WoW removes a mode from Midnight, completely gives up

World of Warcraft removes a game mode entirely. A declaration of bankruptcy, says MeinMMO demon Cortyn.

Until yesterday evening I actually thought to myself: Oh, how nice. You don’t have a theme this Wednesday to get a little upset about. But as so often, it turned out differently, and Blizzard jumps in with a very strange announcement and flails its arms: “Here, me! Write about me!”

I can’t resist, of course. Because the removed game mode in World of Warcraft could have been great. But it just wasn’t finished. And in the next patch it will disappear again, because the decoration duels will be buried.

Decor Duel – A guaranteed victory, completely driven into the ground

The history of the decoration duels is probably one of the low points of the current WoW expansion Midnight. When the mode was announced, I was full of anticipation. After all, it seemed to be a formula that simply couldn’t fail. Overwatch showed how well such a mode can work. WoW didn’t have to do anything else but copy the strengths and the gameplay and slightly adapt it for the MMORPG. It would have been an “Easy Win”.

But that’s not how it turned out.

When the decoration duels went live with Patch 12.0.5, they were bugged and in some cases unplayable:

• Hiders could stay in walls or outside the map boundaries.
• Hunters could see all opponents on the map with “Track Humanoids.”
• Who wins or loses in the end is completely random, as found characters often count double or triple.

But those were just the bugs. There were also completely questionable design decisions that contradicted every hide-and-seek game:

Those who hid too long without moving would not receive a reward because they were considered afk. In a hide-and-seek game. Just to repeat the absurdity: Those who hide too well do not receive a reward. Famous concept.

Moreover, it seems that no great thought was given to the design of the environment. Because there are several floating platforms that can be reached via a kind of jumping puzzle as hiding spots. One where you can easily slip off, clip through an object, or be pushed back in different ways.

Anyone who goes up there as a hider is nearly safe. Yes, there is a class of seekers who can jump up there, but even that takes time, and through various methods, the hidden player can simply escape again, wait until the seeker follows him down, and then teleport back up. That has nothing to do with good game design.

But that’s not where it ends. Due to all these rather unfun aspects, a large part of the community thought: Why even bother? In countless matches, it became “the meta” not to hide at all, but to stand directly in front of the seekers’ camp in a row and let themselves be found immediately, so the match ends as quickly as possible. Blizzard could not get a grip on that either.

The end of a mode that lasted only a few months

The end of the story is now: decoration duels die. They will completely disappear once Patch 12.1 goes live. Until then, there are still double the currency and a few last bug fixes.

After this time, the mode is history. The rewards will be distributed to other vendors, so you can still get them – presumably for gold or Voidlight resin.

In a way, I can understand it. Because the decoration duel is unpopular. The waiting times for the mode have become long and longer. Hardly anyone plays it anymore, as Blizzard has failed to make the mode fun.

That Blizzard is now pretending afterwards that this mode was a kind of “temporary event” that is simply coming to an end, is skirting very close to an obvious lie.

The truth is probably quite different: They released decoration duels in an unplayable state, slowly fixed serious issues over weeks and months, and then noticed that it was already too late to pull the cart out of the muck. Further development time on the mode is seen as wasted, so they simply remove it.

To me, this all looked a bit like the passion project of individual developers. I don’t know if they didn’t get enough development time for the feature or were simply unable to copy the seemingly simple formula from Overwatch or other “Prop Hunt” games.

But that they simply throw their hands in the air and don’t even try to save the mode but directly bury it is primarily one thing: a pity. An outcome that ultimately stands for so many hastily introduced features of Midnight.