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).

They are spending money to boost level 58 casino bots now 🤣🤣🤣 from r/classicwow

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:

Guardian druids right now from r/wow

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.

World of Warcraft's latest patch, 12.0.5, was a bit of a doozy—flooded with bugs from small irritants to busted classes, head-scratching design decisions, and raid-scuppering glitches. Not to mention just some confusing choices, like giving my class a new ability that makes it harder for everyone to not stand in the fire.

It's been one of the messiest updates in recent memory, and while I know Blizzard's halfway decent at sorting things out after the fact, the point remains that a lot of what players are griping about was brought up on the PTR—in some cases weeks in advance.

In a new post to the game's site, Blizzard has issued an apology: "The 12.0.5 patch launch was not up to our standards, and we know this disrupted your time and caused justified frustration.

"The team has been working around the clock since launch to stabilize the game and fix the biggest issues players were hitting right away," the post continues—which is fair enough. Several problems, like bonus rolls from the Voidforge and and the aforementioned class bugs have already been stamped out.

"The team is taking lessons learned from this launch to help ensure this doesn't happen again. We will also work harder to communicate openly, early, and often when a launch doesn't go as expected: the known issues we're working on, fixes as they roll out, and any other information that would be useful to our community as problems are worked on and solved.

"We care deeply about this game, and we play it right alongside you. We will do better."

It does seem genuinely heartfelt, and I don't envy being in the position of a developer having to bear the brunt of any irate fanbase—let alone World of Warcraft players, who are… let's just call them passionate, for better or worse.

But it's clear patch 12.0.5 was born of a structural problem with Blizzard's QA pipeline. Devs aren't just oblivious, they know when something's wrong, but they're also paid salaried jobs and, like any work, can't just pivot without upper management's say-so. Developers not being given the time to fix obvious, already-reported bugs before launch smacks to me of a management issue.

Fans are, understandably, waiting to see if Blizzard can do more than talk the talk. Over on the forums, one player writes: "All these bugs come from trying to release too many systems too fast. We don’t need all these side games in wow. Our classes don't function, communication in game doesn't function, pets are broken, battle pets are broken, UI is broken, Instances are broken. It would be faster to list what does work."

Over on the r/WoW subreddit, sentiment is also rough: "What I don’t understand is that some of these bugs were reported 3+ weeks ago on PTR," writes user tapwater86. "Who in their right mind would sign off to go live with all of this? There’s no way someone in the chain didn’t say 'hey guys we have a lot of issues we need another week or two'."

One option is just slowing down a bit—Blizzard's been on a roll ever since Dragonflight in meeting its roadmap goals, but the game's been getting… very ambitious, lately. An overhaul of the UI to fit a post-addon world, a player housing system (which is genuinely rather good), a narrative promising to span three entire expansions that were announced all at once, and a rapid-fire patch cadence.

As someone used to the arguably too slow cadence of Final Fantasy 14, WoW players have been eating good—but with patches like these, it feels like Blizzard is struggling to keep up with itself. For both the players and the development team's sake, I hope they can find a balance soon.

World of Warcraft's latest patch has come with… well, let's just say it's not exactly landed well with the playerbase. That's owing to a swarm of nasty bugs that have made it through the net—ranging from genuinely game-breaking to tiny frustrations, but gathering speed into one big mess.

One of the funnier outcomes of Blizzard's difficulty with QA this patch cycle, however, comes from the Outlaw Rogue, and it's either completely unintended, or just an accidental consequence of something that seems cool on paper but in practice, uh, gets people killed.

I've been playing this specialisation since Dragonflight, and it's always held a special place in my heart—I like the fast-paced, proc-focused elements of it, and Midnight tidied up the spec's Roll the Bones feature so I could merrily keep shooting people without a loud WeakAura screaming at me to toss some dice every 30 seconds.

It has, however, been a touch underperformant in Midnight, and needed some tweaks. Blizzard, like a mischievous genie, has granted my wish—but not without dire consequences.

There's a new talent in the Trickster hero tree, and it's called Cloud Cover. Whenever you activate Adrenaline Rush (you will be doing this a lot), you drop a huge smoke bomb. Attacks made from within the cloud have a chance of applying Fazed, which is the Trickster's damage debuff.

It's an objective improvement to the Trickster rogue for both Outlaw and Subtlety specialisations (that share the Trickster tree) and it's flavourful as hell—I think it's genuinely cool that my rotation now includes throwing down a smoke bomb and doing a bullet storm from within it with my dual pistols a-swashbuckling.

There's just one problem: This is a game about not standing in the fire. And you know what makes it hard to stand in the fire? A giant sodding smoke cloud. Look at this thing.

This is a massive problem, because it means that if you want to do content as a Trickster rogue, you've got to basically ask a whole group of very patient strangers to bear with you while you drop a giant muddy puddle in the middle of everything. And while there are options in the menu for adjusting what you see from other players, the point remains that I still gotta deal with it, man. And I'm already bad at not standing in the fire.

Anyway, I hope Blizzard at the very least makes the cloud a little less thick. I do genuinely adore the flavour of it, just not the way it clashes with just about every design decision in every piece of content in the game. At least I don't have to chug a darkness potion to up the contrast, anymore.

As a routine World of Warcraft player, I've been pretty warm on Midnight—at the very least, the offerings it provided on launch all seemed well put together, with a few asterisks. Those asterisks are starting to bog down the sentences they're attached to, though, as the game's latest patch, 12.0.5, is utterly rife with bugs. Some small, some large, and some just completely baffling.

We've already reported on the new prop hunt decor mode getting ruined by players with access to the "track humanoids" ability or certain consumables, but if you happen to either do too well (or too poorly) in a round, you'll also get punished for not participating. Which seems to me a pretty glaring oversight, given prop hunt incentivises you to, you know, stay still once you've found a hiding spot. It's the entire point of hide and seek.

If you're too good at hiding in decor duel, you get flagged as not participating and don't get rewards even if you win from r/wow

Then there are more issues with loot. The Voidforge, which shouldn't give you duplicate items, is doing just that—with one unlucky player getting the same shoulderpads three times in a row. That's since been fixed, but it's far from the only major flaw in the patch itself, as detailed in this roundup thread by Reddit user SgtFolley.

Player Housing went down for multiple regions when the patch dropped, and there's a delve that prevents strafing if you pick up a mirror. Multiple classes entered the patch with major bugs—for example, Holy Paladins have an FPS-tanking talent and a missing hotfix that puts them a whopping 50% below other healers in terms of damage.

As SgtFolley points out, certain bugs impacting Demonology Warlocks were reported on the PTR almost a month in advance, and weren't fixed before the patch went live.

The final boss of the new raid also appears bugged for some players, who are unable to cleanse a stacking damage buff as intended and wiping the raid. Some players can mount up while moving, for some reason. The Keystone Mythic achievement had to be disabled, though players will receive it if they qualified retroactively.

One particular foible that I'm staggered by are these tooltips, which clearly missed a second round of editing: "The first thing you need to know when investigating a Ritual Site is that with so much magic in the air that while in combat Regeneration Orbs will manifest healing you for 15% of your heath." I've italicised a typo—it actually says heath, in addition to feeling like an excited toddler explaining their favourite toy to me.

These bugs range from complete head-scratchers to relatively minor, but even small bugs have a way of building up fear in the playerbase. And while I'm usually one to remind folks that game development is far more complicated than it looks, even I'm sitting here wondering how some of this stuff made it to the live servers.

Back when I put together my World of Warcraft: Midnight review, I wrote: "Given how reactive Blizzard is, I believe it'll get a handle on the expansion's wonky class design and bugs within the coming months." And while some of these issues have been fixed, proving Blizzard's reactivity, it's clear something is wrong here.

New problems are clearly being brought up faster than the studio can tackle them, and if every patch comes with a barrage of issues like this, it's not going to matter much if Blizzard's sticking to its roadmaps. Especially if, like the Haranir clipping bugs, they've already been raised among the playerbase for weeks or months. Something's gotta give.

The last thing you want in a game mode where players disguise themselves as furniture in a World of Warcraft city is free access to x-ray vision. There's no fun to be had when you're just chasing after dots on your minimap instead of studying a suspicious table that you could've sworn moved a little.

Unfortunately, that is exactly what has happened to Decor Duels, Blizzard's new prop hunt-style mode that uses housing decor. It didn't take very long for players to realize that the "track humanoids" ability isn't disabled when you're in the mode, according to Wowhead: Hunters have it for free, but anyone can activate the ability with a Blackened Worg Steak consumable item. With it flipped on, it's no longer hide-and-seek, but a game of tag.

That is a critical oversight if I've ever seen one, which is surprising considering Blizzard put in extra precautions to keep Decor Duels fair. The mode seems to have an invisible AFK timer for the hiders if they sit in one spot too long, preventing them from receiving any rewards, for example. But someone on the development team must've forgotten about an ability that's been in the game for as long as I can remember.

It also appears that some players have found ways to slip past the invisible walls around the arena to plant themselves in unreachable areas. This is actually something Overwatch players do in that game's prop hunt mode as well, so I'm not particularly surprised. You challenge people with hiding in map geometry and they're inevitably going to figure out how to break into out-of-bounds areas. It's WoW we're talking about here: Players have been squeezing themselves through cracks to reach forbidden areas for years.

I'll cut Blizzard some slack, given that it's only been a day since the patch with Decor Duels came out. It's also never made a mode like this before, so it could still be figuring out all the variables it needs to lock down. But it's still a bummer that it's not really fair for anyone at the moment. Hopefully a patch is incoming because I know how WoW players get when there are housing decor rewards involved.

Last week, popular World of Warcraft private server Turtle WoW got hit with a cease and desist from Blizzard after a judge ruled in the studio's favor regarding a copyright infringement suit filed last September. Court documents revealed that the two parties reached a settlement that hinged on "certain actions that are required to be taken by certain parties," and today, the other shoe dropped for anyone still playing the modded MMO: a forum post announced a complete shutdown of the project.

"Working on Turtle WoW has been the highlight of our lives," said Turtle WoW developer Torta in the post. "The adventures you had, the battles you fought, and the friends you met are what made it all worthwhile. We hope you will cherish those moments. What we leave behind are fond memories of an 8-year-long journey, and we hope you'll remember it every now and then."

The servers will close on May 14, and all servers have been shot forward to the final patch "for those who want to see the new raids before the project's sunset." All associated social media channels, including the forum site, will close later this year on Oct. 16.

Fans of the server saying their farewells on the subreddit and forum. "Wish I ended up playing more and dinging 60 in the end, but the time I did spend was fun. Thanks for the game and wishing everyone all the best," wrote forum user Zeran. Reddit user ElChuppolaca wrote, "This is genuinely heartbreaking but I figured it would come seeing as they delayed any response for so long."

If you're unfamiliar with the server, it takes an Old School RuneScape approach to World of Warcraft's pre-expansion era, back before you could roll a paladin on the Horde or get an epic mount without grinding for hours. There are new raids, zones, playable races, and dungeons, but nothing that raises the max level or incorporates lore from recent story arcs.

The server aimed to deliver the "Classic Plus" experience fans of vanilla WoW have clamored for since official pre-expansion servers landed, and with Blizzard teasing its own take on the idea following the end of the game's Season of Discovery, it's hard not to see parallels with the shutdown of Nostalrius (which came just a year before World of Warcraft Classic was announced).

Regrettably, it seems that publisher-approved fan servers like EverQuest's Project 1999 and City of Heroes's Homecoming are the exception and not the rule, as in the end, the Turtle WoW team's open plea for a fan server licensing framework proved fruitless.

If someone can hit the level cap using only dance mats, then playing World of Warcraft with hot dog controllers isn't too out there, right? But watching Addison2k gently flicking and thwapping those dogs in his meat-only mythic keystone run is enough to make you question where you draw the line.

The controllers Addison2k uses are 3d-printed plastic with four hot dogs inserted in each, wired for touch input. One controls movement and the other controls abilities, and it quickly proves playable—for a retribution paladin at least. Though "playable" isn't the same thing as ideal.

For starters, Addison2k can't move the camera. "It's really hard to dodge," he says with understatement to the players who are carrying him. "It puts me backwards-walking." Only one problem proves insurmountable though, forcing him to fall back on the keyboard for a single key-press: "My target got stuck to a dead mob and I don't have tab bound to a hot dog."

The other players don't seem to mind the fact they're stuck with a hot dog paladin who keeps kicking and can't cast lay on hands. Mostly they just troll him by insisting he should be using his tongue to work those glizzies instead of his hands. "I'm not gonna lick the hot dogs," Addison2k insists in reply. "That's insane. Plus they're kind of warm now. It makes it weird."

Despite that one slight cheat with the tab key, at the end of the run all the bosses are defeated and the dog-wielder is victorious. Though the true punishment comes after. As he says in the comments, "my hands smelled like hotdogs for hours".

World of Warcraft's been taking some big swings at its difficulty assumptions in recent years—both adding harder solo and open world content in the form of Delves and Prey, while also making the typically hardcore content slightly easier to get through.

Take Mythic+, the endgame dungeon experience that sees players speedrunning high-level dungeons with vicious modifiers for, well, phat loot. Midnight's latest season saw players chewing through it with relative ease, thanks to both some re-jigged numbers tuning and a different philosophy towards those modifiers.

For example, in lower difficulties, tanks are helped out by Lindormi’s Guidance, which displays a route through the dungeon. Couple that with gearing tracks that're generally easier to advance on your lonesome, and you've got a recipe that results in one of the easiest Mythic+ seasons in years.

Which is a bit of a problem if you like pushing Mythic+ keys. MMOs live and die on their rewards structure. Even if you're doing it for the love of the game, it still feels unsatisfying and pointless to do high-level content if you're not getting rewarded for your trouble, as was the case with this season.

Well, Blizzard's moved to fix it. In the upcoming patch, high-end Mythic+ players will be getting some unique rewards, per a post on the forums:

"Upon reaching 3400 Mythic+ rating, players will earn a Timelost Saddle (earned once per warband per season). This item can be brought to Lindormi in Silvermoon or the Timeways, where it can be exchanged for a mount of your choice from a curated selection. This includes Keystone Master and Keystone Legend mounts from previous seasons, as well as all new mounts being added to the pool."

In addition, if you wind up being in the top 1% of Mythic+ players, you'll get a unique mount all to yourself.

While this is something of a bandaid fix (if you don't care about mounts, this isn't that great of a draw), it does seem pretty savvy from Blizzard. Creating one new mount to add to the game doesn't seem like that much of a workload, while the Timelost Saddle is making use of models that are already in the game.

It also shows an understanding that the need for long-term grinds are something Blizzard's keeping at the forefront as it adjusts to its new difficulty philosophy. While the studio usually doesn't get it right on the first pass, I've seen enough reactivity to feel confident the next season'll have something the sweatiest of gamers can aim for.

One integral part of World of Warcraft back in the day was powerlevelling: I remember a starry-eyed Harvey watching Protection Paladins on YouTube sweeping through hordes of the Scarlet Crusade for a group of lucky levellers. I was completely unaware of the economic underbelly supporting it, but it sure looked cool to see someone soloing a dungeon.

It was doubly helpful because levelling back then was a bit of a pain. Even without any fancy tricks in retail, levelling up an alt account today doesn't take much time—but back in the Burning Crusade? It was a journey. It also helped you rake in gold as a nice bonus, something that was also in more meaningfully short supply.

If you're hoping to recreate this experience on the WoW Burning Crusade Classic: Anniversary realms, though, you'll be denied the pleasure. As revealed on the official forums by community manager Kaivax, Blizzard has stepped in to stop dungeon boosting.

"We’ve observed a significant number of Burning Crusade players entering dungeons and then participating in no meaningful gameplay," Kaivax writes, "Often while only one party member plays through the instance. When this is prominent, it can lead to detrimental economic effects, among other concerns, so we’re implementing a series of hotfixes to address it."

The hotfixes in question? Firstly, no freebies—players need to participate to earn any experience in dungeons now. Secondly, non-boss enemies now drop loot based on how many players participated in the kill. This takes an axe to both power levelling and gold farming.

And while it's an uppercut to my nostalgia, I do kinda get why it's happening—even if the old days were more innocent (at least, with my rose-tinted glasses on), it's a different landscape out there. Real money trading is more rife, powerlevelling services are rampant, and the information required to perform it is more readily available.

You're no longer special if you have a kitted-out Paladin that can carve through one of these dungeons without trouble—and that's going to have a major impact on the economy, something that's notoriously hard to control in MMOs.

On the other hand, Blizzard now offers its own level 58 player boost on its official store. While services like these are a genuine attempt to cut down on real money trading and protect players from potentially bad actors (the equivalent of 'if you're going to drink, I'd rather you do it in my house'), it's still a fair point that removing powerlevelling routes does make these boosts more appealing. I wouldn't describe this move as a crash grab at all, but it doesn't help the optics.

Either way, the kibosh is being put on dungeon boosting when the next weekly maintenance rolls around this week. We'll have to see if Blizzard sticks to its guns on this one.

You can get about as granular with what sort of World of Warcraft you'd like to play as you might with a deli sandwich or an ice cream cone: Would you like that classic or modern? Permadeath-only? That one expansion with all the alcohol-dependent pandas? But private servers like the popular Turtle WoW are still the only place players can find the WoW equivalent to Old School RuneScape: the classic game, but with new stuff.

That said, while some private servers for other games have gotten the go-ahead from the right people, Blizzard hasn't been gentle with these sorts of projects in the past. Before World of Warcraft's official classic realms serving up the vanilla version of the game, there was the private server Nostalrius, which got into legal trouble before long. Now there is Turtle WoW, which got hit with a lawsuit last September—and on Friday, a US district court judge ruled in Blizzard's favor.

You can find the court docs online, and they detail an order to cease and desist. Basically, the devs have been ordered to stop "developing, programming, coding, operating, updating, supporting, maintaining," et cetera, the server. Notably, it also prohibits the developers from passing along their code to facilitate a "'successor.'" That might seem cheeky, but these servers rarely just lay down and die.

Another document states that Blizzard and the defendants have reached a settlement which "is expected to result in a resolution of the action in its entirety," though the specifics are not shared. "The terms of the parties’ settlement agreements are confidential," the document reads. "However, the settlement is conditioned upon certain actions that are required to be taken by certain parties and non-parties over the next several weeks."

Shortly after the lawsuit was filed in 2025, the Turtle WoW team asked Blizzard for a fan server licensing framework. While the server didn't charge a fee for entry or technically have a cash shop, it did allow players to donate in exchange for in-game rewards.

Fans of the server are not pleased. "I get that intellectual property should be respected, but Turtle WoW is giving us what Blizzard won't," said Reddit user kurtkeoki on a thread sharing the news. "I would gladly pay a subscription for something similar to Turtle, but it simply doesn't exist."

World of Warcraft's next patch is fast approaching—and while it's not a major update in the sense that there won't be new raids, there is a healthy batch of new things to do out in the game world that should help you push keys, get your Heroic and Mythic clears, or engage in the real endgame: Fashion.

Aside from the prop hunt mode, WoW will be getting three new kinds of overworld content come April 21. The first are void assaults—open-world attacks on Eversong and Zul'aman that work through a weekly rotation. Beat enough void strikes, and you'll have an incursion on your hands.

The second are ritual sites, which do seem pretty neat. Something of a demi-delve, these'll see players of party sizes between one and five aiming to stop the naga and Twilight's blade from accruing power: They'll also come with difficulty tiers, escalating rewards, and contributions to your Great Vault.

If all that doom and gloom is a little much for you, you can go chill out with some spearfishing in Zul'aman dubbed "Abyss Anglers", which promises more ways to upgrade your gear and is an opportunity snap up some cosmetic rewards. Little awkward if there's void assaults going on in the same zone, mind.

Finally, Decimus' voidforge is now properly open for business. Decimus being the suspicious, but sassy domanaar we teamed up with during Midnight's story. This was something you could unlock since the expansion's launch, but it's now finally going to have a use. Per this PTR post on the forums, it'll work like this:

"Upon defeating a Midnight Season 1 raid boss or completing a Mythic+ Dungeon, Bountiful Delve, or Prey Hunt on Nightmare difficulty, players may choose to spend their Nebulous Voidcores to receive a random item appropriate for their Loot Specialization from that activity. After receiving an item in this way, it is removed from that loot pool until all eligible items have been obtained on a per-difficulty basis."

As for how you get those voidcores, there's a buncha methods—gold, Marl, Veteran dawncrests, and so on. You'll also be able to get Ascendant Voidcores (we are fast approaching proper noun overload, but this is an MMO), which allows you to bump up one of your fully-upgraded Mythic or Hero-tier weapons or trinkets.

Which, alongside Prey, marks the second gearing method we've obtained in this expansion from a suspiciously self-interested force tampering with dark magics. I now have two nickels. Basically, the patch offers more world content for solo players and more gearing options for the item-level chasers. Oh! And prop hunt, of course.

You could build a cozy cabin or recreate an entire Counter-Strike map with World of Warcraft's player housing tools, but imagine the fun of pulling one over on other players by becoming a table and hiding in plain sight.

Blizzard's huge catalog of household objects are practically begging for a prop hunt mode and it looks like one is finally coming in a few weeks with patch 12.0.5.

The new mode, called Decor Duels, will be a game of hide-and-seek that takes place in the elven capital city of Silvermoon. One team will play as random, everyday items, and the other will be on the hunt for whichever objects look curiously out of place. Part of the fun of prop hunt modes is trying to see how well you can slip into the scenery without people noticing.

You'd be surprised at how easy it is to blend in when there are so many other normal pieces of decor around. A single misplaced barrel or crate won't raise alarms unless you get caught fidgeting a little. Overwatch has its own prop hunt mode that gets surprisingly competitive as players try to find the most absurd places to hide.

Decor Duels will reward you with a mount, toys, and housing decor for playing it. You can view the full list of goodies on Wowhead. It doesn't seem like you need to do anything special to start up a match, so everyone should be able to play. Blizzard says you can join a team through the group finder tool under the PvP section.

I'm glad to see Blizzard is making use of the housing tools in new ways. It's made it clear that all the work going into the system won't be limited to building homes: It will also touch quests and new modes, like Decor Duels. I figured we'd have to wait quite a while for that stuff to start showing up, but it looks like Blizzard already has big plans for how it's going to utilize these new tools for more than just building and decorating rooms.

Decor Duels will arrive with patch 12.0.5 on April 21.

I've never been in a match of Counter-Strike before and I can still recognize Dust 2 when I see it. It's a testament to the iconic design that it's just as recognizable when it's been built with the rudimentary tools of World of Warcraft's player housing.

An incredibly resourceful player recreated the map in the MMO, complete with a car made out of wood. I've been looking at the screenshots Reddit user Edengonedark posted and I'm still surprised that it's WoW under there. The hard edges on the crates and the fake blue skybox are extremely convincing as long as you don't scrutinize the tiny details too much.

You could send me one of their screenshots and tell me some indie shooter ripped off Dust 2 and I'd not only believe you, but I'd still be kind of impressed at the level of accuracy. On X, Edengonedark said it was "probably the hardest design I ever worked on," partially because the room wasn't tall enough. "Throw in that carpets + stones don't lie flat and I rage quit like 40 times per day lol," they added.

The build got the attention of the official WoW X account. It replied to the post with a joke video of an Orc first-person bunny-hopping with a knife out, asking, "B site when?"

Edengonedark politely asked people to not make fun of their car, which is made out of wooden shelves, doormats, and fruit plates. I've seen videogame cars made out of bespoke textures that look uglier than that, so I think they should give themselves some credit here. For me, it's the ability to look at the tools you have and imagine a way to build something so visually antithetical to the fantasy world of WoW that makes this truly commendable.

You can go visit their version of Dust 2 if you're an EU WoW player by following the directions they laid out in a comment on their Reddit post. They weren't joking when they said the map was in their house: You have to take a few turns and go through what sounds like a hidden passageway to find it.

Builds like this are why I appreciate Blizzard finally releasing player housing. I may not have the skills to create beautiful mansions or a literal Imperial Destroyer ship from Star Wars, but I at least get to enjoy seeing what far more creative people can pull off.

It's been a long and painfully close Race to World First for Team Liquid and Team Echo as both have gone head-to-head on the isle of Quel'Danas for two weeks, to ultimately defeat the World of Warcraft: Midnight's Season 1 mythic L'ura.

Team Echo led the charge with a best-in-world pull of 4.07% at one point. But in the end, they just lost out on victory, with Team Echo getting sub 0.45% wipe at one point and a 1.1% wipe just after Liquid managed to swipe the win by executing the secret fourth phase that had shocked players, casters, and onlookers days before. This means Team Liquid has won RWF four years in a row, with the last victory for Team Echo being back in 2022.

"If I was in that position I would be gutted," Team Liquid player Maximum says in a post-RWF interview. "That's like a year of your life. So just shoutout to [Echo] for being as good as they are. They got better from last year as well, and they easily could have won the race."

L'ura had three known phases for most of the race, just getting through the third phase proved to be a monumental task for all teams involved. Liquid managed to be the first to get L'ura down to 0 health during her third phase, and their reward was the shock and horror of being the first to find out that their hundreds of attempts weren't enough to claim RWF victory, as they had a whole new phase ahead of them.

If you haven't watched the now-infamous "L'ura Incident" video, which is essentially just a compilation of everyone's horrified reactions to the secret phase, then I'd suggest you give it a watch.

After L'ura falls in the third phase players jump out of their chairs, cheering and celebrating, as their coach desperately yells at them to sit back down and one player even yells out "This cannot be" as he reads the dialogue from a stunned NPC. Meanwhile L'ura regens 100% of her health ready for round four. Luckily, we can all laugh about it now Liquid has won RWF, otherwise it would be a slightly more depressing watch.

The fourth phase saw raiders deal with waves of void monstrosities with only one single beacon of light for help, but even so Liquid managed to keep all 20 members of their team alive for the final attempt. In the end Liquid took L'ura down after 473 pulls and two weeks of hard work. A job well done.

Imagine you're a professional World of Warcraft player trying to be the first in the world to kill the final boss of the newest raid and, after days of attempts, you finally see its health bar hit zero. You begin to cheer, ecstatic that you beat all the other guilds around the world, that you might be able to sleep peacefully tonight.

And then.

You glance back at your screen to see the boss standing back up, at full health, and beginning a phase you've never seen before.

"This cannot be," one of the raiders, THD, read aloud from the dialogue of a similarly stunned NPC watching the final boss of Midnight's latest raid come back to life over the weekend. "Secret phase! No!"

Blizzard developers must've been grinning as they watched an entire guild realize their job was far from over. Rumors of a secret phase were floating around after dataminers found unused boss abilities in the files, but the already brutal difficulty of the fight made it seem unlikely.

That's why just about every player leapt out of their chairs at the sight of the boss finally dying, only to sit right back down in disbelief as L'ura started "reintegrating" back to life. Liquid compiled everyone's reaction into a video about "the L'ura Incident," and it's impressive how quickly some of them brush off the shock and lock back in.

World first races tend to involve boss fights at their hardest. Part of it is intentional: Blizzard benefits from the popularity of the streamed event and making it too easy would ruin the fun. But part of it is because most of these players are going in relatively undergeared compared to all the people who will tackle it over the next few weeks.

One of L'ura's most challenging mechanics requires players to memorize the order of symbols and move on command to avoid instant death. World first raiding guilds, including Liquid, already have one player dedicated to shotcalling during fights, but this mechanic is so hard that they'd had to create a mod, or an addon, mid-race to help solve it.

Tight positioning, quick reflexes, and mastery over your class aren't always enough when there are so many variables in fights as complex as these. L'ura has a particularly nasty first phase by all accounts, and that just makes it even harder to learn how to survive the rest of them. After hours and hours of failed attempts, I too would've been convinced that it couldn't get any worse.

"Usually you can tell when you're at the end of a boss," Liquid raid leader Maximum said, reflecting on what happened. "Like when a secret phase happens, you're like there seems to be the need for something else here … But on this fight, I think the reason we celebrated is because 0% was so hard to get to that it felt like a final thing. It felt like the end."

A fourth phase means Liquid has to find a way to do the first three phases even cleaner than they have been. It also means every other guild now knows what they're in for, making an already close race even closer.

As of today, L'ura still stands. Team Liquid is back at it, hoping to kill the boss before the UK guilds wake back up for another round. Meanwhile, Blizzard is being showered in praise from viewers who are thrilled to see that it had one last trick up its sleeve to keep the race going for at least another day or two.

World of Warcraft's generally made a few great choices when it comes to its raid and rewards structure in the past few years—one of these solid ideas has been the inclusion of story mode, a soloable version of its endgame raids that lets casual players bop their big bads on the head so they can see the cutscenes everyone at Blizzard worked very hard on.

Well, sort of. The issue is, story mode—much like the casual Looking For Raid (LFR) version—keeps getting time-gated. The patch drops, the raid comes out, and both LFR and story mode versions are locked behind a seven-day wait, with LFR in particular releasing its wings piecemeal.

I can somewhat understand the LFR thing—releasing a new raid is a big deal for Blizzard, and fine-tuning a version where difficulty matters slightly less (but still matters!) is something I can see a savvy developer putting off for a while under the guise of making organised raiders feel a little more special having seen all of it.

But story mode's current implementation feels completely counter to what Blizzard's trying to do with The Worldsoul Saga—that is, having a more accessible and easily-appreciated story. I'm mixed on my overall story feelings of Midnight, but I can at least tell that Blizzard's trying to spin an interesting yarn.

I've even enjoyed some character arcs and plot twists, even if I'm still quietly wondering where the heck the Horde is in all of this—the end of the Voidspire raid, in particular, is a really enjoyable knife-twist. I also like that Blizzard is splitting up its raids, into multiple, smaller ones—allowing for a broader, more episodic story over the course of a patch.

And yet, as it stands, experiencing that story for the first time as a casual player involves playing a bunch of neat lead-up quests to the raid itself, building momentum and then—just as the climax reaches its peak—you get hit with a seven-day wait. Why?

You can make the argument that it, as mentioned, is to make players feel rewarded for organising with their buddies and clearing the raids themselves. But that feels like a load of old tripe for me—because I did it.

When the Voidspire raid came out, I brushed off my old raid instincts (I've cleared a Savage tier of FF14 before, so I'm at least baseline confident) and decided to give Normal a try for myself.

And I mean, it was fine. I don't want to dunk on WoW players, because it's not their fault, but compared to a game that essentially makes you play a 500-hour tutorial over several expansions, the overall mechanical literacy of your average WoW player is… let's just call it "not as thoroughly prepared".

I'm mostly talking about the dragons and that goddamn fear cone. Blizzard basically holds up a giant, blaring sign in front of you—early warning that you're going to get targeted with the breath—and still, the groups I played with couldn't manage it. It's alright, though, my dumb arse died on the final boss and I was thoroughly carried, so the cosmic balance is preserved.

My point is, while I broadly enjoyed the raid, I didn't enjoy the sense of pressure to get it done before I was spoiled by the cinematics being uploaded to YouTube—and I certainly didn't feel like my story experience was particularly improved by doing it with strangers whose inter-party politics rival Game of Thrones in their bloody pettiness.

We're long past the point where seeing a raid actually carries any prestige, and as such I just can't fathom why story mode is being held behind the gate—you can make the same LFR argument that Blizzard's just spreading out developer time to balance it, but story mode's explicitly the "mechanics don't matter, have fun" version.

Nothing's ever easy in game development, sure, but I can make the safe assumption that the balance team doesn't have to work overtime on this one. Until then, Blizzard will continue mandating that its story and solo players—the ones it's ostensibly trying to appeal to with the mode in the first place, as well as Delves and Prey—have to wait a full week while playing spoiler dodgeball before experiencing the story as-intended. For what reason? Who's to say.

World of Warcraft: Shadowlands might go down as one of the worst-received expansions in the game's history—a situation so dire that it quite literally caused Blizzard to do a 180, scrap whatever plot it was working on, and throw players into a five-year timeskip on the Dragon Isles just so it could shake the dang thing off.

That's for a number of reasons—arduous endgame chores, massive content droughts—but also its story, which made a huge attempt at retconing an extremely boring villain, who spent most of his time saying "pitiful mortal," into years of beloved Warcraft lore. It didn't work. People hated the guts out of it.

There was also Sylvanas, who I'll let our former WoW expert Sarah James explain through this opinion piece she wrote back at the tail-end of Shadowlands: "But Shadowlands hasn't been a good expansion for Sylvanas fans … Not content with killing countless night elves, she turned her back on the Horde, killed Saurfang, and has apparently been in contact with the Jailer for years—as far back as her 'death' at Icecrown Citadel at the end of the Wrath of the Lich King expansion."

Basically, it took a decently-liked character and wrung them through the retroactively justified villain machine. Which made my eyebrows damn near lift off my head when (spoilers for the March on Quel'danas raid for World of Warcraft: Midnight) I saw that they were bringing her back.

It's somewhat-foreshadowed. Arator himself wonders out loud what it'd be like to have auntie Sylvanas pay him a visit, and the inclusion of both Alleria Windrunner and Vereesa Windrunner did seem to be teeing up a sisterly reunion, but still. I didn't think Blizzard would have the stones, to be perfectly honest.

She… doesn't do much other than spook Xal'atath, who doesn't seem keen to try and 1v1 a banshee queen, but I do think the hug from Vereesa is a genuinely sweet little bit of characterisation. Then she says something that made my eyebrows actually vacate my skull and book a little beach holiday for the rest of the month:

"The Shadowlands are not at all what they seem, I cannot rest until I've uncovered the truth." And I mean, this might be me reading into it, but—that's a retcon, right? Or at least a soft retcon. Grabbing a poorly-received story and trying to spin something else out of it.

That's not to say Blizzard stopped caring at all about the implications of Shadowlands, mind. A huge central point of The War Within followed Anduin's path back to the light after his brief Jailer-brainwashing snapped his connection to it.

But in terms of the cosmology? Going ahead and saying 'yeah, the realm of death we pranced around in? Not at all what it seems. Later, losers' is a huge move on Blizzard's part.

Such a huge move, in fact, I'm almost begrudgingly interested. I'm a sucker for flawed, but sincere stories, and the process of repairing a long-standing one like WoW's has always fascinated me: How do you make something decent after all of those fumbles? I don't know if the result will be good, but it's bound to be interesting.

We'll have to see if the studio can stick the landing—whether that's at the tail-end of The Last Titan, or picking up Sylvanas' story after The Worldsoul Saga is done.

It's a big day for World of Warcraft secret finders. The final steps of a puzzle that took them over a year to solve have been discovered. Specifically, the 11th and 12th orbs that surround the mysterious Felcycle mount have been lit and the secret is, well, no longer a secret.

A little over a week ago, players found out how to light the 10th orb in the secret lair below the Karazhan raid, which confirmed their suspicions that a puzzle from last year would continue when the Midnight expansion was released. That orb is one of 12 that surround a motorcycle mount players can unlock by lighting up the first nine.

The clever minds in the WoW secret-finding Discord server recently cracked the code on the final two steps. While the second-to-last step isn't required to get the unique transmog appearance, it does reward an achievement. And as we all know: To be a completionist is to have the courage to take on anything to make the number go up, including synchronized dance with a group of 40 players.

That's right—the final step requires more people than WoW raids even support anymore. The days of 40-player raids are long over, but Blizzard apparently wanted to inject a little bit of nostalgia into the solution for this step of the puzzle.

If you can somehow wrangle 40 other people together and bring them to the Divine Flame of Beledar in the Hallowfall region, you can participate in the secret minigame. Everyone will need a buff from the item players accidentally found while trying to solve a separate puzzle, the Oddsight Focus. Then, like many complicated things in WoW, you'll need a mod, or an addon, to synchronize the order of everyone's emotes.

Targeting the Divine Flame of Beledar shows a progress bar for every successful round of emotes. Fail the timing enough times and you'll have to start over, but coordinate all 40 people correctly and everyone will receive the Radiant Singer achievement, and the 11th orb will light up.

For the final orb, you need to head to a specific spot in Suramar (Wowhead knows the exact position). There you have to find an invisible ghost who will give you a bad orb—not to be confused with the good orbs. It's a bad orb because as soon as you stuff it in your pockets, bad guys come after you, and you have to avoid getting hit by them as you travel across the world to Aszuna. I'm getting flashbacks to carrying items through the treacherous lands of Silksong to finish the Great Taste of Pharloom quest, a burden I vowed to never take on again.

Completing this quest—hopefully with your sanity intact—rewards you with an outfit that matches the green Felcycle mount. It's a visual callback to the Legion expansion, which was filled with big demons and lots of glowing green demonic energy. I can't say I would want my character to look like a Mountain Dew ad, but to each their own.

Knowing how complicated the first nine steps of this entire puzzle are, I'm convinced WoW players have no reservations on what they'll do for an outfit. Many people don't even wear this stuff, they just want to collect them all in case the day comes where they want to look like they're made out of Nickelodeon slime. Either way, I can at least respect spending an entire year solving this puzzle just for the love of the game.

World of Warcraft: Midnight's first Season is in proper swing, and there's been a lot of concerns about the difficulty—the first part of the world first race, split up between the Voidspire and the March on Quel'Danas, has come and gone so quickly it's had hardcore raiders sitting on their thumbs.

That's due to a lot of reasons. Thinned-out addons, class simplification, easier fights, and faster gearing methods—and, as WoWHead shares, some of the fastest Mythic+ grind completion times in recent history.

For those not in the know, Mythic+ is the other slice of the hardcore scene in WoW, and is often used by hardcore players as a supplementary gear diet in between raid lockouts. Players level up "keys" by beating timed dungeon runs stacked with extra modifiers. For some, it's even the entire reason why they play in the first place.

There has, however, been a considered effort by Blizzard to make them more accessible—see the new modifier that, at lower difficulties, gives a path for tanks to follow rather than having them rely on addons. Self-described "Loa of statistics" Jordan shares on X that, looking at the Raider.io numbers, around 92% of players are beating them within the timer—compared to the numbers of 78.2%-79.4% in all three seasons of The War Within.

Furthermore, in a separate post last week, Jordan noted that there were "more [level 10 keys] timed in the last 18 hours than there [were] all of week one of [season 1 of The War Within]." As WoWHead notes, one of the modifiers, "Xal'atath's Guile", reduces the timer by fifteen seconds whenever someone dies—and was moved from level 7 keys in The War Within to level 10 keys in Midnight.

The new Prey system also contributes. The hardest difficulty of Prey, nightmare, isn't actually too tough, and also rewards players with "Champion" gear. Combine that with similar gear being available from delves a full week before Mythic+? Players were rocking up to the race with some solid kit.

Either way, hitting level 10 keys in a matter of days is a bit of an issue, because anything higher than that and you're not really getting much out of it. For those of whom Mythic+ is the entire draw of WoW in the first place, that's a problem.

This has brought up some mixed results from the playerbase. YouTuber's Talesin & Evitel remarked on X last week after nearly getting level 10 keys across the spate of dungeons in one night that "I agree the dungeons might be a bit undertuned". Others, such as those in this thread on the r/WoW subreddit, are more enthused:

"For me, the feeling of being able to realistically achieve Cutting Edge and a 3000+ Mythic+ rating without completely no-lifing the game is a huge win," writes one player. "This season being easier has made me feel less like I'm gonna burn out and more like I want to try out more classes once I'm done instead, really enjoying that not everything feels terribly stressful," adds another.

On the other hand, user Strachmed writes: "I am almost there (3k) week one. My vault is already full of myth track gear … I'm probably going to be done with WoW three weeks into the season, when usually it lasts longer."

It's a toughie—you can absolutely make the argument that WoW's higher difficulties have been pretty unassailable in the past, Mythic+ included. The assumed knowledge going into a key was always pretty high, as was the usage of AddOns, and that's certainly something that put me off the last time I gave it a bash in Dragonflight.

On the other hand, not everything in an MMO has to be for me, and Midnight's given me plenty of decently tough solo content with nightmare difficulty Prey and Delves. The question remains as to whether this difficulty'll be a new normal in the seasons to come, or a one-off under-tuning that Blizzard will correct in the future.

Nothing is more of a tease than dangling an upcoming raid boss in front of players a week early. MMO players thrive when there's nothing to do but wait for the next patch, so if a boss is just sitting there, they're going to look for a way to kill it against Blizzard's wishes.

And they almost would've if it wasn't for Blizzard ruining the fun by implementing a safeguard to prevent anyone from actually pulling it off.

World of Warcraft: Midnight's March of Quel'Danas raid opens up on Tuesday, but one of its bosses, L'ura, is hanging out in the game right now. The floating cluster of energy may be almost godlike in the Warcraft lore, but the health bar above her head says she has 149M health—and to crafty players like YouTuber Rextroy, that means she can bleed.

The first major obstacle in the journey to kill L'ura was staying alive long enough to actually hit her. Although she can't attack players directly, anyone who enters her domain near the freshly-voided Sunwell will take massive periodic ticks of damage. No character can survive more than a few seconds in there because it deals 40% of your health a second.

But Rextroy wasn't going to be stopped by a big scary DoT and decided to look into how it worked. Basically, the game considers the player as the one doing the damage, which happens to leave open a very clever loophole: By dying outside the chamber and accepting the resurrection sickness debuff that reduces your damage done by 75%, the DoT becomes trivial enough to survive for a few minutes.

This trick let Rextroy and their friends start to test some theories. Over the course of a few days, they figured out the boss could be hurt by hunter pets, but not enough that it actually made a dent in her health. In fact, the pets effectively didn't deal any damage at all because the boss gradually heals itself. The only way to get the job done was to hit it for a whole lot of damage all at once.

The solution Rextroy and the crew landed on (based on a previous feat) was to bring in a sacrificial rat and a bugged monk attack that let them deal around 100M damage. This is due to the way high-level characters deal bonus damage to low-level enemies, and the way the monk attack transfers that damage over to L'ura.

After gathering up as many rats as they could on Saturday, the group shrunk themselves down using a toy that reduces their damage by 99% (to solve the DoT problem), and the item that spawns the rat. The first rat knocked L'ura's health down to half, but when Rextroy sacrificed the second rat, the boss didn't die.

Desperate for the kill, the third player in the group gave their rat a smack, hoping L'ura only had a sliver of health left. When it didn't work either, everyone realized what was happening and sighed. "Blizzard… that's so boring," Rextroy said once they realized L'ura was simply programmed to be unkillable.

Blizzard's little cheat dashed the group's hope of achieving a world first before the raid was even out. The combat log even showed that they dealt more damage than the health she had left, but apparently no fun is allowed.

Well, some fun is allowed. Rextroy went out to find other ways they could use what they'd just learned. They took out a mythic+ boss in one hit and then surprised some players in PvP. Neither were as satisfying as it would've been to kill the boss though. At the very least, Blizzard can't take away the fact that Rextroy and their friends are certainly the world's first—and probably last—players to defeat L'ura as a group made up of monks and rats.

World of Warcraft is getting its first official, proper pride event (via WoWhead)—and the neatest part? It's based on a community-run event that's been raising money for LGBT charities for years.

The Running of the Trolls is an event that's been active on the US Feathermoon server for 12 years, helmed by the larger group WarcraftCares. It sees players rolling up with a troll to, traditionally, Silvermoon. The event raises money for The Trevor Project, which provides crisis services to LGBT youth, alongside research, advocacy, and education.

Given Silvermoon's been remade for Midnight, the group'll need to pick a new locale this year, as you need to have access to the expansion to get there—the Burning Crusade version's still accessible, but it takes some doin' that'd make logistics a nightmare.

Either way, there'll be an alternative for folks who can't make it to Feathermoon—Darkspear Dash, which'll last from June 27 to June 29 and see players "[joining] the Darkspear trolls as they celebrate individuality and identity".

In a thread on the r/WoW subreddit, run founder Dravvie writes: "Just for background, [the] Darkspear Dash microholiday is based on the Running of the Trolls, a yearly community event [run by] WarcraftCares, started in 2016, that is held every June to benefit the Trevor Project as the sibling event to the Gnome Run!

"I can't comment on everything that's still in the development stage that's been datamined, but it's been a long process since I first talked with the dev team about two years ago about possibly developing a Troll Run holiday."

Datamining, shared by WoWHead, suggests that players will be able to get a tabard and a rainbow toy for participating in a special version of the run—but given we're a few months out, it's unclear what the specifics will be.

Either way, it's a sweet gesture on Blizzard's behalf. Especially when other MMOs, cough cough, have been seen winding down pride events. It's also just something I like about the genre—MMOs thrive as a result of their communities, so to see a community event actually become integrated into the game as its own proper little holiday bash is genuinely heartwarming.

Even the World of Warcraft players who compete at the highest level succumb to the same mistakes as the rest of us. A pro player competing in the world first race for the recently released Midnight expansion was kicked back out to the login screen during a boss fight because he forgot to renew his subscription.

The same player who risked his account for a 4% damage increase a couple of years ago was in the middle of fighting a boss in the new Voidspire raid when his game completely froze. After a beat, the login screen appeared with a message that his subscription had expired. Nobody would've seen it if his point-of-view wasn't being streamed live on his raid leader's Twitch.

"My POV fucked up, I can't see anything," Team Liquid raid leader Maximum interjected while trying to shot call for the team. "[Imfiredup's] fucking subscription expired. Keep going, keep going, keep going. You fucking idiot," he said smiling as laughter erupted in the voice chat.

You can tell they're professionals because a second later they were back to focusing on the boss. Twitch chat, however, was a blur of laughing emojis and LMAO spam for the rest of the fight. Once it was beginning to look like a failed attempt—as is common with fights as hard as these—Maximum called for the team to reset while trying not to burst out laughing again.

"I actually bought a WoW token, I forgot to use it," Imfiredup said, referring to the in-game items that grant you a 30-day subscription before triggering another round of laughter from his teammates.

Everyone in the guild knows this is actually an embarrassingly common occurrence during world first races. To play at this level, you need multiple accounts with multiple characters ready to go come raid day. Guilds have to be prepared to swap strategies and team compositions at a moment's notice as they search for any advantage they can get. Remembering how many days are left on each account is probably harder to track than their ability cooldowns, which is why this seems to happen to one unlucky player every race.

After a few minutes, the guild was already back trying to make progress on the boss again. It doesn't look like anyone else's subscription lapsed for the rest of the stream, but some of the players were talking about not knowing how much time their accounts had left either. "I will not be checking [my subscription]," one of them joked. "I may disconnect at any moment."

Whatever else one can say about Elon Musk, the guy employs some incredibly talented engineers, and the latest update from the Neuralink project is like something from the future. A major goal for Neuralink is improving the lives of people with severe disabilities up to full-body paralysis, and now the 18th participant (in what is still a trial) has posted about their progress after 100 days: and part of it involves playing World of Warcraft.

Previously we've seen Neuralink patients playing games like Counter-Strike 2 and, while that is still sorcery, in that case the interface was aided by a single mouth-controlled joystick. But the nature of the two games aside, WoW's controls are on a different level: it's one of those that, depending how deep you want to go, can end up with almost every key bound to some sort of macro, alongside mouse controls.

British Army veteran Jon Noble has had the Neuralink implant installed into his motor cortex for 100 days, and in a new update first describes the surgical process he had to go through:

"The surgery on Day 0 was surprisingly easy," writes Noble on X. "A quick general anaesthetic, a small incision, and the robotic system did the rest—precisely placing the 1,024 ultra-thin threads into my motor cortex. I woke up alert and in good spirits and went home the next afternoon. By Day 3 I was feeling a lot better, and by Day 7 the little scar was already starting to fade. Recovery was genuinely minimal; I felt sharper and more positive than I had been in years after the [Brain Control Interface] was turned on."

By the second week Noble's chip had been paired with an Apple MacBook, "and within a couple of minutes I was moving the cursor just by thinking. At first it felt like trying to remember a dream, but by week three it was second nature. Scrolling, clicking, typing—all mind-controlled. The Mac integration was buttery smooth; I went from total Mac newbie to power-user faster than I ever expected."

By day 80 of using the chip Noble says he was "ready for the big leagues" and fired up World of Warcraft, using "pure thought control".

"The first raid felt clunky, but once my brain and the BCI synced, it was pure magic," he said. "I'm now raiding, and exploring Azeroth hands-free at full speed—no mouse, no keyboard, just intention. It's honestly brilliant. The freedom is addictive."

Noble's post on X, embedded below, includes a video of him playing WoW, and frankly you'd be hard-pressed to know that the game was being controlled by pure thought. Noble's avatar stalks a monster and, with his buddy, proceeds to handily dispatch it using a variety of attacks:

The only appropriate reaction is awe: this really is, as Noble said, the stuff of science fiction. And while Neuralink remains in the trial stage with a limited number of participants, this unquestionably shows a progression from where the tech's capabilities were a few years ago, in terms of the complexity of what Noble's doing in WoW.

Noble is paralyzed below the neck due to a spinal injury. Neuralink has installed its N1 implant in his brain, which translates Noble's neural signals into digital instructions, basically allowing him (with practice) to control various devices via thought.

Obviously the gaming and WoW factor of this is why it's on PC Gamer, and it does demonstrate a key element of the N1 implant: adaptability across different control and interface systems. But the implications for people with severe disabilities are so much wider. Simply being able to control a computer itself is an enormous step towards increased independence, and the obvious implication is that various tasks will become achievable for these individuals without outside assistance.

Neuralink remains a device being tested and developed under the strictest controls, with a very limited number of participants: it is unlikely to be common technology anytime soon, though that is the eventual goal. But if it can already do this, the implications for things like controlling prosthetics and smart devices (such as home devices that could enable greater independence of living) are mind-blowing.

"100 days in and I already can't imagine life without it," ends Noble's post. "The N1 didn’t just give me a new way to use a computer—it gave me a new way to live. Can't wait to see what the next 100 days bring."

World of Warcraft: Midnight is one of the most ambitious expansions in the game's 20-year history, and I don't entirely mean that as a compliment. Blizzard is taking its biggest swings in years, and sometimes Midnight whiffs—but just as often this expansion smashes it, dosing you with a hit of pure refined nostalgia in the gorgeously-remade Silvermoon or hooking you into the dopamine loop of its excellent dungeons.

It's hard to come down too firmly on Blizzard for Midnight's occasional whiffs, though, because look at what the studio's had on its plate—player housing, a complete class design overhaul, a UI revamp to deal with a lack of combat addons (the result of a controversial ban which is itself a huge, risky move), a reimagining of one of the game's most beloved cities, an entirely new gearing system in Prey, and the second book of its first ever multi-expansion story.

As the middle child in the Worldsoul Saga trilogy, Midnight has a tougher job. If The War Within fell flat, then hey, at least it was just the start—and if The Last Titan sucks, then at least it's over and the team can move on. If Midnight hits a sour note, though? Then Blizzard has a big problem.

I'm happy to report that, after a couple of weeks with the new expansion, Midnight's design heft doesn't cause the whole thing to crumble and give way—it's not on solid ground just yet, but all of the cracks can be plastered over in the months to come. The bones are good, and the future's looking bright.

What is old is new again

Midnight makes the best use of WoW's 20 years of MMO bulk I've seen out of its expansions yet. It's not as expansive as say, Cataclysm, but the way it digs into pre-existing lore and locales rather than simply whisking players away to a new continent is a delight. In fact, half of its zones are old places given a facelift. And by 'facelift' I mean 'comprehensive redesign.'

The new Silvermoon and Eversong Woods and Zul'Aman share precious little in common with their past-expansion versions in terms of raw design. In terms of vibes, though? As someone who played during the original Burning Crusade when I was (oh god) 11 years old, my 30-year-old self was fully swept up in the tide of nostalgia.

Blizzard's artists and environment designers are some of the best in the business, and they are absolutely flexing here. Midnight is a gorgeous and deeply atmospheric game, making the best use of WoW's enduring artstyle it possibly can. It is a continuing astonishment that a game released in 2004 still looks this lovely.

Eversong is lush and vibrant, Zul'Aman feels wild and overgrown and drenched in mysticism, Harandar is downright jaw-dropping at moments—the only zone that's a little dry around the mouth is the Voidstorm, and even then, every time I look up at the skybox I'm impressed by the sense of scale.

The sidequests in these zones also do a great job of fleshing them out. I haven't ticked every single one off just yet, but Midnight, like The War Within before it, is chock-full of heartfelt little tales off the beaten path. Which is all the more frustrating when I look at the main story, because it comes so close to being something special before falling prey to insecurity.

World of expositioncraft

Midnight's central yarn isn't bad, but it could've been great if Blizzard hadn't designed half of it for people who aren't paying attention. Despite this, I still spent the better-executed half of my playthrough deeply engaged in the fantasy politics of Azeroth in a way that feels completely novel.

We've got a villain, Xal'atath, with an actually-very-good plan, a pressure cooker that's keeping everyone distracted; zealots being forced to rub shoulders with pragmatists, naturally making both of them unhappy; and plenty of little moments in between all the epic, fate of world important parts that are thoughtful and well-written.

The story's execution, unfortunately, is more of a mixed bag. Take "Relics of Paladins Past" in Arator's journey. You need to go to the basement of Light's Hope Chapel and retrieve five relics from paladins of ages past. Relics that are, contrary to the zeal he's just been grappling with, humble: A stein, a meditation crystal, a medkit, a smithing hammer.

On paper, this is a neat, subtle way to show that Arator is discovering there's more to being a Paladin than holy wrath. In practice, Arator says something along the lines of: 'But X was good at fighting. This relic is… not fighting? Is there more to Light than fighting? Woah.' Five consecutive times. Subtlety cannot survive being wrapped around a big hammer and used to bludgeon you over the head (ironically, for the point it's making).

Too much of Midnight's complexity gets smoothed out in the editing room. This means the story is just good, rather than great—a shame, because the Voidspire raid is an excellent hook that's got me by the cheek: An ominous, high-stakes twisting of the knife, a step back for our heroes that that promises a thrilling set of patches I'm actually quite excited for.

Cracks in the wallpaper

I'm largely coming around to Blizzard's vision for a WoW without combat addons, but it's plain to see that the studio has a lot more ground to cover—certain basic functionalities are missing, and the roll-out feels caught between post-band-aid sting and open wound.

I went through the normal version of the story's raid blissfully unaware, for instance, that healers have been struggling to find and nix dispellable debuffs with the default UI offering. The damage meter, while basically fine, doesn't have an option to only enable it in group content. The cooldown manager is still missing a handful of features, and is certainly woefully uncustomizable compared to what we used to have.

And then there's the class overhaul, designed to make each specialisation playable without addons—there's a list of issues that've soured the whole thing. My initial character, an Outlaw Rogue, had very few problems aside from some subpar damage. My Marksmanship Hunter, meanwhile, hit like a wet noodle outside of her burst windows. As a FF14 player: You do not want the two-minute meta in your game, trust me.

The more I looked for these little cracks, the more I found them. For instance:

• Some specialisations were scuffed on release, with the Survival Hunter having a big, glowing button that needed a 1500% buff to make it worth pressing, or the new spec, the Devourer, not needing to push its big black hole damage button at all.
• Others were simplified so much they're barely recognisable.
• Harandar was plucked out of The War Within—with a blatant leitmotif from the previous expansion haunting its soundtrack and thinly related story.
• The Haranir themselves were released with a bunch of gear that clipped into their bodies. Sometimes their underwear did this, too.

These are mostly small scuffs in Midnight's shining plate armour—but they produce a sensation of a developer that's stretching itself thin. World of Warcraft's team feels like it's pulling out all the stops with what energy and time it does have, but there's a distinct undercurrent of plate-spinning.

Contributing to this palpable sub-surface pressure are the game's two big headline features—one is almost perfect, while the other screams untapped potential.

Murder and furniture

Prey could become one of my favourite additions to the game in years with just a little more time in the oven. It sees you select a Prey-specific NPC target from a list. Then, that target can ambush you out in the world. Fend off enough ambushes, disarm enough of their traps, and you'll be able to hunt them down and fight them directly.

I've played all three difficulties, normal, hard, and nightmare, and out of the three nightmare is by far my favourite, because it's the most invasive. The promise of Prey's premise is a shot of adrenaline placed into your daily grind, and that's what nightmare delivers—occasional bursts of activity that require your undivided attention, and won't wait for your bio breaks.

Multiple times, I'd find myself scrambling for cooldowns I didn't use outside of harder delves and raiding content—having to, say, interrupt a slowly approaching ghost, dodge a pool of explosive blood, or kill a poor critter at behest of the totally-not-evil Astalor Bloodsworn.

Conceptually I'm a huge fan, but I feel seriously let down by the hunt targets themselves. They… have mechanics, arguably, but they're usually just "interrupt this, here's a bleed, don't stand in the bad". Even on the hardest difficulty, they just don't really do enough to be particularly memorable.

Blizzard has gone for quantity and variety—and I understand, given you're liable to do four of these (even more, if you're grinding out rep) a week. But most of the differences between targets are entirely superficial.

They all ambush you in a similar fashion, and they all have the same worldquests with different coats of paint. There's one that sees you disabling power sources while evading their guards, and it's literally just the same objective with a texture and model swap.

There's a giant, yawning hole where a ton of personality could be, and I would've happily taken fewer targets and recycled quests for more in-depth mechanics. As it stands, the only hunt that really stood out to me was a jerk who kept placing a nasty black hole I thought I had to run away from, only to discover that distance didn't make me take less damage and it was just a fancy DoT.

Even so, Prey is genuinely promising—and it's not like Blizzard hasn't fleshed out systems over an expansion's lifecycle before. As The War Within progressed, the delve nemeses became more complex and textured, with the final season's scratching the kind of sweaty, soulslike itch I want Prey to scratch.

WoW's player housing, on the other hand, is exactly what it should be—there's still some functionality to be implemented, like letting players own multiple houses rather than just one per faction, but the sheer customisability you're capable of achieving is bang on the money. You can rotate, clip, and kitbash with almost no limitation.

The way it controls is downright blissful, too. Blizzard has looked at 20 years of player housing foibles and gone "Alright, we're not doing that". I've messed around with housing in quite a few MMOs, and I can confidently say that WoW's in-built tools are the easiest to use I've found. In cobbling together my apartment, I had just one instance in my multiple hours where a wall wouldn't rotate right. Other than that? Frictionless.

Ultimately both of these new huge expansion features feel like wins, even if I want more out of Prey in the months to come.

No doomsday

Midnight is a real step up in a lot of areas—I found its story gripping, if lacking in confidence to slow down and really dig into the complexity of its themes and characters. Its new zones are downright beautiful, delivering on the promise of an old-world redesign which I think will carry WoW far into the future.

It's full to the bursting with solid delves, dungeons, and a decent set of opening raids with interesting mechanics. I especially enjoyed one fight, which I shan't spoil otherwise, that saw the entire arena crumple inwards, forcing the entire raid to avoid skidding into the death zone at the centre while dodging puddles of void goop and trying to steer into purging arrows.

And while not all of its mainline features quite deliver on their promises—Blizzard especially needs to figure out what to do with its "Abundance" events, which make me praise the Loa I'm not into crafting or gathering—the studio has stuck a very difficult landing, only slightly hurting its knees in the process.

Given how reactive Blizzard is, I believe it'll get a handle on the expansion's wonky class design and bugs within the coming months. But my job is to assess Midnight as it came on its first few weeks, and while I had a grand old time, there were little nags and snags that kept nipping at me. Nothing ruinous, but signs of ill health all the same.

But then, I'm somewhat pleased to see Blizzard taking those swings at all. It's certainly preferable to stagnation: Adding player housing while you're also trying to do a huge class overhaul, while remaking old zones, while trying to tell a better, more complete story, while adding UI functionality to replace a wide, bustling addon community? It's downright hubristic, and it's even more impressive that nothing completely blew up.

I feel like I'm on a very fancy plane that's going through a rough patch of turbulence: Marvelling at the design of the craft itself, which is pulling off a mechanical wonder—but also a little sore and jostled, with wet knees from a spilled glass of complimentary champagne. Still, that Midnight is basically great with some dents to buff out is a promising sign for the rest of the expansion's lifecycle.

After all, all the thorns have been pulled, all the band-aids ripped off—the hard bit's done, now all that's left is for Blizzard to clean things up, knuckle down for some further class design tweaks, and apply a thick layer of polish.

World of Warcraft is a big, dense, complicated game with a lot of little instances of utter nonsense—you get that sort of thing when you're two decades old with over a dozen expansions. But this one has to be the funniest quirk I've seen out of the MMO in a while. Turns out, if you're a Protection Warrior, you've got a shield tax.

That's per user Kersplode on the game's subreddit, who took a whopping 20,000-strong sample of damage instances to test their theory that they were paying more in repair costs.

For context: In WoW, most tanks have mitigation buttons, things you'll need to be pushing routinely while in dungeons to smooth over the experience for your healers. One of the Protection Warrior's most important ones, Shield Block, blocks all attacks against you for six seconds.

Only issue is, when you block in WoW (either with the passive percentage chance or with Shield Block) your shield has a chance to lose durability. Kersplode discovered that their shield loses a point durability at a 3.5% chance when they block: "My ilvl 237 shield costs ~42s per durability to repair, therefore: It costs me an average of 1.47 silver per block."

As in, 3.5% of 42 silver is 1.47—if you block 100 times, and lose the mathematically probable 3.5 points of durability you'd tank in that scenario, you'll be paying 147 silver. Which, over the course of 100 blocks (dividing 147 by 100) is 1.47 per block. It all checks out.

The issue with Shield Block (the ability) isn't that it increases the chance you have to lose durability, but rather your frequency of blocked attacks—Kersplode, for instance, passively blocks around 35% of attacks. Increasing that to 100% for six seconds multiple times over the course of a dungeon means more blocked attacks overall, leading to higher repair costs.

"3,600 incoming attacks … I would normally block [around] 35% of those attacks, which is going to cost me 18 gold, 90 silver. If I press Shield Block, I am going to block [around] 81% of those attacks instead, which would cost me 43 gold, 74 silver."

Which means that, by playing Protection Warrior, Kersplode's repair costs are roughly 25 gold more expensive. When we round up (comparing 19 gold to 44 gold) we see that Protection warriors are paying 230% more in repair costs, even compared to other characters with shields.

Now, granted, 25 gold is pocket change in retail WoW. I'm actually pretty skint on my Outlaw Rogue, and I still have around 15,000 gold. But that's per dungeon. Let's say you have a normal gaming habit and a job and you push an average of… I dunno, 30 dungeons in a week—a handful on weeknights and bigger gaming sessions on the weekend.

That's 750 gold a week. Over a month, that's 3,000 extra gold. Over the course of a season, which last five to six months, that's a 15,000 gold tax, which… okay, actually still isn't that much—it's the equivalent to a gem or a pricey crafting mat for an item you might need—but it's the principle of the thing! The principle!

Anyway, given the amount of new features Midnight has on its already-full plate, I'm not sure saving one spec 25 gold a dungeon is massively high on the list of priorities for Blizzard. But it does kinda stink and I hope that you, my Protection Warrior friends, get justice soon. And then queue for more dungeons, because my schedule doesn't need a tank shortage.

The first World of Warcraft Midnight raid race is on and Blizzard has already had to disqualify one group of players for breaking the rules.

While players from around the world race to gear up and take down the boss Chimaerus in the recently released Dreamrift raid, a guild known as RAoV QA Strikes Back walked right in and took first place using exploits. Their names went up on Blizzard's hall of fame list before being removed a few hours later.

The first red flag was how fast they killed the boss, but the fact that they were all playing warlocks wearing low-level gear confirmed that there was something fishy about their strategy. And if you look at their character names, they're all jokes about breaking the game, like "Exploitearly," "Exploitoften," and "Betatesters."

Someone from the group uploaded an obnoxious video of the kill on YouTube that features memes and a clip of a world-first raider amused about the news while working on doing it for real on stream. Blink and you might miss the actual footage of the group defeating the boss—which is about three seconds long. They simply walk up to Chimaerus and pop him like a balloon. It doesn't seem like anyone is aware of what method they used, but whatever it was let them deal almost 300 million damage instantly.

This isn't the first time they've done this: The same group of players downed a boss in the last expansion with half of a raid group before Blizzard wiped them from the list of successful kills and banned them. Exploiting bosses for 15 minutes of fame seems to be their entire goal, so I wouldn't be surprised if they show up again for the next race.

Their guild name "RAoV" stands for Random Acts of Violation, which was also the name of a group of exploiters that Blizzard sent a cease and desist letter to in 2018. Nobody knows if the two guilds have any relation or if it's just a new generation of players who enjoy toying with Blizzard.

Meanwhile, no other guild has managed to defeat Chimaerus the old fashioned way yet. The guild Melee Mechanics nearly got him halfway down after seven attempts, but has joined all the other players who are focusing on completing Voidspire, the traditional, six-boss raid that was released at the same time as the Dreamrift. I suspect most guilds will ignore the Dreamrift until they've completed the main raid of the patch, leaving the glory to the exploiters for the next few days.

The last time I tried to solve a secret puzzle in World of Warcraft, it took me several hours and a few guide videos to figure it out. Things have escalated quite a bit since then because apparently Blizzard is making puzzles that span multiple expansions now.

About a year ago, players figured out how to obtain a motorcycle mount hidden underneath an old raid dungeon. Blizzard practically dangled the Felcycle in front of WoW's legion of secret finders by parking it in the middle of a clock with 12 pedestals. By collecting the right items and using them in the right spots around Azeroth, they found out how to fill those pedestals with glowing orbs. On the 9th orb, they got the mount.

I'm oversimplifying something that took an entire Discord nearly a month to solve. You can read about how each step was figured out in a guide on Wowhead. Blizzard even published a lengthy post-mortem on designing the treasure hunt, which is where you'll find a section at the end titled "What comes next?"

"Perhaps more will come in a future update," the post teased. Secret finders were already skeptical about the fact that it only took finding 9 out of 12 orbs to solve, so the post basically confirmed that there was still work left to be done in the future.

That future is now in the newly released Midnight expansion, where players just figured out how to light up the 10th orb, confirming that there is indeed more left to this puzzle. Where it leads is completely unknown, but we're talking about an obscure puzzle made for the true secret sickos—they'll solve it just for the love of the game.

Players found the solution while trying to solve an entirely separate puzzle that has to do with joining a secret cabal known as the Mind-Seekers. A specific fish in the Waking Shores drops an item called the Bubblefilled Flounder, and it can only be looted after you've died and entered spirit form. Feeding it to Hek the Hungry Hornswog nearby will cause him to drop a Duck Egg. That egg can be placed in a nest to get another item, and when you bring it to an invisible NPC, they hand over the Oddsight Focus. It wasn't until someone noticed that obtaining the item lit up the 10th orb back at the Felcycle clock that everyone realized they were working on the wrong puzzle.

Currently, the secret finders are stumped on what to do next. All they know is that using the Oddsight Focus gives players the "Gift of the Oddsight" buff for three hours and displays two numbers. Those numbers change every week, which could be Blizzard's way of communicating that you only need two to solve it. Even though this particular puzzle required waiting for the next expansion, it seems rare for it to time-gate things like this. It's more likely that it wants to prevent people from brute-forcing it by making the solution unique per week.

The community in the Secret Finding Discord are doing their best to decipher the numbers and maybe even find a clue about what this is all for. They've already got the mount. What will be the reward for the second part? The thrill of finding all the breadcrumbs Blizzard left behind? Surely there's something cool hidden behind this weird clock and you know they're not going to stop searching until they get their hands on it.

Much of the current videogame landscape can be traced back to systems and design decisions either first conceived or formalized in World of Warcraft. From the universal RPGification of game mechanics to live service gameplay loops to incremental gearscore advancement, videogames as we know them look like they do in large part because of WoW.

If former Blizzard vice president and game designer Jeff Kaplan had his way during WoW's development, however, the games industry might have followed altogether different paths. In a 10-hour stream of his new studio's upcoming frontier survival game, The Legend of California, Kaplan said that in its early days, he envisioned it as a first-person game and tried to get others at Blizzard to do the same.

"I really wanted WoW to be first-person," Kaplan said. "I argued a lot for that."

Kaplan acknowledged that there are "a lot of arguments" in favor of WoW's third-person perspective, like the benefit of having a full view of your character. But Kaplan explained that his preference was defined by EverQuest, which enabled his entry into game development when his rants about its game design earned him a reputation with his Blizzard employee guildmates.

"EQ was all first-person, and weirdly, because it was first-person, I saw my guildmates up close way more. And I feel like I saw and appreciated the character art way more," Kaplan said. "I wasn't seeing myself, but I knew other people were seeing me that close, so in EQ I actually cared what my character looked like more than I did in WoW."

As a thought experiment, imagining the world where WoW was first-person quickly spirals out into some fascinating directions. Would a first-person WoW have had the same level of landmark success? How would its systems and mechanics be different to account for the player's different sense of—and relationship with—the MMO's spaces? And what strange ways would its influence have spiraled out into the wider games industry if the WoW clones of the late 2000s and early 2010s had the same first-person perspective?

Would we all have gotten sick of first-person MMOs in the same way we abandoned the action bar? Would that timeline's Destiny be a third-person juggernaut that would then shape industry standards in its own image?

Those implications are staggering to consider, but I've saved the most profound for last: Would Blizzard's pauldrons have been so huge if you had to spend hours trying to look around them in first person?

I'm still chewing on the thick, juicy slab of meat that is World of Warcraft: Midnight for our review—eagerly awaiting the launch of Season 1 later this week. I am also secretly very glad that I'm not into crafting, because profession-savvy WoW players are having a much worse time than I am.

Abundance events are little collect-a-thons that, for most people, see them romping through a cave eight times a week (more on that in a moment) harvesting abundance in a frenzy of nonsense, grabbing stacking buffs with which to gain more under a time limit. They're… fine. I've done a couple, and I cannot say that they gripped me nearly as much as Prey did. Certainly not enough to plug in eight runs in a row.

Players were finding the fun, however, by tackling them in big raid groups—which not only made them the brand of chaotic they seem to be angling for, but also made it far easier to bag Unalloyed Abundance, which is an important currency for crafters. Only problem being, these raid groups were lagging the hell out of zones, so Blizzard has seemingly had to put the kibosh on them.

As reported by WoWHead, but with seemingly no mention of it in the game's hotfixes for this week, raid groups aren't able to split their abundance anymore. Here's a thread on the WoWEconomy subreddit spotting the same changes: "I couldn't get to 900 on any of my runs regardless [of] the number of players in a group. [Early Access] players are already on purple tools and I'm getting pushed back another week."

That's part of the issue, too—you can only do eight of these things per week, which means that players who got in on the early access are now already ahead, and—in a decidedly Shadowlandsian, downright Torghast-esque move—implicitly encourage you to plug in eight runs a week or fall behind.

Which, if you care about min/maxing, all need you to sweat harder to hit that 900 unalloyed abundance cap as of this latest change—though there's a small chance it could be unintentional.

Here's another on the r/wow subreddit, with user Swaydonym understandably griping: "You can hardly get orbs now, and getting 300 unalloyed abundance instead of 600-900 each run feels like I'm drinking moldy dog water. It was even more fun with groups of people! Running around like a little Pac-Man eating up hundreds of Abundance with other players while Dundun yelled every two seconds felt so silly and was dumb fun."

It's a tricky one and, like a lot of problems Blizzard has had recently, all to do with how rewards are distributed—making Abundance events absurd, silly fun right into the issue of it providing vital progression for an entire slice of the game.

To me, it feels like a fatal assumption's been made that profession-based players aren't hardcore about it, or wouldn't want to optimise the event itself. As we have all learned by now, WoW players will optimise anything.