There are few things more frustrating in a World of Warcraft dungeon than, midway through a tricky boss fight, suddenly disconnecting, or DCing as it’s known. When this happens to me, I am immediately flooded with guilt. I am no longer contributing! I am a massive pile of dead weight! Not only am I not doing damage at a critical moment, but I will certainly just die and my friends will have to waste time reviving me or mana healing me. We will be slowed down. Our timer (in a Mythic key) will lose precious seconds. I am a failure of a human being and I should never do a dungeon again.
Oh, that’s just me? Well. Even so. It sucks to DC!
But it might, maybe, suck less now. Because players think they’ve discovered something odd after the latest WoW patch. Instead of characters freezing up or vanishing when their players disconnect in dungeons, those characters seem to be continuing to fight all on their own, with no player input.
This has been reported by a handful of players this week following Tuesday’s big Curse of Ula’tek 12.1 update. The original poster claims they were in a dungeon with an Evoker who disconnected about 39 seconds into a boss pull. In the linked video, you can hear the person claiming they’ve DCed, but you can see the Evoker continuing to fight and cast spells. The poster claims this happened twice, across two different dungeons. And multiple individuals in the replies corroborate, claiming it happened to them or their friends as well:
“Okay cool, thought I was confused,” reads the top comment on Reddit. “This happened today to my brother while he was on his warrior. We were on disc and his client crashed. He hung there through almost the entire boss fight we were on and then like 30 seconds into his D/c. His warrior charges the boss and starts hitting it. My brother was actively narrating his re-login. According to him his game hard locked, froze and he alt+f4d and relogged in.
“Suuuper weird”
Other replies offer suggestions as to what could be happening here. One explanation is that the person is actually botting and this is all some elaborate hoax, but that seems like sort of a weird and unlikely thing to lie about for basically no reason. It’s also possible that the game’s relatively new (but still predating this latest patch) one-button rotation feature could be queuing up optimal actions in advance for some reason and continuing to finish everything that was in the queue prior to the disconnect. I’m no expert, but I’m not sure that explanation fully convinces me, given the way the Evoker in this dungeon (look for the player character with the dragon wings) continues to move after the disconnect. But I don’t play Evoker so I could just be missing something about how they work.
A nicer suggestion, however, is the idea that players who disconnect are being temporarily turned into “followers,” an NPC mechanic that normally lets players complete easy dungeons with NPC companions. The idea is that a sudden disconnect would allow NPC AI to take over briefly and cause the character to do a roughly optimal rotation and attempt to avoid mechanics for a time, giving the player a window to get back in and take over. If that were the case, it would essentially establish a buffer for people who accidentally disconnect, helping them avoid falling into situations where they might take damage, fail mechanics, die, or otherwise cause issues for their group through no fault of their own.
However, such a feature would likely be ripe for exploitation. And if it was intentional, it seems weird that Blizzard would add such a huge feature without telling anyone about it, which makes it more likely this is some sort of bug that will be patched out. We’ve reached out to Blizzard for comment as to whether or not this is real and, if so, how it works.