After strong pushback from the World of Warcraft community over planned changes to starter gear sets in Patch 9.1.5, developer Blizzard Entertainment has responded to player concerns.
World of Warcraft patch 9.1.5 is fast approaching, and there are plenty of changes arriving in Shadowlands with the game’s latest large-scale update. Several of the planned adjustments already have the community up in arms, however.
Along with pushback over content changes made in the wake of Activision Blizzard’s on-going lawsuits, and a lack of in-game updates in general, fans were outraged after discovering a rework of the starter gear sets for many of WoW’s playable races.
Now, after overwhelmingly negative feedback, the WoW developer has responded. First reported by Wowhead, a Blizzard community manager addressed these concerns on the World of Warcraft forums, and issued a welcome clarification to help ease the discontent amongst players.
Blizzard responds to World of Warcraft starter set backlash
Days after word of the changes began to spread, Blizzard issued a response. Under one of the many posts blasting the changes to various World of Warcraft armor sets, community manager ‘Kaivax’ explained just how the developer plans to address these concerns.
“Please don’t worry that any original starter gear might go away forever,” the CM’s response read, before confirming that “We’re working on making all of those older starter pieces available to players who want them.”
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This clarification seemed to be quite well-received by WoW players. “Awesome news!” one fan responded. “Oh thank goodness,” another exclaimed, before continuing “[I] was really, really worried when I heard about these new starting armors.”
While most of the responses took a positive tone, others were more skeptical that Blizzard would actually follow through. “We heard the same thing about Garrison crafting gear,” they pointed out, “[And] we’re still waiting on that, too.”
It remains to be seen whether or not this update makes it into World of Warcraft (or if it does, when), but Blizzard’s response was certainly welcome news to many players, particularly when most of the announced changes have been less-than-favorably received thus far.
