Cheeky Upgrade option in Character Screen

Those cheeky fellows working in Blizzard have plonked an ad for Mists of Pandaria in the character screen you see after login.

It is not subtle or unreasonable, and after my initial reaction of “what the f?” I considered using that to purchase my upgrade.

It makes me ponder if we will see character customisation, race change, name change and such in that screen too. Heck it would even be handy to be able to buy month-by-month time as well. The user is logged in, so might benefit from it. All the special offers for pets and such could be there too.

Are you pondering that already Activision?

Honor Valor Justice Conquest Trading

Just in from the patch notes for 4.1 – swapsies on Honor, Justice, Valor and Conquest points. Yes you read that right, we will be able to switch lower-end point rewards amongst each other, which in effect makes participation in different forms of gameplay more desireable for those looking to gear faster, or in a more flexible manner.

Honor is now purchasable from the Justice Commodities Vendor at 250 Honor per 375 Justice.
Justice is now purchasable from the Honor Commodities Vendor at 250 Justice per 375 Honor.
Conquest is now purchasable from the Valor vendor at 250 Conquest per 250 Valor.

What I really like is that it offers more than one path to get to a basic gear readiness.

This a good change to let players spend points they may have, which are otherwise wasted. It also offers a path to upgrade alts, and it offers players who may have not considered playing another style a way to get quicker entry.

It won’t help you if you’re already max’ed out with gear, but then clearly that is not the goal. It will also potentially create scenarios where a player will be in pvp gear with basically no pvp skill (which is not a new scenario), and pve players who only have played pvp. Is this a risk? Well yes, of course, but the impact of this will be an interesting experiment in freedom of choice.

Happy gearing.

ps. Please send snarky observations about how easy the game is, or how this is broken the backbone of the challange to spam@whine.com – I mean really there is enough going on in patch 4.1 to make every player slightly nervious, and to expect a game not to change is just silly. I grant you that sometimes I break that rule too – to blog is to whine a little.