Go behind the blue curtain and into the mind of the developers who constructed Ratts’ Revenge and the enigmatic riddles that led to the mount reward: Incognitro, the Indecipherable Felcycle as a part of the 20th Anniversary event.
I’m glad that more individualized puzzles was a take-away here. The Felcycle stuff looks fun, but I associate it too much with the Anniversary events secrets, and my distaste for that nonsense is still too immediate to engage with this. No more Torch/Idol/Cap “”“secrets”“”, please and thank you.
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Ratts’ Revenge made me miserable.
Was that the designer’s intention?
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Time to equip my tinfoil hat!
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Honestly looking forward to using it as drive mount. Would love if the red one unlocked it at the same time.
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I hope the last 3 orbs each take as long as the first 9.
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The felcycle was my first time taking part in a current content secret quest. It was a ton of fun to play through, and it was amazing seeing Josh and the other devs in Discord. It was so cool having to use stuff from your toy/transmog/pet collections to solve puzzles. The crypts became like a second home. I still joke that it’s where I want my player housing.
There were so many great moments (and a few moments of despair when we were stuck on some of the harder steps). The pressure plates for the enigma machine were my favorite part, even though some people didn’t approve of how it got solved. Really awesome stuff.
I’m proud of the very, very minor contribution I made toward figuring out one of the puzzles. Some of them were extremely tough. I’m just glad we have smart people in the community who can solve all these encryption puzzles.
Light only knows. Perhaps more will come in a future update. Perhaps in the future there will be more to discover about the felcycle itself. Chief Engineer Ulzik seems to have hidden some additional capabilities behind protected codes. Stay tuned!
This is exciting. There seems to be quite a bit more hidden about the felcycle. Where’s my [Deluxe Tuna]?!
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Being able to interact with Josh in the Secret Finder discord was one of the coolest things imo. Reminded me of the old days, when there were actually still gm’s in game. He did an awesome job.
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I spent more time trying to resolve the Felcycle riddles than actually playing the expansion. I regret nothing it was epic!
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It was a lot of fun trying and watching people solve the riddles, it is amazing what players will come up with! Once the orbs were solved, I sat down for half a day and got that mount.
Now, if you could all turn your focus to 2077’s FF : 06 : B5 mystery with the same heavily focused passion, that would be appreciated!
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I think the Discord channel made the secret a lot more fun than it would have been without seeing all the zany ideas people threw out. I would love to see more individual puzzles, not just for secrets.
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I think WoW could benefit from more puzzle content.
It’s great for the community.
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Biggest take-away was that GM involvement with players actually participating in the game together created an authentic happy environment for everyone involved.
Maybe put more effort t’wards that. Spend time with your players, instead of off-loading stuff to AI and automated systems.
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I love their music, now we got to experience their puzzles!
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If you weren’t one of the people participating in the decoding, running things through hex/binary decoders or mass brute-forcing things, then it was a pretty non-event. A few of the puzzles maybe could have been solved on your own like the owl room. Stuff like the rats and statues? No way.
Lucid Nightmare was memorable because you could (and had to!) solve the puzzles on your own, all anyone could do is point where to go and offer some tips.
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I passed on the Felcycle very early on, I lost all interest in doing the whole thing. The carrot on the stick was not worth the effort or time in my book. For me personally it just was not fun.
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I look forward to modifications to the felcycle like a sidecar, or lol, a mailbox and AH. 
Oh, and I like that this was fairly on the same level as Myst or Riven, thank you so much for that 
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They seem to love getting people to do unfun chores via “too far in, might as well complete it” design aka farming people for their sunk cost fallacy. They legitimately do not understand this is not letting the game stand up on its own, and is a poor experience.
My guess is seeing how far they can push people with sunk cost fallacy.
Since sunk costing players is how you train people to turn into microtransaction whales. It is the textbook reason why engagement metrics are top priority. My guess is they want another 90 dollar mount in the future to FOMO people with and are experimenting with how to push people.
Them doing this shtick for anniversary is actually one of the things that got me to quit WoW. They actually managed to get me to stop caring about collecting things in this game outright, and made it feel bad and like they’re trying to be manipulative rather than provide a meaningful experience.
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It was definitely some sort of humiliation or hazing ritual, which should theoretically boost “loyalty”, whatever that is in a digital sense.
It just left a really bad taste in my mouth. Even them bringing up this rotten event again makes me very angry.
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I enjoyed the puzzle, though 99% of that enjoyment was being part of the secret finding discord and not actually doing the puzzle, which… is a problem, I suppose.
The ending was abrupt and unsatisfying.
Watching it all go down live, I felt like some Blizz exec complained that their kid was working on this puzzle and wanted it done before the family went on their ski vacation, so nix the last orbs and just give the kid the bike already. So suddenly we all wake up, with orbs still un-lit, and… the bike is just there, in the chest in Ratts’ cave? It was about as satisfying (and I’m dating myself here) as that season of Dallas where the season finale announced everything that had happened was just a dream.
No overarching narrative.
Sure, you can claim Ratts’ “story” was her making a puzzle with all tools available, including ones outside the game-world itself, but give us that story. Put it in a context that makes sense within the game.
Hell, we never did “Find Ratts,” which was the point of the scenario.
And what about Ulzik? The community went down some great lore rabbit holes to find Ulzik, all for nothing.
Griefing.
I didn’t experience this, but I saw a lot of reports about players griefing others by killing doomguards at Uther’s Tomb and killing each other using the AOE damage of the ending console.
Inconsistent or nonexistent in-game feedback for steps.
While I liked that certain steps had an AOE or proximity-based solution - Vale of Eternal Blossoms, ZG altars - it was frustrating to never really know if what you tried worked.
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