Secret Drop Mechanics In Wrath of the Lich King Revealed

Blizzard implemented a new system in Wrath of the Lich King, changing drop mechanics for items.In his keynote speech, Jeffrey Kaplan of Blizzard revealed a number of interesting things, one of which was that drop mechanics were secretly altered in the recent expansion to the MMO giant.Apparently, drop rates for quest items in World of Warcraft used to be around 35%. “We found that this had a lot of problems where players would run into streaks, and they only remembered the shitty streaks,” said Kaplan.In Wrath of the Lich King, a “progressive percentage” mechanic was added. In short, every time a player kills a quest mob, it ups the percentage chance of the quest item being dropped.In addition, a number of statistics on quests were dished out. Originally, the WoW designers aimed at having 600 quests in the game – a number made so that it could compete with Everquest, which at the time had 1200. The designers wanted players to have enough to keep them occupied, but not so many that they wouldn’t run out occasionally. However, because of the focus on the newbie experience, people quickly became used to quests, and hated having an empty quest log. In the end, WoW launched with 2600.This number has increased since. The first expansion, The Burning Crusade, upped the number of quests to 5300, while Wrath of the Lich King has now raised the number to 7650.Thanks to Shacknews for much of this.