This has been an extraordinarily busy week for players of both retail and classic World of Warcraft. Beginning with retail, there is an increasing amount of information being released about what to expect from the Shadowlands expansion, which comes as no surprise as we continue to near its release date in the fourth quarter of this year, though a firm date has still not been set in stone.
Shadowlands Alpha Build 34821 has revealed brand new spell effects for Death Knights, Mages, and Warriors. While these are not yet finalized and subject to change, click here to read them all, it seems that the legendary effects granted to players during the Legion expansion but removed at the start of Battle For Azeroth are making their way back into the game. On the one hand, this makes sense in that it would seem overpowered to see such powerful abilities from the beginning of the last expansion, where players should be working again to augment their gear and overall power level. On the other hand, players worked hard to develop their skills in Legion, that it feels odd to see the same content recycled so quickly.
In the live version of the game, players can dive into the Midsummer Fire Festival of 2020 that runs from June 21 through July 5. Unfortunately, there is nothing new in the event this year, only what was added last year. However, players may still want to work towards acquiring 600 Burning Blossom to purchase a Battle-Hardened Heirloom Armor Casing in case their have a piece of Heirloom gear that has not yet been fully upgraded.
Lastly, the next rotation for Preserved Contaminants will occur on June 23 (24 for EU servers). This will allow players to purchase Preserved Contaminant: Infinite Stars (Rank 1), Surging Vitality (Rank 1), Glimpse of Clarity, Sever (Rank 2), Racing Pulse (Rank 3), Siphoner (Rank 3), and Avoidant (Rank 3).
In classic World of Warcraft, Blizzard took its most direct and severe action against botting and boosting. Last week on June 17 Blizzard announced that over 74,000 accounts from all regions had been closed or suspended for violating the End-User License Agreement. Blizzard stated in a blue post that, “The majority of these were found to be using gameplay automation tools, typically to farm resources or kill enemies much more efficiently than legitimate players can.” This occurred shortly after Blizzard also announced that players may only enter a maximum of 30 unique instances per day, per realm. This was for both dungeons and raids, but the raids component has been removed.
The results have been fascinating, to say the least. Overnight, Stratholme was no longer home to the same groups of Mages and Druids who mysteriously never slept or took a break, and the price of Righteous Orbs jumped as supply plummeted, since there were no bots farming them day and night.
Time will tell how effective these actions are in the long term, but Blizzard seems to be making great strides to deal with these bots, which is a great thing to see!
Source: mmo-champion.com