Blizzard is meeting gold-starved World of Warcraft: Forever players halfway by making more quests more generous regarding the resource. That said, an old feature that plenty used to grind gold is staying gone.
When WoW: Forever launched, players racing to level up as swiftly as possible found that the XP-to-gold conversion for quests completed at max level was no longer present. If you'd like a quick history lesson, Blizzard added the feature to OG WoW before Burning Crusade launched, and it worked simply – once you're at max level, you get gold instead of XP.
The decision not to include that feature in World of Warcraft: Forever hasn't been popular. As such, Blizzard has made an appearance online to explain some of its rationale.
"We left that functionality in place in Classic Era in 2019, but we decided that for WoW: Forever, we would remove the XP-to-Gold conversion, as it created an incentive for players to hold a full quest log worth of completed quests to hand in after hitting level 60 for maximum gold returns," community lead Randy "Kaivax" Jordan explains in a forum post. "Under those conditions, the optimal way for players to level to 60 was to simply grind creatures for XP and not hand in quests at all, which is not a design we want to retain in WoW: Forever."
Jordan continues by explaining that one thing Blizzard did not account for, however, is that only 25% quests in the original World of Warcraft actually provide raw gold rewards. So on that front, Blizzard is saying, yeah, actually you might have a point if you think the MMO is being stingy.
But hopefully not any longer. Blizzard has now released a World of Warcraft: Forever patch that ensures most quests at level 48 and above now additionally reward gold. That said, don't expect the return of XP-to-gold conversion, as "it would be inappropriate" to have players keep hold of quests rather than hand them in.
"This change brings high-level quests in line with the rest of questing in WoW: Forever, with the goal of giving players a good reason to complete those quests while leveling up to 60 and thereafter," Blizzard explains in a new patch post. "Quests that were not affected by this change include those that already reward valuable items, repeatable quests, and those that don't provide significant rewards because they're quick, easy, or trivial to complete."
World of Warcraft: Forever is out now.
