Islands are the best content system released in WoW in over a decade.

Islands are the best content system released in WoW in over a decade. It’s unfortunate that they’re terrible. If you’re thoroughly confused, welcome to the club - nearly everyone is. Let me explain why they are important. I will also speculate that Blizzard, institutionally at least, likely does not understand the full scope of what they’ve created.To review the basics - islands have been a sore spot since alpha due to their seemingly cacophonous theming and pacing. They’ve certainly been hated since launch due to their ‘lack of rewards’, prompting the devs to increase reward frequency at least twice publicly. Yet, the devs continue to act in an almost nonchalant way towards this particular piece of content that everyone else mostly hates with burning indifference.If you’re like me, you thought to yourself at some point “how could the devs be this disconnected?” every time they buff rewards from islands and it does nothing tangible to drop rates. You’ve done dozens of mythic islands, furiously rampaging around with specific 3-person comps to mow down creatures and mine Azerite in the most efficient way possible. You’ve seen the end screen pop dozens of time and all you have to show for it are a few hundred dubloons. Even more, you did PVP islands (THE HARD ONES!) and got nothing as well. You’ve tried farming normal and heroics for the hell of it to maybe speed up the completion rate but came out with nothing.Unfortunately, almost everyone is wrong. Not just “why hasn’t the secret discord discovered this yet” wrong, but paradigm-shifted-and-now-oblivious wrong.Since even the early days of community forums, then Thottbot and later wowhead, items and drops in WoW have been a fairly consistently determined. If it isn’t from a vendor or quest, something (or group of somethings) has it on its loot table. It might be rare, but the human reporting, data mining and statistics quickly eliminate options and as data pours in from the first week of a new patch, the number of items which are unknown for shrinks quickly to a few rare and whispered speculative items that, of course, drop off of the boss they are named after, or maybe just the last boss of the raid.It’s gotten so prevalent that Blizz even started simply listing everything in a journal. Everyone knows that items drop off loot tables. Everyone knows that loot tables are fixed. Everyone knows that islands are just some garbage low-drop-rate completely random piece of garbage content that no one should do. Except…Interestingly, with the change to island experience, some friends and I recently had an opportunity to start doing normal islands to level some alts. It is roughly equivalent to questing right now, arguably better with full rest due to the pacing of kills vs the prevalence of ‘non-combat-value’ quests. Due to the monotony, we started testing some rumors. You see, with the drop rate increase even casual islanders had started whispering of patterns and deterministic opportunities.So, dozens and dozens of islands later, we have discovered a few facts about islands by trial and error.1) All island loot rolls are irrespective of any sort of specific individual contribution. We had someone sit AFK and they still received the ‘rare’ loot consistently.2) It is possible to target loot, though not really to target specific loot except through repetition and RNG.3) The normal way people ‘do’ islands is counter-productive and does not reward you with items (at all, in some cases).Long story short, islands have a series of dynamic loot tables built for the entire group that are filled with low chance proportions based on the named rares you kill on that island. You do not know each mob’s loot table contains as it is obscured from direct inspection, you can only infer and guess based upon repeated killings of the named rare and acquisition of items. However, it is repeatable enough to confirm this is the case with some simple testing. When you finish the island, you roll on at least two loot tables, one for green (transmog armor) and one for blue (weapons/pets/tokens). Possibly a third for epics such as mounts (too low drop chance to confirm).So why is this important? Remember back to the mechanism of FINISHING the island – collecting Azerite. What is the densest Azerite spawn? The rare elementals that pop a few minutes into the island. What isn’t a NAMED elite rare? You guessed it, that giant Azerite elemental surrounded by 3 pillars or his buddies. What doesn’t populate your loot table? Yep – farming packs of unnamed basic mobs or mining generic Azerite nodes.In essence, the most efficient way of doing islands ELIMINATES your chances of getting loot – in some cases nearly completely. If you happen to do 1-2 ‘X’ nodes with no NAMED rares/elites and then the Azerite elemental spawn followed by killing the enemy faction a bit while you mine super dense and efficient nodes? Your loot table is EMPTY.If you kill some Mantid or Mogu? Pandaria transmog. Nerubians? Azjol Nerub quest tokens and Nerubian pet. Pirates? Crackers mount. It is likely some items are only obtainable on some weeks due to island creature types and terrain specific spawns. Specifically, many of the items seemingly come from the invasions that take place at roughly 50% azerite level. If you ignore those (for instance, let the enemy faction tag them), you lose a major loot table addition.So why do I think islands are the most important content to hit WoW in a decade? Blizzard has (accidentally?) found a way to circumvent data mining and reintroduce exploration. Dynamic, server-side cascading loot tables with sufficient RNG over the course of a complex or long-enough duration content cycle which is disconnected from direct sourcing (e.g. on a corpse) means that no one can say for absolute certainty what drops and from whom. Importantly, since sometimes you get nothing (20 consecutive 5% rolls doesn’t mean you have 100% chance), you’ll never know for sure. Yes, wowhead 'knows' what drops from islands, yet almost a year since data started trickling in and it knows nothing about how or why or when. Neither, it turns out, do most people.Why is this important? Well, imagine a piece of content like warfronts which are mostly completely boring garbage scenarios with predictable RNG loot generation. Now imagine that all the content from Arathi the world zone actually dropped inside the scenario, just like in islands. Only, unbeknownst to the world, your groups loot table was dynamically populated based on the specific actions you took. At the end, 2-3 people would get something super rare and exciting and you wouldn’t know exactly why. But you might speculate. You might think, hey, 2 of us got this awesome treant pet. We were killing trees all game. Just maybe…Now imagine an “explorer’s chest” similar to your M+ cache. In it will be the combined dynamic loot table of whatever outdoor content you did that week. Titan facility dungeon? Maybe some sort of transmog Titan weapons. Fished a lot? Maybe a fishing mount or item. Pet battles in Drustvar? A cool little witch pet that no one could ever find... No one would know EXACTLY what caused it, but people would start speculating. They would compare notes. They would focus on content they hadn’t considered. That blue pirate parrot mount MUST be from completing world quests in Freehold, right? RIGHT?This is how Blizzard reins back in the complete loss of mystery and intrigue and adventure for the average player without resorting to opaque riddles and secrets. This is how Blizzard revitalizes the adventure, extending content and community involvement out for weeks and months and even years to discover things.Will they? Who knows. I doubt they even realize what they’ve created. I suspect some might ‘know’ but not understand the implications. I suspect even more are confused at why people are complaining islands give ‘nothing’. It’s right there! Don’t they KNOW? They don’t. They’ve been programmed to look at websites and journals.I hope I’m wrong, I hope Blizz takes this loot system and has their eureka moment.