Fellow Classic players!
This post has no funny videos nor memes. But fear not! It’s about fun. Which you may or may not receive in near future. Please bear with me for an explanation.
It’s all about a recent change that has been introduced to the game. As you may have noticed, starting from 19th of December a Plain Letter item (a piece of paper you receive with an incoming mail) had become soulbound.
That change had a certain number of unforeseen or intentionally ignored consequences.
There wasn’t any explanation or any blue post to this. I, however, do not want to attribute it to poorly-thought-out intent of Blizzard’s team. The change is so clumsy and affects gameplay so drastically, I hope it is a bug. That is why I choose to speak up and I encourage, you, the community, to speak up en masse .
Some of you would, surely, say, big deal! Why do I care about the crappy letter some scammers may sell from AH or use it for lottery or whatever the infinity of ideas can come to people’s mind? Let Blizzard kill it with fire and forget about it.
Let’s us ponder on this.
Let’s assume this is not a bug. Hypothetically.
Aren’t there any means to battle the mentioned above flaws less invasively?
One could make those letters not eligible for sale on Auction House.
Or one can decided to leave a Plain Letter soulboundness to a Parental Control configuration.
One could even issue a loading screen tip with a warning of a possible AH scam.
But complete removal of a feature? A good game designer would always take into consideration the consequences that can occur in such complex and huge system like the game we play. And the consequences are huge! It happens that the Plain Letter is a significant part of RP toolkit.
It is big deal indeed.
As you may know there are not so many ways for players of the same faction to interact between themselves. To express themselves roleplayers rely heavily on language and conventional mechanics. One of very few in-game ways to enhance the roleplay is to exchange certain items. And if you want to build something with that in mind, you do think that things won’t change any time soon.
As the above-mentioned Plain Letter .
Let us pick just a few examples to illustrate what exactly was affected by the change. All those use cases, so to speak, were gathered from Reddit and Discord RP servers. I do not mention any names, but all the quotes belong to their respective authors. I encourage them to support this post and act. And I encourage you, a fellow creative player, to add more examples in the comments, because I am sure this is only a tiny part of possible use cases of the Plain Letter across the game.
“I have a close friend on an RP server that runs his own restaurant with these really cool menus that have little designs on them and everything. Now he won’t be able to hand those out, which is a shame… And what kind of barbarous place serves food and drink without a menu?”
“There is a guild on Zandalar Tribe which has non-playable alt as their Overseer (GM) and all members of the guild being simple grunts. The guild concept is built around receiving and passing Overseer’s orders from one member to another.”
“I would give out coupons for services of people referred me customers. Are these retroactively invalid now as they can’t trade them and I can’t check validity.”
“Plain Letters can be used as some form of signed contract for RP (since the signature appears). Since it’s no longer possible to show Plain Letters around, their use as an in-character roleplaying contract is void”
“It makes it impossible to archive large amount of communication. Plain Letters take up bank space. This makes it infeasible to collect large amounts of Plain Letters on a single character, and often archivist alts (bank alts) are employed.”
“Since the change came by completely unannounced large number of letters are now permanently trapped on the wrong kind of characters”
“Plain Letters can be used as in-character books to be shared around.”
“It is a form of custom quests that can be shared.”
“It is no longer possible to archive Plain Letters efficiently anymore. People have been keeping important correspondence in some bank, in case it might be useful for future RP. Since Classic bag space is pathetically low, people have been using Archivist alts (aka bank alts) to store large number of Plain Letters)”
“The change came completely unannounced and caught everybody unprepared. Now a lot of such Plain Letters are permanently trapped on the wrong characters”
It does seem like a big deal, doesn’t it?
We need those letters back.
Bear in mind those letters are still tradable in retail version of the game. It is certainly a bug. Or could it be worse? Could it be they watch if there is any outrage in Classic on this, and if there isn’t, those will be removed from Retail as well?
So, I ask you, please reserve a minute of your time and submit a bug-report (either in-game or via ticket system). You can just copy the following lines.
Plain Letters seem to be soulbound since December ~19 in Classic. Currently it is not possible to pass Plain Letters to other players anymore. This disrupts immersion and roleplaying in many levels. It is no longer possible to use messengers to hand letters over, or archive letters in a bank alt. Plain Letters have never been soulbound in Classic, and they are still free-to-trade in Retail. Moreover, the change itself or the rationale behind it was never announced anywhere.
Optionally, you can choose from one of the paragraphs above to add up for your reasoning.
A minute of your time can save thousands and thousands hours of fun for all of us.
Act now.
And thank you.
