World of Warcraft Patch 12.1 has introduced Lairs, Blizzard's new attempt to turn the traditional world boss experience into something faster, cleaner and considerably less dependent on forty people standing around waiting for a rare spawn.
There was just one small launch problem.
Some Lairs apparently didn't understand when they were finished.
Players were killing the boss, completing the encounter and then watching the matchmaking system continue to funnel fresh adventurers into an instance where there was absolutely nothing left to fight.
Welcome to the raid.
The boss is dead.
Please enjoy the room.
Players Were Being Sent Into Finished Lairs
The issue appeared shortly after Patch 12.1 went live in North America.
Players reported that completed Lair instances remained active and continued searching for replacements even after the boss had already been defeated.
That created the wonderfully pointless situation where new players could queue for a Lair, enter the instance and discover that everyone had already done the thing they came there to do.
One player described the system as continuing to funnel people into Lairs where the boss was already dead.
Which is certainly an efficient matchmaking system if your primary objective is disappointment.
Leaving Could Give You Deserter
There was another complication.
Players reported receiving the
Deserter penalty when they manually left these broken instances.
Normally, that makes sense.
World of Warcraft doesn't want players constantly abandoning queued group content the moment something becomes mildly inconvenient.
But in this case, the content was already over.
There was no boss.
There was no encounter.
There was just a collection of confused players standing in an empty Lair wondering whether Blizzard expected them to start fighting each other.
Leaving anyway could result in the usual queue penalty.
Blizzard Has Already Hotfixed the Problem
Thankfully, this particular Patch 12.1 launch bug didn't survive very long.
Blizzard Community Manager Kaivax confirmed that a hotfix is now
live on all realms.
The fix changes how the matchmaking system behaves once the boss encounter begins.
As soon as players enter combat with the Lair boss, the queue should stop searching for additional players.
That means the game should no longer continue filling an instance while the boss is dying — or after it is already lying on the floor wondering why another twelve people just arrived.
Lairs Are Supposed to Fix an Old WoW Problem
The irony is that Lairs exist partly to remove exactly this sort of friction from world bosses.
We previously looked at why Blizzard is experimenting with Lairs.
Traditional world bosses can involve waiting around, awkward group formation, lag, enormous crowds and bosses that sometimes die before you've properly worked out which direction they are facing.
Lairs put that concept inside a dedicated instance.
On World difficulty, players can queue solo and automatically be matched with others while participating in a small scenario before the main encounter begins. Higher difficulties support organized groups and turn the same basic boss concept into more traditional raid-style content.
It is a smart idea.
Providing the instance remembers to stop.
This Is Exactly the Kind of Patch-Day Bug You Want
There are good bugs and bad bugs.
A bug that deletes your character is bad.
A bug that breaks an entire gearing system for three weeks is extremely bad.
A new matchmaking system accidentally continuing to invite people to a party after everyone has gone home?
That is almost charming.
More importantly, Blizzard identified the problem quickly and pushed the fix globally within hours of the first public reports.
Patch 12.1 has a lot of genuinely complicated systems that could go wrong.
If one of launch day's memorable problems ends up being “the boss died but the queue didn't notice,” we can probably live with that.
The Lair is closed.
Please stop sending adventurers.
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