Breakfast Topic: How’s your luck?

If you haven’t tried doing any Garrison Shipyard missions lately, you might want to go take a peek at your table. After a round of hotfixes to adjust the rate of rare missions showing up, the chances of success, and a welcome change to the chance of a ship getting destroyed, the shipyard’s actually gotten…I don’t want to say “fun,” necessarily, but it’s gotten a lot more rewarding. If you do a mission and make sure your success rate is over 90%, you won’t lose a ship, even if you failed the mission. That’s a nice bonus, but what has my full attention at the moment are rare missions and treasure missions. They’re everywhere. And if I’m lucky, I’ll have a Left Shark of my very own this morning.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not the sort of person that thinks rewards should just be handed out without any effort involved. I like the challenge of farming, even if it’s frustrating — I spent years farming Attumen the Huntsman in Karazhan for his mount. But I didn’t really care for the shipyard when it first came out, and it took a while for me to puzzle out exactly why that was. It wasn’t that it was difficult, or that I had to wait for the correct missions to pop up. It was that if I failed a mission, one or both of my carefully leveled ships would simply disappear in the blink of an eye. It wasn’t just losing the mission, it was losing the means I had to do the missions in the first place.

It felt sort of like when I was younger, trying to do a level in a side-scroller when there wasn’t any kind of auto-save point in the level. So if I died — even if that death was inches away from the finish line — I had to start back at the beginning, all over again. It wasn’t just frustrating, it was demoralizing. And at some point after slamming my head against levels like that, I’d invariably ask myself if moving on was really worth all the effort I was pouring into it. It was a game, after all. It was supposed to be fun, and that wasn’t fun.

So I kind of like these shipyard revisions. I like that if I put enough effort into it, I won’t lose my ships. I might fail the mission — heck, I might not get that Left Shark this morning, not without a 100% chance of success — but I can still try again. I might have to wait a few months for that mission to pop back up, but I can try again. Have you guys tried the shipyard since the hotfixed changes went live? What do you think about the changes? Do you think they were necessary, or do you think they weren’t needed?