Kwee Q. Peddlefeet still in game?
Kaivax
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.