Patch 6.2.2 Flying Reveals that Draenor is on Farmville Servers
It’s hardly any secret that World of Warcraft’s zones don’t always line up with the in game geography. Getting from Andorhol to Stratholme takes about five minutes instead of six days, flying east from Kalimdor won’t take you to the Maelstrom even if you do manage to avoid fatigue, and the entirety of Eversong Woods can be seen floating off the coast of Hellfire Peninsula.
Little oddities like these were part of the reason the release of Draenor flying in patch 6.2.2 was so anticipated, as people waited to discover what sorts of hilarious oddities would pop up on a continent that was never designed for flying in the first place. Players were eager to see what they could find with their new mobility. Would the top of Hellfire Citadel be just as unfinished as the roofs of Silvermoon? Would we be able to get inside the large purple dome in Shattrath, only to find an area as empty as the zone’s storyline? Or would we discover that the whole continent has been floating just a few feet below Stormwind this whole time? Well instead, intrepid explorers found something even more shocking and unexpected: the entire continent of Draenor is hosted on the same servers as Zynga’s hit Facebook game, Farmville.
This bizarre discovery was first revealed by MMO-Champion user “Borelords of Draenor”, who flew south over the Zangar sea and managed to avoid death by fatigue by exploiting heals and first aid. He hoped to find the real locations of instanced zones such as Ashran or Highmaul, of perhaps to discover remnants of unfinished zones such as Farahlon, but was shocked when he instead came across the farm of 53 year old soccer mom and wine aficionado, Debora Nelson. Reddit user /u/Illidonewithyourshit later confirmed this by posting screenshots, stating “at first I thought I was back in Halfhill somehow, but the darker, edgier, pandaless environment quickly made me realize that I wasn’t. Whatever this zone is, it’s on a Karazan Crypts level of f*cked up.”
Of course this still begs the obvious question of, why? To get an answer for this, we spoke to Blizzard programmer David Ray. It’s no secret that World of Warcraft was originally built on a modified version of the Warcraft III engine, which in turn started its life as DotA, a mod for Riot Games’ popular MoBA game League of Legends. But as it turns out, this isn’t the only time WoW has cannibalized another game’s technology.
“When the designers first started planning out Warlords of Draenor, it became obvious that we were going to see a pretty massive shift in gameplay,” Ray told us. “Instead of traveling around the world completing quests and dungeons for themselves, players would sit in one place for hours on end waiting on timed missions to complete so they could get their rewards. But when they came to us to start prototyping these mechanics, we quickly realized that the game’s engine just couldn’t handle it in its current form. We spent a long time trying to come up with a work around before we finally figured it out: the easiest way to make garrisons work was to run them on a heavily modified version of the Farmville engine.”
In the end this turned out to be a good decision, as it paved the way for several other features that came through later in the expansion, such as Twitter integration, updated Tauren models, and reposting old content Archimonde as an end boss. When asked if we would see similar technology in the upcoming expansion Legion, Ray replied “I don’t wanna spoil anything, but let’s just say Candy Crush is running some pretty tight sh*t under the hood.”