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World of Warcraft’slatest Hearthstone eventis receiving some mixed feedback. Mostly because it’s a little confusing, but also because of its chaotic world bosses. In case you’re unfamiliar, here’s the rundown:
In three major cities (Stormwind, Orgrimmar, and Valdrakken) there are hotspots with Hearthstone tables in ‘em. Well. Table singular, unless you go to a shady merchant and get a special Hearthstone Wild Card—which’ll let you right-click the item to, uh, play a cardneara table. This gives you the vague suggestion of having fun while also letting you complete the quest. If you or one of your mates has the Hearthstone Game Table toy, you can put one down, but it does seem like a bizarre choice from the get-go.
On roleplay servers, the problem’s been multiplied tenfold:
Argent Dawn chooses violence today in World of Warcraft for the Hearthstone event pic.twitter.com/kI4jVJr96aMarch 11, 2024
Argent Dawn chooses violence today in World of Warcraft for the Hearthstone event pic.twitter.com/kI4jVJr96aMarch 11, 2024
In simple terms—pre-sharding, if you wanted to split populations up to handle heavy loads, you had to do it for everybody. Post-sharding, you could apply it to select zones.
But there was a problem: In roleplay servers, places like Stormwind have become major hubs where players will run in-character events, socialise, and have overdramatic duels to the death while rattling off their tragic backstories. Presumably while the guards stand and watch. Can’t blame them, they probably don’t even get dental.
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Sharding, however, splits these communities up at random. You can’t stumble into organic and public roleplay with somebody who just isn’t there. Blizzard started turning sharding on and off for roleplay realms, even targeting atypical zones to facilitate large-scale events.
(Image credit: @WarcraftDevs on Twitter/X.)
Despite this, it seems as if said sharding tech was, ah,notenabled in Stormwind to help Argent Dawn handle the Hearthstone event. Whenever a portal spawns, a tide of loot-hungry players—all in the same shard—rush to kick Whizbang’s gaggle of monsters, and all Fel breaks loose. Athread that hit the WoW subreddit yesterdayopens a window into the utter chaos:
“We’ve been fighting this Hearthstone anniversary boss for 40 minutes because we only do abilities collectively three times a minute,” writes userIAmRoofstone, who coincidentally posted the lovely slideshow at the top of this article on Twitter. Sheaddsthat everyone was “on the same shard clogging it up with like 500 AoE casts, trying desperately to get a tag on the boss. The server did not appreciate this behaviour.”
While I’d expect a temporary hotfix to come soon—Blizzard has temporarily re-enabled sharding on roleplay servers before, after all—this whole debacle is a great example of how straightforward changes to a game can be anything but. At the same time, this event offers transmog, pets, and mounts—and you should never underestimate how thirsty players often are for all three, regardless of the MMO.
TOPICSBlizzard Entertainment
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PRODUCTSWorld of Warcraft: DragonflightWorld of Warcraft
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