The latest feature in World of Warcraft is well received by almost everyone. But that is not to be taken for granted – because the trading post could have been really terrible.
The Trading Post in World of Warcraft has been active for a little over a week and is enjoying great popularity. There are a lot of cool unlocks to be had, and whether you’re a transmog fanatic, a pet collector, or a mount fetishist, there’s something for everyone in the Trading Post to enjoy. But that the trading post is so well received is not a matter of course. Because Blizzard initially had a few ideas and plans that look really terrible in retrospect.
Where was this discussed? In an hour-long interview with the World of Warcraft Community Council, the developers behind the trading post answered questions from the community and also chatted about the ideas and changes they made during development. Some of them sound so terrible in hindsight that most should be glad it didn’t happen that way.
The monthly reward was intended as a purchase item
Anyone who has completed the travel journal in February will be rewarded with the stylish Ash’adar mount as a free bonus. But it wasn’t always planned that way. The original version in the development of the trading post was that there should be a very special item every month – in February it would have been the Ash’adar mount.
The special item would have been the “highlight” of the month. It felt awful, though, because suddenly you didn’t really have a choice anymore. The only decision I made was to buy this particular item as everything else felt inferior.
Ultimately, the developers came to the conclusion that it would be better to just give away the “best item” of the month as a free bonus. It just feels better and gives you more freedom.
Sets distributed over several months
In an earlier version of the trading post, you could buy each item individually. For example, an “ensemble” was then divided into 8 individual objects. If you wanted to buy a set, you had to buy a lot of items individually.
In internal tests, however, this led to people not finding items like the bracers in a set interesting and skipping them.
But that’s not all: Sets could be spread over several months. So about half of a set could have been offered in February, while the other half ended up in the trading post in March. This should give the feeling of being able to collect a set over time.
Luckily, that was just an attempt – because the idea was not well received by all sides.
Every day an item flies out of the rotation
Another idea was that the assortment in the trading post rotates more frequently. At one point it was planned that around 30 items would be available in the trading post. Every day, an item should fly out of the system below, while another one moves upstairs.
What would have provided more variety and faster new items in theory would have turned into complete chaos in practice. Not only would it have made you miss an item fairly quickly, but it would also have made you hoard trader currencies early in the month and hesitate to spend them – after all, cooler items might end up in the trading post later in the month that you can’t afford.
For exactly this reason, the feature did not go live.
Trading Post is just the beginning
However, the developers emphasize that the trading post is a feature that will run for a long time and will probably be revised a few times. If you find out, for example, that players are not getting by with their merchant currencies and would buy a lot more on average, this value can possibly be adjusted.
At the same time, they would have already created “tons” of content for the Merchant Post, so there’s always something new to discover over the next few months — and some that haven’t yet been datamined.
How do you like the trading post as it is now? Are you happy with the development of it? Or would you have found some of the ideas even good?
All of February’s Trading Post rewards are here.