A Word on World of Warcraft
Originally Posted by Blizzard (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
Greetings Azeroth,

2024 is underway and it’s a big year for World of Warcraft as the game reaches a milestone 20-year anniversary!

To think that 20 years ago Facebook launched, MySpace was cool, and many of us were playing on a Nintendo DS and a Playstation Portable. Friends aired its final episode and Lost delivered its first. And that same year friends, family, and coworkers started playing a game called World of Warcraft!

It fills my heart that Azeroth has become home to so many different types of people and players around the globe who have shared memorable moments these past two decades. *hugs* As Morpheus cried in Matrix Reloaded (2003, but anyway) “WE are STILL here!” I’m glad I chose this rabbit hole and have never regretted how deep it goes. WoW is my wonderland – all day, every day.




Thinking about the year ahead, and our roadmaps we remain committed to, we want to share with you three things we’re focused on as a development team:

  • #1. Continue to evolve the living world for all players.
    • Build on our learnings from 2023 to deliver content regularly for Dragonflight and Classic.
    • Update and modernize your experience and quality of life in all flavors of WoW.
    • Listen to your feedback and keep improving.

  • #2. Deliver the first installment of our most ambitious story with The War Within.
    • World of Warcraft: The War Within is preparing to invite players for testing in the coming months, and we are working hard to deliver on the epic journey of our Worldsoul Saga.

  • #3. Try new things and take risks to bring you new experiences.
    • Our development team is trying new approaches. Invention and creativity are critical to this ever-evolving world of Azeroth we craft for—and with—all of you.


All that in mind, immediately ahead of us we have WoW Classic: Season of Discovery Phase 2 launching on February 8 at 1:00 p.m. (21:00 GMT) globally. For more details, get the full scoop from our overview. You’ll notice some new approaches mentioned there that we’re trying out and (as always) we will listen to feedback. (“New runes, a new PvP experience, skill books, and more!)

WoW Classic Hardcore’s Self-Found mode is coming in late February, followed shortly after by the Beta for Cataclysm Classic. More news on that will be coming soon.

As many have noticed, this is the first period of time since Dragonflight launched that we haven’t had an active PTR and we understand that it is creating some curiosity.

For the 10.2.6 patch for Dragonflight, we created what we think is a unique event inspired by past musings from the community. We can say that it is open to anyone with a WoW subscription if they want to participate (Classic or Dragonflight players). That's all we’re going say. Sorry, not sorry? Our goal is to continue to keep it secret— and keep it safe. The speculation is great! We watched the reaction to the surprises in Season of Discovery and thought we’d try a similar, but different, approach for Dragonflight.

That means there will be no PTR (Public Test Realm) for a portion of the next content update as we have traditionally done. What we can say is that it will be coming in March. A finer point, but the update will also include everything that’s needed for Dragonflight Season 4 but will be hidden. Around (after) the launch of the update we will make Season 4 available for testing on a 10.2.6 PTR before it goes live.

Why are we doing this? We like the idea of releasing content that has some surprises and isn’t datamined or revealed in advance. We also like to see the joy the community gets out of uncovering it all together as they all jump in to play. We look forward to seeing if the community likes this type of surprise and look forward to hearing your feedback. This is risky experiment and could be a bit bumpy, though we are doing everything we can to ensure success.

The WoW team prides itself on ensuring a solid, quality launch. We are sensitive and reactive to problems and issues that can and might arise, so I hope you can forgive us if we experience some hiccups with this experiment and work alongside us as we try this out in March. ALL WILL BE REVEALED THEN!



With gratitude and excitement for the new memories we create together,

Holly Longdale
This article was originally published in forum thread: A Word on World of Warcraft started by Lumy View original post
Comments 53 Comments
  1. Kathranis's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by doledippers View Post
    my bet is on some kind of scaled up content or mode, where you can just play at any level. Think a roguelike game mode where u start out naked and can collect power ups, as an example. im excited either way
    Maybe something to help level up alts, in anticipation of Warbands and to get Classic / lapsed players caught up and ready for The War Within?
  1. Zarvel's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by RobertMugabe View Post
    PTR's are primarily just for generating hype. I doubt that user feedback plays even a minor role for QA/development... I mean there isn't even a "proper" way to report bugs, besides just being able to write down a small note (no images, limited text size etc.)
    You have no idea how wrong you are on this lmao. But I like the confidence.
  1. DeltrusDisc's Avatar
    No one called it a "Playstation Portable!" It was called a "PSP" she's a FAAAAKE!!! /s
    Damned corporate-speak
  1. doledippers's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Kathranis View Post
    Maybe something to help level up alts, in anticipation of Warbands and to get Classic / lapsed players caught up and ready for The War Within?
    if the implication is that its available simply by having a sub, then it just cant be DF or level 70 specific, which just adds to the intrigue. Definitely looking forward to speculating
  1. FelPlague's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Julmara View Post
    no ptr so it wont be tested properly
    so i assume plenty of weird bugs
    Eh, its worth it for cool stuff, I mean Season of discovery has been untested, and the untested stuff they have been doing since late shadowlands has been rather bug free, key word RATHER.
    I have confidence.
  1. Kyphael's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by merywow View Post
    third faction : pirate
    Everyone knows the Third Faction should have been Night Elves and their Amazing Friends way back when.
  1. Kilpi's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Luthorite View Post
    In general given the amount of firings in recent times for Activision Blizzard I have zero faith in the future of their games anymore.
    Was there ever a report who got fired? Not names but departments. Meaning was there WoW devs or QA fired? Anything else don't affect this. I still don't understand why the survivor game devs weren't mixed to other projects, but still..
  1. Soeroah's Avatar
    "event"

    Damn it

    Hopefully there's a nice chunk of story too
  1. Shadowferal's Avatar
    I got my selfie-cam all prepped...somewhere.
  1. rrayy's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Just Passing through View Post
    Where is the obsession? Giving a patch a number could be down to sheer...you know..programming and release demands.

    I mean..I don't get why it isn't called 10.1, 10.2, 10.3, 10.4 etc but needs to be 10.2.6 - but if you want to call that an obsession...then ok /shrug
    Because that gives them room if they need to add a patch before the next big one is ready.

    - - - Updated - - -

    Quote Originally Posted by Kilpi View Post
    Was there ever a report who got fired? Not names but departments. Meaning was there WoW devs or QA fired? Anything else don't affect this. I still don't understand why the survivor game devs weren't mixed to other projects, but still..
    WoW wasn't touched. These were all redundancies created with the merger.
  1. DechCJC's Avatar
    Super intrigued with the 10.2.6 stuff. Their wording is strange, not sure why they felt the need to specify that anyone with a subscription can play the new event. Isn't that a bit.... duh? I wonder if them specifying that anyone with a sub can play is a hint that it's some sort of new mode akin to SoD, though I can't imagine how something like that would work in retail. Consider me interested.
  1. doledippers's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by DechCJC View Post
    Super intrigued with the 10.2.6 stuff. Their wording is strange, not sure why they felt the need to specify that anyone with a subscription can play the new event. Isn't that a bit.... duh?
    well it implies that you dont need to be max level, or even own dragonflight to do it. which could mean its some kind of scaling content
  1. FossilFree's Avatar
    Maybe the ability runes in classic are coming to retail? Classic could have been a testing ground for them before bringing them to retail. Rogue tank, mage healer, etc.
  1. Mojo03's Avatar
    sounds like separate realms (since classic and retail subs can do it)

    they tend to overhype things and under deliver, so I'm skeptical, but still sorta curious

    sounds like an elaborate community treasure hunt or something, hence the pirate flag

    yup, that's where my money is.
  1. WeAreNotSmilesTimes's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by meroes View Post
    Twitter integration part II!
    no no no. It's X integration now! That means it's new!
  1. arandomuser's Avatar
    one piece crossover?
  1. Soeroah's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by doledippers View Post
    well it implies that you dont need to be max level, or even own dragonflight to do it. which could mean its some kind of scaling content
    Makes me think of Legion invasions, but pirates
  1. RobertMugabe's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by sykretts View Post
    You have no idea how wrong you are on this lmao. But I like the confidence.
    Except that I am completely right on this. Player input always played a rather small role in bugfixing here, where as I already said, there isn't a decent system to report bugs at all, let alone anything beyond that. Games like Minecraft use a full ticketing system like JIRA, meanwhile in WoW you can just submit a random ass text which can't be longer than a paragraph and then there's no way of knowing if anyone ever even read the report, let alone if anyone got any use out of it.

    And tbh the reason why it is like that in WoW is because it mostly just doesn't matter for Blizzard and I don't mean this in a bad way. Because, as I said, PTR's are only here for generating hype. Even during a expansion's beta, player feedback doesn't matter all that much except maybe reporting blatant bugs. At the stage where players get to test out something, all decisions have already been made a long time ago and that's why we rarely see any major change even if the issues are obvious.
  1. Enrif's Avatar
    10.2.6 being such a mystery event, and it being available for classic and retail subscribers is interesting.

    I think it is something they test now that will be part of the TWW expansion features. Zaralek was for the underground system. We will get warbands with the prepatch, but have not a single system of it tested yet.
    So my prediction for 10.2.6 - Privateer Mode. A different mode to war mode. Where you set yourself as neither faction. Which will allow for entering and interacting with both factions, but you can no longer PvP. And it will come for classic too, for the people who want to play with players from both factions.
  1. Shadowferal's Avatar
    I suspect Classic is about to become afu.

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