WoW Review: The Argent Tournament

Since I'm back into playing WoW a bit, although much more casually than before, I figured I'd talk a little about one of the major new events they added in the last content patch. A few days down the line and I'll be talking about the revamped Noblegarden and Children's Week events, as well.

The Argent Tournament is a new permanent in-game event in Icecrown, right on Arthas' doorstep. The idea behind it, as far as the lore goes, is to train warriors for combat against the forces of Arthas by having prospective combatants practice on each other. There's also another, one-time-only quest line that deals with "the dark knight", apparently someone who's been tasked by Arthas to infiltrate the tournament and kill off the most powerful fighters of both the horde and alliance.

Beyond that, its basically another daily quest hub that focuses a lot on a new mounted combat idea, which is based off the vehicle mechanics we've seen used all throughout Lich King content. The rewards are excellent - there are quite a few vanity items, some epic weapons (again, geared toward the casual player, not the raider), titles and a lot of reputation gains all around.

Let's talk about the positives first. Its nice that Blizzard is catering toward the role player some more - most, if not all, of the vanity items available through the tournament shout that out loud and clear. (Now if only they would actually enforce their RP server rules, right?) The new daily quests bring in cash and prizes that focus on what most casual players want. For the most part, things are soloable, as they should be for the casual player. Some quests are very short and sweet. For the non-mounted kill quest, all you have to do is fly the distance of a stone's throw away from the tournament and beat up some Scourge minions. There are a few quests which are random each day that have you going and nabbing a long-lost weapon of some sort, somewhere in Northrend. The hardest part about those is the time it takes to fly from Icecrown to either Howling Fjord, northeast Dragonblight or Grizzly Hills and back.

Unfortunately, there are some huge drawbacks to the tournament, as well, and I'm beginning to think even the awesome rewards aren't worth it. For starters, the mounted combat needs some major work. The NPCs can react as soon as an action is technically possible - humans have lag in their reaction time and their connection to the servers. The combat is clunky and the mounts don't function like regular mounts do, which makes the combat annoying and a hassle. If you don't use your abilities just right at just the right time, its likely you will lose versus the NPC opponents. This mounted combat accounts for roughly 75% of the daily quests you're tasked with to obtain the Champion's Marks needed to purchase all the cool stuff.

Sure, you could group up with someone and it would be easier, but that negates the point of casual content - relying on someone else to help you get the job done. Casual players don't always have the right circumstances or enough time to deal with group quests. And that brings me to point number two - one of the daily quests to receive two of your five daily Champion's Marks is an actual group quest. Why? Again, that is contrary to what casual content is supposed to be. Dealing with finding a group every day for this quest is not my idea of fun.

Lastly, the rewards should cost about half as much in terms of Champion's Marks. Sure, if these more "hardcore" players have the time (and they likely do if they're "hardcore"), they will be able to get the maximum amount of marks per day, even on multiple characters, thus allowing them to purchase the vanity items fairly quickly. (A jaunt on over to warcraftpets.com's comment section will show you just how fast some people are getting the vanity items.) Myself, I can swing about one or maybe two of the daily quests per day, and neither of them is the group quest, which means two marks per day. That's twenty days for a pet, fifty days for a mount…you get the idea. This is not even factoring in if I happen to miss a day (I miss at least one day every week). Seems a bit awkward to put casual content in the game that even casual players will never see for weeks or months down the line.

Overall, it’s a nice idea with excellent rewards. I'm just not sure it was executed properly, given the part of the player base its supposed to represent.