The Queue: I like gold

Welcome back to The Queue, our daily Q&A feature for all of Blizzard’s games! Have a question for the Blizzard Watch staff? Leave it in the comments!

Your beta progress will be wiped, yes. Beta is beta, not release. I believe Heroes of the Storm saved progress from beta to live, but no other Blizzard game has ever done that.

I can’t say I’ve ever tracked my gold-per hour and I suspect it can be variable depending on drops if we’re including vendored items or items sold on the auction house. Actively questing during the leveling process could change things, too — if you’re constantly getting quest rewards, that would yield different results than endgame where you’re trying to do dungeons/raids/PVP. If I had to guess at my gold-per-hour in World of Warcraft right now, eliminating income from the garrison, I’d say it’s somewhere around zero. Nearly all of my gold comes from garrison missions. What gold doesn’t come from those, I earn it off of the glyph market fueled by garrison herbs.

What I do know is World Quests in Legion yield significantly higher gold than quests currently do in WoW. The soloable World Quests currently display a reward of around 90 gold, but when you complete them, they actually give somewhere around 200 gold. I don’t know whether the display is incorrect or the reward itself is incorrect, but either way, that’s still significantly more gold than the 15g you get for completing max level quests in Warlords. There’s only a few of gold-generating World Quests available at a time, though. You can’t do an infinite amount of them in a day for infinite gold. How much gold you’ll earn in a day will depend on what the rewards look like at the end of beta — who knows which number is correct right now.

Personally, I’m not sure I understand the point behind ratcheting up gold rewards while also increasing gold sinks at the same time.

Why not both? Players of all types should be able to get cool stuff. Maybe not all players should be able to access the same cool stuff, but they should have cool stuff available to them regardless. They’re goals. Players need goals to have a good time in a game. Putting limitations on who does or does not get attainable goals to pursue seems silly.

They’re convenient initials. Back when I worked at Hollywood Video, there was an ungodly amount of paperwork to do when opening/closing. You had to initial a bajillion different things. Eventually, I got so impatient with it my initials merged together into a star. Starring things was much faster than writing my initials, but I could still defend a star as my initials during an inspection! Hooray!

I wish I understood their reasoning behind it. Why stop people from turning off combat text? Why prevent people from customizing their settings without forcing them to use addons? Why strip useful information from the character pane?

I can understand if newer players become confused by the overwhelming number of options and information, but wouldn’t a better solution be a split between Simple and Advanced settings? Start players off with Simple, let them choose Advanced — particularly in regards to the character pane.