This time the news feed is going to contain a respectful but sad goodbye to some of our former staff members, who have left the team due to different reasons. A celebration of our truly patient and dedicated players who have completed the Ironman challenge and received their Tiger. We also are going to introduce you to some pets that have been added in shop or within the game. Last but not the least, we will mention some of the latest fixes and updates that have been done lately by our developers.



Let's get started, shall we?

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The staff team has over the last few months been going through some changes. We have gotten new game masters, as mentioned in the last news feed, but sadly we have also been in the position where we have been in need of saying goodbye to some of our former game masters. Each one of them have influenced the server in some way and helped us achieve what we have. They all deserve a big thank you for their time and effort, and we wish them all the best in their future, on earth and in heaven. Thank you to Axis, Andromelech, Nuko, Natnat and Zaiti.

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We would like to congratulate the players who have successfully completed the Ironman Challenge and reached level 80 in 2021. This is truly a difficult task because of all the restrictions you have to follow. To complete this challenge, you must truly be patient, careful and dedicated. It is not something you get through easily. So, everyone who has earned it, deserves our shared respect and great wishes! We hope you all will enjoy your Tiger!

The list below shows those who have completed the challenge within the beginning of the year to now.

• Smee – January 3, 2021



• Meopala – February 8, 2021 - Bloodthirsty



• Coldiep – April 21, 2021



• Froz – May 13, 2021

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We have added some pets to the vote shop. Some have previously been used as rewards or gifts, while others have never been available here. The pets that have been added to the vote shop are Cat Carrier (Corrupted Kitten), Celestial Dragon, Golden Pig Coin, Silver Pig Coin, Polar Bear Collar, Red Dragon Orb, Green Dragon Orb and Turtle Egg (Loggerhead) and they cost only 100 vote points! Besides these has there been added one pet in-game, which is Terky. You get Terky by looting the White Murloc Egg, who is located in Borean Tundra, more precisely at the Riplash Ruins. So if you are one of those who just adore pets and thinks one more cannot hurt, then you are lucky that we now have more pets just waiting for you to give it a home!

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One of our developers is working really hard on fixing bugs and visuals within the raid Ulduar. Ulduar is a complex and different raid. Some would even go so far to say that it is the most complicated raid within the expansion, and that is why it is also the most bugged raid on pretty much every private server. We are working towards making that statement false on TrueWoW. It is a long and tough process, but when it is fully done it is worth the effort. Some minor changes within the raid have already been made and players will for sure be able to feel the difference when next time they enter. To fix this raid it takes a lot of research, developing and testing – So before we go over what has been done there, we want to appeal to you, our raider, our eyes and ears within the game, if you raid Ulduar and have any desire in helping fixing this raid, please report the bugs you find on the bug tracker along the way and feel free to talk to Andriuspel about how you can help in the process – this is over the forum, through private messages, of course!



But now to the exciting part. The fixes and updates that has been applied already – are the following:

• Implemented base camp vehicles default exit offsets. This change will make proper exit animation by default vehicles exits passenger on their current position, meaning they will be ejected to the side of the vehicle.



• Chopper passenger seats is not switchable. This change will disable the passenger to switch seat into driver seat.



• Implemented "Load into Catapult" and "Throw Passenger" spells. These abilities is on the demolisher and its passenger. This change will allow players to become real cannon balls. Player based cannon balls will be able to land on Flame Leviathan and disable his mini turrets.



• Redesigned Flame Leviathan "move in" intro event. Fixed his ability "Flame Vents" and adjusted his missiles, these things will not be casted while he is overloaded which makes him shut down. Implemented turrets on him which means that from now on are there 2 turrets in 10 man raid and 4 turrets in 25-man raid. These are related to overload events and to certain achievements. Related achievements are still broken but they will get fixed pretty soon.



• Fixed tower buffs for Flame Leviathan. Previously even if towers are not destroyed, boss did not gain extra auras and events which would make his event more challenging. There are 4 towers and each of them give extra auras which increases HP, damage and other boss stats.



• Minor improvements to Brundir’s movements to be visually more like it is on retail.



• Re-scripted "Ward of Life" and corrected incorrect timers.

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We hope you have enjoyed this newsletter. If you have any suggestions for upcoming releases - let us known in Private Messages on the forums or on the Discord server. Thank you for playing TrueWoW!

As a part of our new initiative to make our website represent our server activity more, we will now every fortnight make a post where we share some of the highlights of our community. These posts will include new staff members, exciting updates/fixes within the game and accomplishments by individual players or guilds.



Let's start with our first bit of news...

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Lately have we gotten some new game masters and new trial gamemasters. We would appreciate it if everyone would be patient and understanding when they try to handle upcoming tickets. It will take a bit longer but they will do their best to assist you to the best of their abilities. So please welcome Outsider, Schism, Ayoe and Lightbearer to the team. Show them what great players we got here and how fantastic it is to be a game master on TrueWoW!

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Our great developers have raised the drop rate of some of the most rare mounts within the game. They have raised the drop rate to 4% for Ashes of Al'ar, Fiery Warhorse, Blue Proto-drake, Onyxian Drake, Raven Lord and Grand Black War Mammoth. So if there was ever a time to try and farm mounts, maybe for the 100 mount achievement, then it is now!

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This week we are going to honor a guild, that has done a lot on this server. It is the longest surviving guild with the largest and most active player base. The players within the guild have marked the server with their competitive performance. They were the first ones to down Sindragosa 10 heroic and The Lich King 25 normal. They earned Realm First! The Fall of the Lich King by killing The Lich King first, in Icecrown Citadel 25 Heroic mode. They have taken part in so many memorable activities including Ulduar raids and other activities. They were responsible for the server’s biggest world PvP by taking over Stormwind for a long period of time. They are dedicated, they are united, they are Hellraisers.



Hellraisers was founded the 30th of May 2010. It has changed leadership over the years but they will be known for their remarkable PvE gameplay and their trolling behavior outside of raids. Besides their performance in PvE, Hellraisers tries to live up to the intention of the guild, when they first were founded, to be a fun guild with a good community. One thing will never change, Hellraisers will always mark the ground of TrueWoW.



Thank you for 11 years worth of memories, we look forward to follow your upcoming achievements.

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We hope you have enjoyed this first instalment of a new series of newsletter. Hopefully we can find all kinds of bits of trivia to share regularly, as well as inform you more often about the work of our developers.

Following the previous announcement, our realms will merge on 2 November. Starting from 11AM server time, at least 4 hours of downtime is expected. The functionality of both realms is already the same but afterwards all your characters can be found under TrueWoW (which is no longer a PvP realm). At the same time both arena seasons will end and rewards given accordingly, more information about our arena seasons can be found here and here.



• 10+ Characters: If your account has more than 10 characters across both realms then a new account will get created with the same username except a comma "," added in front. All characters from your least played realm will be moved to that account. The account will be linked to the same forum account but first requires a password reset in the Account Manager. Contact staff if you need help with recovery or if you want a new username for this account.



• Name conflicts: If a character name is taken at both realms, the one with the most played time keeps it. In this case you still get the option for a free rename if you wish to give the name to the other character (maybe you own both characters). The other character will be forced to choose a new name at next login. Inactive characters were already renamed so there are not many conflicts. If you believe you deserved the name instead, contact staff with reasons to review it manually and don't rename the character until you have an answer.



• Guild names: The guild with the most members keeps the name, the other gets a dot "." added. These guild leaders may contact staff if they wish a new name or for review if there are objections. Additionally only a few arena teams are affected with inactive leaders, hardly worth mentioning.



• Addon settings: These are saved with your WoW client and won't automatically work for PrimalWoW characters because the realm name gets changed. The same happens with a change in username or character name. You can go to this topic if you need help to copy settings.



It's a full merge so nothing else should really be affected. As said before, we won't delete any characters, items, etc.

While some of you wanted to see this news a year ago, this will come as a shock to others. We made the hard decision of rescheduling the merge of our realms to the earliest opportunity. This means the PrimalWoW community will no longer have a separate realm to progress through WotLK, all characters will populate one realm.



Unfortunately this is not a matter of choice, we simply don't have enough volunteers who are willing to do the grunt work for a successful WotLK launch. Our main developer has been overworked with crash fixes as stability comes first. And most of the people who were originally involved with the TBC launch have left so we have already been behind schedule for a while. The only other option is keeping it as a static TBC realm indefinitely which hardly anyone would be happy about.



Note that you're always free to progress through WotLK at your own accord, a disciplined guild could manage this. We have some ideas to support this playstyle as a compromise but again no work has been done yet.



Obviously the upside of a merge is population, there will be more people to play with. We will no longer have to split our limited resources over 2 realms. And in turn, our small server will have better chances of surviving. Players will also be able to enjoy features that have been exclusive to the TrueWoW realm, AHbot has been selling items for 2 months but there are no plans to adjust it for a PrimalWoW release.



The merge is expected to be ready within months so not immediately, more details and a specific date will still follow. It's also a big project that requires careful preparation and I am mostly doing that alone. If you're angry about this decision, I only ask that you don't take it out on staff members. Such an attitude is really demotivating and we will be worse off if they leave. If you actually want to help, send us a staff application and maybe you will make a difference.



5 September marked the release of WotLK on Primal and all 3.3.5a content is now available. AHbot has been enabled and the realms are now basically identical in preparation for the merge.

The realm type for TrueWoW was changed from PvP to PvE as agreed here.