If there's one thing this World of Warcraft player has learnt from this new, post-Shadowlands Blizzard, it is this: While they are a little (okay, a lot) messier, they do tend to move quickly. So quickly in fact that it's become a bit of a cycle for WoW to have updates where something's borked—rewards systems, item costs, and so on—only for Blizzard to turn the dial down.
Basically, if something's bothering you—like, say, the recent transmog updates—it's not going to stay that way for long. In case you're unfamiliar, WoW's recently rehashed its transmog (a glamour/outfit system) to work on specific outfits you buy slots for with in-game gold.
This has the upshot of not requiring you to visit a transmog specialist every time you get a new piece of gear, while reducing flexibility—due, in part, to the gold cost. Given you'll be saving money on not doing repeat visits to your favourite ethereal, Blizzard reasoned that this new way of doing things ought to be more expensive.
This was not popular, because for a lot of players, myself included, futzing around with an outfit on the regular was part of the fun. I'm indecisive. I'm not a "set and forget" kinda guy.
Well, that's changed less than a week since the launch of the new system, per a Blizzard post to the official forums by community manager Linxy: "We’re going to lower the cost of outfit creation prices by 50% to bring them more in line with what the prices were prior to the Transmog update. This price reduction is currently under development and should be available within the next day.
"Additionally, we’re going to try to grant the one free Transmog to all player-characters as soon as we can, before 12.0.1, hopefully via a hotfix."
Linxy also clarified how the Trial of Style event—a minigame where players have a limited time to dress up towards a theme, then vote to determine who is the most fashionable of them all—will work, given there are now limited slots for outfits:
"When Trial of Style is available, players receive a special Transmog outfit slot that can be worn both inside and outside the competition. All Transmog updates made to this slot are free. While in the competition, this is the outfit players are judged on. Once the Trial of Style event ends, the outfit slot is removed."
Honestly, it's nice to see Blizzard moving so quickly—and while I have other bugbears with the system I'll be sharing later this week, the goldsink is the major one. And sure, it might've been nice for this to've all been settled during alpha, given people were complaining there, too. But hey—the next best time to plant a tree is to plant a tree less than one week after you probably should've been tree-planting. That's how the saying goes, right?
