This article was posted August 9, then updated August 12 to reflect clarifications from Blizzard. Click here to jump to the new information.
World of Warcraft: The War Within is ramping up to be massive for the MMO's quality of life. Warbands, as a feature, make the game incredibly alt-friendly, letting players trade key currencies, "warbound" items, and giving them account-wide storage accessible from anywhere for a pretty nominal fee.
Transmog—that is, the game's outfit system that lets you swap out the models of your equipped gear—also had a massive boost. Previously, you'd only unlock appearances for items your character could equip themselves. Now almost anything you pick up will drop into your collection.
It seemed these improvements would go one step further with the game's questing system: For those completely alien to MMORPGs, in WoW, when you complete a quest, you get to pick one item out of several as a reward.
In The War Within beta, quests award appearances for every item they could give players, regardless of the reward they chose. Players (myself included) had a miniature heart attack when it seemed that Blizzard would be walking it back in the live version of the game, as per this thread on the customer support forums.
The thread's creator brings up the issue, to which a member of the game's customer support staff writes: "I’m afraid that this"—quests giving you all appearances from their rewards—"is incorrect, and was most likely a bug during the beta. Sorry."
However, they do clarify at the end of the post that: "Customer support is not involved with the development of the game: I can only confirm that what has been reported by the OP is not a bug." In other words, the developer reasoning behind the decision—and any plans to adjust it—wasn't something they were privy to.
As for why this response inflicted heartburn on the playerbase, there's two factors at play. First off, as WoWhead notes, associate game director Morgan Day appeared to confirm the behaviour was intentional in an interview with MrGM. "Appeared" is the key word here, however, because while the question itself explicitly referenced rewarding players with every appearance, Day's answer is actually non-specific:
"Quests will continue to grant the transmog and should be retroactive, and also with warbands coming in the War Within, any items that you have in your bank or your inventory will become collectible like I'm sure you saw. Sadly, if you deleted things, I don't think those will count, sorry—make sure you collect things and keep them in your bank or your Void storage."
The other factor is, well, it just seems counterintuitive. Particularly when stacked up against the way warbands are designed to work. Not only are appearances now easier to collect from non-quest activities, the quests themselves will be absent on your minimap if a member of your warband has completed them at least once.
You can toggle these markers back on by checking "warband completed quests" on your minimap, but it felt weird for the intended design to be: Hey, you only need to complete these quests once—unless you're a transmog collector, in which case it's time to dust off those alts!
Interestingly enough, however, I hopped into The War Within beta and found that, after knocking out a quick quest in Terokkar Forest, I was given every item for the quest "It's Watching You!"
This made me suspicious enough to make a note, in the original version of this article, that it's entirely possible this whole thing was a miscommunication, and that the the information such staff have access to—namely, what is and isn't intended on the live server—probably doesn't include beta features that are yet to make it into the main game. Lo and behold, a second clarification arrived in short order.
Blizzard clarifies
Community manager Kaivax cleaned up confusion regarding the transmog system, posting to the forums late last weekend:
"We’re also still working on the much-discussed update that makes it so that when quests are completed, all appearances from non-cosmetic item rewards will be granted, regardless of whether that particular class could have seen or chosen them. We plan for this to be retroactive, so any quests that you previously completed should grant all qualifying appearances when you first log onto any character.
"Again, our intent is to implement the above with the next patch after the launch of The War Within."
Kaivax also addressed a secondary bugbear. One of the major quality-of-life features the live pre-patch added was, as mentioned, allowing players to collect new appearances regardless of whether they could equip the item in their bag or not. This didn't extend to class-specific gear, such as certain tier sets. Luckily that's also something the devs are working to fix, with plans to allow "non-cosmetic class-restricted gear [to] have its appearance collected by any class".
It's a relief to hear that it was all a big misunderstanding—because warbands are an absolute win for the game—both in terms of nonsense meme peddling and gameplay improvements.
