Blizzard’s recent experimental streak on World of Warcraft has brought about two huge shifts in content through unique modes of play – Plunderstorm and the upcoming Mists of Pandaria Remix mode. Both of these take interesting and different approaches to World of Warcraft – in the case of Plunderstorm, by not being very WoW at all short of asset usage, and in the case of MoP Remix, by being a twist substantial enough that it is far more than what it appears at first glance. This week, I accomplished two things related to these modes – I finished the Renown track in Plunderstorm for all my rewards and I leveled a character through MoP Remix on the PTR to level 66 of 70 (and we’ll discuss why not cap when we get there). Given that, I have some strong opinions and analysis to present about these modes and what they might signal for WoW. This post is the first of two talking about these experiments, which I am separating just for the sake of them not being too long (the MoP Remix one will be long as hell still, though).

Blundering Into Plunderstorm

Firstly, let’s get the utilitarian analysis out of the way – Plunderstorm is WoW in name only, the game presented is a vastly different experience that just happens to be built upon the engine framework of WoW with WoW assets. It is a wholly different battle royale title that just happens to also be launched via the retail WoW client. Blizzard is very late to this scene, as it has arguably seen its peak by some analysis, but battle royales are still popular and easily-understood modes of gameplay. So how did Blizzard do?

Absent anything else but the core gameplay of Plunderstorm, it’s actually kind of good for what it is, in my opinion. As a game mode, I came to enjoy playing it in much the same way I do mainline battle royale titles like Fortnite – I don’t enjoy BR’s for long stretches of gametime, but I can easily spend about an hour a session playing away and generally have a pretty good time. The spell variety, randomness in landing points, and the little x-factors that happen when you stuff 60 people into a map and let them fight lead to a mode that has a fair bit of replayability and interesting mechanics. The limitations on loadout (2 attack spells, 2 utility, 1 item) leads to some decision friction, and the ability to loot copies of spells to upgrade add an extra layer of depth that can be decisive in some matches.

The major thing I kept coming back to as I played deeper into the Renown track is that I dislike the use of Arathi Highlands as the map. It’s fine, and the BfA glow-up helps it look modern and interesting with it already being designed around another PvP-like mode of gameplay for Warfronts, but it is also exceptionally plain. I wish they had chosen a different map, and player suggestions like Valley of the Four Winds from MoP or The Maw even were things that stood out to me as appealing way more than the use of Arathi. Those two suggestions take into account one of the main reasons the team chose Arathi in the first place – that it doesn’t have an abundance of trees to block views or drops. Given the map, matches feel a bit repetitive visually and don’t leverage the strongest aesthetics in WoW, but I will grant that Arathi has the core themes of WoW nailed down pretty well so I still understand why it fit. It also tends to feel too small for the 60-player match size – it doesn’t take long for most chests to be looted and a majority of the NPC enemies to be defeated, so a lot of the match ends up centering on navigating the map and how you handle skirmishes with other players. Again, for some folks, that’s the point – it is PvP, after all – but for a fair few others, it doesn’t have the depth of a Fortnite or PUBG, where you can spend a LOT of time just investigating the map, opening chests, and avoiding conflict. For that reason, I would say it is a simpler take on the overall BR concept, but it still works and I think, absent any linkage to retail WoW, is a pretty enjoyable experience. Maybe not enough to be someone’s main game, but pretty decent.

Now, where Plunderstorm connects back to retail WoW is through the battle-pass style Renown track and rewards, and on that front is where Blizzard kind of kicked a hornet’s nest.

WoW players are overwhelmingly motivated by cosmetic rewards across content types and difficulty levels – the most consistent excitement Blizzard can get is if something rewards a character customization, new piece of shiny armor, or something of the sort. With that knowledge, Blizzard made Plunderstorm’s hook a full suite of different pirate looks for transmog – mounts, pets, and a bunch of armor-agnostic clothes, accompanied by weapons that match. The Renown track dispenses these rewards in small bits, with most Renown levels giving one piece, and some giving a piece plus another item. The grind is long, requiring 100,000 plunder earned to get all the way over the finish line. If you enjoy Plunderstorm, this is fine, and if you don’t, well…the journey sucks, frankly. This topic invites a lot of incendiary conversations about whether or not most players “need” the items from Plunderstorm, or if it is okay for players to be excluded from rewards if they don’t want to play the baseline mode that gives them, and honestly, I think my perspective is somewhere in the middle. It is fine if people cannot get everything, because most players cannot get everything by virtue of how the game works. I am not a fan of PvP and not good enough at it to get the Gladiator or Elite sets, so I can’t have them. Do I want them? Sure, yeah. I could put the effort into learning and doing PvP to get them, but that’s a time investment (and stress investment given the average PvPer in WoW and how they talk to each other) that I don’t want to make.

The thing with Plunderstorm, however, is that it does have a path to get there for people who don’t want to engage with the mode in full. It is possible to engage solely in PvE gameplay in the mode and still get Plunder, and even enough Plunder over time to get the full Renown track done – it’s just time intense and extremely tedious. For those players, the ranks of which I count myself a member, Plunderstorm was a timesuck that didn’t feel great to play all the time, and it was a huge relief to hit 40 and be done with it. Even as I came to enjoy it a little bit, I still didn’t want to spend the amount of time I did in it, but I wanted the rewards enough that it was still worth doing in spite of that. There’s a segment of the WoW community that wanted to pretend that players doing that were being weird about it, but it is totally understandable I think and reveals a lot about some content creators (and Blizzard themselves) that dunking on people who wanted to PvE through it was an activity that any time was spent on. Through the lens of modern WoW and the playerbase numbers (PvP in WoW is an absolute minority of players!), it is quite simple to see why people weren’t thrilled and dunking on them just showed how cloistered and distant some popular WoW creators are from the average player.

You don’t have to be good at Plunderstorm to get the rewards, you just have to show up and stick to it, and I definitely disliked that Blizzard made it such a long track to grind through – an average match being 400-600 Plunder means it could take as many as 200 matches to get through the track! Even then, a match where you play exceptionally well and engage in a lot of PvP doesn’t really up the average that much, so it was still around 100 matches minimum for most folks. Captain’s Orders and the Daily Doubloons help a lot, and I optimized my time in the mode by doing an hour a day, making sure to hit Captain’s Orders as often as possible and doing Daily Doubloons when it came up for the day as a part of that hour, which reduced the friction a fair bit, but I still found it tedious and sort of unfun by the end. Even on matches where I tried going full PvP demon mode, my results weren’t better, and short of the fun of getting a couple of kills and the immediate joy of a winning fight, it was still sort of a grindy, repetitive activity. And that’s WoW, baby! – but because the core gameplay isn’t as good as it could be, it felt like a chore, a little bit like tedium.

Now if this was just a thing that was in the game in perpetuity, whatever, fine. I think what actually drove a lot of these concerns is that Plunderstorm is marked as limited time, with no clear end date. The rumor was six weeks, or 12 weeks, or maybe ending in June, but Blizzard hasn’t just come out and put an end-date on it, and so a lot of players are scrambling to get it done now not out of a strong desire to play, but because they want the stuff before it becomes unavailable. That leads to the feeling of forced grinding and the tedium that comes with it, because with no certain end in sight, players have to make smart assumptions. Will it be popular after Season 4 launches? Maybe, maybe not. Has it held up this weekend with a lot of people pushing to PTR to test MoP Remix? Dunno, but every streamer I know that was in Plunderstorm a lot spent the whole weekend in MoP on PTR, and that perception can help drive player trends. Without certainty, there will be panic, and the panic I saw was people fighting to get their rewards while matches were popping as the uncertainty of Plunderstorm’s future has loomed closer and closer. Honestly, my take is that the uncertainty drove the severity of reactions, and when coupled with the length of the grind, it led to unpleasant reactions. As I prepare this post to publish, they’ve just announced a double reputation week event for this upcoming weekly reset, which is cool – but the sheer size of the mountain you have to climb is pretty large even with that.

Plunderstorm also catches some rightful flack for how it was rolled out. A lack of testing use cases made clear early that the plunder rates and gameplay balance were a bit off, and the lack of team sizes larger than 2 was offputting in its own right. The inability to use characters from your WoW account (or even at least import their appearances rapidly) led to a disconnect between Plunderstorm and the main game (which might be the intention, but I don’t think a portion of the WoW audience connected with that!). Lastly, the big issue is that Plunderstorm was kept secret and advertised as a big content drop for retail WoW – no indication that it was a unique or separate mode of play, so patch drop day was a disappointment for those looking for content to do with their main characters, since the other half of the patch is just Season 4, which still doesn’t launch for another week.

So I come away with this – it’s a cool experiment and enjoyable in small bursts for me, but Blizzard saddled it with rewards that will go away, a long track to earn those rewards, and a shroud of uncertainty that made the rewards feel more like they had to be done sooner than later – which drove player apprehension and distaste for the mode and led to conflict between those who like Plunderstorm and those that don’t. All of this mired what is otherwise an inoffensive, halfway good battle royale set in WoW with player consternation. It’s a decently fun idea, don’t get me wrong – but the problems here are almost all in approach.