Ben Stovall Blog

Tag: warcraft

Warcraft Housing Needs Adjustments

At the beginning of this month, Blizzard released their anticipated Player Housing system into the World of Warcraft as an early-access/pre-order bonus for their upcoming expansion, Midnight. For years, for over a decade, people have been clamoring for this kind of customization and expression to come to Warcraft. Hell, it’s practically the only big MMO on the market that didn’t have something like this. It’s basically industry standard.

On the whole, the system’s quite good. Buying a house could scarcely be easier, having a neighborhood of my guildmates rules, and furnishing my house has been a fun distraction: whether that be collecting decor items or placing them in my house and settling on a layout of rooms.

Unfortunately, there’s some design decisions that really need a second pass. There’s trouble in paradise (or, at least, in Razorwind Shores). (And whatever the name of the Alliance’s neighborhood is.)

Limited-Use Decor

The first issue one is likely to encounter when furnishing their digital home is this: for every door, every chair, every candle one wants to place, you have to have collected that many copies thereof. If I want a dining room with two tables and six chairs each? I’ll need to buy both tables and a dozen individual chairs to make it happen.

The price of these items aren’t all terribly exorbitant, but it doesn’t sit right with me that this plain old stool requires multiple purchases to fill out every edge of a table, with another for a desk, and more for a reading nook or study. And I did say they aren’t all pricey; some of them do have a meaningful cost making multiple copies a large investment of time or money, because with the existence of the WOW Token, every piece of gold has some equivalent real-world value.

Obviously this is meant to function as a gold sink, but I think its execution is all wrong. Better in my view for some items to be limited per use – the Maelstrom Altar I earned from all the activities I did in Legion on my shaman? I don’t take umbrage with that being limited. However, such items should be the exception, not the rule. As for the gold sink, maybe these “common” decor items with unlimited uses could cost a small amount more to unlock, and the majority of the drain on the economy could be spent on expanding the size of the house, our interior decor budget, alternative facades, or interior utility items like teleporters and profession hotspots; things that are permanent, account-wide bonuses. Something of the like, at least.

Especially since some decor items will eventually be bought with real money from the in-game store. We don’t know much about how this will look yet, but I think it’s fair to assume they’ll likely be selling these items in bundles. If we want five of a special shop-only chair, but they’re only sold in multiples of four? Pony up twice or find an alternative, sorry pal.

And this all gets worse when we consider the overall collection limit.

Be Careful What You Collect?

In a mad dash to fill their decor collection with a few copies of every item they’d unlocked, a few users discovered there is an overall cap on the number of decor items we can have at our disposal at any given time. This is entirely at odds with the game’s myriad other collection systems. We’ve never reached a hard cap on the number of mounts, pets, or armor appearances we can collect; each season simply adds a new swathe of things to add to our mountainous hoards.

I certainly understand that there’s a real-world cost to storing data, especially on the scale that an MMO requires, but a limitation on this spiraling out of the requirement that I own several individual copies of all the light fixtures I want to mount on my walls? It just feels … misaligned. As Warcraft has evolved in recent years, it’s become more-and-more collection-focused. In Midnight, we’ll earn the alternate colors of our class tier sets from the lower difficulties whenever we complete a set. I just can’t help but imagine that the variables they’ve included forced them to install this limitation, and they’d only hoped it wouldn’t be discovered so soon.

A New Source of Loot Drama

The night after housing was released, after I’d played with the system a bit, I logged back over to Legion Remix to work on the last few thousand Bronze I needed to complete my goal of buying everything from the event vendors. As each night before, I pinged my guild and got the usual suspects together. Things proceeded much as we all expected, until we ran the Nighthold. There, after beating Spellblade Alluriel, we discovered a new item had been added to her loot table: a Nightborne-themed fountain.

But, only one dropped, and we had to roll to win it from one another.

Naturally, we all have many max level characters. If anyone was desperate to have this fountain, they could get it pretty easily. But … it’s weird it’s a roll-off to begin with, right?

Like, come Midnight, we’re going to be doing raids and dungeons we can’t just solo on our own. Maybe that rug from this boos is really going to tie the whole room together, but for me to have it, everyone else that was involved in whatever activity has to wait until next time? Why aren’t these just awarded to everyone?

Not to mention that presently some of these items aren’t popping up a window prompt to roll for them, but are instead just looted by whoever clicks the boss fastest.

The bottom line is this: Blizzard’s player housing is good. Hell, I don’t play a lot of other MMOs, it might be the best on the market. (I certainly like it more than ESO’s.) But, with the above issues, I don’t think the system will ever be the best that it could be. Falling short of that peak just seems so … unnecessary.

As always, thank you for reading. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to reconfigure my house’s whole layout. Again.

December 12, 2025
Legion Remix and the Mage Tower

Last week, Blizzard announced in a blue post that during the upcoming Legion Remix event, the unique weapon appearances from the Mage Tower will not be made available again. This was a rather contentious announcement – there are many who want the weapon appearances to return, and there are perhaps just as many that want them to remain gone to elevate the weapon appearances; to grant them a level of prestige from their exclusivity.

As someone who’s been playing Warcraft way too long, I’ve got my own opinion.

A Brief on FOMO

I’ve written on my blog before that I find weaponizing FOMO (the Fear of Missing Out) to be a blight upon game design. Usually, they’re used to pressure players into spending money on microtransactions, to incentivize daily engagement, or prolong retention. Frankly, I think if a game isn’t simply fun enough for its players to want to log in every day, or week, or month, then maybe the game has other issues it should address?

Presently, there’s a few events going on in World of Warcraft. Right now, there’s Turbulent Timeways, which grants a unique mount for playing a handful of Timewalking Dungeons for a number of weeks during the event’s duration. There’s Collector’s Bounty, which has boosted the drop rates of many rare mounts and items from old raid and dungeon bosses. There’s Greedy Emissaries, treasure goblins from Diablo invading our capital cities and the patch zone that give you currency when killed that you can use to buy recolors of an HD updated version of one of the classic and iconic class sets from the game’s earliest years.

To some degree, these all engage in some level of FOMO, to varying degrees of vexation. First, the special recolor armor sets from the Greedy Emissary event, we have no information on if they’ll ever be available again. Get them now, or maybe lose the chance to earn them forever. Second, the Collector’s Bounty event offers a greater amount of efficiency to earning old, rare mounts and items, but those items will remain in the game after the event ends; you’ll only lose the increased efficiency. Lastly, for engaging in Turbulent Timeways, the unique mount you can earn will likely become available for Timewarped Badges (a currency earned from Timewalking events) the next time the event runs, like the two mounts from the previous time this event has been available have.

Naturally, I think the Greedy Emissary event is the most egregious with FOMO – but even it is something you can earn every reward from in one week if you’re willing and able to put in enough time. For Collector’s Bounty, missing out on the efficiency will be tough, but all the items will still exist. For Turbulent Timeways, I myself realized I started engaging in the event a week too late, and until I discovered the mount would likely be made available again in the future, I was really kicking myself for missing one week too many.

Luckily, between Remix events and the game’s monthly Trading Post, the items from the Greedy Emissary event will likely come around again in the future – but right now, we don’t know if they ever will.

But enough about that. Let’s discuss the Legion Remix.

The Mage Tower

During the Legion expansion, in patch 7.2, our brave heroes returned to the Broken Shore to establish a foothold and stage an assault on the Tomb of Sargaeras raid when it launched a few months later. As part of this patch, there were several buildings the players could cooperate to construct, and the most compelling to many players was the Mage Tower.

The Mage Tower provided everyone with a single-player boss scenario focused on mechanics to overcome, and when successful, you’d unlock a special appearance for your artifact weapon and an achievement for doing so. These are some of the most unique and special weapon appearances that exist in the game, and at the end of Legion, they were removed when the Mage Tower became inaccessible.

Now, after nearly nine years, we likely have players who’ve come to the game who, if they’re the same age I was when I started playing, would have been in preschool during Legion. These players could be some of the best in the world – they may become world-first class raiders. But they can never earn these weapon appearances because they weren’t playing the game at the right time?

To me, that sounds like bullshit.

And, before anyone wants to say that I just want to earn these weapons myself – I told you I’ve been playing this game too damn long. The 7.2 patch launched on 03/28/2017. This is my former main, who has the achievement for A Challenging Look from the first time the Mage Tower was built, earned on 04/05/2017. Throughout the expansion, as players earned more gear and more power from their artifact weapons, these challenges became easier. I completed them on classes I had no business playing by the end of the expansion, they became so simple. Completing the Mage Tower challenges now, with the scaling tech involved, is harder than they were at the end of Legion.

But I don’t feel like my achievement is any less valuable for other people having earned it themselves. I have a sense of prestige not because I own this appearance, but because I overcame the challenge. And if these weapon appearances will give people an incentive to challenge themselves, then I say they should come back. Give us a reason to enjoy remix. Lock our scaling in the Mage Tower to retain the challenge? Whatever. Just let people earn them again.

A recolor is the least Blizzard should do, but I think they should just come back in full.

As always, thank you for reading. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got some more Stonecore runs to do to see if I can loot this dragon.

July 22, 2025
Warcraft: Mythic+ Affixes Are Overbearing

Since its addition in Legion, Warcraft’s Mythic+ dungeons have become an insanely popular endgame activity. I’ve participated in most seasons, missing only seasons 3 and 4 of Shadowlands while I was unsubscribed. Overall, it’s been a huge boon to the game. Mythic+ serves as a PVE activity that doesn’t require the level of investment and set-up that raiding needs.

The system has survived some large changes since its inception. Fortified and Tyrannical were originally envisioned as a hurdle for keys beyond level 10, but are now present on all keystones. We’ve seen several affixes nerfed, rotating seasonal affixes, and some that have been introduced and removed entirely.

Presently, Blizzard is testing a new slate of affixes on the Public Test Realm, and much of the player base has had few kind things to say for them. Many players find the affixes to be unduly impactful, to the extent that players have to focus more on avoiding the negative consequences of failing the affixes over battling the mechanics designed specifically for the dungeon.

Others claim this criticism is the whining of a player that lacks the skill to engage with the affixes as they are. However, many of the top-rated Mythic+ players share these opinions, as I do. And, while I’m certainly not in the realm of the very best players, I’ve never lacked the ability to attain the goals I chase in the game.

But, as a pre-emptive counter to anyone who would discredit this post on the merit of skill or accomplishment, here is my raider.io profile. I have two characters beyond the rating threshold for Keystone Hero and several Keystone Master achievements.

Now, let’s talk affixes: new, old, and philosophically.

Playing the Affix

The most criticized affixes are the ones that become so intrusive to the standard gameplay that they overshadow the usual dungeon experience, such as Explosive and Sanguine.

With Explosive, we are constantly battling our UI to kill these priority target bombs before they explode for heavy group-wide damage. For many players, the task of killing these bombs falls on the healer’s shoulders – at the lower levels of play, players are unlikely to swap targets and kill them, while at the top-end of play, the group loses the least amount of damage throughput if the healer defeats them all. Since these spawns scale with the number of enemies engaged, many orbs might be active at once, rolling throughout the duration of a fight. On the PTR over the weekend, there was an adjustment in testing to make these orbs several more times durable, but with a reduced spawn frequency.

Now, conceptually, I don’t think this was a bad direction. However, the pool of hit points tested over the weekend was bloated such that players were simply ignoring them outright with their spawn cadence. I’d prefer to see the spawn rate reduced further, but I think another nerf to both values would be an even an even better adjustment. UPDATE: Blizzard has since proposed a huge change to the functionality of Explosive orbs, having them instead shield enemies based on the health remaining instead of damaging the party. I think this would be better for the experience of the affix, but I don’t think it addresses much the feeling of playing against the affix over the dungeon. We’ll see how it works when that begins testing.

Then, Sanguine requires a dedication to movement and area control beyond what is usually asked by the affixes or base dungeon mechanics. Even the tools players bring to aid the tank in repositioning monsters are suspect in many scenarios, with enemies that are immune to knockback and grip effects, or uninterruptible casts, which adds an element of target prioritization on top of this affix’s asks. I think it’s wrong to say that all affixes shouldn’t affect tanks because of the role they play in the group, but I think Sanguine is a bit heavy handed in that it requires the tank’s engagement the most with minimal impact from the other players.

There’s even a couple more affixes that have been adjusted since their introduction, but would’ve fit here before: Bursting and Bolstering.

Bursting changes the way every pull in a dungeon should be played, with the enemies afflicting the players with a stacking damage-over-time effect for each enemy they kill. This extends the danger of a pull beyond the point where the monsters are dead, and asks for halting damage to prevent refreshing the damage effect’s duration. It’s since had a change to make it dispellable, allowing a class-utility counter to make it much more bearable with a priest’s Mass Dispel, but I haven’t chosen to run a dungeon with this affix without a priest all season, and not all groups have that luxury.

Bolstering once called for adjusting target priority on many pulls in a dungeon, but the new duration limit on the buff has significantly reduced the impact of pulls with one monster of higher health than the smaller creatures around it that die from passive cleave.

And there’s many more affixes that contribute negatively to the experience of running dungeons without overtaking the gameplay loop to the degree of those above outliers. Quaking hits casters harder than tanks and melee players by interrupting their casts and has required multiple specific exceptions to be installed to avoid catastrophic overlaps; Raging can create unavoidable one-shot damage instances with the only counter being large defensive cooldowns or limited soothe effects; Overflowing affected some healers much more negatively than others; Necrotic and Skittish put more responsibility on the tank in an unfun way; Inspiring created painful monster groups by restricting the use of the class tools we had to overcome dangerous enemies; Infested and Beguiling were infuriating to deal with throughout their respective seasons.

And I think it’s bad for dungeon affixes to exist solely in this space – to add only annoyance to a dungeon. These were originally created to add variance to the dungeons week-to-week, because, for most people, running the same encounters ad infinitum would get stale fast.

But Blizzard doesn’t seem to agree. Let’s look at those new test affixes.

Our New Afflictions

So, available for testing over the weekend, we had Incorporeal, Afflicted, and Entangling. Despite the callout, Afflicted looked to be the least offensive of these three. It functions a lot like explosive, but in reverse. A ghost spawns with low health and dispellable afflictions. Removing any of these effects or healing the ghost to full health removes the ghost. Should the ghost be left alone, it afflicts the party with a Haste reduction (which we don’t want). Unlike Explosive, the affix is presented more directly healer-facing. They can address it with their usual game play, and hybrid classes can ease the burden at low-cost, and I think both have factored into its reception thus far.

Then, there’s Incorporeal, which has been adjusted a bit for the better since the weekend’s testing, but I still think could use a redesign. These creatures require direct crowd control effects or kicks to prevent them from massively hampering your group, but you generally would like to invest those abilities into the dungeon’s monsters instead. However, since it’s intended that they be immune to damage, and things like Blind, Polymorph, Hex, or Hibernate would deal with them completely, I think they’re not in as worse a place as they were when those effects were breaking.

And, last, we have Entangling. Like Quaking before it, this affix is just going to be at its worst creating painful overlaps with the dungeon’s mechanics. I know it’s going away next season, but imagine this effect occurring during Odyn’s runes in Halls of Valor. That extra delay of movement could spell catastrophe for an otherwise successful key. In Blizzard’s post, they do talk about increasing the visual clarity of the effect, which was a pain point for testers over the weekend.

Even as unintrusive as Afflicted looks, these affixes are all still annoyances to be layered onto the game. But I think it’s wrong to behave like that’s the best or only avenue to add challenge to the game.

Examining the Philosophy

In the past, I had discussions about my grips with the Mythic+ system and often talked about Hades, an isometric roguelite with fantastic game play. After you’ve had a successful clear or two, the game opens up a “Heat” system, where you can elect to add on additional modifier to make the run more challenge, and more rewarding.

There’s options here that would be an annoyance if they were prescribed: enemies need to be hit a number of times before they begin taking damage; monsters can deal up to 100% more damage and have up to 30% more life or both; you have to sacrifice a boon to climb between the underworld regions; you put yourself on a timer. Yet, these never felt intrusive because of two reasons: one, they affected the “Heat” of the run at different values, so harder affixes increased the rewards more; and two, you picked every single effect you were going to deal with on a run. So, why the hell doesn’t Warcraft do it that way?

Well, as far as picking your poison goes, I don’t think it would work as well in Warcraft. Hades is played solo, while Mythic+ is a 5-man group activity with the active player base of an MMO. Everyone having the same affixes on their key every week is good for people forming and joining groups. It just wouldn’t work as well to go from Volcanic in one key to realizing you have Spiteful ghosts chasing you down on the next.

As for the former, there is a built-in rating system for Mythic+, and Tyrannical and Fortified already provide semi-separate score values, but I don’t think increasing the requisite investment to have all players engage with every affix would be health for the game. Currently, you can get a real decent rating on one month’s subscription, but if every affix had its own point contribution, it’d take several weeks to clear your scorecard of any zeroes.

So, fundamentally, I think affixes-as-annoyances is a bad design space for Warcraft. It is good for the process of grouping to have keys prescribed for the week, and detrimental that we cannot opt-in to the annoyances.

So, I’d propose–

Affixes-as-Boons

I think affixes should exist. Tyrannical and Fortified don’t need to go anywhere; they do a lot of the legwork in modifying the week-to-week experience in these dungeons.

But positive-effect affixes – even built as a reward for engaging with something like Afflicted – would be better than what we have. I don’t propose this as a way to make dungeons easier; I’d want to see it paired with an adjustment to the overall scaling, so that obtaining the benefits from the affixes would affect the dungeon’s success.

I wouldn’t even begrudge the existence of an annoyance affix paired with a boon affix. Just by virtue of design, the affixes will always be less interesting than the dungeon mechanics, because the affixes must be designed to be applied to all the dungeons, whereas a boss or monster pack have a lot more freedom in their design space.

What affixes do to add variety to dungeons in the long-term is valuable, but instead of each week ending with the sentiment, “That goodness I don’t have to deal with that anymore,” dungeon affixes could instead foster excitement for the gameplay opportunities they provide. At the very least, I’d be interested to try.

As always, thank you for reading. I’m looking forward to starting the climb all over again in season two, even with all my complaints. I just wonder if things can be better. Now, to get after these last few portals for my paladin …

April 6, 2023
Returning to Warcraft

In July of 2021, news broke about a lawsuit against Blizzard Entertainment. The suit alleged that, as a company, Blizzard had systemically mistreated their female employees. There was a “frat boy culture” complete with “cube crawls” in which workers would drink at one another’s cubicles during the workday and grope their female coworkers. Employees who reported these behaviors faced retaliation. A female employee committed suicide during a business trip with a male supervisor who had brought sex toys with him on the trip. Their courtesy rooms for recently pregnant employees who needed to pump were poorly furnished and lacked security with someone reporting their breast milk stolen from the fridge. In the midst of all this news, two people were promoted to fill J. Allen Brack’s position once he left the company, Mike Ybarra and Jen O’neal, and they did not pay Jen as much as they paid Ybarra despite both of them advocating for it.

I ended an eleven-year concurrent subscription to World of Warcraft the same day that this news broke. I was horrified and disgusted that this company that had been a part of my life for so long was like this. Unfortunately, it was more akin to the last straw than a strictly moral stance. Shadowlands was the least fun I’d ever had playing Warcraft, but I was more-or-less in charge of the guild I’d been playing with for over a decade, so I felt some sort of duty to stick around.

When this news broke, I told the guild that when my time expired, I was done. I didn’t think I’d ever be coming back. My game time lasted until November, and on the last possible night we managed to finish the raid on heroic after several weeks of attempts on the final boss. I did not open Battle.net for an entire year after that moment.

I kept up with some news. I watched the Dragonflight announcement and felt underwhelmed. I didn’t really think Blizzard would change – not in philosophy, and not in culture.

But, maybe they did.

New Direction

I’ve been a fan of Preach Gaming for a long time. I think I first found his channel in 2012 during Mists of Pandaria, but I probably became a subscriber and fan in the time of Legion (2016). Like much of the player base, Preach had been heartbroken with the news and resolved to risk his entire livelihood and stop his daily coverage of Warcraft as his primary work for his videos. Like many of us, he had been passionate about this game for a long time despite it feeling worse and worse over time.

Late last year, Preach spent his own money to take a trip to California and visit the Blizzard campus, interviewing the developers to talk about the new direction of the game and the fallout of the lawsuit. And, honestly, it began to look like the lawsuit had helped remove the problematic people who had been with Blizzard all those years. Things looked like they’d gotten better.

The game was headed to a healthier place: one designed for the player’s enjoyment and not just their retention. Gone were the nonoptional activities that advanced your character’s power outside of the endgame pillars. Gone were the restrictive systems and grinds that made players feel the need to engage with content they’d long since grown tired of to continue gaining artifact and anima power. Playing multiple characters became something encouraged by the game, instead of a burden as players saw a laundry list of dozens of things they’d need to complete again to get their characters ready for the fun stuff they wanted to do.

Even hearing this from friends, I was skeptical. Many of them hadn’t quit in Shadowlands, maybe it was just survivorship bias. Ultimately, I knew I couldn’t take anyone’s word but my own, so I decided to drop some of the gold I’d had in game for a token and give it a shot.

It’s been about a month since then. I’ve leveled four of my characters to 70, when I only ever got one to 60 in Shadowlands. I’ve just achieved Keystone Master with my friends, despite us now needing to find people to fill our groups instead of having an active guild to run with. I’ve been making gold with my professions, in the hopes of continuing to pay for the game with that virtual currency. I haven’t been into the raid yet, but I’ve been completely satisfied with the dungeon endgame.

That game is just fun again.

But I’m not ready to give Blizzard a full pass.

There’s Still Room to Improve

Ultimately, the monetization of Blizzard’s games is still disgusting. Diablo: Immortal is not even a year old. Diablo 4 is set to release this year with a battle pass system for cosmetics and so far, they’ve been quiet on what, if anything, they’re doing with this system to address FOMO. And, at any point, they could fall into their old ways and start designing poor systems that restrict the players again.

But, unlike before, I’m not going to stick around if the game stops being fun. There’s really not much else to it.

As always, thank you for reading. Now let’s drop that ready check and get this run going.

January 12, 2023