WoW’s haunted: Players report that their disconnected friends’ characters are starting to play the game on their own

Disconnects are an unpleasant fact of life in an MMO, and if you play WoW long enough you’ll start to recognize the telltale signs indicating one of your adventurer colleagues has fallen afoul of a network hiccup: They might simply halt in place mid-combat. If they were moving when the connection dropped, their character might proceed to run directly into a wall, or get caught in a brief loop of stuttery motion until the server has enough and logs them out.

Since WoW: Midnight’s 12.1 patch dropped, however, players have started reporting some uncanny behavior from their disconnected fellows (via Kotaku). Rather than the expected unresponsiveness, disconnected characters have seemingly started to move and fight on their own.

The best available look at the phenomenon comes courtesy of redditor Stuperstrong, who shared a YouTube video on the WoW subreddit that they’d recorded of their Evoker friend disconnecting and continuing to participate in combat. In the clip, embedded above, you can see the dragon-winged Evoker exhibit the typical signs of a mid-encounter connection drop on the left side of the screen at around 39 seconds—and then they start fighting again.

The video is surprisingly unnerving: Speaking as someone who’s played WoW on and off for over 20 years, there’s something instinctively unsettling about seeing a player character performing actions when you’ve received all the visual signals that they absolutely shouldn’t be. It feels wrong—and the stiff, robotic cadence of their inputs doesn’t help.

Stuperstrong isn’t the only one who’s witnessed it. Other players responded to the thread with their own eyewitness accounts, like the brother of a warrior player whose game crashed while they were in a Discord call:

(Image credit: Blizzard)

“He hung there through almost the entire boss fight we were on and then like 30 seconds into his [disconnect], his warrior charges the boss and starts hitting it,” says redditor shlomo_baggins. “My brother was actively narrating his re-login. According to him his game hard locked, froze, and he ALT+F4’d and relogged in. Suuuper weird.”

So who’s playing when the player isn’t? While this could all be an elaborate hoax, the best theory so far is that we’re seeing an early manifestation of some sort of unannounced disconnect protection feature.

For a few years now, WoW has used NPC dungeon follower tech to let players run through casual content with a party of AI-controlled player characters who are—in most cases, anyway—surprisingly capable in combat. If disconnected characters are indeed starting to fight on their own, it’s not unthinkable that Blizzard might have reworked that tech to keep a dropped connection from ruining a dungeon run or raid attempt for the whole group.

Either that or WoW’s haunted. Blizzard hasn’t yet acknowledged the phenomenon; until there’s some sort of official explanation, all theories are on the table.

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