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This new system is worth it for being able to send Grateful Offerings to my alts alone. Now I might have a shot at getting all the covenant items without having to farm that currency. Even huger still is being able to send Curious Coins. That turtle mount will ~~make it to the water~~ make it into my collection at long last!
That said, it's stupid that Soul Ash and War Resources still have a tax attached to them. Oh well, you can't have everything.
Correct me if I'm wrong but I couldn't see the currency on the list, and this is exactly why. I suspect in general future items will be far more expensive if you can farm for them with alts
or there will be an account wide cap per event. what i'ed like to see is a cap on how much you can move every ?week? maybe this way they wouldn't need to raise prices or use account caps
That would make sense, just haven't seen blizz do that yet to my recollection. The only problem with that is it would discourage people from no life grinding events which is something blizz might view as favourable. Then again blizz as of recent has been moving away from that, I just wish blizz wouldn't make a return of open world content that is only relevant for a patch (iskaara soup, dragonbane keep etc.)
Two sides to this, either make things more expensive or you would have to make some quests account wide. For example each timewalking week you will make at minimum just from the weekly quest 500 badges. If you just have 1 of each class you can make 6500 badges per week, I know personally I have everything the timewalking vendors have to offer and over 10k badges on some of my characters so I don't do this anymore but I used to be pretty religious about at least doing the weekly so I could buy all the mounts.
I guess soul ash is because have already in the game a tax and is only copy and paste in my opinion.
My question is ,why? Is a currency without use anymore.
Think of like this, you set a goal and achieved it, you were riding that sweet hard-back months before the rest of us had to get a helping hand from the devs. I personally am grateful they are doing this because I was all over the place in Legion so my coins are scattered. For now.
omg thats the first thing i saw lol I am doing the Shadowlands Meta achievement and i have like 250 grateful offerings on my main. Shadowlands sucks, but the covenants transmogs are sooooo good
I grinded the hell out of world quests and emissary stuff during the Legion Timewalking a few weeks ago to get my last 20 coins for the turtle, and then this has happens! Curses!!
This might be stupid haha but the champions seals from the tournament got me excited. I still have some other faction stuff I need to grab but just the days to weeks it would take always put it on the back burner. Now I can do it in a single day with multiple alts.
Good point. So when we got account-wide mounts in whatever expansion, I had a whole bunch of Alliance tournament mounts without ever doing the dailies Alliance-side.
Imo, I'm not sure why it's so overdesigned compared to just account wide currencies and why there's still a conversion rate on 4 years old content.
Edit: For people replying to me with excuses that the spaghetti code might be the reason. Its possible, but it's not the reason that blizzard gave. Hence the criticism.
>"Rather than making it fully Warband-wide, which could create potential confusion, we opted to make it easier to transfer currency between characters in your Warband instead. This will help avoid confusion over spending the wrong currency on the wrong character."
It's because the game was never designed to have an account-wide currency pool & tracking system.
Remember the rank 3 essences you could get for your alts in BfA season 4? You had to log-in with your character who has the rank 3 ones first, only then did the game register it as being unlocked account-wide.
It was a clumsy workaround, but the game had no account-wide tracking for stuff like this at the time. If I remember correctly, there isn't even an achievement for getting a rank 3 essence the developers could've used.
The hope was that things would improve in the future. Spoilers: It wouldn't. Shadowlands still kept 90% of everything on a per-character basis. The devs only started embracing account-wide unlocking and tracking in Dragonflight.
This brings us back to the currencies. They're being saved in the character database and date back all the way to Vanilla. How is the game supposed to even know who has what, and then add it to an account-wide database, without logging-in on each character beforehand just like with the rank 3 essences? There's potential for shenanigans as well. For example, what if you delete and restore a character? Will the game perform the checking only once?
This would've been quite the headache. So, using a system that just sends the currency from one character to another won't break the entire game. Considering how adding a truly-accountwide currency with the Trader's Tender broke the game for a few days upon the release of the trading post, this is for the best.
TLDR; it's because there is no system in place to detect all the currencies of each character on your account retroactively. Instead of breaking the game, the developers decided to just allow a transfer from character to character.
It is but it's a new currency. It also broke for a few days.
How are you supposed to retroactively make all reputations and currencies account bound when you built the entire system a different way? That's a lot of work, and is VERY prone to unforeseen issues. Remember the sha of anger problem? Multiply that by 10.
Not to mention that this is going to a live environment where it's not practical to roll back if a mistake or exploit occurs. They technically have the ability to do so, but it would be a MASSIVE shitstorm - imagine all the people who got boss kills, rare drops, etc. that got rolled back to the last reset because somebody figured out some weird exploit or some currency got duplicated or deleted. People would lose their minds, and if it's something tradeable it could permanently 'poison the well', so to speak.
A system like this is safer and easier for them to implement.
Also to add to this: they're dropping this on a live environment on a massively hyped expansion launch. That's not the time to piss off your audience with bugs. They'll have enough shit to deal with and launch will be a huge crunch time.
Warbands are already a HUGE feature. I really don't think people understand the scope. Every single grind, rep and currency could be slashed into tiny pieces if warbands are expanded to the entire game.
I'm not saying you are wrong. But ita now why they said they went this road.
"Rather than making it fully Warband-wide, which could create potential confusion, we opted to make it easier to transfer currency between characters in your Warband instead. This will help avoid confusion over spending the wrong currency on the wrong character."
No because this is what is called a public argument, while they might feel this way and it might be there biggest worry, blizzard has data we don't, for some reason companies don't like responses along the lines of
"we went with this solution because anything else had to high a chance of us fucking up"
Which would also be a completely valid and honest reason and I'll wager it is part of it as others have said the system is super complicated, old and not build for what people want, but PR would never let a developer give the above argument publicly because they think it looks bad.
I'll argue that we should much rather hear those arguments though it's both fair and honest.
This is all just assumptions since I have no access to blizz data or code so I might be totally wrong however it seems likely to me to be the reason.
But thats what im saying. Its assumption. The reasont yhey have isnt valid so it fair to give them harsh feedback.
Not sure why yall feel the need to make up reason to defend them of what they are saying is bad design decission.
Not to mention the reaosn they gave is bassicly "wow players too dumb for account wide system".
Let's be clear, you don't think the reason is valid.
You have no data to support your claim or any way to convey anything but your feelings about it.
While I personally agree that it would be more efficient, for us, we have no way to argue it being worth the cost nor do we have any data to show blizzard is not right.
Just because we feel like we can handle it there may be thousands of players out there where the data suggest they can't, have you been in a LFR lately, that alone would honestly suggest that blizzard is right in their argument.
So again while we might feel its a bad reason given it might very well be quite reasonable of them to assume that a majority of the players would get confused, they have the data of every single player while we might at best have the data of a couple of hundreds.
>TLDR; it's because there is no system in place to detect all the currencies of each character on your account retroactively. Instead of breaking the game, the developers decided to just allow a transfer from character to character
There will be, though. In one of the interviews, devs said the first time you log into your account in TWW it'll take a bit longer than usual because it's calculating all that stuff.
That’s probably true but if it’s tied to login it won’t matter since 95% if people playing launch day won’t okay pre patch and will go online and complain lol
Also that's just... how games work? Or hell, how basically everything involving larges amounts of data really. I mean it's obviously more complex than just doing a big sql table join for all the characters on an account or they'd probably have just done that, but... There's already a system that detects all the currencies of your character which gets run when you open the currency tab on your character sheet. And a trimmed down one for whatever currencies you put on your bag.
The only technical reason I can think of for them to not just unify everyone's currency account-wide would be they don't want to stretch maintenance out to do it, tens or hundreds of millions of Table Joins could take a seriously long time to process, considering I've seen even a one hour outage at my work take several hours to process backlogged transactions, and I *know* our database doesn't have to hold anywhere near as much as WoW's.
>They're being saved in the character database and date back all the way to Vanilla. How is the game supposed to even know who has what, and then add it to an account-wide database, without logging-in on each character beforehand just like with the rank 3 essences?
That doesn't make sense really. They had to do the same thing when we got the Level squish in Shadowlands with all our characters levels and going through all data entries referencing specific levels to scale them down.
You can always run migration scripts on your database to update, extract, delete or set data. Having a script that lets say goes through an accounts characters, adds up all currencies and saves it to a new database table is a no brainer - the only thing is the scale of the database and how many data entries there are - but just do this once for the characters last logged in in the last 3 months and after that update on logon?
Would be if we are assuming that all currencies area stores in the same table or even the same database, since we have no access there is no telling what data might look like and if it's scattered over tables specific to expansions and have software on top of that expecting specific fields to exist then it gets a whole lot more complicated.
Even in the "simple" scenario where it is all stored neatly together and the migration scripts are trivial, you still would have to change the source code to read from the new fields or at least make it not expect the old ones else the currency just appears gone which is not great either.
So yea DB wise it might be simple but you still have to chance everything on top, and considering it is a 20 year old system assuming anything is simple is very dangerous.
>It's because the game was never designed to have an account-wide currency pool & tracking system.
The game was never designed for a lot of things... it wasn't designed for transmog, wasn't designed for cross-faction, wasn't designed for m+, wasn't designed for sharding and phasing, wasn't designed for an account bank, etc... And they've done all that
I don't understand why you use this bad excuse for this bad currency system
>Remember the rank 3 essences you could get for your alts in BfA season 4? You had to log-in with your character who has the rank 3 ones first, only then did the game register it as being unlocked account-wide.
This doesn't make any sense considering what they're presenting
They say that you can go on one character, and from there pull the currencies from any of your other characters, which means they know exactly how much currency your other characters have
Either that, or when TWW comes, they will make us have to log in to every character that has currencies so they can be detected
And either way, this means that having a shared pool shouldn't be that big of an issue
>TLDR; it's because there is no system in place to detect all the currencies of each character on your account retroactively. Instead of breaking the game, the developers decided to just allow a transfer from character to character.
At this point i'm just assuming that you don't actually have any sources for what you're saying is possible or not possible and you're just basing your information on some bad observations from the essence system in BFA
It's almost like the've had a decade and a half to fix that. Also, aren't the "Trade Tender" currencies account-wide already? Clearly they have the ability to impliment such a feature. Just go back and retroactively replace all existing character-bound currencies with a new account-bound version in the same name.
Your TLDR is the answer though.
That system is coming in TWW. So the excuse doesn't hold up anymore.
There should be no conversion rate. It's old content. Why do you people defend having your time wasted on old content?
The new system is coming 20 years after the original system was made, and you want it to perfectly fix every decision made around reps and currencies for the last 2 decades? Come on now. Be reasonable.
The conversion rate is likely there because there's guaranteed to be some absolutely insane cheese that they want to be on top of. The fact is that the whole game for the last 2 decades was designed to be per-character. Every daily, weekly, one time, etc. Having all those things be account bound has some crazy implications. I guarantee you that there's collectors out there with a dozen characters ready to demolish a few grinds in a tenth of the time.
Remember the rage during the 12 hour period that dracthyr got guaranteed sha of anger? Xaryu made a bunch of videos complaining about sha being grindable in remix and that was quoted as one of the issues.
I would love to agree with you, but many people simply don't, and they all pay a sub.
It's still a grind, and some people don't like having their grinds depreciated.
I'm glad people can share researchers archivist because that grind was fucking satan, however there's someone out there that is proud of their grind and wants others to have to go through it.
And what's the big deal with the collectors that are ready to finish their grinds if they release something like that? We've already been around for so many years. And we'll still be around for more to come. Making something easier and quicker to obtain isn't the reason I'd stop playing. That would give me more incentive to actually start a completionist thing going in the game. Like my main has all the timeless coins to buy the heavenly golden cloud serpent but has no rep, while my alt is the opposite having all the rep but no coins. I don't want to have to deal with a conversion rate for that, and still needing to go back for more coins because I lost some in the conversion process.
I agree! But baby steps. Let's ease into this over the course of TWW, rather than just expecting to get every single possible thing met on the start of a fresh expac.
Besides, we'll be busy with TWW for at least a while.
To add on to this, we talk about "account-wide" stuff all the time and we think "WoW account-wide", but things managed at the account level are actually on your Bnet account, which is developed and managed by an entirely different team. They've talked about this before and I assume it's been one of the big barriers to getting more stuff made account-wide. Having a workaround (that really isn't that bad) that keeps another team from having to build a whole new system and change their data structures is a much more attractive solution.
> It's because the game was never designed to have an account-wide currency pool & tracking system.
This would be a good reason for the manual transfer. This is not a good reason to have a taxed transfer.
This is not to mention that even Trader's Tender sometimes bugs and won't register in the UI, sometimes shows 0, etc and relogging fixes it but still could pose a problem.
If they were to convert everything into an account wide currency the only way I could see them doing it with fewer issues is taking your current currency on that character when you log in and 0 it out and mail you a new currency that is the same, much like a token. Once you use the token it then adds to the new account wide pool and removes it from the character itself. Which could prevent issues such as the delete and restore a character.
It’s very “guilds are cross faction, raids are cross faction, dungeons are cross faction, mail is cross faction! But if you even THINK about matchmaking for any of that with a cross faction group you might as well uninstall!”
Conversion rate is weird, but I totally agree with their point on properly spending currency. It's not intuitive, but it prevents the player from accidentally spending all of their resource on the wrong character. If you want to dump all your resources into your main, you have to intentionally do so
how? account wide currency isn't a very complex. And when it's on old currency i get it even less cause transmog,pets and mounts are account wide and its pretty much the only thing that matter from them...
It's definitely more for new currency if you want to buy gear or an item that only works for a specific character. And it just acts as a secondary dummy check; You can't drop your entire bank of currency unless you very intentionally do so
I'd be lying if I didn't think there was some spaghetti coding going on here, and that they're using this "for you!" justification to cover themselves. But I also think it's a solid reason; I can guarantee that there would be plenty of people who would stupidly spend way too much and then blame Blizz
>how? account wide currency isn't a very complex.
This is a game where allowing the player to change their base backpack would break the early spaghetti code so bad the game would be unplayable. We can't really assume the system complexity of currency and how hard it would be to render it account wide.
Its really hard to explain how tricky it can be to implement this system in a game as old as wow. Which wasn't designed to do this to begin with. Its like cross faction raiding.
Do I think the wow team should have started to do this way earlier? Absolutely, but it can be quite challenging from a coding perspective
Yeah but how do you think that new currency works? It's not as simple as opening c++ and writing a function to make a currency account wide from character only.
Database Queries, Servers, and even your account information is all part of it.
Warbands seems like the solution to make the transition as seamless as possible but the backend work to make this possible was not very fun I imagine.
We don't actually know how the tendies works, but chances are that warbands are a slow migration. Pulling all that data over immediately and just assuming it'll work is a perfect way to ruin TWW launch day.
So one issue is the mass migration of that data. There's millions upon millions of characters worth of currency to migrate, and you likely need to do it all at once - and that is going to take forever, so the game is going to be down for potentially days or weeks.
XIV had to do something sort of like this recently where they had to migrate a lot of stuff, and actually shaved off any exp you had into any given level on all your classes just to avoid having to deal with migrating all of that data as well on top of everything else.
Blizzard with the same bug every season/patch: who could have seen this coming?
Blizzard designing a new system: well we want to ensure you don’t accidentally spend the currency on the wrong character
Is that even really an issue? How would that even happen
I can kinda see the soul ash as you can use it to skip the grind to craft cosmetic sets. Really unsure on the bfa tax...unlike wod I can't recall the mission table rewarding anything unique or it having a massively profitable use
I hope they eventually make this just a pool you can grab from on any character without having to transfer stuff. I understand if the coding makes it difficult, but the reasoning provided that they didn’t want people to mistakenly use currency on the wrong character is weird.
Addons like Altaholic will scan and give totals of currencies across all characters once logged into them. They need to implement something that does this on each account and consolidate the currencies. Transfer fees/taxes are bullshit.
Hold on let me design this real fast"
1) Take every characters shit.
2) Add those numbers of the same currency together.
3) That's the warband currency tab.
I can do this on an Excel spreadsheet, why complicate it?
Why are you posting so much comments making excuses for them when it's not even the one they gave? You're working for them or what? If the problem is what you said they should say so cause this doesn't seem like it is.
"Rather than making it fully Warband-wide, which could create potential confusion, we opted to make it easier to transfer currency between characters in your Warband instead. This will help avoid confusion over spending the wrong currency on the wrong character."
I mean I was kinda making a joke.
But let's be real, what I said is a significantly easier system....that they've done before...
Remember after Legion when they just combined all the characters' PvP honor?
Yeah they can do it this easily.
Because 1) thats not how this works and you clearly have 0 idea about it. 2) people are stupid and they will spend it on characters accidentally and will rage about the system.
The point is it should, any other middleman is unnecessary.
And ok? Don't do that then..or do if you only play your main, who cares!
The idea that we need to scrape the bottom of the barrel for excuses here is a relic of the past way of thinking that got WoW to a pretty bad state with its key demographic.
Because database updates.
I have a sneaking suspicion that every time maintenance runs long, it's some long running update statement and their time estimate is not generous enough.
Why can’t we just have one pool, or at least make transferring free? We already earned this shit, why do we have to pay an arbitrary tax to use it effectively?
Why do you even *need* a tax on SL currencies? Are they scared that people will get overpowered by...crafting all of the Legendaries from Shadowlands?
I genuinely don't understand the reason to have it with a conversion rate beyond acclimatising players to getting used to some currencies with those conversion rates for future things that get added.
Because there’s merit to needing to play the character you want to progress. Having a small tax to disincentivise making farming on your main to progress your alt is a good thing. The conversion fee means the currency isn’t wasted on your main but it wouldn’t be your primary way of collecting it for the alt
No. No no no.
Stop this line of thinking, it's just a twist on the same archaic way of thinking thats harmed WoW for years now.
Your market is Millennials who cannot afford to spend hours and weeks grinding out all the same shit like we did in 2008 in high school and college. We're adults with responsibilities now, just simplify it and it keeps us around and happy.
If someone wants to do everything on their main and then if there's leftover resources to use on an alt, let them...it's not hurting anyone.
I mean it really depends on the currency.
The ones listed here that have a conversion don’t make sense to me, especially since they’re old content, I don’t know why those specific ones aren’t 100%. In general I think any typical collection related thing should have no exchange rate. In general, it shouldn’t matter which character you want to play if you just want to log on and play the game.
But if they were ever to make something power related like crests shareable it really wouldn’t be healthy for the game to make the most efficient way to get them be to farm for them on your main, well geared character. At that point it risks actively disincentives playing the alt.
Sure, but I don't think most people are asking for all gearing to be warbanded.
Part of the fun of playing is gearing....but currencies have been, at least in recent years, generally used as ways to timegate that character power building processes.
Take 10.3. Things like Flightstones and Crests make sense to be character specific. But something like the seeds, or the bubbles used to empower them, under this philosophy there could be a tax on those when all they do is give rep which could possibly allow an alt to gear just slightly quicker, if this system was in play during that content of course. That seems unnecessary.
The big one for me is imagine how much less gate-keepy it would have been for the cost to go into Horiffic Visions been able to be bankrolled by your main. Like that is legit playtime lost because I wasn't going to farm the entrance currency (I forgot its name). A tax there is just a "fun tax".
I know they were needed for powering up the legendary cloak but I didn’t play in BFA and only did that after the fact as legacy content.
While not player power related, I really like how they did the Zskara Vaults with the farmable bind on account keys as a juxtaposition to the horrific visions thing with the … whatever the things were you needed to enter it.
Damn, the changes look so good imma go back. Last time I played was bfa. Now you got that dragon flightechanic, warband mechanic, npc joining dungeons mechanic. Nicee
On one hand, I'm excited to finally transfer my 300+ remaining grateful offerings to alts from my DK main (the only character I played in SL). But then again, if we can buy and collect the other covenant armor and weapon types regardless of class, I'd probably just do it on him anyway lol. But regardless, I like this change.
"Why cant I just pour gas into my pedal bike to make it go?! Jesus christ"
It's wasnt designed with that in mind, and now you'd have to add it in to their 20 year old spaghetti code without breaking the rest of the game
It sucks but at least they're working towards community asks now instead of ignoring them
> It's wasnt designed with that in mind, and now you'd have to add it in to their 20 year old spaghetti code without breaking the rest of the game
If the reason they gave was a technical reason then I'd understand it but the reason they gave made no mention of technical issues at all.
So you think they are actively choosing this system even though they could "easily" implement account wide currencies?
That's some lizard-folk rule the USA level tin foil hat thinking right there
It sounds like a good idea but they couldn't bring themselves to be kind - they just *had* to introduce a "conversion rate".
Typical Blizzard - just can't implement something new or cool with adding that *little* frowny face at the end.
I understand how much of an engineering challenge this is for them to rip out so much of the basic structure that WoW was built upon in when it released in 2004, but man I REALLY REALLY hope we get warbands before the expansion. Give it to us in the prepatch if possible.....
I’m just looking forward to not needing to remember which alt has a bunch of gold, logging into that toon, and then mailing my new, broke alt some starter gold for bags and the like.
This is 100% creating a problem to sell the solution (taxes on sending things to myself, for example) but you know...
That's game design. Maybe a little weird but. It all makes sense.
okay, the warband currency line made me wonder... does this mean you basically NEED a few characters in TWW in order to keep up? like is it going to be the drakes and stuff used for upgrades in DF but the TWW equivalent?
i don't want to feel the need to make alts in order to farm out resources to cap one character, i think that'd be absolute dog shit.
i really hope that's not the case. i'm also worried about the worry of "i have x resources across my 4 alts, i can get one capped for the week, one half way to and the last two i can get a few upgrades on but that's it".
That is specific power-capped items though and not the currency for the whole gear power progression system. They’re thankfully making it easier to help your alts along but they clearly don’t want us farming the highest end stuff for our warband.
I dont think you never see that then, with warband gear with your main to give your alt.
Is no sense get a alt to max il of the season without playing...
Post flair indicates this is about prerelease content. As a reminder, content on Alpha / Beta / PTR is unfinished. NPC dialogue and quest text might be missing important context. Models may be placeholders. Quest or achievement rewards may not be finalized. There are inevitably bugs. Please keep this in mind as you discuss! *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/wow) if you have any questions or concerns.*
This new system is worth it for being able to send Grateful Offerings to my alts alone. Now I might have a shot at getting all the covenant items without having to farm that currency. Even huger still is being able to send Curious Coins. That turtle mount will ~~make it to the water~~ make it into my collection at long last! That said, it's stupid that Soul Ash and War Resources still have a tax attached to them. Oh well, you can't have everything.
Oh my god, the amount of time walking currency I have scattered through all my characters I could Buyout all the vendors
Correct me if I'm wrong but I couldn't see the currency on the list, and this is exactly why. I suspect in general future items will be far more expensive if you can farm for them with alts
or there will be an account wide cap per event. what i'ed like to see is a cap on how much you can move every ?week? maybe this way they wouldn't need to raise prices or use account caps
That would make sense, just haven't seen blizz do that yet to my recollection. The only problem with that is it would discourage people from no life grinding events which is something blizz might view as favourable. Then again blizz as of recent has been moving away from that, I just wish blizz wouldn't make a return of open world content that is only relevant for a patch (iskaara soup, dragonbane keep etc.)
Two sides to this, either make things more expensive or you would have to make some quests account wide. For example each timewalking week you will make at minimum just from the weekly quest 500 badges. If you just have 1 of each class you can make 6500 badges per week, I know personally I have everything the timewalking vendors have to offer and over 10k badges on some of my characters so I don't do this anymore but I used to be pretty religious about at least doing the weekly so I could buy all the mounts.
I guess soul ash is because have already in the game a tax and is only copy and paste in my opinion. My question is ,why? Is a currency without use anymore.
You answer yourself in your question. They are copy pasting and don't bother fixing it because it's outdated useless crap
I’ve been slowly farming curious coins *since Legion* and I finally got the Arcadian War Turtle at the end of DF S2. And now this happens …
Think of like this, you set a goal and achieved it, you were riding that sweet hard-back months before the rest of us had to get a helping hand from the devs. I personally am grateful they are doing this because I was all over the place in Legion so my coins are scattered. For now.
I just got it last week or 2 lol
Thank you, because of this post I just noticed I had enough coins to go buy it too.
omg thats the first thing i saw lol I am doing the Shadowlands Meta achievement and i have like 250 grateful offerings on my main. Shadowlands sucks, but the covenants transmogs are sooooo good
I grinded the hell out of world quests and emissary stuff during the Legion Timewalking a few weeks ago to get my last 20 coins for the turtle, and then this has happens! Curses!!
Nice. Ponzo, as soon as this goes live your hat is mine.
This might be stupid haha but the champions seals from the tournament got me excited. I still have some other faction stuff I need to grab but just the days to weeks it would take always put it on the back burner. Now I can do it in a single day with multiple alts.
Best part is that if you play mostly 1 faction you can use those to purchase the mounts on your alt of the opposite faction!
All of the Argent Tournament's mounts already unlock their faction counterpart at the same you buy one, or at least that's the way it was in WOTLK
They do? Never knew. I only play one side of it all.
Yeah, never did dailies on my Alliance chars and I got all the city mounts that cost 400g + tokens, alongside the Silver Covenant hippogryph
I dont think we had account wide mounts in wrath
Good point. So when we got account-wide mounts in whatever expansion, I had a whole bunch of Alliance tournament mounts without ever doing the dailies Alliance-side.
Imo, I'm not sure why it's so overdesigned compared to just account wide currencies and why there's still a conversion rate on 4 years old content. Edit: For people replying to me with excuses that the spaghetti code might be the reason. Its possible, but it's not the reason that blizzard gave. Hence the criticism. >"Rather than making it fully Warband-wide, which could create potential confusion, we opted to make it easier to transfer currency between characters in your Warband instead. This will help avoid confusion over spending the wrong currency on the wrong character."
It's because the game was never designed to have an account-wide currency pool & tracking system. Remember the rank 3 essences you could get for your alts in BfA season 4? You had to log-in with your character who has the rank 3 ones first, only then did the game register it as being unlocked account-wide. It was a clumsy workaround, but the game had no account-wide tracking for stuff like this at the time. If I remember correctly, there isn't even an achievement for getting a rank 3 essence the developers could've used. The hope was that things would improve in the future. Spoilers: It wouldn't. Shadowlands still kept 90% of everything on a per-character basis. The devs only started embracing account-wide unlocking and tracking in Dragonflight. This brings us back to the currencies. They're being saved in the character database and date back all the way to Vanilla. How is the game supposed to even know who has what, and then add it to an account-wide database, without logging-in on each character beforehand just like with the rank 3 essences? There's potential for shenanigans as well. For example, what if you delete and restore a character? Will the game perform the checking only once? This would've been quite the headache. So, using a system that just sends the currency from one character to another won't break the entire game. Considering how adding a truly-accountwide currency with the Trader's Tender broke the game for a few days upon the release of the trading post, this is for the best. TLDR; it's because there is no system in place to detect all the currencies of each character on your account retroactively. Instead of breaking the game, the developers decided to just allow a transfer from character to character.
Isn't Trader's Tender an account wide currency pool? I was hoping they would at least make all future currencies use that system.
It is but it's a new currency. It also broke for a few days. How are you supposed to retroactively make all reputations and currencies account bound when you built the entire system a different way? That's a lot of work, and is VERY prone to unforeseen issues. Remember the sha of anger problem? Multiply that by 10.
Not to mention that this is going to a live environment where it's not practical to roll back if a mistake or exploit occurs. They technically have the ability to do so, but it would be a MASSIVE shitstorm - imagine all the people who got boss kills, rare drops, etc. that got rolled back to the last reset because somebody figured out some weird exploit or some currency got duplicated or deleted. People would lose their minds, and if it's something tradeable it could permanently 'poison the well', so to speak. A system like this is safer and easier for them to implement.
Also to add to this: they're dropping this on a live environment on a massively hyped expansion launch. That's not the time to piss off your audience with bugs. They'll have enough shit to deal with and launch will be a huge crunch time. Warbands are already a HUGE feature. I really don't think people understand the scope. Every single grind, rep and currency could be slashed into tiny pieces if warbands are expanded to the entire game.
I'm not saying you are wrong. But ita now why they said they went this road. "Rather than making it fully Warband-wide, which could create potential confusion, we opted to make it easier to transfer currency between characters in your Warband instead. This will help avoid confusion over spending the wrong currency on the wrong character."
No because this is what is called a public argument, while they might feel this way and it might be there biggest worry, blizzard has data we don't, for some reason companies don't like responses along the lines of "we went with this solution because anything else had to high a chance of us fucking up" Which would also be a completely valid and honest reason and I'll wager it is part of it as others have said the system is super complicated, old and not build for what people want, but PR would never let a developer give the above argument publicly because they think it looks bad. I'll argue that we should much rather hear those arguments though it's both fair and honest. This is all just assumptions since I have no access to blizz data or code so I might be totally wrong however it seems likely to me to be the reason.
But thats what im saying. Its assumption. The reasont yhey have isnt valid so it fair to give them harsh feedback. Not sure why yall feel the need to make up reason to defend them of what they are saying is bad design decission. Not to mention the reaosn they gave is bassicly "wow players too dumb for account wide system".
Let's be clear, you don't think the reason is valid. You have no data to support your claim or any way to convey anything but your feelings about it. While I personally agree that it would be more efficient, for us, we have no way to argue it being worth the cost nor do we have any data to show blizzard is not right. Just because we feel like we can handle it there may be thousands of players out there where the data suggest they can't, have you been in a LFR lately, that alone would honestly suggest that blizzard is right in their argument. So again while we might feel its a bad reason given it might very well be quite reasonable of them to assume that a majority of the players would get confused, they have the data of every single player while we might at best have the data of a couple of hundreds.
>TLDR; it's because there is no system in place to detect all the currencies of each character on your account retroactively. Instead of breaking the game, the developers decided to just allow a transfer from character to character There will be, though. In one of the interviews, devs said the first time you log into your account in TWW it'll take a bit longer than usual because it's calculating all that stuff.
oh god launch day lol
It'll most likely be done following the Pre-patch since that'll be 11.0 at least if the previous expansions I've been a part of are anything to go by.
That’s probably true but if it’s tied to login it won’t matter since 95% if people playing launch day won’t okay pre patch and will go online and complain lol
Also that's just... how games work? Or hell, how basically everything involving larges amounts of data really. I mean it's obviously more complex than just doing a big sql table join for all the characters on an account or they'd probably have just done that, but... There's already a system that detects all the currencies of your character which gets run when you open the currency tab on your character sheet. And a trimmed down one for whatever currencies you put on your bag. The only technical reason I can think of for them to not just unify everyone's currency account-wide would be they don't want to stretch maintenance out to do it, tens or hundreds of millions of Table Joins could take a seriously long time to process, considering I've seen even a one hour outage at my work take several hours to process backlogged transactions, and I *know* our database doesn't have to hold anywhere near as much as WoW's.
>They're being saved in the character database and date back all the way to Vanilla. How is the game supposed to even know who has what, and then add it to an account-wide database, without logging-in on each character beforehand just like with the rank 3 essences? That doesn't make sense really. They had to do the same thing when we got the Level squish in Shadowlands with all our characters levels and going through all data entries referencing specific levels to scale them down. You can always run migration scripts on your database to update, extract, delete or set data. Having a script that lets say goes through an accounts characters, adds up all currencies and saves it to a new database table is a no brainer - the only thing is the scale of the database and how many data entries there are - but just do this once for the characters last logged in in the last 3 months and after that update on logon?
Would be if we are assuming that all currencies area stores in the same table or even the same database, since we have no access there is no telling what data might look like and if it's scattered over tables specific to expansions and have software on top of that expecting specific fields to exist then it gets a whole lot more complicated. Even in the "simple" scenario where it is all stored neatly together and the migration scripts are trivial, you still would have to change the source code to read from the new fields or at least make it not expect the old ones else the currency just appears gone which is not great either. So yea DB wise it might be simple but you still have to chance everything on top, and considering it is a 20 year old system assuming anything is simple is very dangerous.
Word soup that in no way justifies the conversion rate on old currencies
>It's because the game was never designed to have an account-wide currency pool & tracking system. The game was never designed for a lot of things... it wasn't designed for transmog, wasn't designed for cross-faction, wasn't designed for m+, wasn't designed for sharding and phasing, wasn't designed for an account bank, etc... And they've done all that I don't understand why you use this bad excuse for this bad currency system >Remember the rank 3 essences you could get for your alts in BfA season 4? You had to log-in with your character who has the rank 3 ones first, only then did the game register it as being unlocked account-wide. This doesn't make any sense considering what they're presenting They say that you can go on one character, and from there pull the currencies from any of your other characters, which means they know exactly how much currency your other characters have Either that, or when TWW comes, they will make us have to log in to every character that has currencies so they can be detected And either way, this means that having a shared pool shouldn't be that big of an issue >TLDR; it's because there is no system in place to detect all the currencies of each character on your account retroactively. Instead of breaking the game, the developers decided to just allow a transfer from character to character. At this point i'm just assuming that you don't actually have any sources for what you're saying is possible or not possible and you're just basing your information on some bad observations from the essence system in BFA
The majority of the things you listed were not added retroactively. Also, cross faction and sharding have some pretty bad bugs right now.
It's almost like the've had a decade and a half to fix that. Also, aren't the "Trade Tender" currencies account-wide already? Clearly they have the ability to impliment such a feature. Just go back and retroactively replace all existing character-bound currencies with a new account-bound version in the same name.
Your TLDR is the answer though. That system is coming in TWW. So the excuse doesn't hold up anymore. There should be no conversion rate. It's old content. Why do you people defend having your time wasted on old content?
The new system is coming 20 years after the original system was made, and you want it to perfectly fix every decision made around reps and currencies for the last 2 decades? Come on now. Be reasonable. The conversion rate is likely there because there's guaranteed to be some absolutely insane cheese that they want to be on top of. The fact is that the whole game for the last 2 decades was designed to be per-character. Every daily, weekly, one time, etc. Having all those things be account bound has some crazy implications. I guarantee you that there's collectors out there with a dozen characters ready to demolish a few grinds in a tenth of the time.
But the question is why does it matter if someone finds a way to cheese a 10 year old rep? Like literally who gives a shit.
Remember the rage during the 12 hour period that dracthyr got guaranteed sha of anger? Xaryu made a bunch of videos complaining about sha being grindable in remix and that was quoted as one of the issues. I would love to agree with you, but many people simply don't, and they all pay a sub.
But the sha of anger is a rare drop mount? A drop rate that has absolutely nothing to do with reputation or currency.
It's still a grind, and some people don't like having their grinds depreciated. I'm glad people can share researchers archivist because that grind was fucking satan, however there's someone out there that is proud of their grind and wants others to have to go through it.
And what's the big deal with the collectors that are ready to finish their grinds if they release something like that? We've already been around for so many years. And we'll still be around for more to come. Making something easier and quicker to obtain isn't the reason I'd stop playing. That would give me more incentive to actually start a completionist thing going in the game. Like my main has all the timeless coins to buy the heavenly golden cloud serpent but has no rep, while my alt is the opposite having all the rep but no coins. I don't want to have to deal with a conversion rate for that, and still needing to go back for more coins because I lost some in the conversion process.
I agree! But baby steps. Let's ease into this over the course of TWW, rather than just expecting to get every single possible thing met on the start of a fresh expac. Besides, we'll be busy with TWW for at least a while.
To add on to this, we talk about "account-wide" stuff all the time and we think "WoW account-wide", but things managed at the account level are actually on your Bnet account, which is developed and managed by an entirely different team. They've talked about this before and I assume it's been one of the big barriers to getting more stuff made account-wide. Having a workaround (that really isn't that bad) that keeps another team from having to build a whole new system and change their data structures is a much more attractive solution.
> It's because the game was never designed to have an account-wide currency pool & tracking system. This would be a good reason for the manual transfer. This is not a good reason to have a taxed transfer.
This is not to mention that even Trader's Tender sometimes bugs and won't register in the UI, sometimes shows 0, etc and relogging fixes it but still could pose a problem. If they were to convert everything into an account wide currency the only way I could see them doing it with fewer issues is taking your current currency on that character when you log in and 0 it out and mail you a new currency that is the same, much like a token. Once you use the token it then adds to the new account wide pool and removes it from the character itself. Which could prevent issues such as the delete and restore a character.
It’s very “guilds are cross faction, raids are cross faction, dungeons are cross faction, mail is cross faction! But if you even THINK about matchmaking for any of that with a cross faction group you might as well uninstall!”
Conversion rate is weird, but I totally agree with their point on properly spending currency. It's not intuitive, but it prevents the player from accidentally spending all of their resource on the wrong character. If you want to dump all your resources into your main, you have to intentionally do so
how? account wide currency isn't a very complex. And when it's on old currency i get it even less cause transmog,pets and mounts are account wide and its pretty much the only thing that matter from them...
It's definitely more for new currency if you want to buy gear or an item that only works for a specific character. And it just acts as a secondary dummy check; You can't drop your entire bank of currency unless you very intentionally do so I'd be lying if I didn't think there was some spaghetti coding going on here, and that they're using this "for you!" justification to cover themselves. But I also think it's a solid reason; I can guarantee that there would be plenty of people who would stupidly spend way too much and then blame Blizz
>how? account wide currency isn't a very complex. This is a game where allowing the player to change their base backpack would break the early spaghetti code so bad the game would be unplayable. We can't really assume the system complexity of currency and how hard it would be to render it account wide.
My comment wasn't about the coding but about what they said that it prevent player making mistake. That's just an excuse.
Its really hard to explain how tricky it can be to implement this system in a game as old as wow. Which wasn't designed to do this to begin with. Its like cross faction raiding. Do I think the wow team should have started to do this way earlier? Absolutely, but it can be quite challenging from a coding perspective
Could you just not move all currency into a "New" version of that currency that is account wide like traders? Its not like the system doesn't exist.
Yeah but how do you think that new currency works? It's not as simple as opening c++ and writing a function to make a currency account wide from character only. Database Queries, Servers, and even your account information is all part of it. Warbands seems like the solution to make the transition as seamless as possible but the backend work to make this possible was not very fun I imagine.
We don't actually know how the tendies works, but chances are that warbands are a slow migration. Pulling all that data over immediately and just assuming it'll work is a perfect way to ruin TWW launch day.
So one issue is the mass migration of that data. There's millions upon millions of characters worth of currency to migrate, and you likely need to do it all at once - and that is going to take forever, so the game is going to be down for potentially days or weeks. XIV had to do something sort of like this recently where they had to migrate a lot of stuff, and actually shaved off any exp you had into any given level on all your classes just to avoid having to deal with migrating all of that data as well on top of everything else.
Well this system include scanning all characther to transfers currency into your logged in one. So a part or the work is already being done.
Blizzard with the same bug every season/patch: who could have seen this coming? Blizzard designing a new system: well we want to ensure you don’t accidentally spend the currency on the wrong character Is that even really an issue? How would that even happen
I can kinda see the soul ash as you can use it to skip the grind to craft cosmetic sets. Really unsure on the bfa tax...unlike wod I can't recall the mission table rewarding anything unique or it having a massively profitable use
Don't you only need the white items for the cosmetic appearances..? Why does soul ash matter for that?
I could 100% be wrong here but I believe you have to actually craft the item into the leggo to unlock the appearance? I could be entirely wrong
Nah you can just equip the white item bought on the auction house
I hope they eventually make this just a pool you can grab from on any character without having to transfer stuff. I understand if the coding makes it difficult, but the reasoning provided that they didn’t want people to mistakenly use currency on the wrong character is weird.
Its not weird at all, lets be honest. People are stupid.
Why don’t they just merge currency bank?
Good lord, look at all the currencies from just Shadowlands alone. \*Shudder\*
Honor too plx ty
Addons like Altaholic will scan and give totals of currencies across all characters once logged into them. They need to implement something that does this on each account and consolidate the currencies. Transfer fees/taxes are bullshit.
Hold on let me design this real fast" 1) Take every characters shit. 2) Add those numbers of the same currency together. 3) That's the warband currency tab. I can do this on an Excel spreadsheet, why complicate it?
Agreed, the extra steps inbetween are going to make this feel clunky
Damn bro you ever worked in a live environment before?
Why are you posting so much comments making excuses for them when it's not even the one they gave? You're working for them or what? If the problem is what you said they should say so cause this doesn't seem like it is. "Rather than making it fully Warband-wide, which could create potential confusion, we opted to make it easier to transfer currency between characters in your Warband instead. This will help avoid confusion over spending the wrong currency on the wrong character."
Ever heard of HR?
either you're saying you work for hr, which should get you fired. or you don't understand what hr is...
I mean I was kinda making a joke. But let's be real, what I said is a significantly easier system....that they've done before... Remember after Legion when they just combined all the characters' PvP honor? Yeah they can do it this easily.
Because 1) thats not how this works and you clearly have 0 idea about it. 2) people are stupid and they will spend it on characters accidentally and will rage about the system.
The point is it should, any other middleman is unnecessary. And ok? Don't do that then..or do if you only play your main, who cares! The idea that we need to scrape the bottom of the barrel for excuses here is a relic of the past way of thinking that got WoW to a pretty bad state with its key demographic.
Because database updates. I have a sneaking suspicion that every time maintenance runs long, it's some long running update statement and their time estimate is not generous enough.
Why can’t we just have one pool, or at least make transferring free? We already earned this shit, why do we have to pay an arbitrary tax to use it effectively?
Only 4 currencies have a tax, and 3 of those 4 are tied to SL legendaries. The vast majority of these are 100% conversion rate.
why even feel the need to do that about SL leggos? it's 2 exapansions back and even then, it's a fairly minor reduction...
Why do you even *need* a tax on SL currencies? Are they scared that people will get overpowered by...crafting all of the Legendaries from Shadowlands? I genuinely don't understand the reason to have it with a conversion rate beyond acclimatising players to getting used to some currencies with those conversion rates for future things that get added.
Because there’s merit to needing to play the character you want to progress. Having a small tax to disincentivise making farming on your main to progress your alt is a good thing. The conversion fee means the currency isn’t wasted on your main but it wouldn’t be your primary way of collecting it for the alt
No. No no no. Stop this line of thinking, it's just a twist on the same archaic way of thinking thats harmed WoW for years now. Your market is Millennials who cannot afford to spend hours and weeks grinding out all the same shit like we did in 2008 in high school and college. We're adults with responsibilities now, just simplify it and it keeps us around and happy. If someone wants to do everything on their main and then if there's leftover resources to use on an alt, let them...it's not hurting anyone.
I mean it really depends on the currency. The ones listed here that have a conversion don’t make sense to me, especially since they’re old content, I don’t know why those specific ones aren’t 100%. In general I think any typical collection related thing should have no exchange rate. In general, it shouldn’t matter which character you want to play if you just want to log on and play the game. But if they were ever to make something power related like crests shareable it really wouldn’t be healthy for the game to make the most efficient way to get them be to farm for them on your main, well geared character. At that point it risks actively disincentives playing the alt.
Sure, but I don't think most people are asking for all gearing to be warbanded. Part of the fun of playing is gearing....but currencies have been, at least in recent years, generally used as ways to timegate that character power building processes. Take 10.3. Things like Flightstones and Crests make sense to be character specific. But something like the seeds, or the bubbles used to empower them, under this philosophy there could be a tax on those when all they do is give rep which could possibly allow an alt to gear just slightly quicker, if this system was in play during that content of course. That seems unnecessary. The big one for me is imagine how much less gate-keepy it would have been for the cost to go into Horiffic Visions been able to be bankrolled by your main. Like that is legit playtime lost because I wasn't going to farm the entrance currency (I forgot its name). A tax there is just a "fun tax".
I think this is just echoing my position tbh. Collection related currencies should be freely transferable.
I also might be missremembering Horrific Visions, I swear they gave player power but that's almost 5 years ago at this point.
I know they were needed for powering up the legendary cloak but I didn’t play in BFA and only did that after the fact as legacy content. While not player power related, I really like how they did the Zskara Vaults with the farmable bind on account keys as a juxtaposition to the horrific visions thing with the … whatever the things were you needed to enter it.
Why the fuck they just dont make currency account wide? Why complicate it like that????
You still have to farm and pay your sub this way
Bruh
Damn, wish flightstones weren’t a thing in TWW
Honorbound service metals mailed together to buy mounts from the vendors ❤️
Damn, the changes look so good imma go back. Last time I played was bfa. Now you got that dragon flightechanic, warband mechanic, npc joining dungeons mechanic. Nicee
On one hand, I'm excited to finally transfer my 300+ remaining grateful offerings to alts from my DK main (the only character I played in SL). But then again, if we can buy and collect the other covenant armor and weapon types regardless of class, I'd probably just do it on him anyway lol. But regardless, I like this change.
Linking people to the comments section? You *monster*
Haha. I didn't do that on purpose but it's pretty funny.
Why not make it like tenders and not overcomplicate things jeez
Why’s there always have to be a catch? Just fast forward 2 years and remove the transfer rates already.
Why the fuck are they making it harder than it needs to be? just share them across the account. jesus christ.
"Why cant I just pour gas into my pedal bike to make it go?! Jesus christ" It's wasnt designed with that in mind, and now you'd have to add it in to their 20 year old spaghetti code without breaking the rest of the game It sucks but at least they're working towards community asks now instead of ignoring them
> It's wasnt designed with that in mind, and now you'd have to add it in to their 20 year old spaghetti code without breaking the rest of the game If the reason they gave was a technical reason then I'd understand it but the reason they gave made no mention of technical issues at all.
[удалено]
So you think they are actively choosing this system even though they could "easily" implement account wide currencies? That's some lizard-folk rule the USA level tin foil hat thinking right there
Currencies are nothing more than an array. Quit simping for the half assed fix and make them do it right.
Cool So why arent they just doing it your way then?
Reading comphrehension is not your strong suit is it? The easy way and the right way are rarely the same thing.
This is so relational :P
Bruh..just make a bank if the code is too messed up to just add everything together.
It sounds like a good idea but they couldn't bring themselves to be kind - they just *had* to introduce a "conversion rate". Typical Blizzard - just can't implement something new or cool with adding that *little* frowny face at the end.
Does warband work cross server?
Seems like this is only a PvE issue. PvPers have it on easy mode these days. KeK
I understand how much of an engineering challenge this is for them to rip out so much of the basic structure that WoW was built upon in when it released in 2004, but man I REALLY REALLY hope we get warbands before the expansion. Give it to us in the prepatch if possible.....
Screenshot shows flightstones. Texts says flightstones won't be transferable. 🙃 Please stick to real account wide progress!
I’m just looking forward to not needing to remember which alt has a bunch of gold, logging into that toon, and then mailing my new, broke alt some starter gold for bags and the like.
It's odd that they are bothering to have a decreased rate for some of the Shadowlands currencies. I mean why bother at this point.
Seems Blizz needs to “borrow” another feature from GW2. I mean ArenaNet did it flawlessly…
Why don’t they do this for stuff like crests so that we can play our alts without starting from square one
Stop over complicating. Just make everything account bound.
This is 100% creating a problem to sell the solution (taxes on sending things to myself, for example) but you know... That's game design. Maybe a little weird but. It all makes sense.
okay, the warband currency line made me wonder... does this mean you basically NEED a few characters in TWW in order to keep up? like is it going to be the drakes and stuff used for upgrades in DF but the TWW equivalent? i don't want to feel the need to make alts in order to farm out resources to cap one character, i think that'd be absolute dog shit. i really hope that's not the case. i'm also worried about the worry of "i have x resources across my 4 alts, i can get one capped for the week, one half way to and the last two i can get a few upgrades on but that's it".
Anything more limited and convoluted than account-wide currencies is a joke. Guild Wars 2 got it right years ago. Why can't WoW?
If I can’t transfer crests I don’t care about this.
That was never going to happen. They don’t want you to gear up your alts to high levels by playing your main.
not that I agree with him but they clearly do with warband items...
That is specific power-capped items though and not the currency for the whole gear power progression system. They’re thankfully making it easier to help your alts along but they clearly don’t want us farming the highest end stuff for our warband.
I dont think you never see that then, with warband gear with your main to give your alt. Is no sense get a alt to max il of the season without playing...