No one is safe from the ire of players who feel like their toys were ripped away from them. Not even Blizzard when it tried to balance World of Warcraft’s next Remix event after players overwhelmingly loved how unbalanced the last one was.
The concept was simple: Break off an old WoW expansion as its own mode, add powerful new gear to it, and let players earn rewards to take back into the live game. After some minor hiccups, it worked for last year’s Mists of Pandaria Remix. Players got to experience what it was like playing the MMO like it was Diablo with ridiculously strong characters capable of soloing its hardest dungeons.
When Blizzard started hinting at the second Remix event, based on 2016’s Legion expansion, everyone was excited to do it all over again. Blizzard said Legion Remix would lean into the Diablo-like character progression and have a way to earn an endless amount of power and a new “Heroic World Tier” that increases the difficulty for everything in the open world.
While those features certainly existed in the PTR that ran for the last few weeks, all the minor details were all wrong. Players quickly figured out that, unlike MoP Remix, just about everything took longer. All the new remixed questlines and raids weren’t available from the start, the cost of cosmetic rewards was substantially increased, and diminishing returns on upgrading your gear meant it would take months to feel overpowered.
Compared to MoP Remix, Legion Remix sounds so drawn out that it could just be called Legion Classic. I can kind of see what Blizzard is going for—weekly progression to keep you logging back in—but once you let players gobble up as many cookies as they’d like, it’s going to be hard to make them eat one crumb at a time.
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The disappointed Reddit threads and YouTube videos over the last few days caught Blizzard’s attention, however. Earlier today, Blizzard community manager Linxy wrote on the forums that the PTR will return next week with “major improvements with a goal of adding speed, power, and fun to the mode.”
Nobody is quite sure how much Blizzard will change with only one more week of testing and a month before its supposed release date in early October. Number tweaks could do quite a lot by the sounds of it, but it also seems like nobody wants to wait for new updates to come out every few weeks, which Blizzard might not be willing to budge on. All I know is that players want Remix to feel distinct from other versions of WoW and a time-gated grind is absolutely not that.
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