We’ve been working over the past few days to evaluate and determine the best course of action to offer players some kind of compensation for those who were caught off guard by the new gear. The plan we’ve found to be achievable within an acceptable amount of time is to provide players who were affected with 4000 Honor Points. This extra Honor would function similarly to the currency down-conversion in that it would stack over the cap, but you would not be able to earn more until you spent under the 4000 cap. (source)You read that correctly: four thousand (4000) Honor points. The announcement is hedged in "this is still uncertain" and "things could still change" but to come right out and say they would be giving out 4000 Honor and then not doing so would likely cause more problems than the initial screw-up. The other thing Blizzard mentioned is that the most likely date of this distribution of wealth would be July 19th, which is about a week and a half from now. I recommend marking your calenders because there will likely be thousands of players on your server getting 1-2 pieces of high-level epic gear that will need gemmed and enchanted. This is about as close to a patch day AH run you can get without it actually being a patch day.
Honestly, this post by Blizzard rather floored me. The solution I thought they would go with would be to simply reset the purchase timers on all of the Season 9 gear bought in the last week. You know, this thing:
After reseting it, you could simply sell it back to the vendor and recoup your Honor points to purchase the 371 gear. Perhaps that is more technically complicated than I am aware of, or maybe they did not want to run the risk of players missing the announcement and playing for 2 hours while the timer expired. Other solutions suggested were to add the ability to purchase the 371s with the S9 pieces like they sometimes do when you upgrade heroic raiding gear. Then again, that would require a vendor to always have that available, lest they remove the option and get bitched at by some clueless player a few weeks later. The "let them eat cake" option is truly unprecedented especially considering they decided to grant 4000 regardless of whether you just bought a 1650 Honor belt, or similar.
It will be intriguing to see whether my warrior ends up getting a 4000 Honor stimulus package despite my having gotten the S9 Chest refunded already. I must say though, this solution almost makes me sad that I did not "waste" Honor buying more S9 gear across my other toons.
The major and first reason they didn't choose your first solution is that it would've meant that all those players that got a complete old set could turn it into a complete new set - which wouldn't (and shouldn't) have been possible even without Blizzard's screwup.
ReplyDeleteRemember, in the original plan, once the new season started a hard 4k honor cap should've been enforced removing all surplus honor above these 4k (they screwed up and it was done a week too early). This means, yes, you could (and would) have saved up 4k for the start of the new season buying you 2-3 pieces - but not more!
So, their solution is, more or less, exactly remedying the issue (if they can exactly target those players that didn't save up 4k for the new season but spend it in the week between the seasons).
For those who spent the entire week grinding, it's very feasible they could have dropped 15k, 20k and more on a full set of gear in prep for S10 - combined with all the enchants and gem costs, a 4k 'cash back' offer in the SECOND week of the season is a slap in the face.
ReplyDeleteBlizzard's reputation for change control management is garbage.
@Anon
ReplyDeletePoint taken, although what this solution does accomplish is give a free 2,350 Honor to anyone who just happened to have bought a belt or whatever. And that is assuming the person getting the 4k doesn't just spend the 4k upgrading their other pieces instead of replacing what they bought. It will also be interesting to see whether Blizzard is capable of giving 4000 Honor to players without it affecting the "7250 Honor to unlock Honor weapons" limitation.
@John Galt
Indeed. The fact that AV was the weekend BG could not have come at a worse time.
I get that it would be silly to have S9's 365s be the bottom tier when S10 is at 384, but it is still a pretty awful design to pretend 365s would be useful for people to buy a week before they get replaced by 371s.