History Videogame / Wizard101

*** In a recent update, the developers have removed PvP entirely for low levels. Instead, they are now only allowing people in certain level ranges to PvP. This is likely due to people exploiting the system previously.

* DamageSpongeBoss: Ice and Life bosses, due to their ability to cast heals and armors. [[LethalJokeCharacter This goes for PvP, too.]] Despite both schools losing out on damage, their defenses are so beefy, that they can tilt a battle wildly. While ShootTheMedicFirst is an option for dealing with Life wizards, this tactic tends to fall short for Ice, who can take so long to finally succumb that [[PyrrhicVictory you'll leave feeling like you're the one who lost.]]

After the developers revamped the friends list, they made a "feature" that doesn't allow people to view the stats of others in pvp matches. They moved the other buttons up, so when players mean to teleport to another friend, that accidentally send a group request instead

** Reshuffle was modified after people discovered that using Reshuffle would Reshuffle itself back into your deck, so you'd essentially have infinite copies of it. Since then, they introduced a symbol to the cards that says "x1", so it will not Reshuffle itself back into your deck. Although this wasn't useful in boss fights, as you'd run out of mana eventually (and many boss fights can be completed in a small handful of turns anyway), it was used in PvP where the usage of spells did not need mana, so a player would be able to use unlimited spells as long as they carried reshuffles.
** Really, PvP as a whole was prone to this. One of the losing conditions is if you ran out of cards completely, you would just straight up lose. So if a player was very close to losing because they only had a small amount of cards left, they could just spam pass indefinitely. And if it happened on both sides, it then just becomes a game of endlessly passing until 1 person just gives up, resulting in matches that may have lasted for days. To discourage this, timers have been implemented to prevent infinite matches. There is now a chess-esque timer that counts down on the person's turn (PvP now uses a modified turn based system so there's no longer a first turn advantage) and if it hits 0, they lose.

** When boosting (either losing on purpose or using another account to lose) was popular by playing at level brackets that not many people played at (like level 5) and/or at hours that not many people played (like at 5 in the morning), people were able to get high ranks on their account for their wizard without actually putting the work in. To counter this (although it wasn't perfect), the developers tracked down the more popular level ranges that people did PvP in (like levels 100-109) and made it so people were only allowed if they were in those level brackets. Additionally, to assist in countering boosting, you cannot match with the same person more than once in a certain time period (likely to discourage people from playing late at night and matching with their friend repeatedly who would intentionally throw). People still can accomplish this by getting others to help them do so, but you are very likely either risking a ban, or getting your rank reset.
** One of the more powerful strategies for PvP before it was banned was making pre enchanted treasure cards to use in PvP matches. This resulted in a lot of people buying gargantuan treasure cards (colossal treasure cards do exist, but they are much more difficult to come across) and applying them to a bunch of spells. Because gargantuans are +250 damage, there was nothing to stop people from attaching them to a bunch of wild bolts and spamming them every single turn to do up to 1250 base damage if they were lucky (260 base damage at worst) before any other damage modifiers like auras were in place. This effectively gave people in PvP a strong advantage against those who didn't do so as not only would they have more attacks, they would be powered up. Since then, almost all enchants (treasure card or not) became PvP banned.

** ApocalypseHow/Class2: The fate of ancient Dragonspyre and Celestia due to the Fire and Storm Titans, and the potential fate of Grizzleheim (and many more worlds) if the Ice Titan were ever to wake.
** ApocalypseHow/Class6/ApocalypseHow/ClassX: [[spoiler:The ultimate fate of Azteca. For gameplay reasons, all the player sees is a Class 1, with the world operating as normal under a darkened sky and constant rain of comet shards.]]

** A tiny Frankie Forearms (a character from another Kings Isle Entertainment game, ''Rise and Destroy'') can be seen wandering the Arcanum, as well as being available as a pet for a limited time.

''[[https://www.wizard101.com/ Wizard101]]'' is a MassivelyMultiplayerOnlineRolePlayingGame developed and published by Kings Isle Entertainment that is targeted towards children and preteens. The player is a student of the [[WizardingSchool Ravenwood School of Magical Arts]] in the world of Wizard City, where they enlist as a student of one of the seven PersonalityPowers-based schools of magic, then set off to complete quests and learn new spells. The combat system has very simple roots, similar to action-based RPG games, and relies on cards that correlate to spells and magic points that you collect each turn to use the cards with. The cards work in a TacticalRockPaperScissors power arrangement based on the game's primary magic schools: [[PlayingWithFire Fire]], [[AnIcePerson Ice]], [[ShockAndAwe Storm]], [[GreenThumb Life]], [[LifeDrain Death]], [[TheBeastmaster Myth]], and [[JackOfAllStats Balance]].

** ApocalypseHow/Class3a: Caused on both Dragonspyre and Celestia [[AfterTheEnd long ago]] due to Titans. Most of the worlds of the spiral risk this if a Titan were to be allowed free reign.
** ApocalypseHow/Class6/ApocalypseHow/ClassX: [[spoiler:The ultimate fate of Azteca. For gameplay reasons, however, all the player sees is shards of Xibalba raining from the sky, the world operating as normal.]]

** With boss cheats being introduced in Celestia, it didn't take long for people to find ways around the cheats. An early example in Celestia is that some bosses may use special versions of tower shields that reduce damage taken by 90% and they will interrupt the battle to put another one in place if you try using a weak attack to remove it. However, using spells that don't steal damage like pierce or steal ward to simply take it will work on most bosses. At high levels, this isn't really as necessary because players can get massive amounts of pierce to circumvent shields entirely. Later bosses are designed to react to people attempting to steal their shields, like [[spoiler:Tiddalik in Wallaru will announce "That's not funny"]] and spawn another tower shield upon doing so. The intended way to win is by [[spoiler:fizzling]] which will cause him to give up all of his buffs. However, you can still get a myth wizard to use a spell that hits multiple times like Minotaur or Improbable Gaze, which will destroy the shield with the weaker attack and allow you to smack him with the full attack. Another option for myth wizards is with the lore spell Splashsquash, which has a path of stealing the shield and THEN doing damage.** Another way around boss cheats is to just dispel them if possible. A very recent example of this is with the Night Mire side dungeon where after making the boss take half his health in damage (attempting to kill him in 1 hit from full health will result in him coming back to life), he reacts by using an AoE stun. It was quickly discovered that a fire dispel can be used on him to make the stun fizzle. Another less recent example is in the Empyrea expansion. The penultimate boss is intended to be beaten by hitting him 3 times for at least a certain amount of damage and then he self destructs, and to prevent people from killing him in 1 hit, he uses a special global spell that limits the damage well below his maximum health. It also isn't as simple as just using another global spell as he just changes it back. You can, however, use a balance dispel and then change the global to something else. He will try to change it back, but the dispel will force him to fizzle, allowing the player to kill him in a single powered up hit. Especially helpful if the global is one that would benefit the player, like a fire global that increases fire damage for an attacking fire wizard.** Before the Wallaru expansion was released, one of the biggest loopholes was known as stagger joining. With the release of a quality of life update that permitted people to join a turn during the card selection phase, it was discovered that by doing this on purpose, it was possible to disrupt boss cheats that ran on a timer or some kind of script. This was especially infamous on bosses like Malistaire in Darkmoor because you could disable his second phase (unfortunately, doing so would result in drops getting halved) and farm him faster. Another example was with the King Detritus side boss which normally summons minions. By doing the same trick, he doesn't summon minions. Normally when he summons, he will remove newly placed feints on him, so the main strategy was to use feints on him on the first turn and blade an attacker to kill him and the minions on the second turn (which is the most common way of farming him). Stagger joining was popular here so the minions wouldn't be annoying to work with. Since then, this has been fixed by having the scripts not screw up.** Even some of the bosses with more unique cheats were prone to people finding loopholes. For example, there's a boss named [[spoiler:Mr. Cane who takes hostages. If you try to kill him before or the same round you defeat the hostages, everyone on the enemy team gets a full heal. Additionally, the hostages get a "Restraint" aura, which is really just a glorified absorb shield. You are supposed to hit hard enough to get past the aura (about 6000 damage), which triggers your wizard to cast a spell that makes them leave. Of course, because these are absorbs, and because drain spells ignore absorbs, that's the recommended way to go about the fight.]]** With the release of level 110, there were a new set of enchants known as aegis and indemnity. These are designed to protect a buff (positive or negative respectively) from a removal attempt, like a blade from being removed by something like enfeeble. However, the main use they see is against bosses that normally remove certain buffs like blades to allow them to be used in order to bypass cheats. It can be hard to say whether this was the intention or just coincidental. A small set of bosses can still bypass the protection anyway, like using their removal spells twice.

** As is "Taylor Swift" which, given the game's target demographic, in a strange twist is not nearly as common as the above example.