Everyone is sleeping rough in World Of Warcraft, and there’s a very good reason for it

If you've logged onto World of Warcraft's Season of Discovery servers in the past few days, you may have seen a rising number of players sleeping rough in capital city streets, or around the entrances to various dungeons. Indeed it seems that sleeping bags are taking the community by storm right now, as World of Warcraft faces its first ever homelessness problem.

But what's the deal? Are these now jobless GDKPers, or people who have deathrolled maybe a little too much? No it turns out that the sleeping bag epidemic is a byproduct of a sickness that has been plaguing WoW players for years. The uncontrolable desire to squeeze as much XP out of their playtime as possible.

The trick to earning this extra XP comes from the sleeping bag itself! A new addition as part of phase 2 of Season of Discovery, this unique item allows a player who completes a short questchain to place down their very own sleeping bag that they and their party can crash in. Sleeping in it for a minute provides a 1% XP buff, which can stack up to three times. That means if you and four of your homies cuddle up for three minutes, you can bag a whopping 3% XP bonus. That may not sound like a lot, but it lasts for two hours. So if you're planning on grinding out dungeons, it really does add up.

This has however resulted in an aforementioned surplus of players sleeping rough outside for all to see. Community hubs like Reddit have seen a number of posts about the phenomenon, with some jokingly pointing to in-game inflation as a root cause of this issue. Things have, of course, gotten more expensive than you may expect. This is especially true thanks to the long tail of the phase 1 release of Season of Discovery, in which players had little to do but farm gold and make new characters. Now that GDKPs are gone, what to spend this gold on (aside from a shiny new mount perhaps) is quite the mystery.

Ultimately, you can't really blame these players for doing anything they can for a tiny boost in XP. Much like simple tricks like logging out in inns or making sure to stack world buffs whenever possible, tactically sleeping rough's a practice that makes the process of levelling through the Classic WoW - something that certainly can drag at times - a tad faster. The faster they can get inside the new raid and find their new class runes, the better.

Have you been camping out in a sleeping bag recently? Was anyone else with you? Let us know below, as long as it's WoW related.