My Life As A Gamer: Battle For Azeroth, Patch 8.2 Review

A brief review of the new patch for World of Warcraft: Battle For Azeroth.

• Nazjatar is boring as fuck. The zone is actually very small, but because there's so much vertical variability it has the illusion of being large; this illusion will be dispelled (heh) when players unlock player-controlled flight in all of the BFA zones and see just how small these zones are- just like Legion and Warlords of Draenor before it. The available content reflects that the only draw here is the new raid instance, The Eternal Palace. Players come here, do their bitchwork to progress towards flight, and then dip out to where the fun is. This is Legion's Broken Shore revisited and reskinned.
• Mechagon is Mists of Pandaria's Timeless Isle for the fourth time, and this one is actually fun. There are players here at all hours, working towards a variety of objectives, what you can make/get here ranges from character upgrades/catchups to some unexpected utility (remote access to the Black Market Auction House), and once the new Mechagon dungeon opens I expect it will be even more populated since you can only do that with premade groups. (Yes, it's as long as New Karazhan and follows the same release schedule.)
• The changes made to the mechanics, including the new system for the expansion's Heart of Azeroth system, should have been in at launch; we all suspected that BFA got rushed out the door and this confirms it. That's not a good sign, and lends credence to the purported leak by an alleged ex-employee of Blizzard last week to the Chans on internal business conditions at Blizzard.
• Counter-programming the patch release to coincide with the release of Shadowbringers for Final Fantasy 14 is not a bad sign; that's good business. Releasing a new mount for the cash shop that requires the purchase of six months of game time is a bad sign.
• As with the release of the Dreadwake, the developers use Sunk Cost Fallacies to lock players into the game for the rest of the year instead of giving competitors a serious chance with this new mount: the Sylverian Dreamer.

On a side note, WOW does have a sanctioned method for buying gold with real currency; it exists to combat Chinese gold piracy. This is the WOW Token; for $20 US, you can buy a token in-game and post it to the Auction House, whereupon you receive a guaranteed amount of gold. The other party buys that token with gold, and they can either redeem it for 30 days of game time or $15 (US) of credit in the Battlenet store. This is how players who are good at making gold can, in effect, play for free; they literally trade their time for money--or, rather, company scrip--with which they buy game time, the next expansion, and other virtual goods and services such as mounts and pets.

Asmongold's rant on the Cash Shop regarding these mounts--almost all of which are superior in aesthetic quality to what is available purely for playing the game--is sensational and melodramatic, but correct; it's a bad sign when a game that requires an ongoing subscription increasingly pushes microtransactions, especially in such a heavy-handed manner, and signals weakness vs. competitors.

Some folks--looking at you, Taliesin--make the fallacious argument that this system makes Asmongold's argument moot. They are wrong; they fail to comprehend how the system works. To buy a mount with gold, that transactional exchange has to be direct; you go to the NPC vendor in-game, you trade your gold to the NPC and the NPC gives you the mount in exchange.

To buy a mount on the Cash Shop with in-game gold, you have to go to the Auction House and trade your gold for a token; you then exchange (redeem) that token for Bnet scrip; you trade the scrip for the mount. Meanwhile, someone else whips out their credit/debit card and pays the cost of lunch for two at Denny's for that mount; you had to buy it indirectly by going through two intermediaries whereas the other guy bought direct with real money.

This difference is the point behind Asmongold's rant. Meanwhile, to get (e.g.) one of the new frog mounts you have to go that vendor and buy directly from him with gold. Trade vs. Commerce, folks, right there.

I'll post on this again once I've seen what the new raid and dungeon are like.