Keeping World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth running in the best shape possible takes near-constant maintenance, with Blizzard applying hotfixes several times a week. Their most recent batch of hotfixes loosens some previous changes.
Recently, Blizzard implemented some severe and restrictive throttling on the in-game Auction House. This was primarily in response to what seemed to be some exploitative behavior coming from some players, effectively punishing all others as well.
“We’ve implemented a new system that effectively gives each player a ‘budget’ of AH actions per minute, and only kicks in once that budget has been exceeded,” Blizzard wrote in the original post. “The system is tuned so that it should never affect players using the AH typically… it should be essentially impossible to encounter the new limits for most players.”
Though most players were effectively safe, the system was intended to throttle players using addons to swiftly search the Auction House for automated purposes. Players were using these addons to more or less scour the system and work to buy and relist items en masse at a higher price.
Today, however, Blizzard heard fan feedback and decided to lift the restrictions. It seems that, with this newest hotfix, Blizzard has removed the system that was throttling players after a decent amount of negative backlash.
Their notes today simply say that they have “significantly relaxed the throttle on all Auction House operations except canceling auctions.” Given that players were never expected to encounter the restrictions in the first place, it seems a significant relaxation should more or less make them non-existent.
Additionally, Blizzard has made achieving the fourth rank of Essences significantly easier, putting in what fans often refer to as “Bad Luck Insurance.” With each opened Paragon cache, a player’s chance to receive a Rank 4 Essence associated with that reputation increases.
The four factions in question are the Rustbolt Resistance, Waveblade Ankoan/Unshackled, Rajani, and Uldum Accord factions. Additionally, this change is retroactive, making it much more likely to receive them depending on how many paragons you’ve had overall.
Moreover, three achievements – Azerite Admiral, Expert Expeditioner, and Expedition leader – will now increase the chance of receiving the fourth rank of Worldvein Resonance from Island Expeditions. With so many different improvements, it’s become much more likely for players to achieve the fourth rank of their preferred essence.
Given that the fourth rank is usually purely cosmetic, it stands to reason that there’s no great justification of keeping them away from players based purely on luck. With it now being so much easier to obtain them, players are certain to be happy for the less-monotonous grind.
