Kwee Q. Peddlefeet still in game?

U keep him if your faction won the valentines event so I’ve heard. He doesn’t go away.

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Yea on faerlina he’s in ironforge giving out love. What does someone think this is an exploit now ? XD

This post is the video game equivalent of “Teacher! Teacher! You forgot to give us homework!”

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Story time! Gather 'round if you’d like to hear some fun history.

When the 2020 edition of Love is in the Air ended in WoW Classic, we noticed a behavior we didn’t all expect: the faction leader that won the popularity contest continued to have Kwee Q. Peddlefeet in front of them, and you could continue to target Kwee and /kiss in order to get a +200 HP buff.

We looked into this, and it appeared that this was authentic behavior. We looked at the holiday data and we tested it on our reference server, and we got the same results. In original WoW, Kwee Q. Peddlefeet was first designed to stay with the winner of the popularity content for a full year, up until the start of the next Love is in the Air.

But we then asked around (and read some posts online, both new and very old), and found people who believed that Kwee was only supposed to hang out with the winning leader for one week after the end of Love is in the Air. One of these was the original designer of the event, who happens to still work on World of Warcraft, and he enabled us to dig more deeply into it.

In data, it turned out that there was indeed a case to be made for Kwee despawning after a week. The main indicator for that was an old bug that was recorded in the case the event ended in a tie. That bug was from 2006. We found other clues in a bug where on three EU realms only (Anub’arak, Rashgarroth, and Ysondre BTW), there were Valentine’s Day decorations still present in Stormwind Castle for much longer than expected in 2007.

Reading those contemporaneous notes leads us to this conclusion: the designers’ intention was that Kwee would persist for one week after Love is in the Air ended, but it took some bugfixing to make that always the case. Kwee’s behavior was probably inconsistent on different realms, and game masters may have done the clean-up by hand in 2006 on different realms. Of course, the only reason they would have done that would have been that someone told them that Kwee wasn’t intended to be up forever.

By implementing WoW Classic as we did, we’ve re-created an experience that some realms had in 2006.

So, in this next patch (1.13.5), we’re bringing the related bugfixes to WoW Classic. The design intention was:

February 11: Love is in the Air begins, voting can begin.
February 16: Love is in the Air ends, voting ends, a winner is declared, and the victorious Kwee stands by them.
February 23: The victorious Kwee can no longer respawn, which means he won’t re-appear after the next Tuesday reset.

And that’s how it will go next time.

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Nice to see where your priorities are…

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If only you gave responses like this to actual game issues

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It’s proof that staff are reading the forums. Don’t shoot the messenger.

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I never thought about this before, but – do Blizzard employees get incredibly nostalgic when discovering things like this in the vanilla codebase?

Your response betrays a certain excitement at the discovery haha.

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Neat history lesson. Can we get the peddlefeet pet that caused earthquakes when you spam summoned him?

I used to laugh cause I’d sit in a shop in IF and spam him, and chat would light up with chatter about earthquakes and the apocalypse.

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Do Blizzard employees get “classic nostalgia” when discovering things like this in the codebase?

Your story time about the discovery betrays a certain excitement haha.

Yes!

There’s also (for me at least), a very strange sensation when the facts uncovered contradict my clearly faulty memories.

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Lighten up, Francis.

/Stripes

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We get an in depth (and interesting in my opinion) answer to a genuine concern some players had and the first two responses are complaints. Seriously, how do you guys even manage to drag yourselves out of bed in the morning?

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Yeah, I liked the story. Not everything has to be about fixing the critical things of the day as determined by the forums.

They just banned 70k bots, actively reply to forums, just posted this…

I’m all for giving blizzard a hard time about their BS, but s t f u

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Can you tell us which nostalgic employee decided that an April Fools joke was to be revived and implemented as an actual patch (the 30 instance per day limit)?

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Which patch in vanilla was the one that introduced the 30 instance cap? Wait… that wasn’t in vanilla but was a ham fisted change made by modern wow dev’s that fixes nothing and inconveniences legit players more than bots? Well thanks guys… Good thing yall are trying so hard to keep things authentic…

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I don’t like the change either but don’t let it ruin your day.

Love it, what a fun thing to dig into and find out what was really going on back then. Thanks for that fun story!

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how hilariously depressing that THIS is the kind of thread that gets a blue repsonse.

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