There’s been a lot of hype leading up to the upcoming World of Warcraft: Shadowlands expansion and Blizzard has had their plate full with making sure that the eventual release is as high quality as they’ve described – and as fans have come to expect.
Today actually marks the original release of the title before it was delayed close to the end of last month. While the developers have given no new announce date, they seem quite certain that they’ll be able to get the expansion out before the end of 2020.
That upcoming release still has plenty of problems, though. Thankfully, Blizzard is keeping their eyes open and listening to their player base, and have already announced a fix to one of the problems that fans were anticipating.
The issue in question comes from the difference in time between the EU servers and the NA servers. The weekly reset of these two servers isn’t quite synchronized due to the time difference between the two – NA resets on Tuesday and EU resets on Wednesday.
Normally, this isn’t much of an issue, but the reset difference has it so that the EU players were at both an advantage and a disadvantage. This reset difference gave the EU players a day to reach level cap and get their weekly Renown cap before the weekly reset hit.
Yes, we'll make sure there's no permanent Renown or Soul Ash advantage to be gained based on differences in regions' weekly reset timing.
— Ion Hazzikostas (@WatcherDev) October 24, 2020
Effectively, this put the EU players in a position where they were able to gain an entire week’s worth of an advantage, gaining a “free” week of Renown and Soul Ash that the players on NA weren’t able to get. This caused an unfair advantage due to a time difference.
Additionally, though, EU players generally weren’t too interested in taking that advantage. Much of the EU population didn’t like the pressure it put on players to rush to the level cap and snag the resources before the reset hit on the next day.
Many felt that this hurt the first-time leveling experience of the expansion, with the introduction to the content being spent rushing through to take advantage of the cap being given. Blizzard, it seems, agreed.
Ion Hazzikostas, game director of World of Warcraft, confirmed that this problem would be dealt with. While he gave no direct solution that they intend to be doing to fix it, they’ve confirmed that it’s on their radar and something they won’t let impact the game.
Generally, this has been met with a good bit of positive feedback. While this stops some players from taking advantage of this difference, it ultimately levels the playing field across the regions and makes it so that players are free to play without the pressure of having to take advantage of the time difference.
