In World of Warcraft: Legion, the camera distance to the character is reduced. Many players are not pleased with this.
New Zoom Level at Camera Distance Causes Outcry
The latest beta patch for the upcoming expansion World of Warcraft: Legion has caused discontent among some players. Blizzard has disabled a feature that players have relied on for years – the maximum camera distance is being reduced. Players have always been able to adjust how far they could “zoom out” in the options menu, and this will still be possible. However, for those who found this distance inadequate, they could use the console command “/console CameraDistanceMaxFactor 4” to significantly increase it. That is now over. The camera distance has received a new cap (1.9 instead of the previous 3.4), which is precisely where Blizzard intended it to be in the options.
Particularly raid leaders, who prefer to have a larger overview of everything, have played almost exclusively with this setting over the past few years. Therefore, the outcry in the official forum was quite significant.
Blizzard Feels the Decision Is Correct
Ion Hazzikostas, better known in the forum as “Watcher”, wrote a long post about this change. He cites several reasons why the value is being capped for all players. First, it is a significant advantage: those who can see more of the game world have more information and are better prepared for everything. In many action RPGs and strategy games, this is something that would often be achieved through hacks. Finally, Watcher posts a new screenshot of the maximum distance and says:
“I am not sure it is fair to claim that at this zoom level, the character obscures the entire image and removes all player perception of threats.”
Meanwhile, the thread is over 26 pages long, and the complaints from fans show no signs of stopping.
“And once again, you think you know how your game is best played. Let the players decide that already.”
Or as the user Shamler writes in the forum: “This is stupid. I would think if so many players are using a feature, it would be simply added to the settings instead of completely removing the feature.”
Why Is the Change Coming so Late?
Hazzikostas also explains that the change was actually supposed to be implemented in a very early alpha version of Legion. However, while deactivating the various variables for players, one was overlooked, and this bug was only fixed last week.
“At this point, our development team is fixing about 2000 bugs per week, and it is not always possible to foresee which bug fixes will go live with the next update. This was definitely not a change we thought we could just overlook.”
That definitely did not work out.
For more information about what else is changing with the new addon, visit our Legions overview page.
