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Just a couple days after Blizzard changed the way gold was earned in max-level quests WoW Forever, the company has implemented a weekly quest with loot-box-style gold reward. And players don't love it.
Max level players have found a quest in Booty Bay called 'In Demand - Ancient Elven Curiosities,' which is offered each week, according to Wowhead. There is potential that the quest will rotate to different high level dungeons, but so far, for the two weeks Forever has been out, it's pointed players at Dire Maul, where they have to collect three items. The quest rewards a little bag that can drop one of four items at random that are worth either 10g, 20g, 40g, or 100g.
But while this is a way to get gold in a game where money is scarce, it is rubbing a lot of players in the community the wrong way. For a lot of people, it reminds them of retail WoW, which is built on top of piles and piles of weekly quests to pump additional gold into the economy.
WoW YouTuber Bellular posted the Wowhead link on X / Twitter, captioned simply by "uh what," and followed that up with some criticisms of the new weekly quest. He said: "Retail slop, kill! The way to generate gold is crafting, gathering, selling items. Want to do UBI? Make it sneaky via those means. Don’t show the hand of the designer so clearly." Bellular then tagged Blizzard associate production director Clayton Stone and added: "(pardon the spicy language - some genuine feedback) Let the player earn organically through game systems, not by making content a hoop to jump through."
But it's not just Bellular who's upset at the weekly quest. It's a similar sentiment over on Reddit, where ThatOldGuy7863 simply said: "dear god not weeklys." Meanwhile, drtakhs added: "F**k weeklies and dailies. I’ve been pretty happy with all the decision so far and the thought process behind them was reasonable. Now, what is this? Who wants this? No dailies, no weeklies and no FOMO bulls**t are among the most important things that make classic feel… well like classic…"
However, there may be an explanation for Blizzard's move here. EvadableMoxie suggested a repeatable quest for 100 gold "is aggressively anti-bot."
"It reduces the biggest benefit that bots have, the ability to run 24/7 by frontloading gold rewards," the continued. "This of course does not make bots useless but it reduces their advantage while letting players focus on other things than grinding out gold."
Blizzard has long struggled with bots messing with the economy in every version of World of Warcraft. In the beta, the company had to come down hard on people who were buying and selling gold, which is a direct consequence of botting. Simply put, it's not hard to program a bot to crawl zones for you and gather mining, herbalism or other materials to sell en masse on the auction house. A weekly quest that rewards gold could help players that don't have the time to compete with bots dumping industrial amounts of crafting materials keep up.
But players aren't mad that Blizzard is adding a way to earn gold. Rather, it's the addition of a weekly quest, that encourages players to log on every single week for fear of missing out on an injection of gold. This sort of repeatable quest also wasn't in the original game, with most types of daily and weekly quests not being added until The Burning Crusade.
This is just the latest change as Blizzard tries to nail down the identity of WoW Forever. While there are some parts of the original game that the company has stood firm on, like group 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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