It’s been a few months since the launch of World of Warcraft: Dragonflight, and the developers at Blizzard are continuing to release new content with patch 10.0.7 dropping this week, along with getting ready for what’s to come in the Embers of Neltharion update. World of Warcraft vice president and executive producer Holly Longdale and game director Ion Hazzikostas in a recent interview with Gamepur, shared some insight into one of the latest systems introduced to WoW.
The Trading Post is a new feature added to World of Warcraft: Dragonflight in January with patch 10.0.5. By completing challenges each month, players can earn Trader’s Tender that they can then spend on a rotating variety of items, including equipment, battle pets, and mounts. Despite some hiccups along the way, we asked the development team if they had any early thoughts on how this new system was progressing so far.
“It’s going better than we expected if I’m being honest,” Longdale said. “A lot of what we do is experimental, but it’s leaning on the feedback that we had. For quite a long time, players wanted to have access to stuff they may not have had easy access to. And, of course, by tying it to content people love to have activities to do if they are just checking into the game. For someone like me, there are a lot of activities I can do to earn to get me awesome stuff. So it was an experiment based on the feedback from the community, and it is going very well.”
“The Trading Post really is for everyone,” Hazzikostas added. “I think it’s pretty unique in that regard, no matter what your playstyle is, there’s a way of filling up that bar and playing the game you ordinarily would or chasing after specific activities if you want to do it fast. Ultimately everyone likes cool-looking stuff, but I think part of the point of this is also an expression of choice and agency. It’s not giving people a specific reward that some people may not like, but rather giving a wide range of options with the ability to pick the thing you think is the coolest. It’s been fun to see the start of this past month with people looking forward to what the new selection was going to be and checking out the catalog. It becomes this, ‘Christmas comes every month’ kind of thing.
Related: All Trading Post rewards in World of Warcraft
While players are able to use Trader’s Tender on the rotating collection of items, this selection of rewards is from a list of available items presently in World of Warcraft. But is there a chance the Traders Outpost could resurrect retired items and allow players to pick up cosmetics that have since disappeared? This seems to be something that the development team is open to.
“It’s certainly a possibility,” Hazzikostas said. “I think it’s a way for us to get cosmetic rewards into players’ hands. One of the advantages of the system is it unshackles our artists in some ways to just make a wide range of really cool stuff without needing to worry about, ‘wait, what dungeon boss would it make sense to drop something that looks like this?'”
“That is genuinely a consideration sometimes when we’re trying to integrate things into specific content updates. Whereas the Trading Post, by definition, casts a wide net and lets people express themselves. But also, it’s a way to give out some of the lower priced items or just color variants of old appearances that drop elsewhere but with colors that never had a source or were taken out. Those are the easy things you can get for 100 Tender. We’re definitely open to continuing to find ways to expand that as well while recognizing that players can spend their tender elsewhere.”
Hopefully, all of the issues players have been experiencing with the Trading Post have been ironed out now, and the next round of cosmetics goes over without a hitch.
