Filed under: The Burning Crusade, Wrath of the Lich King, WoW Archivist
Last week, we launched into the newest beta in WoW's history -- its sixth! -- for Warlords of Draenor. It's an exciting time for the game. Every beta has its surprises, good and bad. New things that were never announced. Prior announcements that changed unexpectedly. We've already had a number of surprises in the Warlords beta: the faction hub shift to Ashran, cross-faction auctions, and the removal of guild leveling.
Beta is just ramping up. We are sure to encounter more than one surprise over the next few months as we test the Draenor experience and gear up for the expansion's launch. Let's take a look back at the previous five betas and examine some of the twists that greeted testers -- and often shocked the WoW community. Caveat: I'm excluding storyline surprises.
The original beta
In 2003 and early 2004, players didn't really know what to expect from a World of Warcraft MMO. Blizzard, after all, had never made one before. Most of the original beta served up surprise after surprise. Yet, a few stand out.
Tired heroes. Patch 0.6 introduced the first incarnation of the rest system. Today it is simply a bonus for players who don't have time to log in every day. The original version was more like the Chinese government's "anti-obsession measures": it punished you for playing too long. The system looked like this:
- Well rested gave 200% of the XP from a mob kill
- Rested gave between 100% and 200% XP
- Normal gave 100% XP
- Fatigued gave 50% XP
- Exhausted gave 25% XP
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WoW Archivist: Beta surprises originally appeared on WoW Insider on Wed, 02 Jul 2014 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.