World of Warcraft gets a battle pass today with the Trading Post — fancy cosmetics and a few bugs abound

World of Warcraft is getting the trading post starting today, a battle pass style system that allows players to complete challenges for tender tokens that can be traded in for a rotating collection of cosmetics.

It’ll be free too! All players who play World of Warcraft now have a whole new type of content to engage with aside from raids, dungeons, PvP and legacy content. Hopefully with this, some of the typical grind of dailies and weeklies can be chipped away.

Those with characters in the Horde or Alliance can find the trading post in Stormwind and Orgrimmar respectively, where vendors and a selection of the current rewards are displayed for interested parties. Just for logging in each month, you get 500 tender, at which point you can earn an additional 500 from monthly challenges.

With separate challenges for PvP and PvP content, the idea is that any player can net the maximum currency each month regardless of playstyle. All in all, it’s a good addition to World of Warcraft, one of the last vestiges of the legacy subscription model that was up until relatively recently a harbour from modern live service practices. Adapt or die is the game, and World of Warcraft has been playing it for a long time.

So how has this feature been received? Well, on day one there have been some bugs and other issues for a subset of players. Looking at Reddit, there are claims of lost tender tokens, as well as lost progress when relogging. However, the feature is proving hugely popular with players flocking towards the new trading posts in capital cities.

If you needed any more evidence that the live service model is king, the free-to-play fomo-driven method of player retention that we see all the time, then World of Warcraft jumping on ship is perhaps the most telling sign of the times. A game that has dominated for years with dailies and weeklies, through reputation grinds and rare mount farms, taking the plunge into a battle pass.

However, thanks to the subscription model already in place, the trading post might actually be one of the best value-adds from a battle pass we’ve seen in a while. With these things there’s a choice between a pass being packed with fomo for maximum retention, or a healthy player-driven system that is lenient with the community.

WoW already can keep people around for the most part, so they can loosen the grip around your time and wallet and add in perks in the system you don’t often see elsewhere. All the cosmetics will eventually come back again so there’s no real rush to max out every monthly pass, higher cost rewards like mounts stick around for up to three months. Stuff like that makes the whole deal feel better.

Ultimately, time will tell whether the battle pass will keep those who aren’t already enraptured with World of Warcraft around and having fun. Dragonflight is probably the best expansion the game has seen in years so this would be the time to try out a system like this, at a time where people and dropping off due to some unfun grind or subpar endgame.

If you're looking for some Dragonflight content, we've got all the Dragonflight glyph locations here, as well as World of Warcraft players loving the new Dragonflight system to fly through the map!