WoW: The War Within's Big Pre-Patch Event Has Players Just Waiting Around

World of Warcraft: The War Within's big pre-patch event is live now, and it's intended as a way to quickly gear up characters or even level up new ones ahead of the MMO's new expansion on August 26. However, as players quickly realized, the new Radiant Echoes event isn't good for either one of those things due to how it's currently structured.

On paper, the event sounds fun. Memories of Azeroth's past manifest in one of three older zones, requiring players to complete various objectives in order to summon a boss from the game's long history, like the Lich King, Onyxia, or Ragnaros. Defeating enemies and the bosses, as well as completing objectives, earns players a new event currency, Residual Memories, that can be used to acquire catch-up gear and various cosmetics.

It seems simple, but the main issue currently plaguing players is how infrequently the event is actually active. Rather than being active almost all the time, as many players expected and is usually the case for the game's pre-patch events, players complete the event for one zone in just a few minutes, after which it takes about an hour and a half for the event to cycle and begin in another zone. In the meantime, the game tells players it can stick around in the zone where the event was recently completed to farm lingering enemies, but those enemies drop such a small amount of event currency that players would need to kill thousands of them to earn enough to be able to purchase a single item. The best way to earn Residual Memories is to complete a daily quest that awards 1,500 of them, but even those can only be done three times a day on a single character, and still requires players waiting around for hours in order to complete.

WoW: The War Within's Big Pre-Patch Event Has Players Just Waiting Around

WoW: The War Within's Big Pre-Patch Event Has Players Just Waiting Around

WoW: The War Within's Big Pre-Patch Event Has Players Just Waiting Around

WoW: The War Within's Big Pre-Patch Event Has Players Just Waiting Around

WoW: The War Within's Big Pre-Patch Event Has Players Just Waiting Around