Summary
ThoughWorld of Warcraft’s Hardcore servers are on the horizon, players have already been able to spend some time testing out the realms in the PTR. The testing period has provided theWorld of Warcraftteam with some amusing insights into how players are ending their Hardcore runs, with deaths ranging from cave misadventures to drowning along with stubborn attempts to circumvent the game’s typical progression paths.
In a group interview, Senior Technical Designer Tim Jones and Game Producer Linny Cooke Saverline spoke to Game Rant about how the team has been tracking these causes of death with highly detailed analytics data to reveal some interesting behaviors among Hardcore players. They also provided their stance on how “unfair” deaths will be handled, though the team has been making some gameplay changes unique to the Hardcore servers in order to mitigate these occurrences as much as possible.
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World of Warcraft Hardcore Players Die In Both Unusual and Expected Ways
Game Rant asked the developers if they had any insights into what’s been killing the most players, and Jones pointed out that many deaths were due to environmental factors, rather thaniconic elite enemies like Hogger. As expected, caves are particularly dangerous to Hardcore players.World of Warcraft’s caves tend to be mini-dungeons in themselves, with tight quarters and a higher-than-average mob density, and they can often overwhelm players who venture in unprepared. The kobold caves in Elwynn Forest are especially rough due to the kobolds' tendency to flee when wounded, which can turn into larger pulls than players can handle.
The main cause of death actually isn’t Hogger! We have an amazing analytics team, and they’re setting up these awesome dashboards and hopefully some visualizations of exactly what’s killing Hardcore players. We have heat maps of where people die and what times of the day. Someone was trying to get to Winterspring on PTR and there was just this line of corpses through Felwood all the way to Winterspring, and it was cracking us up. We were looking on the coast of Southeast Durotar, right outside of Sen’Jin Village and the Echo Isles, and there were a lot of deaths in the water from people drowning. But there was one death in the pool of water in Sen’Jin Village, so whoever managed to die on land by drowning, props to that guy.
These metrics are super exciting to see, they’re really fun, and we’re excited to share them with the community. Also, Kobolds are very scary. Caves in general – people die a lot in caves getting that gold dust in Elwynn Forest. Voidwalker minions are pretty dangerous as well.
One player had been trying to reach Winterspring by passing through Felwood, a particularly dangerous zone that is regarded as one of the more challenging areas to get through in Kalimdor, especially if one is trying to sneak through the initially hostile Timbermaw Furbolgs that guard the pass to Winterspring. Drowning was another major cause of death, with numerous Hardcore runs ending off the coast of Sen’Jin village asHorde playersdive into the deep coastal waters for certain quests and neglect their breath meters.
No Appeals for World of Warcraft Hardcore Deaths
Linny Cooke Saverline also made a pointed statement regarding any potential for an appeals process for players who died due to server issues or other bugs. In short, there won’t be any appeals process. Death is the end for players onWorld of Warcraft’s Hardcore servers, no matter the cause.
We are very hardline: no appeals process on this.
However, the team has been making some changes in order to lower the chances of unfair deaths. Some robust checks have been put into place for flight paths in order to ensure that any glitches or server issues while a player is in transit won’t cause them to fall to their deaths. In addition, many ofWorld of Warcraft’s notorious escort questshave been reconfigured so that players of opposing factions can’t grief one another by exploiting certain aspects of these quests. Although Hardcore will largely be the same as Classic other than some additional rules, it’s nice to see that Blizzard is still tailoring the experience for this unique challenge.
World of Warcraftis available on PC and Classic Hardcore servers go live on August 24.
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