Plunderstorm Redux

Plunderstorm is back (for a bit) and it's been updated. Kaylriene is quite enthused by the changes, but to me, they've been more of a mixed bag. I like that they added horses out in the open world that work like a temporary speed boost, and the fact that regular mobs respawn now is great in so far as I've been able to hit level 10 for the first time ever. (In the past, even if I lived quite long, by the end the map used to be completely scoured of all NPCs and treasures, so it was no longer possible to gain experience past a certain point.) Blizzard also added a training lobby, which is a nice enough idea but is basically just a copy of the pre-match lobby that doesn't time out.

Some new abilities were added as well, and while that's interesting in principle, it also feels to me like it's made it harder than ever to actually upgrade your weapons throughout the match as the odds that you'll just get a dozen different abilities drop at level one are also increased.

In addition, you can now queue up for Plunderstorm while you're logged into one of your WoW characters, which is a thing some people wanted I believe, but I didn't particularly care for. When I log in to play Plunderstorm, I'm often quite happy to just do that and don't want to do anything in "regular" WoW anyway, so I still prefer going in from the character selection screen as it is. In fact, I was rather miffed when I couldn't find that option anymore after a couple of days and appeared to be "stuck" being unable to change the look of my Plunder character (as you don't get access to the character customisation option when queueing from within WoW itself). It was only about a week later that I realised you could still select Plunderstorm from character selection, they just hid it away in a drop-down menu for some reason.

You also get to choose a colour-coded "drop zone" at the start of the match now, and you'd think that having more choice like that would make the game better, but to me it's honestly just made things more boring. It feels like the population self-segregates very heavily now, which makes matches a lot more predictable. As someone who's not good at the PvP part and just enjoys collecting shinies for the rewards, I tend to choose one of the "green" zones, and they do indeed tend to be pretty empty or at least few people that land there will immediately look for a skirmish. This makes it easier to get your daily objective done, but it's honestly also a bit boring. Yet if I try to "mix it up" by choosing one of the harder zones, that just means that I get ganked moments after landing and get nothing done. It makes me miss the chaos of players of different types all getting jumbled together randomly.

Fortunately I don't need to be too excited about the mode this time around, as Blizzard massively ramped up the rate of plunder acquisition, which I do think is another good thing, even if I found it slightly amusing. It's as if they really did hear all the feedback after the anniversary event about how they are always too conservative with rewards at the launch of something new and decided to go "OK, allow them to go all out and be done within a few hours this time if they want; let's see how they like it". I only play about a match a day but am able to buy something from the new Plunderstore after almost every match, and since there are more returning rewards (which I all earned last time) than new ones, I don't even have that many items left to chase after two weeks. But hey, it is what it is; I'll continue to play in small doses for the duration of the event. I just think it's actually a little less fun now than it was.