World of Warcraft’s latest event has me worried about The War Within

World of Warcraft’s newest event comes at a time when, historically, we’d all be hoovering up gear for our alts in a flash. But this time around the event is proving to be concerningly stingy with its rewards, as well as respect for players’ time.

The War Within’s pre-expansion event, Radiant Echoes, doubles down on some of the most baffling design decisions from Dragonflight: an increasing insistence on community-focused events that just do not work.

Ready, Set, Remember

Radiant Echoes as an event is easy enough to explain: there are three zones of yore that the event rotates between, on a 90-minute timer. At the beginning of this timer, the event begins in earnest, with three phases to be completed cumulating in a boss that everyone needs to work together to kill.

Okay, so all you gotta do is enter the- what’s that? You showed up five minutes late? Oh, the event is already over. You missed out on no less than 500 Residual Memories, the event’s earnable currency. That’s okay! If you want more, you can just kill mobs around the zone for the remaining 85 minutes, for anywhere from 1 to 5 Memories each. Low tier gear will be 2000 Residual Memories, and the new mounts are 20,000. Once a week you can earn 1,500 from the weekly quest. Please enjoy yourself.

WoW community events are an on-call job that doesn’t pay you

So, I’m sure we’re seeing the problem here. Right now, roughly 93% of the event’s active time is spent not doing the event, but rather farming low-tier mobs for currency. Of course, that’s a huge waste of time, so you’re better off showing up at the start. But what does that mean? Setting a real-life timer so you’re logged in, ready to enter the portal the moment the event activates? That’s not recreation, that’s a part-time job.

And I know what you may be saying. “So many people are complaining, they’ll definitely buff rewards! The event changes to rotate hourly, then every 30 minutes in just two weeks!” Yeah, Blizzard probably will “fix” it, but we’ve done this song and dance so many times, I have to ask how we keep getting to this point.

This brings us back to Dragonflight, which has eight community events on timers:

• Community Feast: every 1 hour and 30 minutes (down from 3.5 hours)
• Assault on Dragonbane Keep: every 2 hours
• Primal Storms: 1 hour downtime between events
• Storm’s Fury: 3 hour downtime between events
• Researchers Under Fire: bottom of the hour
• Time Rifts: top of the hour
• Superblooms: top of the hour
• The Big Dig: bottom of the hour

So, this is clearly an ongoing design choice, and one that I, as someone with other things to do, take some issue with. I’m all for having stuff to do in the game, and none of these are “mandatory,” but in an expansion that really turned the tide in terms of respecting player’s time, it’s disconcerting to see a continuation of the trend. Here’s hoping there’s some tuning, as I’m sure there will be, but also that an effort is made to ensure that all time spent playing the game can be done how you’d like, no matter what time you happen to log in.