2019

1.18’s Controversies (Jan - Feb)

I’ll begin this section by talking about controversial move of not boosting level 101 players with a ton of leftover XP to level 104, but rather to level 102 at most. Some players had spent hundreds of hours grinding XP with the expectation that they would instantly be max level again if the level cap was raised, and naturally most of those players quit. A thread was made regarding this on the day 1.18 launched, and responses from the CT only viewed the fire, as they had a differing opinion from the community on this.

Then, former IM bloww made a thread titled “Wynn isn’t what it used to be”, where he pretty much discussed his gripes with the server and community. A lot of players agreed with him and the thread sparked some great discussion. Salted himself ended up replying to it, and cleared up some other stuff in Wynn’s history too. Things should’ve been fine after that, right?

No, a few days later, the shoutbox was removed. The shoutbox was basically a small forums chatroom that also showed which new threads were made, and it was at the heart of most of the forums history. Sure, it wasn’t used much partly due to discord, but it was a useful tool for seeing what threads were added and had a lot of value to many of the more active forum-users. Member Moss made a thread asking for the shoutbox back, and the thread has been kept alive for two years with still no return of the shoutbox. And as you’ll read next, things briefly got even worse for Wynncraft.

Wynncraft’s 2nd Trailer (March)

In late March, the market shut down, and that just happened to coincide with the release of Wynncraft’s Trailer, which is actually super cool but just came out at an unfortunate time. The trailer was promoted by Grian, who if you don’t know, was a super famous youtuber at this point, and Wynn reached an obscene number of players. This led to them needing to close down guild war servers (guild wars were done on separate servers prior to the 1.20 rework), meaning that the market and guilds, two of the main endgame features, were gone.

Crunkle’s Return (May 2019)

At some point in earl April, jpresent seemingly just vanished. He’s no longer and admin and never seemed to have returned to the network, even as a normal player. This meant that guilds and the ingame market were down through April and half of May. Who would get the server out of this predicament? Turns out a serpentine savior returned when we needed him most…

After original admin Crunkle left the server in 2016, I’m not sure if anyone expected him to return. So everyone was surprised when he not only came back to Wynncraft in may 2019, but he also brought back guild wars and added 1.14 (the minecraft version) support. Was this a sign of better times? The answer was yes. The market also returned in 1.18.1, a patch that also added the much-liked /skiptutorial command.

This same update also added the Hardcore, Ironman, and Craftsman challenge gamemodes. It only took a few months before player YYGAMER completed all content with all 3 restrictions active at once. He later went on to beat the similar HICH challenge too after 1.19 dropped, and player Linnyflower would go on to complete both challenges not long after.

The Elemental Revamp (June to September)

After 1.18, the community naturally should’ve focused a lot more on the (likely) upcoming RTD update. But during the summer, they found themselves focused on a different upcoming feature - The Elemental Revamp. This was a rebalancing of almost every item in the game, and most items would be modified to fit ten tri-elemental archetypes. The thread about it would do a better job explaining all the changes than I could… and it also does a good job showing just how controversial this change was. Yeah, this was probably the most divisive idea for changing a part of Wynn that was shown to the community. In fact, the Elemental Revamp was most scrapped in the end, although some of its aspects like Hive Armor changes did make it into the game.

The Silent Expanse (December)

It’s time for another major update! In October, we got our RTD - I mean The Silent Expanse - trailer, and like always, the teasers had only touched the surface of what was being added. For the first time in Wynn’s history, a new class was being added in the Shaman! This is honestly one of the most insane additions to Wynncraft, and there’s an argument to be made that it wasn’t truly balanced until this year, if at all.

1.19 also had some class rebalancing, adjusting the four other classes to roughly their power levels pre-2.0. There was also the addition of the Hunted Mode, which led to a rise in people doing professions more thanks to its XP bonus, as well as the HICH challenge (I’ll discuss that a bit more later). Another “small” feature added was loot quality, which made mythics more common if you had more loot quality. This led to a significant spike in mythics being discovered, and also elevated lootrunning to more of a prominent subcommunity. And we can’t forget the Eldritch Outlook either, a new endgame challenge that added the Eye, a powerful foe that had been hinted at for years.