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:
- The event rotates between three zones on an hour-long timer, but it plays in those zones indefinitely, on loop.
- Rewards from most event activities are boosted. For example, "Remembered" bosses give 1,400 memories (up from 500) while Scattered Memory events give 200 memories (up from 10).
- Across the board, the event now rewards items used to upgrade the gear you're getting—flightstones and crests.
- The weekly quest, which could be repeated across your alts, is now a daily quest, which can't be repeated across your alts. It also rewards twice as many memories for every turn-in.
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.
As for the event itself, I'm glad to see these changes, though part of me feels like I could've told you that a 90-minute lockout on a pre-patch event was a bad idea to begin with, especially with the kind of numbers WoW deals with—turning them into an absolute zerg rush. I'm glad to see things have been straightened out, because the pre-patch is otherwise very good—introducing a few game-changer quality of life upgrades that put the game in great standing going forward.
