This is the story of how we got to the Dye Update in Curse of Ula’tek, streamlining dye crafting, reducing bag space requirements, fixing unintended color changes, and adding a bunch of new colors to use with all dyeable decor.

“These colors don’t match,” many players said after 12.0.5’s release. “This Obsidium Black isn’t as black. This Mesquite Brown isn’t as brown.”

We agreed, so we got to work.

Here’s how we got from those comments to the Dye Update that’s coming in Curse of Ula’tek.

HOW IT BEGAN

When we were first building Housing, we knew we wanted crafting to be a significant part of decor collection. Crafting is a part of WoW and has been since the very beginning, and one of the core philosophies in Housing’s rewards design was “as if it had always been there”, which is how we got to putting all those retroactive rewards on old quests and achievements and added decor rewards to all those old gameplay bits. Dyes seemed a natural fit here as well, so all 62 colors became recipes that both alchemists and scribes could make.

There were complications with the sheer number of items involved, though. One of those was that we couldn’t directly have people crafting that many inputs into that many outputs. So as a compromise, we created the dye crafting system that’s been in the game since 11.2.7: players can use Classic Inscription or Classic Alchemy to make dye pigments, the neighborhood dye stations let players turn them into the specific colors you want to use. This was good enough to ship, but we kept an eye out for ways to streamline it.

Meanwhile, and far less clear to anyone at the time, we also shipped a bug that affected dyes, some more than others, that caused the darker colors to be much more dark. Most notably, Obsidium Black went from being pretty black to almost as black as Sylvanas Windrunner’s coffee order when Housing went live.

The reason for this is technical, but essentially the way it worked is that the bug caused any light that hit an object with a dye on it to be rendered as though the light itself were the color of the dye. This significantly intensified the color, and that’s what shipped to players when we launched housing. So that’s what everyone got used to and made some truly epic creations with.

So when we fixed the bug in 12.0.5, the unintended consequence was that lots of those dyed objects looked… different. Not how players built or wanted them. As a result, we got the feedback I mentioned above: these colors don’t match.