2021

Gavel Reborn (January)

2021 was not a great start for Wynncraft. Days earlier, a massive dupe glitch had struck, causing mythic prices to skyrocket. It was so bad that players actually were clamoring for a rollback, but due to logical reasons, it couldn’t really happen. This meant that the trade market was down until 1.20 dropped, but launch week had its own problems - beta testing naturally can’t squash every bug.

1.2o honestly had one of the roughest launches ever. Only 2 of the 3 raids were in the game, housing was missing a lot of cool features it had, and guild changes were not well received, at least initially. In addition to all this, some of the hotfixes for 1.20 had issues of their own. I’m not just talking about introducing new bugs - I’m talking about hotfix 6, a notorious event that changed how damage was calculated, causing players to deal WAY more damage in the past. The change was put on hold the day after hotfix 6 until items could be rebalanced, but not before a little trolling had been done.

Post 1.20 Updates (February to September)

1.20 was definitely not without its flaws, but I feel as if the admin team clearly showed that they wanted to make the update its best for the community. The reason I believe this is because many 1.20.X updates released afterwards, some of which came out months after 1.20 did.

1.20.1 added the Nexus of Light raid, finally adding the last piece of intended content Gavel reborn was supposed to get. 1.20.2 added improvements to housing, early-game changes, and raid-reward buffs. Said early-game changes were two new quests and the Time Troubles daily event, which correlated with an uptick in people discussing the controversial player retention. It also changed the dialogue system to the shift-based one we had today. 1.20.3 came out not long after, this time focusing on improving guilds and adding Guild Seasons. 1.20.4 added emerald pouches, and the first new mythics since 2019.

Festivals (July to March 2022)

In the summer of 2021, Wynncraft started doing something brand new: festivals. These were limited-time events where people could earn or buy crates with special cosmetics. Detlas would usually get some visual changes too. This was basically all the 1st festival, the Festival of Bonfire, had, but according to Salted the event was successful nonetheless.

The next festival, the Festival of the Spirits, took things a step further. It had more things to do like raffles and an event where you find and catch spirits, and community manager Hams hosted an art content which is now a staple of these events. The Festival of the Blizzard went even further above in beyond, adding temporary interactions with a ton of popular NPCs and bringing back the Wynnter fair. Wrapping up the 1.20 era was the Festival of the Heroes, with a scavenger event and performances that gave special buffs.