Darkmoon Faire Event Not Active, Five Forgotten Features in World of Warcraft

[Lumy]

Darkmoon Faire Event Not Active
The monthly Darkmoon Faire event is currently not active in NA and EU, as the portals to the Darkmoon Island have not spawned in Mulgore and Elwynn Forest. This looks to be a bug affecting the entire 2022 calendar, no Darkmoon Faire events have been generated.

Update: The Darkmoon Faire World Event has been hotfixed to start on January 9th.


Five Forgotten Features in World of Warcraft
In his latest video on Youtube, Rextroy highlights five oldschool features in World of Warcraft that have been either removed or abandoned.

Background

It is time for us to take a look back, at some fun features that sadly got removed. These features are also barely known to exist by most of the community!

1: World Defense

World Defense was an AMAZING feature that existed back in the day (I believe all the way until Legion), it is pretty much Local Defense, but it will instead cover the entire game. So you would know whenever any friendly NPC was getting attacked by the enemy faction.

It started to not function after sharding was added, since it usually reported places being under attack, but by the time you got there it was on a different shard.

It ended up removed completely, instead of being fixed.

A lot of world pvp guilds aswell as roleplayers would definitely want the feature back! To make the ingame world more alive.
Good news however is that it is still working in Classic WoW, and if you reach rank 11 you are even able to chat in the channel!

2: Highmaul Coliseum

The Highmaul coliseum was a great feature in WoD. It was a free for all instanced location, that you could access if you had Gladiator's Sanctum (tier 3) in your Garrison.

You would win awesome titles and toys, however it wasn't easy to win since there were a lot of contenders...

After WoD, the feature is still working. But barely anyone queues for it since you still need gladiator's sanctum. Also not many people playing, knows about it.

It would be great if it were added as a brawl or had an easier / more obvious way to queue into it! To get participation up.

3: Kiting

Kiting bosses and tough NPCs was a fun thing to do back in the day. In Classic it is still a hot topic. However you might wonder why it isnt being done on retail?

The reason is because either sharding, or a seperate limit has been added to restrict it. It appears that you cannot bring NPCs far outside of their original zone, not even with Mind Control, Death Grip, or by normal kiting.
They will be forced to reset...

It would be great if the issue could be fixed so the world could once again, be more alive and feel less... instanced

4: Old Treasures

Back in the day, there were a lot of different items you could obtain (in the Classic days) such as Papal Fez, Chromatic Sword or the Tidal Charm trinket

But after cataclysm, when the old world was changed, a lot of the NPCs that dropped the items were removed. Or had their levels changed.

That lead to them being unable to be obtained (or REALLY rare). One example of this is Uldaman, that even had the level of the dungeon changed back in TBC.
This lead to certain items in there only being obtainable from a single source, the ancient treasure chest at the end of the dungeon.

With a droprate of 0.01%, requiring an average of 10 000 of runs to obtain. People were uncertain if the items were even obtainable!
One of these items are the Miner's Hat of the Deep

Nowadays, a lot of old items can drop again, but many are still a mystery.
Even those that can drop, are sold these days for millions of gold!

5: At war

At war is a really fun feature that was used more in the old days. It enables you to go hostile with a faction that you are usually friendly with, such as the goblin factions or ravenholdt.

This allowed you to gain reputation with certain factions such as Bloodsail or Syndicate. With bloodsail reputation being a requirement for prestigeous titles such as the Insane or Bloodsail Admiral

Sadly this feature aint used anymore... even the times it is you can't attack the NPCs that you are at war with. Because for some reason they are still friendly to you...?

I really wish they updated a lot of these features, which would help to make the game less about instances!

[Biomega]

I'm not sure those old features were super amazing. Shifting world PvP towards actual PLAYER combat rather than people ganking town NPCs is a good thing. We don't need a channel telling us someone is killing quest givers in Stranglethorn Vale, because that's not something we want to be a thing in the first place. Same with kiting mobs to infinity and beyond - all that happens is either some big elite ends up in a low-level area causing trouble, or some quest mob is being held hostage in limbo. Outside of meme potential, this was very rarely if ever a genuinely positive experience for most people.

Highmaul Coliseum was neat, but I guess it's understandable that old expansion content becomes obsolete after a while. If it didn't, we'd have systems bloat even worse than we do now. While the Coliseum itself was not bad content, I think it's okay to have content with a lifespan in principle.

Similarly, the old "treasures" are just remnants with no real use. Outside of some PvP twink concerns for a select few items, they're pretty much irrelevant. Where not, I guess it wouldn't hurt to buff the drop rates a little so you don't need to farm for 2 months. Especially if they're twink pieces or unique transmogs (and I'm not even sure any of them are, but I could well be wrong). That being said, having some super rare stuff for collectors only (i.e. without any real competitive power) isn't necessarily a terrible thing.

As for the 'at war' thing... I think that was an incredibly niche feature that didn't really work out super well - especially since it involved killing NPCs in towns that might be related to other players' content. If it was just random guards or whatever that's one thing, but you really DO NOT want people to have the ability to lock quest-related NPCs. And at the end of the day, so few people ever did anything with that feature it's perhaps better to err on the side of caution and not let people potentially disrupt the majority just because a tiny minority might, at some point, use this feature for a bit.

All in all, WoW has so many massive, widely spread problems that a couple of ancient niche features are VERY low on the list of priorities indeed. This is just a collection of curiosities.

[Shakzor]

And here i thought "abandoned or forgotten features" were things like the air battles or that path of the titans that were never implemented, but even printed and advertised as a feature on the WotLK box (not sure if path of the titans was on the box, but still fits) rather than just outdated systems that basically have no use anymore

[supermany2]

I miss Glyphes that actually do something. It was such a cool new Profession in WotLK. But got worse and worse with every new expansion. Now it is pretty much useless.

[AlmightyGerkin]

I miss Glyphes that actually do something. It was such a cool new Profession in WotLK. But got worse and worse with every new expansion. Now it is pretty much useless.

Went the same way as First Aid and Archaeology

[Fistfighter]

Can't believe, with how popular Battle Roayale games were in the last 5 years, Blizzard never pushed the Highmaul Colliseum concept.

I was a fairly active PvP player back in WoD, and even I only went to the colliseum like 2 times, because it was so obscure noone really queued back then.

[Ange]

Kiting got removed because it was exploited since vanilla beyond imagination.

Soloing current content, just because you play the right class that is able to kite and know a few dungeon/area exploit for pathing?

I liked the kiting challenge in vanilla for the hunter class challenge and of course for PVP. It was exploited way to much, good that its gone for most situations.

[Steelangel]

Brawler's Guild.

That's been gone since before the end of BFA

[Romanthony]

I mean When i saw the list I was like "Huh really?" World Defense, wasnt all that good, only good for pvpers, and sometimes RPers who like to be a Defender of the lands, but it wasnt all that great,

Highmaul understand why, it was an expansion feature no need to keep it.

Kiting, (as a hunter main who kited the last boss in UBRS all the time) Kinda glad it was changed based on what we see on SOM alot of Aholes Kiting the Dragon from blasted lands to HC charaters jsut to grief them SPECIALLY if they are Streamers.

Old treasures? Honestly, ITs not something i care about

At war, again dont really care it was only good for the Centaurs and the Bloodsail thing so eh?

[Will]

I mean When i saw the list I was like "Huh really?" World Defense, wasnt all that good, only good for pvpers, and sometimes RPers who like to be a Defender of the lands, but it wasnt all that great,

Highmaul understand why, it was an expansion feature no need to keep it.

Kiting, (as a hunter main who kited the last boss in UBRS all the time) Kinda glad it was changed based on what we see on SOM alot of Aholes Kiting the Dragon from blasted lands to HC charaters jsut to grief them SPECIALLY if they are Streamers.

Old treasures? Honestly, ITs not something i care about

At war, again dont really care it was only good for the Centaurs and the Bloodsail thing so eh?

Just because you don't care to partake in some features is not to say they're not good arguments in favour of their keeping.

World defense a prime example, it's presence hurts not those who have no desire to use it. They need merely disable or ignore it. That's hardly a captivating argument as to why it shouldn't be there, when many DO use it quite happily. Your arguement is essentially "I don't use it so there's no point in it existing at all". Some people did use it, myself included.

Your remark that expansion features (when referring to the coliseum) do not need to be kept is also baffling.

I think one of the main things this game could really learn from FFXIV is that old content does not need to become redundant or discarded simply because of a new expansion. After all, people wanted previous expansions' m+ content and the mage tower to return in SL. Why? Because if it's good and people enjoyed it, then this idea that it should become irrelevant is asinine. I'm sick of this constant discarding of entire gameplay systems and content as opposed to keeping it relevant like some other MMOs do.

The remainder of your post was more of the same "I don't care about it so why should anyone else" implication.

[callipygoustp]

Small indie company.....

[Enter Name Here]

they probably didnt expect the game to survive this long

[Lucetia]

Brawler's Guild.

That's been gone since before the end of BFA

But that usually happens. It leaves at the start of the expansion and then comes back towards the end later with everything "updated" in terms of new gear and stuff. Usually around the second to last patch so people can "outgear" it and help with pushing some mechanics.

[crusadernero]

I'm not sure those old features were super amazing. Shifting world PvP towards actual PLAYER combat rather than people ganking town NPCs is a good thing. We don't need a channel telling us someone is killing quest givers in Stranglethorn Vale, because that's not something we want to be a thing in the first place. Same with kiting mobs to infinity and beyond - all that happens is either some big elite ends up in a low-level area causing trouble, or some quest mob is being held hostage in limbo. Outside of meme potential, this was very rarely if ever a genuinely positive experience for most people.

Highmaul Coliseum was neat, but I guess it's understandable that old expansion content becomes obsolete after a while. If it didn't, we'd have systems bloat even worse than we do now. While the Coliseum itself was not bad content, I think it's okay to have content with a lifespan in principle.

Similarly, the old "treasures" are just remnants with no real use. Outside of some PvP twink concerns for a select few items, they're pretty much irrelevant. Where not, I guess it wouldn't hurt to buff the drop rates a little so you don't need to farm for 2 months. Especially if they're twink pieces or unique transmogs (and I'm not even sure any of them are, but I could well be wrong). That being said, having some super rare stuff for collectors only (i.e. without any real competitive power) isn't necessarily a terrible thing.

As for the 'at war' thing... I think that was an incredibly niche feature that didn't really work out super well - especially since it involved killing NPCs in towns that might be related to other players' content. If it was just random guards or whatever that's one thing, but you really DO NOT want people to have the ability to lock quest-related NPCs. And at the end of the day, so few people ever did anything with that feature it's perhaps better to err on the side of caution and not let people potentially disrupt the majority just because a tiny minority might, at some point, use this feature for a bit.

All in all, WoW has so many massive, widely spread problems that a couple of ancient niche features are VERY low on the list of priorities indeed. This is just a collection of curiosities.

Maybe with all these small things being gone it makes the world smaller(even though its HUGE) and feel more disconnected. Couple that with alot of other minor and major things that has been changed or removed. Just imagine how god damn huge this game is and how little it feels at the same time. Its insane.

I do agree that most features probably belong in each seperate xpac, but the coloseum feature could have been something Blizzard polished and worked on. Its a cool thing to have in the game, if nothing else for how silly it is with 12 FFA. Just as with most things Blizzard puts in this game it gets removed, totally irrelevant or left to rot while the only steady features we have are raids, dungeons, pvp(not even new stuff there though), zones and quests. Beyond that, everything is tied to xpac. Some of those features deserves to be brought into the future too.

With all the faults of Garrisons, some of it was cool. Coloseum was one of them and something that should have carried over, just like garrisons should have been(with HUGE changes).

[khazmodan]

Hey Blizzard, the Darkmoon Faire is one of the last few parts of the game that is still a little bit fun (even though there are zones still under construction...)

Blizzard: We better fix that...

[Khaza-R]

World Defense - I sort of get this. It was useful for finding WPvP hotspots back in the Vanilla era. Issue is, this type of feature isn't compatible with sharding on modern servers

Highmaul Coliseum - Personally I skipped the majority of WoD so I can't attest to this. But sounds like a cool feature.

Kiting - This one I miss. Sometimes trolling your own fellow players is good fun. Sitting in cities, waiting for queues to pop isn't fun. Nothing wrong with adding stuff that spices it up every once and while

Old Treasures - Not really sure what he means here. I feel like the game still has items with crazy low drops. We could have more unique, obscure items with different effects. That's something I do miss from the old days.

At War - This is a fair point. There was something nice about things so mundane as random rep with only a few rewards. But obviously the prestige is in the grind. Not every grind needs to be about raids/pvp/M+.

[Otaka]

I'm not sure those old features were super amazing. Shifting world PvP towards actual PLAYER combat rather than people ganking town NPCs is a good thing. We don't need a channel telling us someone is killing quest givers in Stranglethorn Vale, because that's not something we want to be a thing in the first place. Same with kiting mobs to infinity and beyond - all that happens is either some big elite ends up in a low-level area causing trouble, or some quest mob is being held hostage in limbo. Outside of meme potential, this was very rarely if ever a genuinely positive experience for most people.

Highmaul Coliseum was neat, but I guess it's understandable that old expansion content becomes obsolete after a while. If it didn't, we'd have systems bloat even worse than we do now. While the Coliseum itself was not bad content, I think it's okay to have content with a lifespan in principle.

As for the 'at war' thing... I think that was an incredibly niche feature that didn't really work out super well - especially since it involved killing NPCs in towns that might be related to other players' content. If it was just random guards or whatever that's one thing, but you really DO NOT want people to have the ability to lock quest-related NPCs. And at the end of the day, so few people ever did anything with that feature it's perhaps better to err on the side of caution and not let people potentially disrupt the majority just because a tiny minority might, at some point, use this feature for a bit.

All in all, WoW has so many massive, widely spread problems that a couple of ancient niche features are VERY low on the list of priorities indeed. This is just a collection of curiosities.

The world defense channel was not about questgivers, it was everything... guards too. And we did use it alot more than you think... everytime there was an alert from crossroads or durotar there were many of us who were in orgrimmar at the time and decided to find out whats going on. All the servers ive played in the past had world pvp like that.
You dont need to join the channel if you dont want it... infact it was disabled by default so you had to manually enable it.

"At War" never really had the issue of locking quest-related NPCs since those were always friendly to you... but for some reason blizzard decided that even guards had to be that way even tho they have no reason to exist in the game other than to protect players from PvP in neutral areas.

Even to this day my bloodsail admiral DK is hostile with the goblins so i cant go to gadgetzan/booty bay/everlook without being attacked by the guards, fun little detail that doesnt really affect gameplay much since those are old zones and i would never go to them anyway.

Kiting mobs is one of the best community driven content you can do in the game... many newer players experienced something like this back in the day which made them even more excited to continue playing (since it was a cool looking monster, something you havent seen yet), only really tryhards get angry about it since they are quite trigger happy when it comes to repair costs and efficiency... anything outside of their routines or harmful to their safety in a generally safe area makes them mad.

All these minor features give the game depth... take them away and all of a sudden the game is a shallow theme park with only things you can do being the ones blizzard tells you can do.
Freedom is key, noone asked for blizzard to turn WoW into a theme park MMO... and clearly it wasnt a good idea either, seeing how small the playerbase is these days.

[Palapop]

World Defense - I sort of get this. It was useful for finding WPvP hotspots back in the Vanilla era. Issue is, this type of feature isn't compatible with sharding on modern servers

Highmaul Coliseum - Personally I skipped the majority of WoD so I can't attest to this. But sounds like a cool feature.

Kiting - This one I miss. Sometimes trolling your own fellow players is good fun. Sitting in cities, waiting for queues to pop isn't fun. Nothing wrong with adding stuff that spices it up every once and while

Old Treasures - Not really sure what he means here. I feel like the game still has items with crazy low drops. We could have more unique, obscure items with different effects. That's something I do miss from the old days.

At War - This is a fair point. There was something nice about things so mundane as random rep with only a few rewards. But obviously the prestige is in the grind. Not every grind needs to be about raids/pvp/M+.

1. This is why sharding is SUPER BAD!
Like- some snailface opens on me in Korthia for nothing.... I kill mobs I'm in combat with and I turn my self to that filthy ganker- the moment I pop my cds on him, he vanishes. (and nope, hes not rogue... he jsut swaps shard or w/e). In mi dof combat.

2. HM Coliseum was SUPERB FUN! Trust me. Enjoyed every single bit of it (Got title Warlord of Draenor)

3. I'm 50/50 with it. I don't miss it. But I wouldn't mind it coming back.

4. Agree with you.

5. Agree with you again

[Rucati]

"Five Forgotten Features"? No, it's more like 5 features that were incredibly stupid and got ignored because of it. Thank Christ the community doesn't make decisions about the game rofl.

World defense channel? World PvP is the worst content in the game, and nobody is going to go way out of their way to fight people in some obscure part of the game. Nobody would use it, so it doesn't need to exist.

Highmaul Coliseum is still in the game. Nobody plays it because it wasn't very fun. If you aren't one of the classes that excels at that type of gameplay (IE: Rogue) then it was just a boring pointless battle royale where half the classes had no real shot at winning and healers couldn't even really participate.

Kiting was incredibly dumb. If the only way you can kill a mob is by kiting it through an entire zone then clearly you aren't supposed to kill that mob. It serves no real purpose, if anything it was just obnoxious because it made mobs take longer to reset in certain situations.

Old Treasures still exist? If you want a super rare drop you can pay for it, the Uldaman drops usually go for like 1 million gold each. There's literally nothing wrong with some items in the game being incredibly rare, honestly I wouldn't mind if we had more <1% drop rate items.

At War serves no purpose, so it was removed. Adding it back wouldn't do anything because it wasn't useful to begin with. Not sure why they removed it, but I'm also not sure why anyone would want this back.

Really isn't a list of "Forgotten Features", more just a list of things that served no purpose and therefore no longer exist. There's nothing wrong with dumb shit like this getting removed from the game.

[Pakheth]

I miss the random treasure chests out in the world that got changed with Cataclysm. The new chests are too rare and often placed in odd locations while the old were usually placed in enemy camps and the like.