WoW Classic Hardcore player shares how they nearly lost their character to anti-disconnect mechanics

In WoW Classic Hardcore, your character only has one life to work with, so losing it because of a disconnect might be the worst way to go out. Fortunately, Blizzard Entertainment has anti-disconnection systems in place that can bail players out of sticky situations if they lose connection to the server. 

But what happens if those anti-DC measures are the actual reason for a character’s death?

In a post to the WoW Classic subreddit earlier today, a WoW player detailed their story about how they were disconnected from the game while on a boat ride and ended up in enemy territory upon logging back into the game. 

“I’m a level 40 paladin and I was on the boat to go from Ratchet to Booty Bay … however as the boat was about to transfer everyone to Stranglethorn I got DC’d,” a Reddit user named chuck6991124 said in their post. “Logged back in…. and no fatigue bar, I’m not even in the water. I’m on a hard surface… it’s…red? I’m alive. So…. am I on the boat? I’m looking straight at wood… graves surround me. The text of the zone appears. Razor Hill.”

Chuck6991124 was obviously playing an Alliance character, or else they wouldn’t have been so nervous about being ported back to the Horde-only town of Razor Hill. The familiar red ground of Durotar is usually a welcome sight for Horde players, but if you’re a member of the Alliance, you’ll want nothing to do with the zone that’s arguably the capital of all things Horde. 

What’s most peculiar, though, is how this actually happened. Why did the measures in place that are supposed to protect disconnected WoW Classic players from situations like this immediately throw chuck6991124 in hot water? 

The answer likely falls into the classic gamer trope of “spaghetti code.” WoW Classic has a “failsafe” measure built into it that teleports you to a faction-relevant graveyard if you disconnect from the game. However, because chuck6991124 disconnected while in transit from Kalimdor to the Eastern Kingdoms, the game placed them at the default Kalimdor graveyard, which is in Razor Hill. This “bug” likely only occurred because they were in a loading screen that went between continents.

“The game has some built-in failsafes that teleport you to a ‘default graveyard’ if it doesn’t know where your character is or is supposed to be, for example if you die of fatigue in the middle of the ocean,” a user in the comments named Vernzy hypothesized. 

Thankfully, chuck6991124 lived to tell the tale this time, surviving a potentially deadly encounter with WoW Classic’s most frightening boss: the loading screen.