- Author: OrinDac
- Date: February 28, 2020
- Updated: October 7, 2020
- Expansion: WoW Classic
There’s been some concern recently, regarding players engaging in cross faction cooperation to effectively exploit and reset the Rallying Cry of the Dragonslayer buff by hiring an opposing faction priest to mind control the cryer and get the guards to kill them. Blizzard holds that the behavior is troubling, stating that “cross-faction collusion is antithetical to WoW gameplay”. They also voiced concerns that it could lead to hostilities between players within a single faction, which is something they don’t want to see.
Despite these worries, they expressed that any change to Classic World of Warcraft would be “considered very carefully”, and so they’ve adopted a ‘wait-and-see’ policy to observe how the scenario plays out. While they will take no action against players involved in the resetting, or players involved in interfering with it, they have firmly resolved to take actions against players that use hostile, or offensive language in chat.
Is Blizzard trying to stay true to the spirit of classic WoW, or are they passing the buck?
We’ve recently seen an increase in concerns about players resetting the Rallying Cry of the Dragonslayer buff by killing the associated NPC.
It’s important to note that this behavior is accurate to original WoW, and was possible in 2005 and 2006. Nonetheless, it’s the sort of thing that wasn’t widespread back then, and we believe that if it had been, it would have been addressed. In general, cross-faction collusion is antithetical to WoW gameplay, and the specific circumstance where players pay a member of the opposing faction help them kill their ally feels inappropriate.
There’s a related concern here – it’s entirely possible for players (who don’t know what their allies are doing or want to police what their allies are doing) to kill the hired priest, and then find themselves in conflict with their own faction-mates. We don’t like to see these sorts of hostilities within a faction of players.
Nonetheless, any change to WoW Classic has to be very carefully considered, so for the time being, we’re going to leave this functionality in place. We will continue to monitor this situation, and we may have to change it in the future. We will not suspend players for resetting the buff or attempting to prevent others from doing so. We will continue to take action against players who send hostile or offensive chat messages.
Thank you for your feedback on this.
About the Author
