How do you feel about The War Within Epic Edition pre-order including early access?

The Blizzard Watch staff are currently recovering from a big BlizzCon weekend, and one of the hotly anticipated announcements was the name and theme of the next World of Warcraft expansion. What we weren’t expecting was the announcement of the next three expansions — or the features of the World of Warcraft: The War Within expansion pre-order bundle.

Like previous expansion announcements, this one comes with three tiers of pre-order bundles;: Base, Heroic, and Epic. What has caused a controversy is the $90 USD price tag and the inclusions that are coming with the Epic version. Coupled with the promised faster cadence of releases during a period of inflation outstripping wage growth, many players are feeling a bit wary about what we will be expected to pay to see the rest of this story play out and how quickly.

But the item that is really causing issues is the Epic edition giving players early access to the expansion content three days earlier than the rest of the player base. While Blizzard has stated clearly that certain endgame content will by unavailable during this period, such as Mythic Plus instances and access to the raid instance, many players feel like this opens the door to “pay to win.” One major area of concern is professions, with early access players being able to get a head start on levelling theirs and learning more valuable recipes before the competition can even engage. Renown farming could also allow those players to get earlier access to recipes through having several more days to farm with less competition. We don’t know what desirable BOEs will be available, but this might also allow those with a headset to gain an advantage.

All these issues aside, this is not the first time Blizzard has dabbled with exclusive — and coveted — bonuses for pre-orders:

• World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria guaranteed access to the public beta for players with the Annual Pass subscription.
• World of Warcraft: Legion digital pre-orders gave early access to Demon Hunter character creation and the starting zone, which caused a lot of pushback from those who had ordered the physical Collectors Edition and wouldn’t receive it until launch day.
• World of Warcraft: Shadowlands digital pre-orders gave early access to Pandaren and Allied Race Death Knight character creation.
• World of Warcraft: Dragonflight digital pre-orders gave early access to Drathyr/Evoker character creation and starting zone.
• Diablo 4 digital pre-orders gave access to an early public beta and 3 days early access to the retail servers.

Has the early access offer convinced you to purchase the Epic Edition? Has the fact that early access is part of the bundle caused you to hold off pre-ordering at all in protest? Do you feel this is all a storm in a teacup and will blow over as irrelevant?