wow Scourge Zombie Invasion Situation and Summary + Stress Test Live Now!

[Starym 3,800]

 

As the big pre-patch event stress test is live now on the PTR (and you should head on over and check it out), we wanted to talk about all the changes that have happened to the event so far and what it could mean for the actual live launch of it.

We've already seen the previously very chaotic event get massively toned down, with zombie spawns being limited, them being more passive and, most importantly, players having to opt-in to PvP to interact with the event at all. Many players are very unhappy with the extremity of these changes, which we'll summarize in a bit, but before we get into that it's very important to note that this is the PTR after all, and all these tweaks are hopefully meant to find a good compromise spot for the event, so as to not frustrate players, but to also bring some of that old feeling of danger and chaos with it from back in Vanilla and WotLK.

So what are these changes? Let's start with the player zombie side:

• You have to be PvP flagged to interact with the event in any way
• Player zombies fall damage greatly increased (you die if you fall from more than 10-ish meters)
• New players get the New Recruit buff which makes them immune to the zombie effects
• Player zombies feel pretty weak, as they can easily be run over by guards and especially non-infected players

Ghoul mobs:

• Ghouls no longer attack or infect any NPC
• Ghouls don't even attack guards unless the guards attack them first
• Ghouls have a very limited spawn rate 10-20
• Ghouls only stay alive for about a minute and a half

A lot of the above were first noticed by Siggythenomad, who is constantly monitoring the situation surrounding the event. Now once again, this is the PTR and all of these changes were meant for testing, as the initial round of testing for the event was truly crazy, with hordes of zombies and ghouls everywhere overrunning the place.

In the stress that's happening right now the event still seems a little undertuned, and players are writing their feedback directly into the chat:

As you can see the actual ghouls show up a lot more frequently, but they just get wiped out quickly, as they are pretty weak and still don't infect NPCs, so it's all up to actual player zombies. However, this doesn't mean that everything is just fine and chill in the capitals, as you can still run into situations like this:

As you'd expect, zombification followed and I quickly created a whole lot more ghouls. Player zombies can still attack NPCs and other flagged players, and create more ghouls and zombies out of them, so you can contribute a lot of chaos to the event. However, I felt reeeally weak as any player could just destroy me very quickly, even when I had a few ghouls with me, so that part feels pretty bad.

In any case if you're interested definitely head on over to the PTR and check it out yourselves! Meanwhile, this is what it looked like before the nerfs:

 

Hopefully Blizzard can find a good middle ground where we get to have some survival zombie apocalypse-type fun, but where players who really can't stand the event can still be allowed to play the game normally. Also, speaking of zombie apocalypses, as someone mentioned in the comments, if the pre-patch arrives on September 29th, that will mean that Shadowlands launch will arrive 28 days later.

PTR Zombie Stress Test (source)

Tomorrow, Friday September 4, at 8:00 a.m. PDT / 11:00 a.m. EDT, we’re going to perform a stress test on the Pre-patch PTR.

Please make sure you select “Public Test Realm” in the Battle.net App, and log in at that time, and join Blizzard employees in Stormwind and Orgrimmar as we test the updates to the event that were made in this latest build.

Thereafter, please leave any feedback you have on the experience in this thread.

We’ll see you in Stormwind and Orgrimmar. Thank you!