Blizzard looks to prevent exploitative transfers during WoW Classic Phase 5 events

No bug mounts for you, exploiters.
Image via Blizzard Entertainment

If you know anything about World of Warcraft’s history, the Black Qiraji Battle Tank likely stands out in your mind as one of the most iconic items in the game’s history. As one of the rarest and most difficult-to-get mounts, the battle tank, which is often referred to as the “bug mount,” requires players to follow a long quest chain to obtain it. 

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But there’s a catch. To obtain the mount, you need to be one of the first people on your server to complete the questline. Only a small number of people can even potentially farm enough resources required to complete the quest in a given week due to the limited number of mobs that drop those resources. This makes getting a bug mount a huge guild-wide effort for many, with just one person finishing the quest in time from any given guild if they’re lucky.

With Classic’s Phase Five starting next Tuesday, July 28, many people have been trying to find creative, and potentially exploitative, ways to farm the bug mount. But yesterday Blizzard announced some details regarding the next phase that will stop this sort of action in an attempt to maintain the clout that the bug mount had in WoW when it originally came out.

Blizzard expanded on previous information that it shared about players looking to farm the bug mount or even participate in the Ahn’Qiraj (AQ) Gate opening event on multiple servers. Blizzard’s focus appears to be on stopping players from using server transfers to farm materials for the bug mount quest on one server and transferring themselves, or those materials, to other servers. 

A few weeks ago, Blizzard said players who have transferred to a realm in the past 90 days won’t be able to complete the final quest in the chain that gives you the bug mount. Though they can do the quest chain, they won’t be able to get rewarded for being one of the first on their server to do so. 

Late last night, Blizzard expanded on that statement by adding that players can’t transfer characters that have “Silithus Carapace Fragments,” an essential resource required to finish the quest chain that takes a significant amount of time to farm.

Both actions were done in an attempt to stop people from transferring characters to extremely low population servers to farm for the bug mount with little to no competition. Had the action been allowed, there likely would have been ample amounts of people who either farmed mats for others or gotten the bug mount on a low population server to avoid competition with other players and guilds.

This might not be exactly how the AQ event worked in vanilla WoW, but the implementation of preventative measures by Blizzard will certainly buy the company some credit with players who want the Black Qiraji Battle Tank to have the same luster it did in the mid-2000s. 


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Author
Max Miceli
Senior Staff Writer. Max graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a journalism and political science degree in 2015. He previously worked for The Esports Observer covering the streaming industry before joining Dot where he now helps with Overwatch 2 coverage.