While for many, World of Warcraft is in a good place right now, one aspect of the game that has come in for criticism from players is event rewards, which recently, for the fourth time this year, have had to be made easier to obtain.
Across 2024’s Plunderstorm, Mists of Pandaria: Remix, a pre-The War Within event and now the 20th-anniversary event, WoW has repeatedly had issues with the rate at which players can receive rewards, with hefty grinds often being required. In response, Blizzard has had to make things easier for players for each event, with game director Ion Hazzikostas noting in an interview with GamesRadar+ that it may “start to seem like a pattern”.
For Hazzikostas, it’s important to find a balance between the scale and replayability of content and the ease of obtaining rewards. “When we look at something like the 20th anniversary, there’s quite a lot to do there, and there’s a lot that’s fresh and novel that the players will enjoy over the course of the 11.05 update.” he begins. “At the same time, we want to ensure people aren’t running out of reasons to do content that they would otherwise want to do too soon.”
Hazzikostas concedes that the team had miscalculated with some of these updates. “Even if they really enjoyed the 20th-anniversary content, there was this sense of ‘I already have been spending a bunch of time doing dungeons and delves and levelling these other alts. This feels like too much to ask on top of that,'” before noting, “That’s the part we hadn’t grasped until we heard the feedback loud and clear when live.”
He is keen to dispel the idea that they plan to start out stingy before inevitably buffing the rewards later, instead explaining why the team tends to err on the conservative side of things. “We can always buff the rewards.” he begins. “We’re never going to nerf the rewards, really, right? If things go out too fast and generous, we’ll never pull that back. And so, while playing a bit of that guessing game of trying to pick the right values, we may tend to err on the conservative side.
“Hopefully, the players understand we’ll be fast and responsive if it feels like we’ve missed the mark”, remarks Hazzikostas. “We hear the feedback from the community loud and clear.”
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