The event “Radiant Echoes” in World of Warcraft is causing trouble. Many people don’t like it – because they have to just stand around all day.
Only a few weeks left until The War Within finally starts. The pre-patch 11.0 is already live, and since July 30, the pre-event “Radiant Echoes” has also started. However, this is not well received by a large – or at least quite vocal – part of the community. The problem is: You can’t play the event continuously, but have to be active at certain times. This has upset some.
What kind of event is this? In the “Radiant Echoes” event, echoes appear at various locations in Azeroth at regular intervals. In a 3-phase event, these echoes must be defeated. First, a large mob, then several events in the style of joint “world quests,” and finally another boss.
- Currently, such an event starts every 90 minutes and is active for a few minutes – depending on how quickly players complete the tasks.
- In the coming week (starting August 7), the event will start every 60 minutes.
- In the following week (starting August 14), the event will start every 30 minutes.
What is the criticism of the event? Several points are being criticized. These can be summarized as follows:
- There are too long wait times. An 80-minute “break” is too long to wait. Players’ time is not respected.
- Killing mobs grants too little currency.
- The event lags due to too few shards, and the individual missions end too quickly.
- Twinks can hardly level up through the event.
What does the community say? We certainly don’t want to withhold some comments from the numerous posts in the WoW subreddit. At least there and in the official forums, the atmosphere is heated:
- “With every expansion, they promise us that the times will improve, but now we have to wait a whole 3 weeks for a relatively quick pre-event, which just shows that they haven’t learned their lesson.” – CluckingChicken
- “So cool that these things rotate every 1:30 hours, but the event lasts at most 10 minutes. That’s more than an hour in which people just sit around and grind mobs for 1-5 currency or hope not to miss the next event.” – kinlopunim
- “I felt hyped, logged in, did the quests. So far, so good. Went to the event location, only to see that I had to wait an hour and logged out again.” – Red_coats
How was that with previous events? When looking at it soberly, pre-events were actually criticized before the launch of every expansion and did not go well.
- The zombie plague before “Wrath of the Lich King” made many angry, as you were permanently transformed into an undead and the capitals were unusable for days.
- With “Battle for Azeroth,” the criticism was that it was basically just a short quest line and had no repeatable content.
- In “Shadowlands,” you could farm rare enemies, but only on a fixed schedule of 10 minutes. Here too, most of the event consisted of “standing around” if you wanted to have every mob.
Mostly, the positive memories of them only come years later when you reflect on it and come to the conclusion that it was actually quite okay.
Is the event really that bad? It probably depends a lot on personal feelings. Some were able to secure the most expensive reward on the very first day, namely the mount for 20,000 memory remnants – and that without grinding mobs, but simply through regular participation in the event.
Anyone who has little time during the day and prefers a “permanent grinding opportunity” will be mainly disappointed by the event.
However, many of the criticisms are likely to resolve themselves in the coming weeks as the event takes place every 30 minutes – even if Blizzard adjusts nothing else. It’s still at least questionable why the timer wasn’t set directly to 30 minutes but instead saved for later. This can indeed give the impression that they want to suggest: If you want to get everything done quickly, you should wait until week 3.
