Thunderfire Games
"Raid Dawn Break Operation" Operations Plan
Officially launches on March 24th
Shatter the Darkest Night, Make Raiding Great Again!
Dear Adventurers:
As "The Darkest Night" slowly unfolds, to assist the braves in their adventures, the CN server team brings everyone a brand-new operations plan — Raid Dawn Break Operation.
We hope that through a series of events in this operation, the 12.0 raid dungeons will shine once again, allowing more players to participate in World of Warcraft's most classic gameplay with greater ease and a greater sense of reward.
I. CN Server Hall of Fame
Every hard-fought battle in Mythic raids is worth remembering. Starting from the new expansion, the CN server will launch an exclusive Mythic raid leaderboard.
The core members of the first 50 CN server guilds to complete the Mythic difficulty challenges of the three major 12.0 raids will receive customized physical souvenirs. Furthermore, every guild that completes the challenge will be listed on the leaderboard, forever engraving your legacy of protecting Azeroth. The birth of the CN Server Hall of Fame benefits from our governance of the raid environment, and its arrival also sets higher requirements for continuing to maintain fair play. We will absolutely do our utmost to safeguard the efforts of the braves.
II. Official Guild Recruitment Platform
Struggling because you don't have a stable team to participate in challenges? A brand-new guild recruitment page will soon go online on the official website and official Wechat mini-program. Whether it's for Mythic progression or casual farming, you can find traveling companions through this page. Via the official page, recruiters can add applicants as Battle.net friends with one click. This greatly simplifies the communication process and also protects everyone's communication privacy.
At the same time, we will collaborate with the Meeting Stone addon to keep the recruitment information on the official platform synchronized with the Meeting Stone addon in-game. Whether you are online or offline, whether you are in front of your computer or not, you can manage recruitment information in a one-stop manner.
III. Spectacular World First Race
12.0 will bring players three major raid dungeons, which will make the race for the World First even more exciting! To ensure everyone can continue to happily follow the progression, we have hired battlefield reporters who have always selflessly created content for everyone. In the future, not only can you continue to follow the drama on the forums, but the official public account will also bring you a special column for First Kill reports. We hope our efforts will bring more interesting topics to the community. Community creators such as Xia Yike, NasDa, and others will also bring you various First Kill stories, so please stay tuned.
IV. More Exciting First Kill Bounties
The World First bounty prepared for the CN server teams has accumulated to 1.6 million RMB. With three raids in 12.0, how is it calculated? Of course, every single one counts! Each raid will add 200,000 RMB to the total prize pool, a super acceleration! Although an objective gap exists, perhaps a CN server team can suddenly rise in the single-boss raid "Dream Rift" and pull off an upset to take the prize? Let's wait and see! The 500,000 RMB top-three bonus introduced in the last patch is still in effect, just one step away. We wish the CN braves smooth sailing in their challenges.
V. Master Loot Mode is Returning Soon
To help reduce the burden of guild and raid management, the Master Loot mode is expected to return to the CN server in patch 12.0.5. In recent interviews, designers have also expressed their attention to the loot mode. We will continue to help CN server players submit their opinions and suggestions, and we thank everyone for their discussions and feedback.
Since the Worldsoul Saga began,
We have fought from the heart of the earth to the deep void, our martial fortunes unending.
Now, the Sunwell once again faces a fatal threat.
Operation Dawn is ready to launch, let raids be great again!
The relationship between Blizzard Entertainment and NetEase's Thunderfire Games is a curious one. While it's true that at one time, the game was handled very differently between regions, that has not been the case for the better part of the past two decades. Despite popular belief, the Chinese studio does not have carte blanche to make whatever changes they like within "their" version of the game - Blizzard is ultimately still responsible for all of the design, and has traditionally been very strict about non-cosmetic changes within the modern version of the game. In contrast to that, they've allowed much more latitude with Classic, adding new Chinese-specific features to help speed up expansion cycles in order for Chinese players to catch up to the rest of the world, as well as the popular Titan Reforged server.
China missed out on Season of Discovery, but created their own updated experience in a special server combining Classic, TBC, and Wrath content.
This announcement marks a surprisingly major change to that stance, though it's unclear whether this is the result of negotiation between the two studios or China is being used as a testbed to determine whether the option should be rolled out to the rest of the world. Although the addition of Master Loot should not have much impact on progression guilds or the Race to World First, as dedicated raiding guilds already use their own de facto master loot systems, though it could certainly be a nice option for less coordinated guilds and pugs.
Rather than needing, greeding, or passing on drops, one player is assigned as the Master Looter, who then decides exactly who each item is allocated to.
Interestingly, Senior Game Director Ion Hazzikostas spoke on this very issue, stating that bringing Master Loot back to Retail WoW was a long term goal during a Shadowlands interview in 2022. At the time, players only personal loot, resulting in a lot of restrictions on exactly what items could be traded between players. While Master Loot itself never manifested, Group Loot was reintroduced in Dragonflight instead, considered something of a compromise between allowing shared tradeable loot and having one person with sole power over all of it. Whether this new Master Loot option for Chinese players indicates a change in that stance and might one day make its way to the rest of the world remains to be seen.
Ion Hazzikostas
Wowhead: In a previous interview, you mentioned that master loot was something you wanted to do but was looking for the right implementation, which kind of was a change from ‘no’ previously. Any update to that?
Ion Hazzikostas: Yeah! I think I would describe it more as group loot rather than master loot. That’s the specific process of a single loot master allocating the drops, that’s actually in some ways some of the stuff we were looking to move away from back in the day. But moving away from personal to shared pool of loot, where you kill a raid boss, you work together with 15 or 20 or 30 people to do it, there’s 5 items on the corpse you can roll for those items, you can pass on them, you can trade them to your friends; that’s a world we think we want to be in again.
