World of Warcraft is full of invisible rabbits. But is that true? And if so, why are these rabbits everywhere?
There are plenty of myths and mysteries surrounding World of Warcraft. One of them is that the loot is determined when you enter a dungeon. A second myth is the existence of numerous invisible rabbits in the game. But what is the truth? Is this just a figment of the players’ imagination? Or is Azeroth really inhabited by thousands and thousands of invisible rabbits?
Is there any truth to the myth?
Yes, it is. Because “invisible rabbits” are something that World of Warcraft has actually relied on since the first hours and that are still in use today. The game world is full of small rabbits, which under normal circumstances cannot be seen by the players – because they are transparent and cannot be targeted.
Why do rabbits exist?
The answer to this is quite banal and yet logical. Because the world of World of Warcraft is supposed to be alive. This means that not only player characters affect the world, but also NPCs. On large battlefields, you can see mages hurling fireballs at a path, and elsewhere you can see archers practicing and firing arrows.
All these effects only work if the animations have a “target” – i.e. a point at which they are fired. These points are always creatures in play. But if something is not to hit an obvious creature at all, then Blizzard needs invisible rabbits. They then serve as a representative target.
How to see the invisible rabbits?
From time to time you can see these invisible rabbits, even if Blizzard doesn’t intend to. But for example, in the WoW subreddit there are posts every now and then in which the rabbits have lost their invisibility.
If you look closely, however, you can sometimes see the rabbits in invisible mode. Because although they are “invisible”, their model reacts to light and particle effects. For example, you can occasionally see the outline of a rabbit when a bright spell effect is triggered by an NPC somewhere.
Do the rabbits sometimes cause problems? Yes, they do. Because the invisible rabbits can also lead to server problems. Especially during “The Burning Crusade” this happened more often. There, for example, the rabbits were used in the Blade’s Edge to fire the Legion’s cannons at a target in the sky. For each shot, an invisible rabbit was created – which no longer despawned. Those who played in the area had to struggle with stutters and lags, which could even affect the entire server.
Because even though the rabbits are invisible, several thousand could accumulate, all of which are calculated as an entity and put a strain on Blizzard’s servers and players’ hardware.
However, the complex in World of Warcraft is not only the system of invisible rabbits. Meanwhile, the talents and abilities of the characters are also so confusing that sometimes you have to read a tooltip over 50 lines if you really want to understand all the intricacies of a skill. For those diving deep into this complexity, it often helps to Buy WOW Gold to gear up faster and focus more on mastering these elaborate systems.
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