I didn't have the heart to crop out the skull. |
Blizzard Entertainment seems to be on a warpath with Wrath of the Lich King's first content patch. The developer has promised players an insane amount of content including the addition of the largest instance to date,
Ulduar, the
Dual Spec mechanic, a built-in Gear Manager, and the Argent Tournament, just to name a few. Not everything coming in v3.1 has been given the bullet point treatment however.
The bloggers on Project Lore have found a few under-the-radar type of additions that we have clung to like
a dork to his
unopened figures. Heartbourne gave us the
Hearthstone cooldown reduction and
Dual Spec price. The first change was likely made to stop "ghetto hearthing" - the art of abusing an instance for a free hearth. Juggynaut got hooked on his
Legendary mace and
the modifications to the Dual Spec feature before hitting us with the removal of the
Black and Plagued Proto-Drake meta-achievement rewards. Myself, well, I covered the
Argent Tournament and the patches upcoming gear additions. Which no one cared about apparently, or just didn't want to spoil themselves.
Following in the footsteps of the Hearthstone's nerf and the additional of the Gear Manager, comes another quality of life change to World of Warcraft, the modification to the RaidID system. Blizzard announced
their intentions to overhaul the archaic system a few weeks ago, but I don't think anyone, including Blizzard, expected it to be done for
Patch 3.1's testing on the PTR.
The RaidID system is Blizzard's internal way of tracking which instance a toon should be connected to. The main problem that arose with the system was the lockout period. Should a player that has cleared a raid or heroic enter into the instance first, followed by the other members of the party or raid, the unsaved players can get linked to the cleared instance. This would then blow their lockout period. Needless to say, this
small issue pissed people off. A lot. Zarhym's promise of "a
better interface to warn players" has come to light on the PTR, but not as elegant as he hoped.
BigRedKitty's screenshot shows us a dialogue box with a warning on it. Basically, we have 15 seconds to get out of dodge if the instance is not what we expected, that is it. The box does not appear to give you any details on the instance itself, so the "better interface" has yet to come to fruition by my standards. Hopefully further upgrades to the system will be coming in the near future.
Many of you probably never experienced this issue, or don't even care about the "fix", but you should. In my opinion, it is Blizzard's application of these little tweaks that helps make them one of the premiere developers in the industry. The company should be applauded for their attention to detail and willingness to correct their mistakes, especially when the issue only effects a small amount of the populace under certain circumstances. Even if Blizzard does it in an iterative fashion when a more drastic change is called for, at least the ball is rolling. Right?
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