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

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

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

1. Don't forget to turn on the lights

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

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

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

2. Add clutter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4. Give your build a storyline

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A constant grind to keep a reward in sight

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Players' reactions were decidedly mixed.

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

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

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

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

Class balance makes earning the bird tougher for some players

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reducing Mythic Plus difficulty to entice support players

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

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

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

Giving players easier, and more flexible, Mythic raids

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

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

Lairs are in instances, to solve that problem.

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

Lairs may branch into more difficult territory in the future

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. Start by finding a reference image

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4. Look at your reference image and figure out proportions

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

5. Add layers easily with repetition

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

6. Limit your color palette

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

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

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

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

8. Turn your decor upside-down

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

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

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

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

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

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

9. Use dyes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An AddOn-less world

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What makes you special

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Built different

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Water, water everywhere

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

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

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

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

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

Slow your roll

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.