WoW Classic Scourge Invasion Snafu Prompts WotLK Pre-Patch World Events Revamp
Last Friday night saw the unexpected start of the Scourge Invasion event on the World of Warcraft Classic servers. The attack of the Scourge on Azeroth was originally supposed to begin a week after the start of the Zombie Plague event (September 13th) but someone messed up and inadvertently set the timer to just 72 hours, catching everyone, including the developers, by surprise.
Instead of yanking the event, Blizzard decided to roll with it and has also decided to end the Zombie Plague event early with an accompanying lore-based explanation on why the zombies suddenly disappeared. “It seems that due to advancements in modern Azerothian medicine in the last 15 or so years, the healers of the Argent Dawn have gotten much better at fighting infectious plagues and diseases. The Lich King doesn’t stand a chance,” tweeted WoW Classic Producer Josh Greenfield.
Due to the time-sensitive nature of these world events, the developers have reworked the Scourge Invasion, Plague Cure, and the Last Chapter/City Attack events to be able to individually start and stop them and make them work better with modern game functions.
“The way these events were built in 2008 causes them to be somewhat error-prone, particularly in situations we find ourselves in now where we have to do things such as opening brand new realms, or when we have general realm instability,” Greenfield said in his latest dev update. “We also had some (largely invisible to players) issues over the weekend where various timers for various events were incorrect which required us to manipulate the events manually, which also potentially further desyncs the timers.”
“We’ve had similar problems with other legacy events in past WoW Classic content releases such as the AQ40 War Effort events and it’s pretty obvious at this point that these types of older events just don’t quite function right in modern environments,” he added. “As much as we’d like to make them play out exactly as they were, we’ll be examining many such events for improvements for future content releases or potential seasons of the various different flavors of WoW Classic to hopefully avoid some of these headaches in the future.”
Consequently, the Scourge Invasion will continue to run until the launch of Wrath of the Lich King on September 26th. The Plague Cure events which are now live will also run right up until the expansion’s release and the Last Chapter and accompanying city attacks will start at 12 a.m. PDT on September 19th along with any other related RP events.
“Overall, we do want to extend our sincere apologies for the confusion around these events,” Greenfield concluded. “We believe that we are in a much better place now that we’ve modernized how these events work on the back-end and hope to see the remaining events to play out in a much more predictable fashion from here with no additional surprises.”
