Just days after Blizzard changed the way gold was earned in WoW Forever max-level quests, the company implemented a weekly quest with a loot box-style gold reward. And the players I don’t like it.
Max-level players have found a quest in Booty Bay called “In Demand – Ancient Elven Curiosities,” which is offered weekly, according to Wowhead. It’s possible that the quest will rotate to different high-level dungeons, but so far, in the two weeks since Forever has been released, players have been directed to Dire Maul, where they must collect three items. The quest rewards a small bag that can randomly contain one of four items worth 10g, 20g, 40g, or 100g.
But even though it’s a way to get gold in a game where money is tight, it rubs many players in the community the wrong way. For many people, this reminds them of retail WoW, which is built on lots and lots of weekly quests to pump extra gold into the economy.
WoW YouTuber Bellular posted the Wowhead link on X/Twitter, captioned simply as “uh what”, and followed up with some reviews of the new weekly quest. He said: “Details, kill!” The way to generate gold is to craft, collect, sell items. Do you want to do UBI? Make him sneaky by these means. Don’t show the designer’s hand so clearly. » Bellular then tagged Clayton Stone, Associate Production Director at Blizzard, and added: “(forgive the spicy language – some genuine comments) Let the player win organically through game systems, not by making content a hurdle to clear.”
But Bellular isn’t the only one upset about the weekly quest. It’s a similar sentiment on Reddit, where ThatOldGuy7863 simply said, “God, not the weeklies.” Meanwhile, drtakhs added: “F**k weeklies and dailies. I’ve been pretty happy with all the decisions made so far and the thought process behind them was reasonable. Now what is it? Who wants that? No dailies, no weeklies and no FOMO**t bullshit are some of the most important things that make classic feel…well like classic…”
However, there may be an explanation for Blizzard’s decision here. EvadableMoxie suggested that a repeatable quest for 100 gold “is aggressively anti-bot.”
“This reduces the biggest advantage of bots, which is the ability to operate 24/7 preloading gold rewards,” he continues. “Of course, this doesn’t make robots useless, but it does reduce their advantage while allowing players to focus on something other than collecting gold.”
Blizzard has long struggled with robots disrupting the economy in every version of World of Warcraft. In the beta, the company had to come down hard on people buying and selling gold, which is a direct result of botting. Simply put, it’s not difficult to program a robot to explore areas for you and gather mining, herbal, or other materials to sell in bulk on the auction house. A weekly quest rewarding gold could help players who don’t have time to compete with robots dumping industrial quantities of crafting materials keep up.
But players aren’t upset that Blizzard is adding a way to earn gold. Rather, it’s the addition of a weekly quest, which encourages players to log in every week lest they miss out on an injection of gold. This repeatable quest type was also not featured in the original game, with most daily and weekly quest types not being added until The Burning Crusade.
This is just the latest change as Blizzard attempts to define the identity of WoW Forever. While there are some parts of the original game that the company has stood firm on, like party tagging, there is an ever-growing list of gameplay systems that Blizzard is actively tweaking in Forever, like Dungeon Experience and now, gold rewards.
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