July 7, 2020 July 9, 2020

Miscellaneous Updates Summer 2020

The Summer 2020 test realm brought some interesting updates to the Spiral. Some are exciting, others a little controversial, but we’re going to focus on something else in this article. We’ll check out the miscellaneous updates that made it into the test realm. These are nice quality of life updates that don’t have a direct impact on gameplay.

The Daily Spiral

The Daily Spiral is a sort of daily news briefing customized for your wizard, found when you first open the Crown Shop. It will update you with what’s currently going on around the Spiral, as well as:

your current mainline quest;
your current daily assignment and PvP assignment;
the Latest Wizard101 game news;
the status of events, like Deckathalons or Beastmoon Hunts;
your crown total;
recommended crown shop items.

Personally, I see this feature as a good thing with lots of potential to become even better. Lack of personalization is the first thing that comes into my mind. With some tweaks, this could become a powerful tool to make you feel like it’s suited to you and only you.

Recommended Items

Generally speaking, this is a nice shortcut to buy desirable items. The fewer the clicks and search time, the better. However, the things that appear here aren’t necessarily things WE as players want. This part of the screen would ideally have two tabs: Recommended and Favorite.

The first tab would be exactly what’s in the Recommended tab now. In the second one we could manually pick the items we like. Whether it’s a certain pack we like, energy elixir, or henchman to aid us in battle. Each of us has different desires, and the best way to satisfy everyone is to give the freedom of choice to each player. Furthermore, this would vastly reduce the time required to find items we purchase frequently.

Other Activities

This is another part that could receive similar treatment as the “Recommended for Your Wizard” part. Right now, we have a list of active side activities that basically give you a reward for completing them. But not everyone enjoys them. There are a bunch of passive side activities which don’t necessarily give us immediate rewards. Things like pet training, fishing, monstrology, decorating are just some examples of what people like and could put on their to-do list. Instead of being essentially a list of daily quests, this part of the Daily Spiral could become a checklist of activities we want to do every day. It serves as a nice reminder to say, “Tend to your plants!” or “Train your pets!”

I can see this change being implemented in two ways. The first one is letting us pick 4 pre-determined things that we want to see on the screen. The second one is more complicated. It would observe player behavior and activities and display different, personalized lists to different wizards. After all, why would someone who doesn’t do PvP want to see “Win 1 ranked PvP match” every day?

Magic Mirror

The second thing to discuss is the Magic Mirror and new textures for our wizards. Most of us were probably more than just a little shocked when we saw our old wizards with new looks for the first time. But that’s something we’ll eventually get used to. And even if we don’t like how we look, there’s the Magic Mirror to fix all of our issues. We can now spend gold to alter our wizards’ appearance to make them more pleasing to the eye.

Improving the Magic Mirror

The Magic Mirror has potential for many improvements as long as there aren’t any technical limitations. First, Kingsisle can always add more colors or different types of eyes, mouths, etc. Apart from that, there are also some other categories which could be added to a Magic Mirror.

A name change – something that players have been requesting for a long time.
Face shape – many people have differently shaped faces. Why couldn’t our wizards have a choice as well?
Emotions – since blinking is possible now, Kingsisle could try and squeeze some more emotions into a Magic Mirror. Our wizard could be smile, be shocked, worry, etc…

Other Miscellaneous Updates

There have also been some other miscellaneous updates in the Summer 2020 update test realm. There’s not much worth mentioning from these changes, but make sure you check them in the Wizard101’s change log or read them from the picture below.