It appears that whoever was doing data entry on this mount and all related quest items to obtaining it went a little trigger happy on putting FACTION: ALLIANCE restrictions on every single item. For most of them it’s not really necessary but not really an issue either, like the honey items. But for the mount, it becomes an issue when horde mains who earned the mount on an alt aren’t able to use it.
Why is this a bug? It is not a pvp or faction mount, nor does it have any alliance specific branding. And other mounts within the same expansion with faction-specific questlines are not faction restricted, such as the Child of Torcali and Kua’fon on the horde side. There is no lore reason given why this particular mount is restricted to one faction while the horde-side equivalents are not. It is finished content that is unavailable to half of your players because of an overzealous data entry intern.
It’s not a bug; the mount and associated quests are for Alliance only. Vice-versa, there are many mounts that are Horde-only. Faction-specific items are common in this game.
Discussion around the Honeyback Harvester, and speculation about why certain items are faction-specific can be explored by either searching these forums for ‘Honeyback Harvester’ or performing a similar search on other discussion sites, or on Google for a general search.
In the end, there are indeed two separate factions in this game, and they’ve had faction-exclusive items available to members since day one (gear, pets, mounts, races). It’s not beyond the realm of imagination that a faction-specific mount was intended.
If you’d like to see this change, the best place to provide feedback is via the in-game suggestion tool, as the people responsible for changing something like a faction-lock on a mount don’t come to the Bug Report forums to collect feedback.
General Discussion is also a good place to post feedback, and developers do collect feedback from there, but I’d prepare for a full and frank discussion (both for and against any changes) if you utilize GD in this manner.
Are you on the dev team? Are Kua’fon and the Child of Torcali mounts horde-only?
No to either or both? To the best of my knowledge there is no blue post explaining what “reasoning” there is in this data entry error, and all “reasoning” comes from players excusing and legitimizing bugs as features.
They don’t have to provide reasoning. They decided to do this or that. For whatever the reason, they decided this mount to be an Alliance perk. You don’t have to like it but it’s their sandbox. That is the bottom line.
Common sense dictates that such a glaring bug, with hundreds or thousands of threads discussion the faction-lock, wouldn’t sit around untouched since 2019.
No, Kua’fon and Child of Torcali are not Horde-only to ride, but they can only be earned by Horde. Also an intended feature.
By contrast, the Warlord’s Deathwheel is Horde only, though. So there’s a precedent for mounts that are for one faction only.
Any ‘data entry’ error by Blizzard would have been noticed and dealt with, or at least spoken about, in one of the hundred thousand discussions about this that took place over the last two or three years, both on this site, and on sites like Wowhead, where Blizz employees frequently post in discussions over in-game elements.
Tweet @Warcraftdevs if you want a direct answer. Posting in bug report about a well-known and well-discussed feature of the game that came out several years ago is futile.
I don’t know how long you’ve been playing this game, but common sense is sometimes not in abundant supply over in the game design pit.
That is precisely my point. Kua’fon and Child are apples-to-apples equivalents to the Harvester, yet they were implemented correctly while the Harvester was not. Both of these mounts can be ridden by characters of either faction; neither has FACTION: HORDE on it. In general, the FACTION: HORDE/ALLIANCE tags tend not to be used except on pvp or faction branded mounts, neither of which the Harvester is. It is an implementation that violates precedent and convention within the same expansion.
The warlord’s deathwheel is a strongly horde branded mount. It makes sense it is horde only. Likewise for strongly alliance branded mounts, which the Harvester is not.
I don’t know why it’s so difficult for some of you people to accept this game is broken in many small ways.
This is the bug report board and I’m reporting bugs. How many years ago this content was implemented is irrelevant, they remain as bugs partly because of individuals like you who actively impede their recognition as bugs.
Source, please. That reads more like a fansite article than a dev post.
Kua’fon and Child of Torcali are Horde only - they are only obtainable by horde characters. However, the actual mount summoning “spell” for those mounts was implemented correctly, and not faction restricted inappropriately.
You can come up with a fair estimate based on the numbers next to my name here. A long, long time.
You seem to be laboring under the assumption that if Horde gets +1, Alliance gets +1. That is simply not the case. Fairness and equality are not guaranteed here.
I don’t know why it’s so difficult for some of you to let things go. Obsessing over a faction-lock in a game, when there’s A) no rule of law stating there cannot be, and B) there’s precedent for faction-locks, and C) there’s been no change in years … seems silly to me.
Accept that it is the way it is. One faction having a cool mount and an entire extra faction to get cool stuff from is not some horrible negative thing. Complaints like this seems to be based in jealousy, which in and of itself is ridiculous, because anyone can roll an Alli toon.
Stop for one moment and consider it’s not a bug. You started out with ‘data entry’ bug, which to begin with isn’t a sound argument - a ‘data entry’ bug is when you mistake a 7 or an 8 or you hit ‘y’ twice.
Here we have an entire faction that is for Alliance only, rewards that are for Alliance only, and a mount that is for Alliance only. That’s one hell of a ‘data entry’ error.
You chalk this up to someone hitting the Enter key twice instead of once, but the actual work involved was probably the product of several people over weeks of time.
You’re just looking to argue and nitpick at this point.
It’s from Wowhead and one of their guides. The same site that Blizzard actively encourages people to use. So it’s a sanctioned site. Not just some flimsy ‘fan site’. Not everything has a Dev post. The same information is found on Wowpedia and other sources, but Wowhead is just as well as hearing directly from the Devs and GMs.
That isn’t what I’m saying at all. Please at least do me the courtesy of reading my posts properly, if we’re going to argue. We have three mounts with faction specific obtainment methods. Two of them are implemented one way, and the third was implemented in a completely different way, seemingly by a different member of the content implementation team with little knowledge about best practices, working solely off notes given them. An intern, possibly.
Wowhead is an unofficial fan site. Thank you for proving my point.
Stop for a moment and consider that it is a data entry error that has gone unaddressed because of armies of individuals like you wasting their time arguing to their dying breath that a bug is actually working as intended. Would you personally be financially damaged if Activision spent a little bit more money on bug fixing? I can’t conceive of any other reason why you people would want to obstruct bug reporting to the extent that you do.
I can’t get into FF no matter how hard I try, so I’ll likely be here until the end. But heavens above sometimes I don’t know how our SFA folks do this day in and day out.
Like I said, you’re arguing to argue. When people file tickets, the most common templated response FROM BLIZZARD directs players to WOWHEAD. Unofficial or official, sanctioned or unsanctioned - unless you’re being purposefully dense, that isn’t something done lightly. There are no other sites that Blizzard directs players to.
You’ve been given reason and logic.
Blizzard decided to make it Alliance only. It’s been a point of contention since it was announced. They have left it as is since it was implemented. That is not a bug.
And with that, I’m taking my leave because you’re not going to be content no matter what anyone says. Even if there were a Blue answer to this somewhere in all of those hundreds of threads back from years ago - you would still want to argue against it. This is not a bug.
Unless you have a blue post from a senior member of the design team explaining the reasoning behind this wonky and inconsistent implementation, I’ll thank you to keep your blind speculation as to what is and isn’t a bug off of the board intended for reporting bugs. Until you do provide that, what we the users can see suggests, provided one is armed with a little bit of common sense and insight into how corporate software development is done, that this is a bug. At best this is bad implementation done in violation of best practices. Either way, it calls for a fix.
Because I’m an idiot and I was trying to dig through old threads for a Blue post for you –
Blizzard Patchnotes from 8.2.5. The original post By Blizzard. A mount for Alliance players, other bee-flavored rewards that both factions can earn. Working as intended.
You could use the exact same wording to describe both of the other BFA mounts that only Horde players are able to earn.
Again, it baffles me that you people are so invested in arguing against fixing bugs in this game. Why? A little forum pvp because playing the actual game is too dull? High on kool aid fumes, perhaps?
Because regardless of your insults and your inability to understand things that don’t play out how you’d like them to? People like Darth, myself and so many others enjoy helping people. Sometimes we enjoy the hunt of finding solutions and answers, even as sometimes we grit our teeth and are thankful reaching through the screen isn’t possible.
Your arguments about this mount are not unique. It was hashed and rehashed over the spans of countless threads and thousands of responses. Blizzard programmed this mount to be this way. Why? Because they wanted to. Anything else we’re not entitled to know or understand the reasoning of it.
Either way, you’ve reported what you think is a bug. It’s not, by all references given. But it’s here for staff to see and do what they will with it. And now, since I’ve at least proven my point that even a post from Blizzard directly isn’t enough to appease you? I’m out. All the best.
They’re not unique, no, but given this issue was never fixed, and no satisfactory developer explanation given, in the past year or two or however long it’s been, they need to be brought up again and again and again until they are. As I’m sure you can imagine these things can slip through the cracks and not get noticed the first time around, which is why it’s important for those of us who actually want to fix and improve this game for everyone, even those like you who argue against it in bad faith for a bit of fun to go with your morning caffeine, continue to report them.
I am out, tho, really I do mean it this time. I have FFXIV to get to. Why I still lurk here sometimes escapes even me.