Changelog

The next Barrens gate opens on Friday, 25 September, one week earlier than the 2 October published on 26 August. The whole realm crosses on the same day, and the ladder continues on its planned lengths from there. Nothing changes in game today: the cap stays 40 and the content stage stays 1.5 until Friday.

Barrens restarted at 16:35 after a countdown in game. Items, loot tables and vendors now carry the numbers your client shows, so what you see on a tooltip is what you get. About 2 800 items that were missing from loot and vendors are back, and the old PvP rank rewards left the vendors. Nothing you own changed hands. The content stage stays 1.5 and the cap stays 40: raid and level 60 dungeon doors are locked until their stage opens them, and the four world dragons stay away until theirs.

The restart hid the six Campaign Heralds, so double experience could not be collected tonight. Three hour boosts already collected keep running. The heralds return with the restart on 19 September at about 06:30, and the one in Ironforge stands on the floor again instead of inside the wall. The campaign ends 24 September with the next phase.

Flametongue, Frostbrand and Windfury left a standing cast animation on the shaman with every single swing. One report put it plainly: Flametongue and Frostbrand animated like a looping shock, Windfury like a buff, and it was ruining the way the class felt to play. The cause was ours and it came from a change the vMaNGOS project made in July. The swing packet used to be sent after the enchant procs so that it would overwrite their animation. That order was reversed so the client could still resolve a victim on a killing blow, and the shaman animation was the price. Both are served now: the swing packet goes out before the procs on a normal hit and after them on a killing blow. This is live on both realms. We have verified that the correct core is running and we have not watched it in combat ourselves yet, so if a swing still animates wrong, tell us.

More than half the serpentbloom outside the Wailing Caverns vanished while the loot window was still open. You saw the flower in the window and the click did nothing. Opening the chest set off its linked trap, the spent trap made the game reroll the whole group of spawn points it belonged to, and that despawned the chest you were standing over. Only a player who clicked faster than the next server tick got the flower. A spent trap whose neighbours are still standing is now simply removed instead of triggering a reroll. The same core also repairs the cat figurine, which had stopped summoning the spectral sabre after an upstream change in June removed the script behind it. Both of these are on Elwynn only. The Barrens runs a core built without them.

Both realms were offline for about twelve minutes while we shipped a new server core and applied security updates across every machine we run. The core carries the two fixes above and eighteen changes we took in from the vMaNGOS project. Two of those you may notice: melee spells and normal swings now roll hit, miss, dodge and parry from one shared table instead of two slightly different ones, and a character flagged for a forced rename can no longer log in without doing it. The rest is plumbing the client never shows you. The website was unreachable for about twenty five minutes during the same window, which was our mistake and not part of the plan: the update replaced the container networking on that machine while it was running, and name lookups inside it stopped working until the machine restarted.

The six Warsong Gulch battlemasters of Classic were invisible on this realm, because the world data hides them at our content stage. They are visible now, in Stormwind, Ironforge, the Undercity, Orgrimmar, Darnassus and Thunder Bluff, and you queue for Warsong Gulch by talking to them from level 10. The Mercenary Broker and the Campaign Herald stand next to each of them, so every capital has the same three NPCs in one place. The Stormwind pair moved from the Trade District portal to the battlemaster a few steps away. The spots were placed from the database, not walked in game, so a broker standing somewhere odd is worth a report.

The three hours of double experience from the Campaign Herald were invisible: a number on the server and nothing on your screen. You now carry a red dragon banner among your buffs, top right, with the time left on it. The icon and the tooltip text are borrowed from Rallying Cry of the Dragonslayer, because this client cannot show a new spell; the words on the tooltip do not apply, the timer does, and the only thing the banner changes is experience. It cannot be cancelled, it survives a relog, and it goes when the three hours are up.

Two reports from Discord, both fixed in the evening build. The daily limit of five dungeon expeditions with warden companions never counted, because the warden stands inside the instance and that hire was not being recorded; the menu always said 0 of 5. It counts now. And a party can hold five characters with at most two warden companions instead of four with three, so three players can take a tank and a healer. Two more changes from the same thread of feedback: the daily limit is three expeditions instead of five, and the broker charges 5 gold for six hours instead of 1, because a player showed that companions earn that back within minutes. The menu of the warden also says shield-bearer now, like the broker. A restart of the Barrens server was needed for this, about half a minute, announced fifteen minutes ahead.

Signed in, you now see a bell at the top right of the dashboard. It lists the newest entries of this changelog and marks the ones you have not opened yet; the mark is kept in your browser, not on our side. The rail also lists Guides under The world, so guides.stonetavern.app is one click away without leaving the dashboard.

Barrens now puts server controlled characters into your group. A warden at every open dungeon sends a shield, a healer or a spellcaster into the instance with you for free, and a broker in Stormwind and Orgrimmar writes a contract for 1 gold and six hours of play time. Each account can lead five dungeons a day with companions, and the warden shows the count before you hire. There is no chat command for any of it: you hire by talking to the NPC. This is a trial, so behaviour and the price can still change. If a companion does something strange, say so in Discord. A guide with every detail is on guides.stonetavern.app.

Warsong Gulch is the only battleground open at this content stage, and a match needs four players per side. If too few players queue, the server waits twenty minutes and then fills both teams with server controlled characters. Real opponents always get those twenty minutes first. A companion you hired does not follow you into a battleground.

The website restarted early on 4 September. What went in is a page for keepers only, behind the same sign in that guards the support queue. Nothing that a player sees or uses has changed. The page counts accounts, characters, levels, classes, races and realms in groups. It never shows a player by name, and it only reads the game databases. It is recorded here because the site restarted, and a restart belongs in this log with its reason.

The roadmap we published for Elwynn described the realm as opening one content patch at a time, and that was the wrong description of what we actually do. Elwynn runs the finished 1.12.1 ruleset from the day it opened. Talents, class balance, PvP, the honour system, all three battlegrounds, the world bosses and the debuff cap are already final and were never gated. The only thing we stage is the entrance to a handful of raids and dungeons. Four things change on the site today. First, Blackwing Lair now comes before Zul Gurub. That is the order the instances were built in, patch 1.6 then patch 1.7, and our own cards printed those numbers while running them the other way round. Zul Gurub stays what it was meant to be, a catch up and second raid night inside the Blackwing Lair era. Second, the chapter called Call to Arms is gone. It promised the Dragons of Nightmare, honour and the battlegrounds as future unlocks, and all three have been live since launch. Third, the debuff cap. The site said it was 8 and would rise to 16 when Zul Gurub opened. It has been 16 since the realm started, because our world runs at the 1.12 content stage and the core sets the cap from that. We read the value out of the running server before changing the text. Fourth, and the reason for the rest: the page about what happens after Naxxramas offered you a choice between opening the Dark Portal, starting a second realm, or staying on Era. Elwynn has no such choice. Naxxramas is the last unlock. After it the realm stays fully open Vanilla, level 60, ruleset 1.12.1, characters kept, permanently. No reset, no season, no expansion, and no vote about any of that. The expansion road belongs to Barrens, which has its own page and its own decisions. The timing also has a stated starting point now. The first raids still open two weeks after 80 accounts reach level 60, and that community gate covers the first raids only. Everything after it is measured from the day Molten Core opens: Dire Maul around month 2, Blackwing Lair around month 5, Zul Gurub around month 8, Ahn Qiraj around month 11, Naxxramas around month 15. Those are approximate and they are not promises of a date. This entry supersedes the progression plan we posted earlier, on the site and in the forum. Nothing on the running server changed today. Only what we told you about it.

A target can now carry sixteen weakening effects at once instead of eight. That is what the server is configured to allow, not something anyone has counted in play. Both realms limited a target to eight before, and the ninth simply pushed one off, which is felt most in a full group where several players stack effects on the same target. Sixteen is the highest the client of this era supports. It is a setting the server reads when it starts, so it took the restart on 31 August to take effect on both realms.

The digsites for Uncovering the Past could leave you searching far longer than they should. They are corrected on both realms, in the world database, and nobody has run the quest in game yet.

A hunter could channel Tame Beast to the end and get nothing, with no error on screen. We have repaired that, without knowing what broke it. Two separate investigations failed to pin the change down and ruled out all four suspects one by one, so this repairs the failure and not a diagnosed root cause. Upstream describes the trigger only as a recent change to how channeled spells work. The repair is in the core that both realms run since 31 August, and we have confirmed it is in the shipped binary. Nobody has taken a hunter out to tame anything yet, so treat this as changed on the server, with confirmation in play still to follow.

Warlock pets and other companions could stand still behind a low wall instead of attacking. That is repaired in the core both realms run since 31 August, and nobody has retested it in game. The cause: a companion checking its line of sight to a target measured it differently than the spell cast itself did, so it could think it had a clear shot when the cast did not. A second case in the same code: a companion stopped healing or buffing a party member who had replaced someone else at the same party size, because it was still working from an old member list. That is repaired too.

The Archaedas and Altar of the Keepers encounters in Uldaman are corrected on both realms. That is read from the core and the world database, and nobody has run the instance since. One of the cases: a creature could come back from the ritual without the immunity it was meant to have.

Creatures at the Jadefire camp in Stonetalon Mountains were missing, and forty spawns are back on both realms. That is read out of the world database, not walked past in game. Patrol paths are restored for part of the camp.

Glutton, in Razorfen Downs, has a script again. The rows are in the world database on both realms, and nobody has fought him since. He yells on aggro and on a kill, and goes into a frenzy at 50 percent health and again at 15 percent.

The level cap on Barrens lifts from 30 to 40, as published. Uldaman and Maraudon open with it; they were never locked, they were only above your level. Catch-up experience does not run at this gate; it belongs to the run up to the last phase of an expansion and the pre-patch into the next one. Arathi Basin is not part of this phase and stays on its later content stage. The same restart also repairs the tame beast bug that broke hunter pets for the last few days, and the missing Darnassus auctioneers are in place now.

Barrens progression now follows published dates. Level 40 opens Friday, 28 August; Level 50 follows five weeks later on Friday, 2 October. The weekly progression vote has been retired. The Council remains for community proposals, feedback and appropriate realm decisions.

The two common Solid Chest types respawn every two hours now instead of every five minutes, on both realms, since 25 August. Measured in the world database, not walked in game. They sit on a few hundred spawn points, which made a chest route into a reliable and disproportionate source of gold, and that is not what a scattered world chest is for. Nothing else changed: every other chest keeps the timer it already had, from the five minutes most of them run on to the days that the rare large chests take. If a chest you remember seems gone, this is why.

Twenty two rare bosses used to roll a chance of 15 to 30 percent each time an instance reset, so a group could clear a dungeon three times and never see the one they came for. They no longer roll. Miner Johnson, Blind Hunter, Earthcaller Halmgar, Dark Iron Ambassador, Bruegal Ironknuckle, Jed Runewatcher, Ghok Bashguud, Crystal Fang, the three Spirestone bosses, Pyromancer Loregrain, Panzor the Invincible, Skul, Stonespine, Meshlok the Harvester, Lord Roccor, Zerillis, Sandarr Dunereaver and Deathsworn Captain are now guaranteed. One place is deliberately left to chance: in Scarlet Monastery only one of the graveyard rare spots is fixed, because making all seven guaranteed would stand seven rares in the same room, some of them twice. This is Council decision 24. It was waiting on a restart, because the spawn pools are only read when the core starts.

The tram between Stormwind and Ironforge could throw you out mid journey. Four of its six cars were calculated to travel between 2450 and 5000 yards past the end of the tunnel. The cause was three numbers in the world database: the rotation stored for a car disagreed with the direction stored next to it, and the engine uses the rotation. It was identical on both realms, so it came from the base data rather than from anything we changed. The six rows are corrected on both realms. The car standing 1.8 yards from the Stormwind arrival point, which is the one most of the reports described, was among the broken ones. We have checked this against the database and not yet ridden it. If it still misbehaves, tell us.

A mixed faction group killing a boss could get an empty slot where an item should have been. The roll picked an entry that was gated behind a later patch, and then hid it from everyone, so the slot was spent on something no player was allowed to receive. Measured on Elwynn before the fix: 28.6 percent of Overlord Wyrmthalak kills and 16.7 percent of War Master Voone kills ended with an empty boss slot. Elwynn hits this hardest because mixed faction groups are normal there. The core now evaluates those gates before the roll instead of after it. Two known cases in Lower Blackrock Spire were already corrected in the data on 13 August. This one cures the class of problem, so a future world database import cannot bring it back somewhere else. It went live on Elwynn on 21 August. The Barrens carries the same change since its core was replaced on 31 August.

A quest could refuse to complete when the count of items it wanted had been rebuilt from your bags rather than read from the quest itself. The two numbers could drift apart, and the turn in checked the wrong one. They are reconciled now. It went live on Elwynn on 21 August. The Barrens carries the same change since its core was replaced on 31 August.

A flag controlling whether a creature grants reputation was never given a starting value, so what it held on any given kill was whatever happened to be in memory. Most of the time that was harmless. Sometimes it meant a kill paid no reputation at all, with nothing to distinguish it from one that did. It is initialised now. This one is on Elwynn only. The Barrens core was replaced on 31 August, but that build does not carry this particular change, so the flag is still uninitialised there.

Elwynn and The Barrens were offline from 17:00 to 18:00 CEST while a storage controller and seven drives went into the machine. Both realms were back at 18:01. The new storage is not in use yet, it has to be prepared first, and that happens without any further downtime. The changes listed above went live with the same restart, because all of them needed one.

The board was counting a single find more than once, and it was counting things nobody can equip. Both are corrected, and the numbers went down. Three causes. First, the item catalogue is keyed by item and patch, not by item alone, so 1876 of 20035 rows share an item number with another row. A join on the item number alone matched several of them at once and counted one find twice or three times. That touched 12.8 percent of all loot log lines. Second, the epic count included anything marked epic, including recipes, trade goods and quest items that no character can wear. Of 94 epic finds counted, 24 were not equipment. Weapons and armour count now, and nothing else. Third, master loot was written to the log under the player who handed the item out rather than the player who received it. That was 34 items out of nearly six million loot lines, and no epic was among them. The item total still counts everything you picked up, because how much you picked up is a different question and also a fair one. The rebuild recovered 38 players that the incremental update had dropped. Places moved and the top of the epic board changed. Nothing was taken from anyone: the old numbers were wrong, and these are what the log actually says. Elwynn only. The Barrens has no loot board yet.

An enemy could die and leave a body nobody was allowed to open. It happened when the group had moved out of range by the time it died, and when a hunter pet or another companion landed the final blow. The same lock also withheld experience and reputation from everyone in the group, without a message, so a bad run could cost the loot and the progress in one go. Both realms now keep the claim on the kill in those cases. The report that led to it came from Wyrmthalak on Barrens. The new core also writes a line of its own whenever a body ends up unlootable, so the next case can be looked at instead of guessed at.

Boarding a zeppelin or a boat could be read as a forbidden transport and log you out on the spot. It fired on the first hit, with no warning and nothing on screen that explained what had happened. Over eight days it hit four real players nine times, one of them six times, and not one of them reported it, which is why it ran for as long as it did. The forced logout is gone on both realms. Detection still runs and still records, and a person still decides what happens next. This is not the older zeppelin disconnect some of you have written in about. That one is still open and still being worked on.

In the Obsidion encounter Lathoric could leave before the group got to the body, so a finished fight paid out nothing. He stays now.

The escort miscounted its attackers as they left, so it could sit waiting on a wave that was already gone. Scouts also arrived inside trees. Both are corrected.

An item or gold sent by post could turn up as an empty letter, because the record of the attachment and the record of the letter were written separately and only one of them survived. The trace it left: 47 mailbox rows carry the attachment marker with nothing attached, 29 of them on 1 August alone. Post is written as one piece now. Letters that were already damaged are not repaired by this.

Being interrupted twice in a row did not extend the school lockout the way it should have. It does again.

Mass mail and player state were written at a point where a shutdown could cut them off, so a restart could quietly drop whatever had not landed yet. Both are written before the core goes down now. This is the first restart on either realm where that holds.

Fourteen of them, the epic racial mounts without armour, across ten vendors. They had been falling out of the vendor lists without a word, because a rule written for a later patch was filtering them out while the vendors loaded. Nothing was logged and nothing looked broken, the merchant was simply shorter. A player noticed that two raptor whistles were missing, and that is how the other twelve came to light. Barrens got the same thing back on 7 August. Elwynn needed a restart for it, which is why it lands only now.

It is carried in both hands, but the record called it a one handed sword. So it asked for the wrong weapon skill, and it could not be paired with a second weapon either, because the two handed slot forbids that whatever the skill says. It is a two handed sword now, which is what the identical older version of the same blade always was. Barrens only: on Elwynn the blade is genuinely one handed at that content level.

Ten entrances now ask for level 61, which no character on this realm can reach. Nothing changes today: the cap is 30 and those doors stood above it already. What changes is the next cap. Until now six of the ten asked for level 45 and two for level 50, so a phase that lifted the cap to 50 would have carried all three of these open on the way past, without anyone deciding it. The content level a realm runs on does not hold these doors shut. The number on the door does. When they belong to a phase, that number comes down as part of it.

The level cap on Barrens lifts from 19 to 30. Gnomeregan and Scarlet Monastery open with it; they were never locked, they were only above your level. Fourteen of the old unarmoured mounts return to ten vendors at the same time, unlocked in the database since 2 August and invisible until this restart. The cap is 30 rather than 29 because a proposal asked for it and carried 35 votes to 7: at 29 the phase would have locked out exactly the gear and abilities that unlock at 30, and much of what drops in these two dungeons is gated there. The ladder is now 19, 30, 40, 50, 60. Arathi Basin is not part of this phase, it belongs to a later content stage. Catch-up experience does not run at this gate either; it is meant for the run up to the last phase of an expansion and for the pre-patch into the next one, and the wording on the feature page has been corrected to say so.

The download page now offers three editions of the same game, on the same realm, with the same account. They differ only in what the client does on your machine. Enhanced is the one we suggest: the client no longer holds a spell back before sending it, and range and line of sight are checked against the same rules the server uses. Classic leaves combat alone and carries engine and performance fixes only. Cinematic adds HD ground, rock and building textures with Questie and the Stonetavern addon already installed. Cinematic is built but it is not on the download host yet, and the page says so instead of offering a button that leads nowhere.

For several weeks the Windows button handed out the small file the launcher uses to update itself, not the full package. On its own that file is missing every library it needs, so it closed again immediately with no window and no message. Players who already had the launcher never saw it, because those libraries were on disk from an older download, which is why it went unnoticed for so long. Windows now gets the complete 1.6.3 package. A check now runs over every published download and compares size and checksum against what the page claims.

There was one download label for every platform, so Windows players in all eight languages were told they were downloading for Linux, next to a file type that was wrong as well. The label now follows the platform, and the file type is read off the file instead of being typed beside it.

On Windows the launcher could ask for an update, apply it, restart and ask for the same update again, without end. Two things caused it. It compared the version on the download host against a version number frozen at 1.1.0 since July, so no update could ever count as done, and the window showed that frozen number to everybody, which is why nobody could see the update never landed. A failed swap also looked exactly like a successful one, so an update blocked by virus scanning relaunched the old build forever. The launcher now gives up after three attempts and tells you where to get the build by hand.

There is a Report a problem button in the launcher status bar now. It stays usable when nothing else does, which is the moment you need it. It attaches the four things you cannot be expected to know: which build you are running, whether the download signature checked out, where the client sits on disk, and what failed last. You see the whole bundle before it is sent, and the log is stripped of anything that looks like a password or a token first.

The catalogue listed 583 addons and every one of them had answered not found for about two months, because the files were never carried over when the download host moved. The files are back and each entry was checked one by one against the file behind it. The launcher now lists 584 addons instead of one.

The download page served a client package from the end of May while the launcher installed the July build. The players on the stale client were exactly the ones who had chosen not to use the launcher. Both now hand out the same package. A line promising preloaded addons was removed from the packages that do not carry them, rather than left standing as a lie.

The Players page carries a tab for each realm, and The Barrens now shows the same breakdown Elwynn does: how many characters, how they split across the two sides, who is at the hearth right now, and the counts by class, profession, race and level. Character links carry the realm they belong to, so opening a name from the Barrens roster no longer lands you on the Elwynn character that happens to hold the same number.

The armory carries a realm strip at the top left now, Elwynn first and The Barrens beside it. Until now the page could only ever read one realm. Character records also load in small batches, because Barrens answers more slowly than Elwynn and one large account used to hold the page open for everybody else looking at it.

Guild number one exists on both realms, so a guild address without a realm in it was ambiguous. Guild pages carry the realm now and older links still work. A guild address with a word in place of a number used to return an error page instead of a not found, and that is fixed. Guild pages for Barrens are not open yet.

The site decided whether a realm was up by knocking on the game port, and the web server cannot reach the Barrens game port through the firewall at all. So The Barrens read as down while twenty seven people were on it. We now say down only when we can actually tell, and unknown when we cannot. The status line is composed in one place instead of being written out by hand on every page and in every language, which is how a stale green label survived the first attempt at this.

Everyone playing on The Barrens was reported as offline to every friend, while the website beside it counted the same people as online. One switch was answering two different questions: whether a realm is open to players, and whether this part of the site can read that realm at all. It answers one question now, and the two are checked separately.

Each realm has a page now that lists what makes a day there easier: what the original game did, what happens here, and the actual server setting the claim was read from. The Barrens lists ten of them, Elwynn seven. The lists were built by reading both running servers setting by setting instead of from memory. That removed four claims that were not true and turned up six comforts that had never been written down anywhere.

The Barrens page now carries a vote: yes or no to moving to the next phase. One vote per account per week, and you can take it back once, though the week is used up either way. It resets on Friday. You need a character at level 10 or higher on The Barrens to take part, and only those accounts are counted, so the share means something. The result is reported to the keeper. Nothing moves on its own. If the roster cannot be read, nobody votes and the page says that plainly instead of quietly letting everybody in.

The vote page holds three things in one place now: what is being decided right now, the ideas behind it, and what was decided before. An idea is backed rather than voted on, and there is deliberately no way to back one against. Three backings oblige the keeper to answer in the open within a week. A proposal is votable the moment it is posted, so the wait for a keeper to read it first is gone, and a keeper can close a ballot with a stated reason.

The self service unstuck under Manage account can move a Barrens character as well, not only an Elwynn one. It sends an offline character back to the inn it is bound to. That binding is stored on the server, so it still works when the hearthstone itself was destroyed or thrown out of the bags. A realm that cannot be written to is not offered at all, instead of failing after you press the button.

The first thing you read now names the choice: Elwynn stays Vanilla, The Barrens goes from Classic through Burning Crusade to Wrath as one realm, and one account covers both. The second button compares the realms instead of asking you to sign up before you know what you would be signing up to.

Fourteen entries on a block list were quietly removing mounts from vendor stock on Elwynn, so several stables were short. They are gone and the vendors were reloaded: twenty two positions across ten vendors came back. One troll mount trader went from six mounts to eight.

The Barrens restarted onto a build that fixes the network layer crashes we had been seeing under load. The same restart brought several corrections across from Elwynn. 599 vendor stock entries had no patch marker and were sold regardless of the patch the realm is on; they are gated now. Jailor Marlgen in Hillsbrad stops throwing his net every five to fifteen seconds and uses the twenty to thirty three second timer his twin always had. The three blacksmithing masteries are gated properly again, so a Weaponsmith cannot collect all three. The Brushwood Blade is a two handed weapon again instead of a one hander sitting in the two hand slot.

If you are wedged in terrain on The Barrens, type .unstuck in chat. Read what it does before you rely on it: while you are alive it kills your character after a few seconds and then sends you to the nearest graveyard, and while you are dead it teleports you there. It needs level 10 and it does not work in combat. It is a way out of terrain, not a free ride. That was never said plainly, and at least one player found out the hard way.

Every proposal on the Council carries two facts it did not carry before: the realm it concerns, and whose vote settles it. That matters because the two realms are very different sizes, so a single number counted across both would let the larger one speak for everyone while looking like a house result. Where a proposal concerns one realm, the players on that realm decide it. Barrens is set up as an electorate of its own; the connection that lets the site read Barrens characters is not finished yet, so until it is, the site will tell you it cannot check rather than pretend you are not eligible.

Until today a proposal went public and became votable the moment it was submitted, with nobody looking at it first. Now it goes to the keeper, who reads it, marks what it concerns and who decides it, and then opens it for voting. It is a short wait instead of no wait, and it means the text everyone sees has been read by a person. It also lets us keep a promise: Elwynn is a museum, so a proposal that would change how Elwynn plays cannot go to a vote whose result we would have to break.

The Players page used to send every character on the realm in one document, close to six megabytes. On a phone that was several seconds of waiting, and it got slower every time someone rolled a new character. It now loads one page at a time and the search box filters on the server instead of in your browser, so the page no longer grows with the roster. The four totals at the top still count everyone, not just the page you are looking at.

The modern client download is now version 1.3 for Windows and Linux. Windows ships an updated JimsProxy bridge (5.1.8). Both packages were rebuilt from a clean tree, so no test logs, caches or saved settings are shipped with them. An install you already have keeps working and there is nothing you need to do.

Sending yourself gear or gold between characters used to mean waiting an hour. It does not any more. Attach whatever you like and it lands in the mailbox straight away. This was Council proposal #5: the Council supported it, and the keeper shipped it.

Fleeing mobs ran straight through houses, line of sight broke inside the Hillsbrad caves, things got stuck in scenery and evaded far too often. All of it came from one broken piece of collision handling in the server core. We are now on the newest vMaNGOS core, which rebuilt that part properly. Walls are walls again.

After a group roll finished, the corpse could end up with nothing in it. The item you just won was simply not there. Fixed in the new core. Roll away.

We brought the Booty Run chest back a while ago, but it turned out the chest itself refused to open. That is fixed now, so the arena is worth showing up for again.

Marlgen in Hillsbrad was throwing his net every 5 to 15 seconds. The net roots you for 10, so you could be chain-rooted with no way out. His twin Borhuin always used a 20 to 33 second timer; Marlgen was simply a bad data entry. He now matches his twin.

A player reported that as an Armorsmith he was able to finish a Master Axesmith quest, which should not be possible. He was right: the quests handed out the specialisation without checking anything, so an Armorsmith could take them, and a Weaponsmith could collect all three masteries at once. In real Vanilla you must be a Weaponsmith, and the choice between axe, sword and hammer is final. The quests now check that, exactly like the trainer dialogue always did. Credit to Frap for reporting a bug that worked in his favour.

How much critical strike and dodge you get per point of Agility was an approximation before. It is now the real per-class, per-level table from the original game data. Most characters will see their character sheet shift very slightly. This is not a buff or a nerf, it is simply correct now. Rogues and Hunters at some levels will notice it most.

Raid instance reset timers now work the way they did before patch 1.9: per player, not shared across the whole raid. If you know the old rules, they apply again.

Mage Mana Shield behaves the way it did before patch 1.12 again, and Breath of Fire has its proper chance to trigger instead of never firing. A wider batch of spell and creature data corrections came with the core update.

Fadeleaf and Grave Moss now share proper spawn pools instead of clumping, so gathering routes work as intended. The duplicate Gordok Tribute chests in Dire Maul are gone, a pile of leftover objects that should not have existed were removed, and several small areas respawn correctly again.

Some trainers that offer nothing but recipes were being treated as the wrong kind of trainer, which broke what they showed you. They behave correctly now.

The Tome of Valor quest NPC in Westfall was sunk slightly into the floor at her spawn: her collision position sat just under the ground you can see. She stands on it now.

Every Wednesday the server crashed while shutting down for its scheduled honour restart. Nothing was ever lost, because the crash happened after everything was saved, but it hid the log, so a real problem could have gone unnoticed behind it. The cause is fixed, and the server now shuts down cleanly.

Some creatures re-cast their crowd control roughly every second instead of on their proper cooldown. It hit nets, roots, Terrify and Thunderclap. It made several fights miserable and a few nearly unplayable. The server was retrying a failed cast immediately instead of waiting; it now waits properly.

Nefaru was respawning every few minutes instead of every few hours. The Poor Old Blanchy quest now has enough Sacks of Oats around the Furlbrow farm to go around, so you are not queueing for them. Small things, but they were annoying.

We are a faithful Classic realm, but a few things are deliberately not Vanilla, and we would rather say so plainly. Paladin and Shaman can now group, raid and run dungeons together. To keep that fair, the buffs that do the same job are made mutually exclusive: you get the Paladin one or the Shaman one, never both. The full list of pairs that do not stack lives at /cross-faction. Auction listings also run longer than retail Vanilla so the market of a small population actually clears, and respec cost is capped at 25 gold. Nothing else touches the balance of the game.

A regression in the core update we shipped today dropped private whispers server-side: sent messages never reached the other player and never echoed back to you. It is fixed, and whispers deliver normally again on both the 1.12 and 1.14 clients. Thanks to everyone who reported it.

Resetting your talents is cheaper now: the cost tops out at 25 gold instead of 50. The steep end of the curve is halved, so frequent respeccers feel it most. (From a community council vote.)

The maintenance today moved Stonetavern onto the latest vMaNGOS development core, the most up-to-date and accurate Vanilla 1.12 engine there is. That means the freshest bug fixes, closer-to-original behaviour across the whole world, smoother and lighter NPC and pet movement, and a more stable network layer underneath. It also brings the Eluna scripting engine online behind the scenes, which is the foundation for our progression content. About six minutes of downtime, no data loss, characters untouched.

The realm now runs on a staged progression system, the way Vanilla actually unfolded. The raids and world bosses are sealed at launch and open in scheduled patches as the server grows: Molten Core, Onyxia, Blackwing Lair, Zul'Gurub, Ahn'Qiraj and Naxxramas. Phase 0 is where we start; the timeline is on the site under the progression page.

Cross-faction grouping now includes Paladins and Shamans in the same party or raid. The class buffs that would unfairly stack across factions (Salvation vs Tranquil Air, Blessing of Might vs Strength of Earth, and similar pairs) are now mutually exclusive instead of blocking the group entirely: you get one of the pair, not both, and you can finally raid together.

Hunter pet revive and call now use the correct cooldowns and timing, and Eyes of the Beast plays its animation on the beast instead of you. When you Mind Control, Enslave or otherwise charm a creature, its real abilities now appear on a clean action bar. Over 1,300 creatures and 2,600 abilities were mapped, which also makes the Razorgore encounter in Blackwing Lair completable. Pets follow correctly on the continents again, and the pet, Dire Maul door and Immol'thar stuck issues are resolved.

Riding the Grom'gol ↔ Undercity zeppelin no longer drops you from the server mid-flight. Inside Naxxramas, the missing inner teleporter is back in place, so movement through the instance works as intended.

The core update corrects world objects across the entire game against the original 1.2 to 1.12 client data. Highlights: the Felwood corrupted/cleansed plant quests (Songflower, Windblossom, Whipper Root, Night Dragon) and their "take the fruit" interactions; the Warlock Dreadsteed mount quest objects in Dire Maul; Zul'Gurub gem-boss summons and the Gong of Bethekk; the Ahn'Qiraj Ossirian crystal; ~40 world chests that open correctly again; cooking now working at far more campfires and braziers; auction houses in Darnassus, Gadgetzan and Ironforge; and Arathi Basin / battleground capture banners.

The anti-cheat used to read a fast burst of sell commands as suspicious and kick you, which is exactly what sell-junk and auto-repair addons do at a vendor. Selling many grey items at once is fine now; genuine packet floods are still logged and throttled.

The camp-able chest farm in Thousand Needles now respawns on an hourly timer instead of every few minutes (the earlier Arathi fix is fully live engine-side too), and the Wetlands digsite hands out quest fragments per-player so they cannot be ninja-looted. Daphne Stilwell is no longer stuck in the ground, and the Defias Dockmaster no longer respawns instantly.

A core bug made many objects (chests, mailboxes, ore and herb nodes, quest objects, fishing rods) only respond when you stood almost on top of them. They register from a normal distance now. The same update also fixes mage Blink landing on the ground instead of mid-air, pet cooldowns surviving a relog, wand shots using your weapon skill, and reorganising two full bags. Landed with the maintenance restart today.

The faction war chests at Go'Shek Farm and Dabyrie's Farmstead were spawning two per side on a five-minute timer, which made them a campable source of easy gold. There is now one chest per side and it comes back every hour. The content stays; the farm does not. Thanks to the player who reported it.

We moved the world server up about thirty upstream revisions (the gameplay fixes in this batch ride along) and gave the database a much larger memory pool: it was running on the stock 128 MB, now 8 GB. This is mainly for auction house load and busy moments.

We put the deliberate changes in one place: cross-faction play, the longer auction timer, and the guards that keep the economy of a small realm fair. Each one says what it does and why, and notes that it eases back toward Vanilla as the realm fills up. Read it under "Why we tune the realm".

Listings on the Auction House now stay up about seven times longer, so the 24-hour slot lasts roughly a week. It costs no more: the deposit is still charged on the duration you pick in-game, not the longer real time. The auction menu still shows the old 2h / 8h / 24h labels; your listing simply outlives what it says. It is a deliberate, temporary boost while the realm is still filling up, so items have time to sell on a quieter market. We will ease it back toward normal as more players arrive. Applies to new auctions only.

You can now connect your Discord account and use it to sign in, one click instead of a password, or register straight from Discord (you still set an account name and password for the game itself; 1.12 needs its own). Once linked, choose a main character under Manage account; we use it to grant Discord roles for your faction and a verified player. Linking is optional and you can disconnect it any time; your existing username-and-password login is unchanged.

The realm-wide "World" channel is reliable again on every client: one channel for everyone, both factions, and it mirrors to our Discord. We dropped a server-side workaround that could leave it broken and unwritable. Type /join World if it is not already in your chat tabs.

Every chartered guild now has its own hall on the site. Open a guild to read its full roster: who leads it, every member by rank, class and level, and who is at the hearth right now. Guild masters and officers can post raid days and dungeon runs; members sign up in a click (attending, tentative, or benched when the roster is full), and anyone who opts into web push gets a quiet nudge thirty minutes before the muster. Each event also opens a war table: drag your signed-up players into the eight raid groups and sketch the plan on a shared tactics board the whole guild can see. Sign in and look for "Your guilds".

Horde and Alliance now share world chat and channels, can group together, and run dungeons and instances side by side. That covers guilds, trade, the auction house, mail, who-list and friends too. This is a deliberate departure from blizzlike: in real Vanilla the factions stayed apart. We open the door because a small community is one table, not two empty halls. One exception keeps the balance honest: a Paladin and a Shaman cannot be in the same party, as their combined buffs never coexisted in Vanilla. Everything else stays untouched.

While we were down for maintenance we swapped the host CPU (E5-2620 v4 to E5-2680 v4: more cores, higher turbo, larger cache) and pinned the world server onto its own dedicated, isolated CPU cores so nothing else on the machine can steal its cycles. The database and every other service now run on separate cores. The performance governor is locked on for full clock speed. A Vanilla world is single-threaded at its core, so an undisturbed, high-turbo core is exactly what it wants: the result is a steadier tick under load and more headroom for big gatherings.

In Whelgar's Excavation (Wetlands), one of the four tablet relics was accidentally faction-locked and would not respond, so the Ados fragment could not be looted and the quest stuck at 3 of 4. The relic is neutral again and the quest completes. Thanks to the player who reported it.

The same kind of faction lock hit the tome for this Scarlet Monastery quest, so it could not be read. Fixed the same way, and the tome responds again.

The number of debuffs that can sit on a target is now 8, the value that matches the current content phase. You will notice it most in raids and group play.

Pulled 11 upstream refinements into the world: corrected NPC positions (Ironforge guards and several quest givers, from sniffed data) and cleaned up a few stray spawns. Small world, more accurate.

The booty chest in the Gurubashi Arena pit was not spawning, because it was never wired to its event. That is sorted now; it comes back with the next maintenance restart and runs on its regular ~3-hour cycle. Thanks to the player who flagged it.

Horde and Alliance see the same auction listings and can mail each other gold and items. Everything else stays blizzlike: groups, guilds, trade and chat.

We turned on the engine that flags speedhacks, fly hacks, teleports and botting patterns. It only logs and notifies a GM. A human still decides every ban, as promised.

The collection NPCs that were standing around in Stormwind, Ironforge and Orgrimmar are gone. The War Effort is not running, so they should not have been there.

We loosened the server-side name reservations. Pick the name you actually wanted. The client still caps you at 12 ASCII characters.

A ticket you open in the game with ? now shows up for the keeper on the website, and a reply gets sent straight back to you in-game mail. Ask once, in whichever place is easier, and you get an answer.

A public status page now shows whether the realm, login, and the site are online, so you can tell at a glance before you log in.

Got a code? Sign in, go to your account, pick a character, and claim it. The reward lands in the in-game mail of that character a minute later.

A Council page records who has a say in realm decisions. Plain credit, out in the open.

Vote for the realm with your website-registered account and you get a one-time six-slot bag in the mail. It is the same for everyone: no gold, no gear, no in-game edge, just a bit of bag space.

You can now open a support ticket from the website and follow the conversation in one place instead of chasing it across Discord. The keeper gets notified when a new ticket comes in.

A clear donate page (Ko-fi) explains that chipping in only helps cover server costs and never buys an in-game advantage. Entirely optional.

Browse the gear of any character on the public armory, search the full player roster, and appeal a ruling by mail. More of the realm is now visible from the website without logging in.

A running ledger of what has changed on the realm, so you can see at a glance which patches and tweaks have landed.

Four boards: PvP, the level race, gold, and server-first kills, so you can see who is chasing what. Top holders are called out by name.

You can now sign in to your account before confirming your email; verification only gates the armory and character pages. Less friction to get started.

Change your password and email yourself from account settings, and use the self-service "find your way home" option if a character gets stuck. No ticket needed.