WoW made a big boi ludicrously hard to get then, after 0.24% of the playerbase managed it, made it smaller—'Blizzard literally stole half my dog'

In recent expansions, Blizzard has given World of Warcraft players a meta-goal to pursue after running through all the usual stuff. It's basically an achievement that needs a boatload of other achievements to pop, a badge that says you've done everything, and it comes complete with a prize.

In the case of Dragonflight, this achievement is called A World Awoken, and at the time of writing a mere 0.241% have managed it, per Data for Azeroth. So a quarter of one percent of the playerbase. WoW aficionado Heather Newman documented her own grind for the achievement last week for PCG, and concluded "WoW did it suck."

But that's not today's development. While this achievement is obviously a reward unto itself, etcetera, it does have an actual reward: a Bakar mount called Taivan, basically a giant dog that plays a story role in the expansion. Funnily enough the narrative is all about his size: Taivan's bigger than all the other Bakar, and is thus expected to be an exceptional hunter, but he's such a gentle floofy thing that it turns out he's more like Lassie, all about saving centaurs trapped under rubble.

That aside, the point is Taivan is not just a good boy, but a massive good boy. Patch 10.2.6 added the ability to gain Taivan as a mount for players who'd managed the meta-achievement, and the main source of delight for players was that Taivan stayed the same size—making him much bigger than other mounts.

And after having surprised and delighted players by letting them ride a ginormous dog, Blizzard then decided to piss everyone off. A hotfix deployed yesterday significantly reduces the size of Taivan, by about a third, and he is now a pale shadow of the mighty mutt he once was.

Get ready. «Whoever at Blizzard thought that making this giant dog smaller would be a good idea needs to be fired,» fumes Too on the official forums. «They clearly don’t understand the appeal of the mount, or anything about fun, or the amount of effort required to get the mount in the first place.