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It is March 2024. Plunderstorm releases, and Blizzard eases up on its grind shortly after player complaints. It is May 2024. Blizzard releases Mists of Pandaria: Remix, and adjusts its Bronze rewards after players complain about an unnecessary grind. It is August 2024. World of Warcraft players aren't pleased with the pre-patch event for The War Within, and less than a week later, Blizzard updates the event to have less stingy rewards.
It is October 2024. I am writing about how Blizzard has done this four times in a year, once more (with feeling) during the anniversary event. It is November 2024. Director Ion Hazzikostas outright says, "while playing a bit of that guessing game of trying to pick the right values, we may tend to err on the conservative side" because "we can always buff the rewards. We're never going to nerf the rewards, really, right?"
World of Warcraft: Midnight's pre-patch event has been released, and players have been complaining that it's a little stingy—the event itself is neat, mind. You run around the Twilight Highlands and do World Quests, kill rares, and knock over weeklies for insignias, which you can spend either on catch-up gear or some cool transmogs, housing items, yadda yadda.
The issue is twofold—firstly, you need these insignias for both the catch-up gear and the cool cosmetics stuff, although to be fair to Blizzard, there are cosmetic-only versions of the gear you can snap up for a fraction of the price, so it's learnt its lesson from MoP: Remix.
The second issue is that this gear was expensive, requiring 40 insignias. The weekly quest gives you 40, but it's only once per Warband per week—ie,, you're only getting one bit of kit across your entire roster. Otherwise, you had to kill rares and do world quests. Initially, the rares themselves dropped one insignia per kill.
You could also get gear drops from them directly, but that's throwing yourself upon the mercy of RNG, and you could only get one per day per character because… uh. Er. Don't think about it.
- A hotfix where equipment drop chances were tripled, killing rares gives you 2-3 insignias, and a tweak so that the rares will only drop level-up gear you can wear.
- Another hotfix slashed the insignia cost of the new gear in half, from 40 to 20.
- Plus, "Equipment drops are no longer restricted to only one per day, per character, from each individual rare."
- Oh, and also, rares spawn every five minutes, not 10.
And, listen—I've got plenty of sympathy for Blizzard when it pulls out a big stonking event that's meant to last it months. Contrary to the popular line of grumbling, I don't resent it any for messing up MoP: Remix or the Anniversary Event a little—these were events meant to keep the game chugging along for many weeks, and balancing anything when you're handing it over to a ravenous, grind-hungry, gulp-frog endangering playerbase is a nightmare so harsh it'd make the Sha blush.
Blizzard is also very fast to fix something when it's clearly not working out. I legitimately have not had time to log in and play the event, yet (I have D&D on Wednesdays) and it's already been hotfixed.
But I can't fathom why Blizzard's worried about people chewing through pre-patch events too quickly. This thing's gonna be here for a month, and WoW is a game where most players have a ton of alts—why not just be generous, give players their free bags of candy and loot, and let 'em do a victory lap? Who cares? It'll be gone soon.
Anyway, I expect to be writing this exact same article in 2028, because I have clearly drawn the ire of a Greek god or something. Mark your calendar. You will find me there, pushing the very same boulder up the same hill shaped like C'Thun's eye, or getting my liver pecked out by an eagle with Ion Hazzikostas' face.
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