World of Warcraft: World of Warcraft: The War Within greatly improves the quality of life in MMOs, Warbands allow players to trade "Warbound" items, the primary currency, and for a nominal fee, provide anywhere It is a feature that makes the game incredibly alt-friendly by providing account-wide storage that can be accessed from anywhere.

The game's costume system, which allows players to swap transmog, or models of the equipment they are equipped with, has also been greatly enhanced. Previously, characters could only unlock the appearance of items they could equip themselves with. Now, anything you pick up goes into your collection.

These improvements seemed to go a step further with the game's quest system: For those who are completely new to MMORPGs, WoW allows players to choose one of several items as a reward for completing a quest. In the beta version of The War Within the quests were all items that appeared regardless of the reward the player chose. However, as this thread on the customer support forum indicates, that appears to have been withdrawn in the production version of the game.

The author of this thread raised the issue and a member of the game's customer support staff wrote Our apologies.

However, they clarify at the end of their post: "Customer support is not involved in the development of the game: all I can confirm is that what was reported by the OP was not a bug." In other words, the developer's reasoning behind this decision and plans to tweak it are still up in the air at the moment, but locking the game transmog in this manner is almost certainly intentional at the moment.

There are two factors as to why this is a problem. First, as WoWhead points out, Associate Game Director Morgan Day, in an interview with MrGM, seems to acknowledge that this behavior is intentional. "But 'Appeared' is the key word here. This is because Day's answer is not really specific, although the question itself clearly referred to rewarding the player for each appearance. Also, with Warbands appearing in War Within, all items in the bank and inventory will be collectible.

Another factor is that, well, it seems counterintuitive. Especially when compared to the way warbands are designed to work. Not only is it easier to collect appearances through non-quest activities, but if a member of the warband has completed at least one quest, the quest itself will no longer appear on the minimap.

You can turn these markers back on by checking "warband completed quests" on the minimap, but it seems odd as an intended design: you only need to complete these quests once, and if you are a transmog collector Unless you're a transmog collector, it's time to dust off the alto, a "two steps forward, one step back" kind of decision.

Interestingly, however, when I joined the beta version of The War Within, I was given all the items for the quest "It's Watching You" after completing the entire Terokkar Forest quest. You can see the picture below. One wonders if this decision is final or if the live servers are just lagging behind the beta changes. If so, it is odd, given that most of the secondary features of The War Within are available in the pre-patch.

As for the customer service response, it is quite possible that the information accessible to such staff, i.e., what is intended and what is not intended on the live servers, simply does not include beta features that have not yet been reflected in the full game.

But it would be a shame if this live version of the transmog system is correct. Otherwise, Warband is an absolute triumph for the game, both in terms of selling nonsense memes and improving gameplay. For the sake of drip collectors around the world, I can only hope that Blizzard will retract this in a future patch.