7MMO
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For the longest time in World of Warcraft, when you finished a quest at max level, the experience you would earn would get converted to gold. But in WoW Forever, Blizzard killed off that conversion, and has now added a fix.
The experience-to-gold conversion for quests completed at high level has been a part of WoW for nearly 20 years, to the point where a lot of players rely on it to build up some cash when they hit max level, especially in the Classic versions of the game. But, when WoW Forever launched last week, that conversion was missing, and now that players are starting to hit level 60, they're starting to feel that loss of gold.
Thankfully, Blizzard community manager Kaivax has posted on the WoW forum to say a hotfix will go live "in the next 24 hours or so" to help high level players earn a little bit of gold. Rather than converting experience to gold, Blizzard will buff the gold rewarded for high level quests, regardless of what level you are.
According to Kaivax: "we’re preparing a hotfix that will add additional gold rewards to most quests with a quest level of level 48 or higher, including adding gold to quests above level 48 that never previously rewarded gold at all. The idea here is that you should feel good about doing quests at the appropriate level to progress your character, and you should feel adequately rewarded with gold for doing so."
But why change that experience-gold conversion in the first place? Well, according to Kaivax, that conversion "created an incentive for players to hold a full quest log worth of completed quests to hand in after hitting level 60 for maximum gold returns. Under those conditions, the optimal way for players to level to 60 was to simply grind creatures for XP and not hand in quests at all, which is not a design we want to retain in WoW: Forever."
Kaivax's post was in a thread where players were complaining about not being able to earn gold from quests. The original post was from Faze, who said four days ago that "the change to not give additional gold in exchange for EXP at 60 needs to be reverted. Quests are basically useless at 60 if they don’t have a reward. This was one of the easy ways to make gold to afford spells and mounts. This is a horrible design and change. It feels good to complete quests and now this just feels BAD at 60. Change this back ASAP."
Before Kaivax posted, nearly 100 replies deep, there were a ton of players who were essentially saying that they'd stop playing the game over this. Player Glôwstick said: "this is a deal breaker for me, wont be playing any more until this is reverted," while Rackjaw commented: "WoW Forever devs seem to be obsessed with 'fixing' things that aren’t broken."
However, players seem to have changed their tune immediately after Kaivax's response. Danni said: "Nice change. Quests giving consistent gold whether you do them at 59 or 60 makes sense, and doesn’t punish people for handing them in 'too soon.'"
There are some players that are skeptical about the change. For instance, Jalesanda posted: "I will withhold putting the pitch forks away for now until we see how much gold this is, and how it compares. But it’s put down, for now."
This change really does highlight the philosophy that the WoW Forever team is taking with the new game mode, though. While there are players who probably want a 1:1 copy of Classic, Forever will make changes as long as they stay within the 'spirit' of the game. That's why, for instance, the devs held the line on group tagging, but had no problem adding some quests like the beloved 'Kyle's Gone Missing' or changing how dungeon experience is earned.
And as more players start to reach max level, the initial design of WoW Forever is going to be pushed to its limits, and we'll just have to see the extent of changes that Blizzard is going to be willing to make. Right now, WoW Forever is kind of like a blank canvass, and while I've been given some hints of where the game might go in the future, I can't wait to see the unique path Forever takes. And this experience to gold conversion change is really just the first of many changes I'm sure we're going to see.
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