With the announcement of phase 5 and the AQ War Effort I was thinking about how many guilds across servers are likely hoarding materials. This discussion has been circulating the forums for a while now.
You have the group of people who want #NoChanges and wish the materials remain the same for turn-ins
Alternatively you could make an argument that without changes you are effectively ruining the spirit of classic by providing the authentic experience of going through the war effort blind.
Changing the mats on a dime seems a bit intense, same with scaling up the amount needed based on server pop.
I would like to propose the following:
Make all in-game mail items expire within 24 hours 2-3 weeks prior to the patch dropping for Phase 5 (much like BG marks) and also make them NON-RETURNABLE
This way hoarders will be forced to sell off the mats they have been sitting on, and yes technically they could store all of these mats on bank alts. Lets do some quick math:
88 slots in your inventory (4x 18 slot and 1x 16 slot base bag)
154 slots in your bank (28 base slots and 7x 18 slots)
Totel bag slots: 242
Lets take one of the materials needed, 90,000 copper bars which would require 4,500 slots.
You would need 19 (18.6) characters with 11 bottomless bags to carry ONE of the material requirements for the war effort.
This doesn’t even factor in the gold required to set up the bank slots and fund the bags for each character.
Feel free to check the math on this, but I highly doubt many servers will run into people hoarding all the mats across characters. Maybe some of the extremely high-pop servers, but certainly not all of them.
The change would only be temporary and it would only occur with notice allowing you to offload your mail that you can probably park on an alt until the patch drops.
The issue with this idea is that it’s one of those things where you can’t just close your eyes and magically all things feel brand new. Just because someone might want to recapture that feeling of first learning how to ride a bike, doesn’t mean it can happen.
The idea of offloading mail onto toons is a bad idea as well. It does nothing to enhance the game and just creates undue stress on the players. Classic WoW only allows a player so many characters if I’m not mistaken. So then they have to juggle things around so their mail doesn’t get deleted. That’s a lot more work and not a well thought out idea.
But this is exactly what they are doing now, if guild’s are claiming they have all the mats they need ahead of time this is the only way they are able to do it.
I’m going to assume that these guilds that are doing this already had a plan set up to make sure everything would be ready if and when the AQ event came to pass.
IE:
Started farming mats
Started making bags
Started making alts
Started getting guild mates
All of this done way before the idea even came to the table, just in case AQ came. This idea on the other hand:
A/B: HEY! get ready for the AQ event and prepare yourself for your mail to be deleted!
Player: But I’m not partaking in the AQ event?
A/B: WHO CARES!! your mail is getting deleted anyways!
Player: Thanks? I suppose I can try and make a few trash toons to transfer mail items to other accounts to keep them safe. Hopefully I can come up with a name before someone else does.
I like WoW and all, but this idea in my opinion causes way more issue than solves anything. Also the way AB sometimes handles things, I don’t see this one going over well at all.
This isn’t hard at all though, realistically how many items or stacks do you think the average person has idling in the mail? It’s likely <100 items unless you have been hoarding for the War Effort.
Also it goes without saying that using the mail system like this is not working as intended. You shouldn’t be allowed to have unlimited bag/bank space by keeping stuff in the mail endlessly.
“War effort” tag on mats gathered during the event would have stopped all of the hoarding.
Only allowing “War effort” mats to be turned in would have solved this and kept it in line with what happened originally in Vanilla.
Sure. We’re more efficient at farming but we wouldn’t be sitting on twice the required turnin like some servers are.
This was suggested waaay back before launch by another player in this very forum. It has been brought up several times since then.
It seems to be the best idea to recreate the event without existing player knowledge turning what should be at least a few weeks into 8 days.
Blizz being blizz ignored that feedback and now they know if they did do something like this. This playerbase would lose their gd minds.
Assume that you are right and that the dev team or whomever never intended for the mail system to act like extra bag slots for things to just sit there.
They were able to dig up old and repair old coding to make this work, but just had a complete oversight of adding a decay timer on mail?
I know that people like to poke at the dev team and all and really question why things happen sometimes, myself included. Adding a decay timer to the coding wouldn’t have been hard at all I don’t believe.
I also believe and I could be wrong here. The powers that be probably knew that they were going to go to at least the AQ event in classic. The game is now 15? years old? I believe they already knew people were going to prep for the event just in case it came to pass. And they still were like, “Mail decay timer? what is that?” I’m just not seeing the connection.
Again, I’ll ask you. What do you have against eleven year olds? You keep writing “11.” In proper english, numbers below 100 are written alphabetically.