Greetings, Time-Travelers!
Northrend has finally arrived, and with it comes the perfect opportunity to sit down and talk about the release, especially given everything that has unfolded over the past few days.
A Word of Thanks
First and foremost, I’d like to express our sincere gratitude to everyone who joined forces with us and helped push towards this release. Since shifting our focus to Northrend, we’ve managed to handle over 250 reports, and that simply would not have been possible without your support, your testing, and your willingness to dig into the details with us.
The Post-Release Reality
Unfortunately, many additional issues surfaced after launch. While we fully expected more bugs to appear in a highly populated, live environment, we certainly did not anticipate quite so many popping up at once.
Rest assured, we are working relentlessly to address as many bugs as possible. Our current priority is open-world content and questing, where the bulk of player activity lies.
To accelerate progress, we’ve placed the server on an intensive deployment schedule, rolling out daily fixes based on your reports. There is still plenty of work ahead, but we’re committed to tackling it piece by piece.
On Progression & Patch Emulation
This brings us to an important topic: progression changes.
In the past, we implemented substantial adjustments to emulate patch-like progression. However, for this release, we’ve concluded that our resources are far better spent fixing issues rather than recreating patch behaviour that adds little to the actual gameplay experience.
As such:
- We will not be emulating changes we have not evaluated to be meaningful to gameplay, for example, NPCs that only appear (or disappear) during certain phases.
- The early phases are expected to be fairly short, meaning features such as profession cooldown progression do not meaningfully impact gameplay and therefore will not be emulated.
- To avoid confusion, we will be removing quests and other assets that belong to future patches; however, our primary focus remains on addressing the gameplay issues we’ve encountered.
- Any content that introduces unfair disadvantages — as well as higher item-level items or anything players should not yet have access to — will also be removed.
That said, following popular demand and recent discussions, we have removed Jewelcrafting epic gems to give the profession more value within the current bracket.
Some common questions:
- The epic gems will be converted to their rare (blue) equivalents.
- Jeeves will have its materials refunded.
- Cut gems and gems equipped in items will be removed from players.
- We expect this process to be fully complete within a week.
What’s more:
- Daily dungeon quests were removed with the addition of the dungeon finder. As such, players have access to the daily emblem by completing the daily RDF dungeon.
- The dungeon reputation quest has also been removed with the addition of the dungeon finder.
- Since we have the dungeon finder, both of those quests are not currently available.
Looking Ahead — Brackets & Dungeons
While we don’t yet have a precise date — especially with the number of issues still being worked through — our initial expectation is that the normal-dungeon bracket will last roughly one month.
Our plan is straightforward:
- Fix as many outstanding issues as possible, especially in the open world and questing content.
- Perform a full sweep of dungeon-related issues, try to reach a near-zero amount of reports.
- Release heroic dungeons once we are confident in their quality.
We encourage you to keep an eye on the Dungeon Milestone to follow our progress.
We are continually in need of volunteers to help us triage, test, and resolve issues, allowing us to release content more quickly. If you believe you’ve got what it takes and would like to step up and lend a hand, feel free to open a ticket in the Contribute category and have a chat with us!
Thank you once again for your patience, your reports, and your enthusiasm. Northrend is a massive undertaking, but together, step by step, we will shape it into the experience it deserves to be.
Onwards and upwards — and may your adventures be bug-free!