- Author: Pride
- Date: September 29, 2022
- Updated: September 29, 2022
- Expansion: WotLK Classic
The Wrathgate cinematic and the subsequent Battle for Undercity events are some of the most iconic parts of Wrath of the Lich King. Yet players who completed the lengthy Wrathgate quest chain and attempted the Battle for Undercity event were sorely disappointed to discover that it was essentially non-functional, with serious bugs preventing players from proceeding further into the event and completing it.
These issues are even more serious for Horde players, as being stuck on certain parts of the event can cause them to be unable to interact with vendors, trainers and other NPCs in Orgrimmar and the Undercity.
Blizzard decided to address this situation, in an effort to quell people’s frustration at this situation. With a lengthy post on the official forums, Aggrend made the following points, briefly:
- The 2008 event was also full of bugs, they fixed many but obviously some remained
- They’re working on a fix for the event, but it will take time
- In the meanwhile, they advise players to avoid the Battle for Undercity event
- Furthermore, they plan to add a temporary measure that allows players to skip the event if they’re stuck on that phase
They are aware that the last 2 points are by no means an ideal solution, as many people were very excited to experience this content. For that reason they stressed that these measures are temporary, and that they’re planning to give players who decided to skip the event a way to go back and re-experience it once it is fixed.
So for now, that’s that, the event is broken and you’re advised to avoid doing it until Blizzard has fully fixed it. Hopefully that’s sooner than later! You can read more about Blizzard’s explanation of these issues & their plan going forward by scrolling further down.
Greetings,
Just wanted to provide an update on the issues that many players are experiencing with Battle for Undercity currently and talk a bit about the short term and longer terms steps we are hoping to take to resolve the current issues.
The History of the Battle for Undercity
We knew going into Wrath Classic that this event was fragile, and indeed, the Battle for Undercity breaking was a very common problem in 2008 at original Wrath launch. This event continued to be problematic for the entire history of Wrath of the Lich King until it was removed from the game in patch 4.0.3. We knew we wanted to try to preserve this experience as close as possible to its original state, and we did a significant amount of work pre-launch to resolve some of the common issues it had during its original run, and “harden” the experience against breaks.
We got a lot of test data from Beta, we found a lot of bugs and fixed them, and were hopeful that the experience would be improved for Wrath of the Lich King Classic’s launch. Unfortunately, that is not the case. Due to the sheer number of players attempting to complete this content, and some unforseen interactions with layers, this event is still very error-prone.
The Issue
There are several issues at play here, but broadly speaking the issues tend to manifest in a way that causes the event to get stuck in a state where it cannot progress further, which blocks progression on the quest for any players currently participating, and any others that join that same phase on that same layer afterwards. This does not occur every time the event starts, but there are enough players attempting the event now that there’s a high likelihood that the event becomes stuck on a given layer after enough time has passed and completions have occurred. These issues are especially problematic for horde players as accepting this quest step actually places you into a phase that you cannot leave that impacts vendors and trainers in Undercity and Orgrimmar.
Near Term and Long Term Solutions
We are diligently working on additional fixes, but due to the nature of the issues and the extreme complexity of the event, these under-the-hood adjustments are likely to be extensive and are unlikely to arrive within the next few days. As a stopgap we will be adding a method to essentially “skip” the event, and hope to have this workaround in place within the next 24 hours. Once we’ve had a chance to fully resolve these issues in the longer term, we want to try and add a way for players that had to bypass this event to go back and experience this story content.
For now, we’d advise players avoid this event and “The Battle for the Undercity” quest until we get our temporary skip in place. We are heartbroken to ask players to bypass this iconic content, and we are going to make all haste to try and implement a more full-featured solution to allow players encountering this quest for the first time to more reliably play through this, and give players who were forced to skip it a way to got back and experience the content, but we simply don’t have an ETA for when that full fix may arrive.
We’ll be posting additional updates as the situation develops. Thank you so much for your patience with this, and please accept the WoW Classic Dev team’s sincere apologies to those that have been impacted by these issues.
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