While Blizzard has vowed to issue a major balance patch for World of Warcraft: Forever when the retro MMO’s raids launch in December, the developer certainly doesn’t seem afraid of doing some tinkering under the hood in the meantime. A roundup of hotfixes published on Nov. 10 would put the full patch notes of many live-service games to shame. And we’re just six days out from launch.
Perhaps the most notable change is to gold rewards for questing during the higher levels, which have been increased. While many players have yet to reach this stage yet, Blizzard has come under fire for abandoning the conversion of XP into gold once you hit max level — a change applied not long before WoW‘s first expansion, The Burning Crusade.
“We felt that it would be inappropriate for WoW: Forever players to be compelled to save up quests as they approach level 60 and then not turn them in until they transformed into a great profit,” Blizzard explained. But this has left players at level 60 somewhat cash-strapped.
“In original WoW, only about 25% of quests in the game actually provide raw gold rewards, which led this to be a slightly more negative change than intended to gold income as you get closer to level 60,” WoW: Forever‘s community manager explained in another post. So Blizzard has added gold rewards to the majority of quests from level 48 onwards. “This change brings high-level quests in-line with the rest of questing in WoW: Forever, with the goal of giving players a good reason to complete those quests while leveling up to 60 and thereafter,” Blizzard said.
Elsewhere, Blizzard continues to tweak the number of players you’ll see out and about in the world of Azeroth by adjusting the number of “layers” it uses in the game’s dynamic server structure. At launch, the developer showed an abundance of caution in crowd management, leaving many players in paradoxically deserted worlds during WoW‘s biggest launch ever. It responded by boosting player numbers, but perhaps didn’t find the sweet spot, as some players have reported zones so busy that it bogs down questing as players compete over spawns.
Blizzard has now swung back and “lowered the population of players in various zones where there was significant congestion,” according to the hotfix notes. Blizzard noted that it had made this an even bigger change for players on the PvP ruleset, which apparently has seen even worse overcrowding.
While the major class balance changes are still weeks away, Blizzard did make some adjustments in the hotfixes. The health of Warlocks’ pets has been increased by around 15%, and the Enhancement Shaman specialization has received a substantial overhaul. Also, on the subject of Warlock pets, Blizzard said that it had “fixed a bug causing the Succubus whip sound to play much too often,” which will be a massive relief for everyone.
Image: Blizzard Entertainment
The changes follow a significant adjustment to dungeon XP earlier in the week, as Blizzard tries to get the balance and pace of leveling right. Almost every one of these adjustments is hotly debated by the community, with intense advocacy on each side of every debate. Some players fear Blizzard is being led by the nose by a dramatic and vociferous player base. In truth, Blizzard adjustments are mostly data-driven.
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“We’re always looking at every available source of information about how our players are doing, how they are feeling,” World of Warcraft game director Ion Hazzikostas told Polygon in a recent interview. “That is, of course, the feedback that pours in from all channels, from our forums, social media, places like Reddit, content creators, [but it’s also] raw data that we can see about how much time people are spending in the game, what activities they are favoring, what activities they’re not spending as much time in, or maybe drifting away from, as well as surveys,” Hazzikostas said. “All of that is synthesized and is used to fuel every iteration that we make on the game, whether it’s rapid bug fixes or balance changes, or recognition that as a portion of our community, a portion of our player base that maybe is feeling underserved in the moment.”
One thing’s for sure: after the biggest launch in WoW history by peak concurrent players, the Forever team has plenty of data to go on as it plots its next round of changes.
