In recent expansions, Blizzard has given World of Warcraft players a meta-goal to complete after a round of normal play. This is essentially an achievement that requires a large number of other achievements, a badge that indicates that you have done it all, and comes with a prize.

In the case of Dragonflight, this achievement is called A World Awoken, and according to Data for Azeroth, only 0.241% have achieved it as of this writing. That's a quarter of the player base; WoW enthusiast Heather Newman documented her own efforts to achieve this achievement for PCG last week, concluding that "WoW sucked."

But that is not how it unfolds today. This achievement is obviously a reward in itself, but there are actual rewards as well. Interestingly, the story is all about Tyvan's size: one would expect Tyvan to be an extraordinary hunter because he is bigger than any other bakar, but he turns out to be a very gentle fluffy thing, a lassie-like being who saves a centaur from being trapped under rubble

It turns out to be a very good story.

Aside from that, the point is that Tyvan is not just a nice boy, he is a giant nice boy. Patch 10.2.6 added the ability to acquire Tyvan as a mount for players who achieve the meta-achievement, but the main reason for players' delight was that Tyvan's size remained the same and was much larger than other mounts.

And after surprising and delighting players by putting them on giant dogs, Blizzard decided to piss everyone off. In a hotfix applied yesterday, Tyvan's size has been drastically reduced, and he is no longer the mighty mongrel dog he once was.

Ready to go? Too is outraged on the official forums, saying, "Whoever at Blizzard thought it was a good idea to make this giant dog smaller needs to be fired."

"They obviously don't understand the appeal of the mounts, the fun involved, or the amount of effort it takes to get them in the first place.

"Everybody loves this very nice big boy. Nobody wants to ride him, but they don't ask for him to be smaller. No one. Cancel this stupid change."

Tell us what you really think. 'You should bring back the Taiban, which is twice the size it used to be.' 'Shrink my goat,' says Adnanosh123 with a crying emoji." BeHereNow91 writes, "Blizzard is totally out of line to change the size when players have probably already played for 100 hours or so.

"I'm the 300th person to say this, but I wanted Tyvan. He's the nicest kid, not the best kid."

"Not cool," Zarelin says." Blizzard literally stole half my dog. I want it back."

The above are just a few of the posts from the official WoW forums, which are now filled with Tyvan posts in various areas of the game, with players outraged over Blizzard's decision. Players have also posted size comparisons, with the following image showing the in-game Tyvan side-by-side with the nerfed mount Tyvan.

Players repeatedly point out that size is sort of the crux of Tyvan's position in Azeroth. 'I genuinely don't understand Blizzard's logic. They did a lot of favors and players' interest by using Taivan as a meta-mount in Dragonflight. Taivan deserves better.

See, it's not just that everyone wants a giant dog. I was going to count up the number of positive posts and the number of negative comments about this change, but honestly, it's the former two, and everyone else hates it." Many players have posted the slogan "Make Taivan Big Again". Yes, there is even a #JusticeforTaivan hashtag.

The most potent counterargument relates to clipping and saddle size: the Taivan's scale meant that the saddle was interestingly oversized, which led to various visual bugs in the mount. Obviously this is the actual reason Taivan was scaled down, rather than the wild claims that Blizzard staff are always plotting to kill the fun, but such practicalities are nothing compared to the fact that people want bigger bois.

"I don't care one bit about his mounting bugs," says Lanstad." Honey, take the dog out of the shrink."

Will Blizzard restore Taivan to his former glory?

The problem here is that it takes an enormous amount of work to get a Taivan, which is not surprising given the size of WoW, but only 0.241% of players actually have this mount. According to Heather Newman, "There was still a part of this meta-achievement that made me want to set my PC on fire. Certain achievements have an element of randomness to their success that is greater than their basic difficulty, making them frustrating to repeat in pursuit of a greater goal. Yet, as Newman writes, "People desperately want a mount, so they go for it anyway."

This is a very typical case of Blizzard failing to communicate with its player base, whatever its intentions. The developers must have known this would be an unpopular decision, but they just dropped it from on high, knowing full well that the players were being reckless in order to get their reward. x, y, z forced Tyvan to do this, but here's making it up to them There is no such thing as a "sorry" to the player.

And, incidentally, it also shows the difference between player and developer tolerance for glitches. Players usually moan their heads off about glitches, but show a surprising degree of tolerance when it comes to such oddities as an oversized saddle tearing through a good bore. Indeed, it would have been better if all of the Taiban prototypes had been perfect. But players would rather ignore it for the simple reason that size matters, even in Azeroth.