Are rewards in WoW rewarding enough?

By Anne Stickney

Recently, Blizzard issued a hotfix that changed the cost of Argus missions that reward Blood of Sargeras. Here’s the long and short of it: players can trade in Blood of Sargeras for Order Hall Resources. The mission originally cost 1800 Resources to do. If the mission was completed successfully with the bonus loot, you could take the Blood you earned and turn it in for 2400 Order Hall Resources total. It was a net gain of 600 Order Hall Resources -- not much, but enough to give players that were low on Resources a reason to do the mission.

Apparently that wasn’t the purpose of that mission at all. With the hotfix, the cost of the mission has now been upped to 2400, essentially eliminating that net gain. In the developer’s notes, Blizzard pointed out their reasoning. The missions are intended to be completed by players with “ample Order Hall Resources,” who use the Blood for tradeskills. Solid reasoning, I suppose – except for one odd sticking point. If the intent is to get players to dump excess Resources for tradeskill supplies… then why not just offer the supplies on the vendor for Resources rather than offering them for sale for Blood? Why insist on that strange middle step of obtaining Blood?

There’s an issue here, and it’s not really about losing that small Resource gain. After all, you can go knock out a single World Quest and earn more Resources than that. The underlying issue isn’t with Blood, or Order Hall Resources, or even tradeskill materials – it’s about the idea of rewards. As the game has progressed over the years, rewards have progressed and shifted as well. But have they shifted into something more fun, or just a means to kill time? What makes something satisfying to obtain?

Let’s look at rewards in World of Warcraft.

The game started with gear and gold

In the earliest days of WoW, quests were fairly straightforward as far as rewards were concerned. Rewards were usually gold, some kind of gear upgrade, or a combination of the two. Gear wasn’t offered based on a character’s class or specialization. If a quest rewarded something you couldn’t use, you sold it at a vendor. In the really early days, this was one of the few ways to make gold. Completing quests at level 60 back then didn’t offer any additional gold — that feature wasn’t added to the game until March 2016, when patch 1.10.0 hit the servers.

At that point in time, gear was a reasonably compelling reward. There were only a few places to get gear once you hit max level – dungeons, raiding, or crafting some decent items. The Badge system wasn’t implemented until Burning Crusade. With its introduction, there were suddenly alternative means to getting decent gear. You didn’t have to raid if you didn’t have the time to do so — you could complete dungeons, gather badges, and turn those in for gear. As expansions have continued to roll out, so have methods of getting that gear. In Legion, there’s an endless number of ways to obtain it. World Quests, Dungeons, Raids, PVP, gear tokens, crafting — there’s no shortage of ways to nab decent upgrades.

The problem isn’t the need for gear, because players always need better gear. The problem is that there are so many ways to get that gear. It’s easy to obtain now, so easy to obtain that the perceived value of that reward has dropped significantly. This is especially blatant in Legion, where once-prized and difficult to obtain Legendary items are cluttering up our bags faster than we can clear them out.

Toys and cosmetics offer variety beyond the gear grind

Blizzard managed to circumvent the eventual rise of gear burnout with the introduction of transmog in Cataclysm. People like pretty things. People really like making their characters pretty. By allowing players to change their armor appearance to anything they collected, Blizzard gave players another compelling reason to hunt for gear. Whether intentional or not, the system suddenly gave gear rewards a renewed sense of value that had nothing to do with gameplay. Gear was no longer solely about the stats — it was also about the aesthetic value.

The same idea came into play with the addition of toys. These items held no value as far as gameplay was concerned — they were just for fun. In Warlords, Blizzard added the Toy Box, so players could collect toys without cluttering up their bags. In Legion, they added the Wardrobe, which saved gear appearances. Both of these additions freed up bag space and both offered a different kind of reward to players. Something fun, or something visually appealing.

Yet despite all that added value, Blizzard continues to limit what players can do with these rewards. In some cases there are perfectly valid limits. If a toy allows you to circumvent game mechanics, that’s a bad idea. If a toy is incredibly disruptive to other players, that’s also not exactly a good idea. But other restrictions have been put into play, seemingly arbitrary. Players can’t transmog fish or frying pans as weapons — but a shovel or a hunk of meat is perfectly fine. Some toys can only be used in certain areas, despite having no discernible reason for it. Cosmetic holiday items are only available for transmog during the holiday.

The end result is that it feels like Blizzard wants us to have fun, but not too much fun.

Currency and reputation rewards for buying other rewards

And then we take a step back, and look at non-tangible rewards. You can’t really do anything with Badges, Points, Resources, Blood, reputation tokens. They don’t offer any immediate gameplay: they’re a means to an end. These types of rewards have varied over the years, but the concept is the same. Collect the badges to go get gear. Click the reputation token to earn reputation so you can buy gear or toys or cosmetic rewards. Collect essences, or blood, or whatever tradeskill item has been added to craft gear and other cosmetic rewards.

There’s nothing satisfying about these rewards. The satisfaction doesn’t come into play until you get the crafted gear, purchased gear, toy, mount, or other cosmetic item. Non-tangible rewards don’t serve as anything other than a ticking counter, marking how much longer you have to wait until you get what you’re really after. Once you get that, the ticking counter loses its usefulness, as does the non-tangible reward — and all those World Quests are now meaningless. That’s the point where we eventually run into instances of collecting Resources to run missions to get Blood to turn into tradeskill items because you have too many Resources.

It’s nonsensical. It's a time-waster that artificially extends the life of gameplay. Is it more satisfying to wait for something? Arguably, yes – there’s nothing quite like the feeling of seeing an ultra-rare item finally drop after you’ve been farming it for months. At the same time, there’s a difference between that feeling, and the feeling of completing a rep grind to talk to a vendor and purchase something. One is a “Yes! I did it!” and the other is a more muted “Well I’m glad that’s finally over.”

How Blizzard could make rewards more rewarding

One of those reactions listed above marks a triumphant end to all the days and nights of farming, leading you to find something else to do. The other essentially ends the point of doing a gigantic chunk of the things that keep you occupied when you’re max level. It’s not just that those World Quests and their rewards are now obsolete. It’s that in an expansion like Legion, those quests are end-game content. It seems to me that the last thing you want to do, if you’re designing a game you’d like people to continue playing, is offer a reward that eventually gives a reason to stop playing.

World of Warcraft in a nutshell is a giant game of collecting. Yes, there’s really amazing story and lore surrounding it all, but in the end you’re playing to get stuff so you can play better and get more stuff. If the rewards you’re being offered aren’t perceivably worth the time spent, that raises the question of why you’re bothering to play. More importantly, if a reward being offered is just a way to artificially inflate the time we spend playing, can we really call that a “reward” at all? If cosmetic rewards keep being bogged down by arbitrary restrictions, how do they remain compelling?

How do you keep rewards compelling enough to encourage gameplay? It’s a puzzle of game design, that carrot-and-stick philosophy that keeps people playing. And there’s no easy, readily available solution to this problem.  However, it’s arguably the only weak point Legion has. The story is amazing, the raids and dungeons are excellent, and the leveling experience is one of the best we’ve ever seen. Rewards are a good thing to have, and offer a compelling reason to keep playing. But they have to be worth your time – not just at the beginning of an expansion, but throughout the whole experience.