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 the other direction.
Hazzikostas says there's plenty for Blizzard to learn, though, in terms of getting the balance right: "Even if they really enjoyed the 20th-anniversary content, there was this sense [from the players] 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.' That's the part we hadn't grasped until we heard the feedback loud and clear when live."
As for why there appears to be a pattern of starting off conservatively, and buffing later, Hazzikostas puts it simply: "We can always buff the rewards. 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."
Yeah, fair enough—it might be a cynical view on the WoW community, but it's completely accurate that, while MMO players might grumble a bit if an event needs a patch job, nerfing a reward after the fact creates even more of a hubbub. As we saw with the whole Gulp Frog thing (though that was arguably an exploit) in Mists of Pandaria: Remix.
Mind, the WoW community is understandably not too pleased with events being released in an unfun state—no player wants to have to wait a week for a patch to be 'fixed'. Hazzikostas notes that the team's trying to do better, and respond quickly: "Hopefully, the players understand we'll be fast and responsive if it feels like we've missed the mark."
