Lore

Welcome, glad to have you on the team!

now buff my class plz

Soooooo since I’m seeing a lot of confusion (here and elsewhere), here’s some insight into how we draw the line between what makes something a punishable exploit versus a “happy little accident.”

The key factor here is intent. Did the player do something with the specific intention of causing a glitch to occur, and did they do it order to exploit said glitch for their own benefit?

This recent glitch makes a pretty clean example. The players who were abusing it had to do some Very Weird Stuff to cause it to occur, and then did so repeatedly. No reasonable person would expect that this behavior was intended, and the players involved had to go out of their way to cause it. It’s obviously unintended, it’s obviously a glitch, and the people who abused it were obviously exploiting said glitch for their own benefit. That’s pretty open and shut.

Someone mentioned Esfand’s random MC reset in this thread, which is a pretty clean example of the other end of the spectrum. I...

We’re currently working on some hotfixes for PvP tuning, intended to go live with the next weekly restarts. We’re planning the following changes:

Paladin

• Protection
  • Light of the Protector and Hand of the Protector’s healing reduced by 40% when engaged in combat with enemy players.
  • Mana regeneration reduced by 30% when engaged in combat with enemy players.
  • Developers’ Note: With the launch of 8.1, the additional healing granted by Hand of the Protector was changed to be based off of the target’s missing health, rather than the Paladin’s missing health. While healing is a core element of Protection Paladin survivability, this has proven to be more effective in PvP than intended. Protection Paladins should feel like they can survive high amounts of damage, and heal their teammates in a pinch, but not provide consistent and sustained healing to their teammates throughout a match.

We’ve seen some confusion about the unlock requirements for Zandalari and Kul Tirans, and how that relates to testing them on the PTR. We’d like to clarify where things stand currently, and what our plans are once they’re officially released.

The basic requirements to unlock Zandalari and Kul Tiran are as follows:

• Exalted with that race’s faction
• Completed the content achievement for that race (“Zandalar Forever!” or “A Nation United,” respectively)
• Completed the Tides of Vengeance War Campaign achievement

On the PTR, we’ve enabled the last part of the War Campaign early, so that the Allied Race unlock quests can be started. As long as you satisfy the other requirements, and are at 3/4 of the requirements for the Tides of Vengeance War Campaign achievement, you’ll be able to speak to Nathanos on the Banshee’s Wail or Halford Wyrmbane on the Wind’s Redemption to get started unlocking Allied Races on the PTR.

We’re actually testing some new improvements that allow the client to share the majority of game data between installs, so you don’t need multiple copies of the entire game in order to test things on PTR.

To use this, you’ll need to be using the Beta version of the Battle.net app (Click the Blizzard logo in the upper left -> Settings -> Beta -> “Switch to Beta”). Then, when you install the PTR, it’ll only need to download about 2.5gb of data. Note that if you have the PTR already installed, you’ll need to uninstall and reinstall it to use this new tech.

Once it’s installed correctly, you’ll see a new folder called “_ptr_” under your World of Warcraft folder, which should be MUCH smaller than a completely separate i...

Last week, there was a bug active for approximately half an hour that resulted in a small number of players receiving an extreme amount of Artifact Power from completing Island Expeditions. While this error was on our end, the amount of Artifact Power given was far too high to leave as-is, as doing so would give an unfair advantage to the handful of players that happened to queue for Islands while this bug was active.

To that end, we have been working to identify and isolate these incorrect Artifact Power gains and remove the additional amounts that should not have been given. Players who were affected by this bug will instead be granted the amount of Artifact Power that would have been correct for the Island Expeditions they completed. This action has now been taken, and affected players will notice their total amount of Artifact Power has been reduced.

We apologize for the confusion and frustration this has caused, and remain committed to providing an equal and fair ...

Just to follow up - we needed to get some extra data together to do it properly, but yes, we’ll be removing the items gained and issuing suspensions for those who abused this bug (with an increasing penalty based on how excessive the abuse was). The reason it’s taken an extra few days is that we needed to make sure we were also cleaning up any extra Titan Residuum gained from this.

We’ve just pushed a hotfix to give Smoochums the correct model once again.

#JusticeForSmoochums