft. But would they have complained more than they are now? I don't think so.

I have, however, been on the other side of that coin. My main love, Final Fantasy 14, has irked me quite a bit with its sluggish tempo—but a lot of that's due to its rewards structure rather than what Square Enix is putting out. A lot of column A, and only a bit of column B.

But even then, Square's inflexibility is a consequence of sticking too much to a schedule.

Moreover, I can't help but ask myself what all of this is for. The last slice of Midnight's first seasonal offerings, the March on Quel'Danas, dropped March 31. In comes in patch 12.0.5 less than a month later, hucking Ritual Sites, the Voidforge, and Void Assaults in an overstimulating wave of new crap to do.

Slow your roll

I'm slower than your average player that's entirely dedicated, given I need to play and write about a wide variety of games—but I wasn't nearly finished with my plate before Blizzard dropped a bunch more mashed potatoes on it. I'm full. Give me a second!

Maybe I'm complaining that my steak is just too juicy—and I would agree with you if the patch wasn't so riddled with bugs while my cup runneth over. But if we're already getting far too much, what's the actual trade-off, here?

I genuinely would not have blinked if the entirety of April had passed without an update, because there's already a lot to do in Midnight. A whole raid tier, delves, Mythic+ dungeons, rep grinds, Prey, player housing, and little Arcantina side-quests. I look at what I've got left to do and I get given a sense of vertigo that's honestly making it take longer.

I think there's been a misalignment here. Blizzard brought its premiere MMO back from the brink by adopting a live-service style structure of roadmaps, seasons, and promises kept, yes—but that doesn't mean that its playerbase has the same appetite as, say, someone who hops from shooter to shooter.

MMOs can survive a bit of a slower-paced release structure for a few reasons—firstly, the days when people are attached to one MMO as their main gaming diet are over. These games have a bit of an ageing population (a Google Play report from 2022 found that over half of players were between 25-44 years old) with more responsibilities, true, but also wider tastes.

Secondly, they're also just different at a structural level. An MMO like WoW has a broad range of things to do and a big historical backlog of expansions to thicken out the videogame soup. Natural lulls are a chance to dip into things you've not explored yet, help out your mates, go hunting for transmogs, level up alts, and so on.

Lastly, MMOs are primarily about investment. They're games where people make little homes and communities for themselves, and it's not a disaster if those communities have time to breathe and help each other out rather than chasing the next item level increase.

Does an MMO need to avoid droughts? Yes. Should it release things at a solid tempo? Yes. But WoW doesn't need to copy everything from the seasonal live service model—and it certainly doesn't need to avoid delaying a patch above all else.

I hope the lesson Blizzard learns (aside from giving more resources to its QA team, which I'm sure is full of people trying their hardest) isn't simply that it needs to be better at its current pace, but that it can slow down every once in a while. Maybe not for 400 days, sure, but if a patch ever needs a couple more weeks to cook, I can just go hunt for decor or something. It might be time for WoW to slow down just a little.