The handful of players who have already reached level 60 in World of Warcraft: Forever recently discovered that gold is no longer a quest reward once they reached max level. This news made quite a few waves throughout the player base, prompting Blizzard to reveal that this is an intentional design choice and provided the reasoning behind making it, as well as adding some remedies to meet players halfway.
Why were players so annoyed about this change? In patch 1.10.0 way back in 2006, a change was added to allow quests completed at the level cap to give an extra gold reward. Since XP was no longer earnable at level cap, that XP was instead converted into gold. This gave players an incentive to turn in and complete the quests still languishing in their logs as they prepared for the first expansion, and helped newer level 60 characters catch up, since flying mounts were coming, and would be expensive. This feature has been in the retail era of WoW ever since, and continued when World of Warcraft Classic was released in 2019, staying in place even as the game split into Classic era, progression, and seasonal realms.
Unfortunately, what ended up happening was players would stop questing, grinding their way to level cap. It is accepted practice to hoard high-level quests and turn them in to get gold instead of XP. This was something the Forever team wanted to avoid, thus prompting the change. However, after the reception from the player base at this change — which wasn’t common knowledge in the testing cycle, since players never really reached level cap — the Forever team settled on a compromise by increasing the currency rewards from quests in the level 48-59 range, and adding currency as a reward to quests that originally did not reward any. This change went live earlier this week as a part of hotfixes to the overall game. Additionally, a new level 60 quest called In Demand – Ancient Elven Curiosities has been added that rewards up to 100 gold for completing it and can be completed each week, though it does require a time commitment to do it.
Virtual economy is one of the more nuanced aspects of any MMO and World of Warcraft is no different. The vertical progression of expansions in Classic usually leads to wild price fluctuations of items sold by players in chat and in the Auction House due to the supply and demand for new items or recipes that come in content releases and the eventual obsolescence and devaluing of certain items and materials. Since WoW: Forever is focused on expanding horizontally — adding content without increasing level caps — there’s a more delicate balancing act when it comes to trading and selling. It’s clear the priority is to make sure that players still have access to meaningful rewards, gold being one of them, without creating crazy currency barriers that could be detrimental to the overall health of the game.