World of Warcraft News and Raiding Strategies

Greetings!

First up I’d like to thank you for taking the time to write up really excellent feedback here. Our team fully supports the sentiment that accessibility is not just a concern for those with disabilities, and that efforts to improve accessibility make the game better for everyone. Posts like this do a great job of helping us gain insight into ways we can level up as developers.

While I can’t provide a definitive answer to all of your points, I’d like to share some insight into how we think about and approach these problems, as well as some things we’ve either already done or are considering that may help.

Collaborative Randomness

This is a cool term and I like it, but I want to expand a bit and talk about even more factors that we think about when determining if a mechanic is appropriate to ask players to do at a given difficulty, such as:

• How complex is the mechanic?
• How much affordance does the mechanic have? (basically a function of how clear it is + how much time you’re given to react)
• How severe is the punishment for failure, and is it binary or granular?

To use a few Shadowlands mechanics as examples:

Smoldering Ire (Denathrius)

• Low complexity
• High affordance
• Outright ignoring it is an instant wipe, but failure is granular (if you only miss 20% the damage is likely survivable)

Spiked Floor (Painsmith)

• Low complexity
• Medium affordance
• Failure is binary (die if you get hit), but it only affects one person so a few mistakes can be OK

Loom of Fates (Fatescribe)

• High complexity
• High affordance
• Failure is binary and instantly wipes the raid.

Note that this is simplifying a bit and doesn’t account for “what else is competing for your attention while this mechanic is happening?”, but it’s still a useful model to help evaluate the impact a mechanic has on a fight.

When it comes to Loom of Fates, I wonder if you’d feel less like addons are a requirement if one or both of the following were true:

• Fewer things competing for your attention during the mechanic (avoidable elements, adds, etc)
• More granular penalty for failure (ex: a single mistake resulted in a “survivable with all your raid CDs” level of damage, as opposed to a wipe)

Ultimately what I’m getting at here is that “high complexity” is a design space that allows us to do some pretty cool and thematic stuff, and I’d like to find ways for us to continue doing things in this space while keeping them accessible. To be clear: We make “high complexity” mechanics not because we feel pressure to keep up with addons, but because doing so allows us to create more unique bosses.

Hiding of Visual Information

Spark Bots on Mekkatorque were a lesson for us on the experiences of players who don’t have the option of using voice chat. Since then any time we make a mechanic with “hidden information” or other puzzle elements that require players to communicate on the fly, one of our requirements is to confirm through playtesting that it can be reasonably completed without using addons or voice chat. In Shadowlands this requirement has been applied for fights like Mistcaller, Hylbrande, Fatescribe, and Lords of Dread.

That said we understand that even if a fight “can be done” without advanced addons or voice chat, it’s still possible for players without those tools to experience a frustratingly large disadvantage relative to a fight’s intended difficulty. We still have room to improve here, and hope to continue learning from and applying feedback like this as we make new bosses in the future.

Even if we can’t achieve complete parity, I think it’s totally fair to ask for designs to be considerate of players who can’t use voice and to provide reasonable in-game tools to bridge the gap. This of course brings us to…

User Interface Improvements

In-game communication tools are a big opportunity for improvement, and there’s been a lot of discussion on the team around the topic of how our interface can be used to enhance communication. The interface updates coming in 10.0 are largely focused on improving how the game provides information to players, but we agree that in the future something like a “ping system” would be great for enhancing communication and would be very much worth exploring.

Thank you again for sharing your thoughts here, and for helping us make our game more accessible for everyone.

The winner of this weekend’s Last Stand Tournament, beginning May 22 on YouTube, will secure the final invite to the Mythic Dungeon International Season 3 Global Finals!


What/Where/When to Watch The Last Stand Tournament

• Broadcast Dates: Friday, May 20 - Sunday, May 22, 2022
  
• Broadcast Time: 10:00 AM PT
  
• Format: Teams of 5 must complete all six dungeons within 15 hours spread across all three broadcast days. Fastest time in each dungeon will be added up, with the fastest cumulative team advancing to the Global Finals.
  
• Language Streams on YouTube:
  
  • English
    
  • French
    
  • German
    
  • Russian
    
  • Spanish
    
  • Korean
    

• Prize Pool: $30,000 (USD) Per Group and Last Stand Tournament
  
  • $300,000 (USD) Global Finals
    

Other MDI Key Dates & Info

• Last Stand Tournament Broadcast May 20 - 22, 2022
  
• MDI Global Finals July 8 -10, 2022

Mythic Dungeon International Season 3 Format

Over 5,000 teams registered for Time Trials, and only five tenacious teams remain (one team had to drop out last minute) to race in this weekend’s MDI Last Stand Tournament for one last spot in the Global Finals! These teams will have 15 hours spread over three days to run as many dungeons as possible. The winning team will join the six teams from the Group weekends and the top team out of China to compete in the Global Finals, with a $300,000 prize pool on the line!


Casters

Dratnos Meeix Naguura Tettles Xyronic

Special Guests: Okaymage & Naowh


Looking Ahead

After careful consideration, we’ve decided to host the Season 3 finals as online-only events. In lieu of focusing all of our efforts on a LAN event to close out the current competitive seasons, we are thrilled to have a variety of upcoming events to honor the end of Shadowlands and prepare PvE and PvP esports for Dragonflight! In addition to the MDI Global Finals on July 8 - 10, Arena World Championship will follow with the Grand Finals on July 16 - 17 and then an online cross-region tournament on July 23 - 24. We’ll also have brand-new community events, an extended Great Push tournament format, and a slew of one-off events to close out the year. Be sure to keep checking this site and to follow us on Twitter as we’ll be revealing more details over the coming months.


Stay Connected

To catch all the WoW^® Esports action be sure to subscribe on YouTube. For updates, memes, and more, follow the WoW Esports Twitter page.

As we previously mentioned, our initial intention was to release the Enigma Crucible with a unique mechanic, a central button that allowed players to manipulate the pillar configuration throughout a match. During implementation, we found some concerns like pathing and line-of-sight issues that could have sporadically affected players and some of their class abilities. So to provide the best play experience and avoid potential frustrations, we have decided to go forward with the version that is currently available on the 9.2.5 PTR which has a single pillar configuration that remains locked throughout the match. We do not plan to pursue the initial version at this time.

Thank you for your understanding and we’ll see you in the Arena.

Over the last few weeks, we’ve observed an unprecedented event in World of Warcraft: an unserviceable number of Burning Crusade Classic players have continuously attempted to play on a single realm.

This has always been possible, of course. At any time over the last 17 years, players in a region could have collectively decided to create characters on a single realm and then all attempted to play on that realm. All realms have a cap on concurrent players (this is configured to be the same number on all realms), and if that many players are in-game on the realm, additional players who come along are placed into a queue. The queue itself also has a cap, and if even more players than that attempt to log into the realm, they are denied access entirely.

By the measurement of its daily total number of players logged-in, Firemaw is the largest realm in the world. To give that some context, the 24th largest realm in the world (Benediction-US) has about 67% as many daily players as Firemaw does.

The reason we’ve never seen such a large population on a realm for more than a few days is something we call “queue pressure”. The game is much more fun if you’re actually playing it, even on a smaller realm, so in the past, players have always eventually chosen to move to other realms. For quite some time, free character transfers have been available from the Firemaw realm. Any player with characters on Firemaw can move to the following realms for free:

• Amnennar
• Ashbringer
• Earthshaker
• Golemagg
• Mandokir
• Mograine
• Patchwerk
• Razorgore
• Sulfuron
• Transcendence
• Venoxis

As always, we encourage players on Firemaw to alleviate the population issue by transferring to one of those realms.

It’s worth mentioning that the subject of layering is not related to this issue. Layers are automatically created or collapsed based on the number of players who are outside of instanced content, and the layering configuration is exactly the same on all WoW Classic realms. Lately, Firemaw has consistently needed 4 layers to accommodate all players who are not in instanced content. Smaller realms have fewer layers, but this is related to the number of players congregating outside instances, not the total number of concurrent players the realm can serve. Adding more layers would not increase the total number of players allowed on a realm at the same time. That maximum is bounded by the limitations of hardware.

We’re currently evaluating all realms’ populations and the necessity for more or different free character transfers. We’ll let you know as soon as we determine whether we need to take additional steps there.

Thank you!