The curious case of the missing Puzzling Cartel Chips (supposedly going live in WoW patch 11.1.5)

When WoW patch 11.1 went up on the PTR with the Gallagio Rewards Club Renown track, one of the items that quickly caught everyone’s attention was the Puzzling Cartel Chip. A throwback to prior token items like the Antique Bronze Bullion and Puzzling Cartel Dinar, these priceless casino chips looked like they would function much like the prior system and allow players to earn a Chip to finally buy that long-wanted item that just refused to drop, or which they couldn’t ever win because their dice failed them on need rolls (looking at you, House of Cards). These were very welcome in their prior seasons, although always with some kind of drawback — Dinars arrived in a season that was essentially a ‘victory lap’ around Shadowlands, while Bullion dropped in many places and in greater numbers but also picking up actual gear with them competed with buying transmog appearances.

The Cartel Chips’ biggest problem appeared to be how late they would arrive in the season: they were initially situated at ranks 17 and 19 of the Gallagio Rewards Club Renown, which meant you had that many full weeks’ worth of raiding to get to them. Given how many guilds are already through the Liberation of Undermine, that would’ve been wildly late. After a lot of feedback about this, the Puzzling Cartel Chips were removed from the raid Renown track, with assurances that they weren’t gone entirely and we’d hear more soon.

That was on February 7. We didn’t hear any more after that until February 26, when WoW content creator Naguura sat down with Ion Hazzikostas and Maria Hamilton for an interview in which Ion flat-out said Puzzling Cartel Chips would go out in patch 11.1.5. The idea is that having them so late in the raid Renown track made them an ineffective catchup mechanism, plus it essentially required raiding, making them unavailable to certain players. The idea was that everyone would be able to get them at the same time in the patch. That sounded like great news! The 11.1.5 PTR went up a couple weeks later, and while we learned about a lot of new features — like Nightfall, Dastardly Duos, and Return to Horrific Visions — there was no word about the Puzzling Cartel Chips. Fast forward to now, with one week to the patch release date, and we know exactly as much as we knew on February 7: Blizzard will tell us something soon after 11.1.5 launches.

Where did the Puzzling Cartel Chips go? Why the near-total radio silence from Blizzard on their acquisition method? At this point, no one really knows where the Cartel Chips have disappeared to or how you’ll be able to earn them, so hopefully it’ll be good news for us on that front in a couple of weeks.