WoW's new pirate battle royale ignites a baffling flame war between PvP and PvE players, meanwhile Blizzard's ramping up the rewards to make the grind a touch kinder

World of Warcraft's funky, limited-time event, Plunderstorm, is just fine by my making. I've played a handful of rounds, and experienced a slightly-clunky romp where you kill some enemies and messily try to land some skillshots Guild Wars 2 style in an MMO not really built for it. But hey, you can get some mounts out of the whole deal.

For the completely uninitiated, Plunderstorm is a battle royale mode that's separate from the main game. You dip in with a custom-made pirate avatar, run around collecting plunder, and fight to be the last swab standing. The more plunder you collect, the more renown you earn—the more renown you earn, the more rewards you unlock for your actual WoW characters.

Issue being, that rewards track is somewhat slow—though it should be faster now, as per a hotfix. Here's a full run-down of the exact changes:

*Please note: when you die, you do not lose any of your own plunder. With this change, you’re now worth more plunder to others, depending on how much you’ve collected during the match.

So that should be fine, right? Well, ah, some people are still mad. On the WoW forums, there's some tension around the makeup of the PvP-only Plunderstorm. The 'problem' with the mode unfolding, from where I'm sitting, is derived from the strangeness of adding a PvP-focused mode during a lull in PvE content—one which has rewards that PvE players want, as well.

There are plenty of threads, comments, and slap-fights going on right now, so let's focus in on replies to the reward buff announcement itself: «Incentivizing people to hunt down and kill those who were already struggling are just there to grind the renown is NOT the way to go with this, y’all. Absolutely asinine,» writes one player to the tune of 70-odd likes. Another adds that the changes make it «extremely clear their only intention for PvE players in Plunderstorm is to provide fodder to the PvP ego.»

It's a strange reaction to a mode where the entire point is hunting down other players (or