After having to buff event rewards 4 times in a year, WoW director Ion Hazzikostas admits there's 'a pattern' and that 'we may tend to err on the conservative side'
World of Warcraft: The War Within has been a blast to play, but it's not been without its issues—Delve tuning has been wonky, and while most of the game's events in recent memory have been a good time, it's taken a minute for them to get there.
The same story has played out four times in a single year: Plunderstorm, MoP Remix, the pre-patch event and the 20th anniversary celebration all saw their rewards buffed after release. In an interview with GamesRadar, game director Ion Hazzikostas admits it might «seem like a pattern».
As is always the case with these things, however, the difficulty comes with figuring out just how fast players are going to chew through any particular piece of content: «When we look at something like the 20th anniversary, there's quite a lot to do there … we want to ensure people aren't running out of reasons to do content that they would otherwise want to do too soon.»
MMOs hinge upon the Skinner box treatment of giving you little treats for pushing the button and getting a thing, except in this case, the «button» is the videogame. Essentially, if you give players all your event's possible rewards too quickly, they'll blow right on through it—and won't come back to the thing your devs worked hard on once they've grabbed all their gubbins. Dish them out too slowly, though, and they'll feel like a rat in a cage, get bored and frustrated, and stop playing for that reason instead.
I'm finding it hard to come down on WoW for struggling with this, because Final Fantasy 14—another MMO I also play—had the exact opposite problem during Endwalker. I called it a «self-imposed content drought» back then, when referring to that game's Variant Dungeons. The rewards were neat, the dungeons were cool, but you never had any reason to come back to them and the whole thing was over a bit quickly. A little more grind would've gone a long way. There are other problems with their design, for sure, but at the core of it, quickly-earned rewards can go too far in
Read more on pcgamer.com
