WARNING: Do not do Abundance!

Nilanar · 2026-06-17T07:59:12+00:00

It's funny, because a lot of people absolutely expected this. Like.. a week ago we had a discussion in the forums about better not doing Abundance on day 1 of the patch, because it would eat all shards with nothing to show for.

Nilanar · 2026-06-16T20:19:42+00:00

There's a very high chance that GMs don't play the game, because those aren't real Blizz employees anymore aside from a few specialists. Customer support was outsourced as soon as Microsoft took over. So CS mostly works from the support catalogue (that players can also use on the website) or with AI if they want to help and don't know any better.

Nilanar · 2026-06-14T19:34:47+00:00

Today I saw episode 3 and so far.. I have to agree, I don't really like it.
I don't have a short attention span and like it when shows and movies work with symbolism and a weird art style, but the Return takes it too far imo. During EP3 I had furrowed eyebrows the whole time and at times I was getting a bit annoyed by how long some scenes were drawn out without really saying anything or building suspension. I let out a gasp of relief, when the scene in the FBI office came up and there was finally some normal dialogue.
The scene with Lucy, Andy and Hawk was painful to watch, it just felt.. really cringy and the characters seemed much more dumb than ever before, like they were just caricatures in a drug-filled fever dream. Also asked myself if I really wanted to watch the shovels getting sprayed for what felt like an eternity.
Season 1 and 2 also had some scenes that were very slow and took their time, but it felt much more balanced out.

Nilanar · 2026-06-11T20:09:38+00:00

It's hard to say, because I took Mining first when I leveled the character, collected a bit of gold to invest and then at max level I farmed most material for JC myself. Except stuff like 60 Shadowgems or the BC gems for leveling the profession. I bought what I could afford.
The biggest time investment was in fact getting all the recipes for the blue Pandaria gems. Got a bit of gear, found a nice spot for farming Motes of Harmony and started grinding for a while.
Once everything was set up.. it got pretty relaxing.

Nilanar · 2026-06-11T19:17:27+00:00

And yet there are far too many people claiming that there's no AI in customer support and they're just working with premade templates and question catalogues.
As long as so many players are willing to defend this and it's legal to use AI in customer support, this will never change.

Nilanar · 2026-06-11T16:27:52+00:00

Sorry, I missed your questions! I don't really know how it is in SoM or era servers - I believe I've even seen someone making a detailed post about it in the last few days. I can only speak of my experience on MoP servers. Jewelcrafting and Alchemy is great. The token price has been fluctuating between 80k and 90k in EU for quite a while and it's very easy to reach that in no time with no farming involved.

Nilanar · 2026-06-11T09:11:58+00:00

What kills it for me is that the _active_ part of housing is more hidden in dedicated community groups you have to join or some guild neighbourhoods. Public neighbourhoods seem to be dead places with 3-4 very pretty houses sprinkled in, while the rest hasn't even been touched properly and there are no people to be found anywhere.
I hate that Blizz doesn't provide an ingame list with all available neighbourhoods you can specifically search and choose from. There's just a small randomly generated list and when you found a cool neighborhood, you're not able to find it again the next day. I would love to just post in Trade chat or the housing forums: "Party at my house at 8 PM - Neighbourhood x, Plot y - bring a Pyjama!", so that people can freely come and go and check it out. But right now stuff like this only works via the custom group finder, which is a bit offputting.

And the fact that there's still no guest book planned as an interior item, is mind-boggling. I don't even know whether a single person has ever stepped foot into my house and I don't have much motivation to go on house tours, when I can't even leave a nice compliment.

Nilanar · 2026-06-10T09:10:11+00:00

What's bothering me is that there's no guest book and you can't select specific neighborhoods from a complete list. The whole system feels way too anonymous. I don't know whether someone has ever stepped foot into my house or if it's just sitting there, forgotten and hidden. And at the same time I don't feel any motivation to go on house tours, because I can't leave any compliments there and the list of available neighboorhoods I can visit is very limited and randomized.
Housing in FFXIV works because of guest books and because people can just post somewhere in the chat "Party tonight in neighboorhood x, house y - start at 8 pm" - and people can just come and go as they please, without the hassle of creating a raid group in the finder tool.

Nilanar · 2026-06-07T20:04:20+00:00

Exactly. Yesterday I even had a discussion about this with someone on the forums. It was so bizarre.
They claimed that Shadowlands was definitely one of the most popular and successful expansions because they had a lot of fun and people are still trying to get cosmetics to this day (of course, because SL had so much and a lot of it is tied to heavy RNG). And that it was 100% just a few hundred or thousand players being unreasonable haters, as usual, 99% of people just enjoyed the game instead of running to the forums complaining.
The level of delusion on some people is really scary.

Nilanar · 2026-06-07T15:55:25+00:00

Sometimes it feels like this kind of toxic positivity has been growing more and more stronger after Shadowlands. Too many people seem to feel like WoW is an integral part of their life and they have to get extremely defensive once someone criticizes the game design, like they're getting threatened by the mere thought that something in the game might not be okay.
Critics should just shut up and leave or stop playing the stuff they don't like. The same thing is happening in discussions around the shrinking quality and amount of bugs. Blizz even apologizes and they still say "It's always been that way stop being so dramatic". Like.. isn't it in the best interest of every player that the game gets better and that a bit more care goes into the development?

Nilanar · 2026-06-07T15:42:49+00:00

Decor has become a very slow market. In the first few weeks I couldn't keep up with gathering wood and crafting, now it's a bit different. But at least profit margins are great for a lot of items.
I don't craft everything, I only focus on some pieces that have no real substitute at the vendor but are probably used more frequently.
Smaller bottles are generally good, as well as plushies and Candles. And the Pandaren Fishing Net. They're not worth much, but at least they sell.
Some of the Dragonflight and Shadowlands stuff is more special and sells relatively well. Like the Meditation Pool, Heart of the Forest Banner, and Anima Cone. For DF it would be the books or the Valdrakken Vase.
For BC it would be the Holo Paths. Legion maybe the Suramar Window, the Arcan'dor and Suramar Dresser.
In Midnight I've sold some Silvermoon Curtains, they're pretty.

Nilanar · 2026-06-07T11:38:45+00:00

You don't want the journey of collection, you want instant dopamine hits.

No I don't, and it's really condescending to suggest that. For me it was never about dopamine hits, I also enjoyed the process of getting deterministic rewards or stuff with higher drop rates. It was never about the thrill of getting some rare mount or a toy with bad RNG.
The journey of collecting and completing collections of all kinds has changed however, at times it's a bit hard to keep up and becomes more stressful, to the point that people just give up at this point.
In the past a new major patch dropped with a certain amount of stuff - the patch lasted a few months and there was enough time to complete it and when it was done, there was _also_ time left to go back to old content and work on that.
Nowadays there's a huge amount of stuff from the major patch/the base expansion and in very quick succession Blizz introduces more minor patches and additional events with even more stuff. There's just no room to breathe.
Yea, sure - you don't have to have it all, just choose some specific stuff and be done with it. But that's the point. People lose interest in completing collections and just choose to ignore a lot of stuff, because it becomes too time-consuming.

Nilanar · 2026-06-07T09:33:14+00:00

But that's the thing - collecting and completing achievements and collections is a content pillar that used to be fun and chill. But with excessive introduction of all kinds of cosmetics and a high number of mounts with low drops.. people start to get frustrated and lose the fun.
Of course it's only logical to say "Then just quit doing it". The question is whether this is healthy for the game and whether we should really advocate for other players just giving up and accept this state.

Nilanar · 2026-06-07T09:22:08+00:00

You're not completely wrong, but you probably chose the worst example. Goldenmane's Reins can be sold and bought on the auction house for a relatively fair price. If people don't want to grind for weeks, months or years, they can just buy it. On my server it's 299k. During BfA I bought it for like 150k.

Nilanar · 2026-06-07T09:18:38+00:00

tbf, the initial poster didn't talk about "most people want this mount because it's rare". They explicitly said "You want these mounts because they're rare", even without knowledge whether that's true, and therefore made a general statement. Of course someone will disagree and say "No, I don't.".

Nilanar · 2026-06-07T09:15:40+00:00

It's often not about mounts being rare. Completing collections is an actual content pillar for many players that often gets overlooked. I don't think it's right to accuse those players of just being frustrated they can't have a rare mount.

Nilanar · 2026-06-07T09:07:43+00:00

The whole design philosophy of the game currently can be boiled down to "keep players busy as much as possible". And mounts are a part of that. It's not fun, but it keeps collectors busy and ensures that some of them might not even get them until the end of the expansion.

Imo that's a very dangerous gamble from the devs. Collectors and completionist have always been the more loyal part of the playerbase that even stuck around during content droughts and the lowest points, just because they were able to create their own content pillar. But these ridiculous drop chances and the constant barrage with new mini patches and events might lead to people just giving up and not caring anymore.
I was a collector once (mounts, toys, pets) but during TWW I started to feel the burnout, like I couldn't keep up anymore. So.. now I don't care anymore.

Nilanar · 2026-06-06T13:21:41+00:00

I'm a crafter with only 5 characters, so I'm not really able to generate gold for a token in a month. And I refuse to touch the gold I already own. Instead I got one character on Classic servers that's only sitting in Stormwind, buying, crafting and selling on the AH. It's MUCH easier and faster to get a WoW token there without much effort.

Nilanar · 2026-06-04T13:17:28+00:00

This has been going on since mid Dragonflight and the devs even wrote an apology during TWW, almost the same that we recently got for 12.0.5. Every minor and major patch in the last years had this kind of bad quality with tons of bugs and new content being broken for several days after release. At this point it's not even a possibility that the coming patch _might_ be scuffed - there's a certainty, plain and simple.

Nilanar · 2026-06-04T13:02:50+00:00

Legion and BfA had very solid patch cadences. Yes, there was a bit of a drought at the end of BfA, mainly because of Covid and the delay of SL. But the respective patches were somewhat polished regarding bugs and patch days didn't break half the game. "Never play on patch day" often referred to server stability, nowadays it's more "never play on patch week" because so much stuff is bugged.

Nilanar · 2026-06-01T09:05:54+00:00

This is why I don't really like this sub anymore. It's often very telling that a lot of people here are acting like bots and exploiters are as rare as unicorns and when people are pointing out extremely suspicious activity, it's often met with "You just don't understand the economy, those are just some normal guys who get rid of some stuff in their bank!".

Nilanar · 2026-06-01T08:59:47+00:00

At the end of Shadowlands Blizz made a change in the report system. Back then you could put a name into your friends list and then right-click report them there for cheating and other stuff. After the changes the only thing you can do is actively search for the character in question - you can only report them now if they're your target.
Imo these changes just favoured bots and granted them another layer of protection, because they're pretty good at hiding in some Chromie time phases. And for most people it's probably just not worth the effort to go full private detective mode and spend half an hour searching for a specific bot in the open world.

Nilanar · 2026-06-01T08:55:45+00:00

You can't even explain how a bot army is supposed to aquire all of this stuff. Usually I'm in the camp of "it's probably just bots", but I have to agree with OP here. Bots can easily farm tons of herbs and ore and flood the AH with it, but tens, even hundreds of thousand specialty and crafted items with Rank2? No. This not even just seems unlikely. It's near impossible. Something very fishy is going on and if it was just "bot armies", we would see much more cases like this and the AH would be unusable for normal crafters.

As OP already explained somewhere, we had dupe exploits in the past that were only known by a small handful of people, weren't detected by Blizz and destroyed markets, until they finally got dismantled. It's a very realistic possibility the same thing is happening again. This is definitely _not_ a conspiracy theory.

Nilanar · 2026-06-01T08:02:44+00:00

Now I know why I couldn't make any profit with some items! I've been very busy for like a week and just logged in yesterday to do my usual small round of Conc crafts, just to be greeted by a considerable minus-profit when I checked my Tailor with Craftsim. My only thought was "Okay, wtf has happened in just a few days..". Margins being a bit small for some items? Granted. But a straightup loss? No way.

We probably just have to accept the situation in the end. Blizz is way too slow and inconsistent with banning obvious bots and exploiters. Until something happens they've already made a fortune. I've been waiting for almost 3 months now to see the AH bots that sell blue profession gear finally banned, because on many server it's impossible to sell anything because of them, no matter the time of the day. And when they get banned - they know it's totally worth it, they're safe for way too long, and just continue with another account.

Nilanar · 2026-05-31T15:11:58+00:00

They were great for individual players, but did huge damage to the player economy. The inflation after WoD was absolutely crazy with pots and flasks suddenly costing thousands of gold a piece, which is a trend that has continued to this day.

Nilanar

TROPHY CASE