World of Warcraft: Classic's Season of Discovery has been a success so far, outperforming most of Blizzard's metrics—but its experimental nature has also caused no shortage of problems. Most recently, those problems have surrounded an unassuming [[link]] orb.
But first, some context: Season of Discovery (SoD) proceeds in 'phases', which are sort of like seasons in a live service game. The level cap's bumped in bite-sized level bands, an old dungeon is retrofitted into a 20-player raid, and a whole bunch of new runes hit the established meta like a swarm of meteors.
, raising the cap to level 50—but it also put players in punting distance of . I use the phrase "punting distance" here because "in reach" isn't exactly accurate. See, Crusader is typically relegated to level 60 characters in your usual Classic server. It's best-in-slot for basically any melee class, giving them a chance to increase their strength by 100 for 15 seconds (alongside a self-heal) with every swing.
, writing: "With a hotfix that went live to all realms earlier today, Righteous Orbs no longer drop during Phase 3 of Season of Discovery. They’ll become available as intended in Phase 4."
While I think resource wars breaking out over a single mob is cool on paper, I can understand why it shouldn't be required to fight over a single creature with a 2% drop rate of a key item (or to have deep enough pockets to buy one off the Auction House) just to get your best-in-slot.
The hotfix, however, doesn't remove already-active Crusader enchantments from the game, which means there's currently a terrifying warrior caste [[link]] of Crusader-wielding players stalking phase 3. This is, as one might imagine, causing a lot of arguments.
On one side of the fence, players who were actually enjoying a unique and player-discovered grind feel as if Blizzard are clamping down on their fun: "We were just told that more hardcore players should come up with creative ways to push their gaming. This was one of them," one on the Classic WoW subreddit. "I would never do this myself but it has no impact on the game besides giving the sweats more to do." argues that the hotfix has also created "an elite group of players that nobody else can touch or achieve."
On the other side of the fence, some people are arguing that an entire server having to compete for a 2% drop rate item from a single enemy just to get a must-have enchantment is, uh, a little unhealthy for the game: "Rip to the bozos that [real-money-traded] to buy the enchant", a player , after discovering that parsing website Warcraft Logs for the rest of the phase.
It's ultimately a fascinating situation—I don't think the Crusader enchantment can be considered an exploit by any reasonable person, but it certainly had an adverse impact on phase 3. Grinds are the meat to an MMO's bones, but if a grind is too severe, it's going to encourage real-money trading and all sorts of unsavoury activity.
On the other hand, orb-hunting seems like it was a fun time for the people who were good at it, and just nixing the orb out of the [[link]] phase entirely seems like it's pushing against the tide. Why not add a few more couriers to the map and make an event out of it—maybe even bump up the drop rate?
Either way, at the time of writing, pre-existing Crusader-enchanted weapons remain. Whether Blizzard'll take the hotfix one step further and remove these overpowered stat-sticks is another question entirely—though considering the current backlash, I'm not sure it'd be wise.