Updated 6:00 p.m. PDT May 28 – The Black Lotus and Warsong Gulch hotfixes are live in all regions.
Via hotfixes, we’re working on several quality-of-life improvements that should go live in the next few days.
Black Lotus scarcity has been consistently among the top issues we’ve seen player feedback about, so we’ve decided to update how we handle Black Lotus spawns. Since the launch of WoW Classic, the game has used the spawn times and locations from original World of Warcraft, but population and social factors have led to Black Lotus being much more scarce than it was in original WoW. While these issues affect all mining and herb nodes to some degree, Black Lotus is especially affected because it has the special property of only having one spawn up at a time in each of the zones it spawns in.
In original WoW, designers planned Black Lotus around a technical limitation – only 10 spawn locations per node type could be active at the same time in the same zone. We no longer have that limitation, but it gives us a design intention that we can work with: Black Lotus was supposed to spawn in the widest variety of locations, while there could only be one up at a time in each zone. As always, our goal is to minimize differences from original World of Warcraft, and we feel this is a case where we can follow that design intention in a way that is warranted by modern conditions as well as beneficial to players.
We’re going to increase the spawn rate of Black Lotus, and we’re going to add many additional possible spawn locations in each of the Black Lotus zones. With a different hotfix, we’re working on making it so that a player cannot see a Black Lotus on-screen or on their minimap if they’re dead, unless they have 300 Herbalism.
For Warsong Gulch, we’ve identified a number of locations in the battleground where clever players have found ways to get to a place they were never intended to go. These exploits are decidedly unfair, so we’re putting a stop to them. In most cases, the way we prevent such things is to place an invisible gate that blocks the unintended path. However, that’s sometimes impossible, so we make the out-of-bounds location fatal.
We’re also working on a hotfix that should put a stop to one small annoyance – now, if a player is actively engaged with the mailbox or bank, they will be considered “busy” if someone else tries to initiate a trade with them.
We’ll have all of these changes noted for you in the next Hotfixes Update that follows them going live.
Thank you!