02 August, 2024
World of Warcraft: The War Within looks very promising—but its pre-patch event hasn't exactly come roaring out the gate.
To summarise the issues: rewards were slim, with precious little to do in between big boss events that were over very quickly—which wasn't great, since they only popped once every 90 minutes, with an arbitrarily-lowered timer as the pre-patch event proceeded apace.
After some community outcry, Blizzard has, it seems, fixed basically every problem the players had in short order, as per an announcement on the game's forums via community manager Kaivax: "We’ve been working to address two main concerns: the wait time for the event, and the rate at which you can earn rewards."
The changes, which are now live, are as follows:
That last point is an interesting one. In case you're out of the loop, WoW's new Warbands system makes several different currencies account-wide, transferred between your Warband characters via the new system. This has some strong implications for weekly quests, which would, in theory, vastly reward players who'd levelled up alts over players who stick to a main.
While WoW is becoming a vastly more alt-friendly game with The War Within, Blizzard has given itself a tricky design problem: there's a thin line between alt friendly and alt mandatory. I've actually seen the inverse of this play out in Final Fantasy 14, a game that's incredibly main friendly in that you can level every class on one character—and yet, that makes it both pointless and tedious to level an alt.
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