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, 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. Alas, that appears to have been walked 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—are still currently up in the air, but locking the game’s transmogs in such a fashion is, at present, almost certainly intentional.
As for why that’s a problem, 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 feels 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! It’s a ‘two steps forward, one step back’ kind of decision.
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!” As you can see below. I can’t help but wonder if the decision is final, or if the live server’s just lagging behind some of the beta changes. It’d be strange if so, considering most of the secondary features of The War Within have arrived courtesy of the pre-patches.
As for the customer service response, it’s entirely possible that the information such staff have access to—namely, what is and isn’t intended on the live server—simply doesn’t include beta features that are yet to make it into the main game.
If this live version of the transmog system is correct, however, it’s a shame—because otherwise warbands are an absolute win for the game—both in terms of nonsense meme peddling and gameplay improvements. For the sake of drip collectors everywhere, I can only hope that Blizzard walks this back in the patches to come.
