One of World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King Classic’s most iconic quests is not working as intended, with Blizzard advising players to steer clear until the issues are resolved.
The quest in question is the Battle for the Undercity. Following the events of the game’s pivotal Wrathgate cinematic, players of both the Horde and the Alliance are tasked with invading the Undercity and finding those responsible for the tragedy. It’s an incredibly unique event and quest with some lucrative rewards, and one that was only playable for a relatively brief period of time originally. Added in 2008 with the release of Wrath of the Lich King, the quest was removed roughly two years later in November 2010’s patch 4.0.3, just ahead of the game’s Cataclysm expansion. The 2022 re-release of the beloved expansion then serves as a great way to revisit the quest, or for many players, experience it for the first time.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t sound like the issues plaguing Wrath Classic’s Battle for the Undercity quest event will be fixed anytime soon. Blizzard says due to the “extreme complexity” of the event, a fix is “unlikely” to arrive in the next few days. In the meantime, Blizzard is implementing a way to skip the event, with the hope of adding a way for players to go back and try again at a later date.
“We are heartbroken to ask players to bypass this iconic content, and we are going to make all haste to try and implement a more full-featured solution to allow players encountering this quest for the first time to more reliably play through this, and give players who were forced to skip it a way to go back and experience the content, but we simply don’t have an ETA for when that full fix may arrive,” Blizzard states in a forum post.
According to Blizzard, the issues with the quest stem from the large number of players attempting the event and “unforeseen interactions with layers,” with layers essentially being copies of the game world that are used to spread players out instead of having thousands of people all in one location at the exact same time. Player progress in the event is getting stuck, and it prevents not only progression for the player currently trying to complete it but also any other players on that same layer. The bug doesn’t happen every time, but due to the sheer number of players attempting the quest, it’s bound to bug out sooner or later, after which it breaks the quest for potentially hundreds of players. Blizzard notes that the issue is especially problematic for Horde players, as the event makes certain vendors and trainers in the Undercity and Orgrimmar unusable during the duration of the event.
Wrath of the Lich King Classic’s launch hasn’t been without issues. Massive server login queue times of five hours or more are currently plaguing WoW Classic’s most populated servers, with Blizzard’s only solution being to offer players free server transfers to those affected. Despite the queue, one player managed to hit the game’s new level cap of 80 just nine hours after the expansion’s release.
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