Puzzling Cartel Chips Bring A Real Bad Luck Protection System Into WoW – Let’s Discuss

The Puzzling Cartel Chip Announcements

The Original PTR Post

The very first Blizzard mentioned the Puzzling Cartel Chips was on the Gallagio Loyalty Rewards Club preview on January 15th, 2025, where the following was announced.

In this, Blizzard makes it known that “This could change before launch” but their current plan is to make it similar to previous Bullion or Dinar systems. From an initial read, this makes it seem like the system is going to be a replica of Dragonflight Season 4 Bullion’s where you upgrade the Item as long as you have crests, but upon a reread, The Shadowlands Season 4 Dinar system did not work like this — the upgrade track didn’t even exist at this point which makes this statement more confusing.

Shadowlands Season 4 Dinar system had no upgrade track and you simply bought the Normal mode piece from the vendor. In order to upgrade the piece to Heroic or Mythic, you needed to kill 20 Heroic bosses or 20 Mythic bosses respectively. If you compare all three of the systems, Shadowlands’ Dinar system is the most hybrid of the system, offering some bad luck protection, while also providing some gear progression for guilds who maybe aren’t full clearing but can kill some early Heroic or Mythic bosses.

However, the second line makes it very clear how the system was going to work at this point but is prefaced with “This could change before launch.” If people want Blizzard to communicate current thoughts, players have to be ready for things to change, especially if they’re prefaced with language that makes it clear that things can change and a feature on the PTR.

The Scarizard Interview

On February 18th, 2025, Dratnos and Maximum interviewed rewards team member and Senior System Design Patrick “Scarizard” Scarborough. One of the questions was about the Puzzling Cartel Chips and Dinars considering they were recently removed from the Renown track. Scarizard answered why they were removed from the renown track, but also some behind the scenes on the goals of this system.

Patrick Scarborough

If we were going to have deterministic loot , it is the most powerful thing that we can do short of you just logging in with an item, it is the maximum, it is the farthest we can go in terms of delivering something to you that is really powerful. That’s why it’s been used in Season 4 to say “hey this is a shorter time, we are loosening the leash on just letting people play with stuff.” It makes sense to say, even though I’m not spending much time on this, let me get the thing that makes me shoot lasers or breath fire that I want and then get out. In an actual season where there’s real stakes and real people that want to be playing side by side to hit their seasonal goals and get Hall of Fame and get stuff like that. It is certainly still very powerful to give you these items, but it is very difficult to make the argument that it’s the thing we should be doing. So having it at the end of the track was mostly to say, we would have wanted it in my original version of this, to happen almost around the .7 patch (and I know that is making people cringe) but it’s more to say that this is more supposed to be there for you if you didn’t get it before now, it was supposed to be sort of a bad luck protection as some people like to call it. The reason that it was removed was because we were already thinking , but it makes more sense for me to say “let’s start far and then push thing up”.

From this interview, we learn a couple things but the main one being that the original idea of the Puzzling Cartel Chip system was proposed to be around the .7 patch, and also they were supposed to act as “Bad Luck Protection”. The idea of the statement gives a design look at how Blizzard views deterministic loot. In the past, Blizzard only handed out deterministic loot in Fated Seasons because it was a shorter and for fun season. Adding deterministic loot to a “real” season is much trickier because of how much speeding up gear progression could actually hurt players as Scarizard explains further:

Talking back to 10.1, I loved Aberrus as a raid, I really like worked on it, a lot of people liked it aesthetically but it was for many people especially if you were a Heroic only raider, it was a lot shorter. It was a lot shorter because you got too strong too quick. A lot of people think this is about the monthly sub stuff, but there are a lot of people out there for whom the weekly raiding guild is how I engage socially with a lot of people. We made a decision that you got the dopamine sooner, but it might have cut two or three weeks off of your Guild’s actual skill floor of how you naturally progress. And that’s a lot of how we think about it, those journeys and how are we supporting you feeling like oh I could actually level up to the next tier or I might want to try Mythic or I might want to try Heroic.

I think this interview gave a lot of insight into the goals of the Puzzling Cartel Chip system:

• They need to be careful and want to make sure not to speed up the gearing process and turn another tier into Aberrus.
• They will likely “start far” and push it up if needed.
• The intent was supposed to be some bad luck protection.

Part of the difference here is that the design goal appears to have changed. From the initial announcement, it seems like a 14 upgrade-track Bullion-like piece is bad luck protection, especially around the Patch 11.1.7 Patch. While this is definitely true, a piece with 14 upgrade-tracks with no other requirements would serve a dual purpose for the wider playerbase, it is bad luck protection for those who are killing the Mythic bosses, but ALSO a form of late season gearing for those who are not killing Mythic bosses. However, this interview seems to talk specifically about the Puzzling Cartel Chip system to specifically Bad Luck Protection and doesn’t mention the gear progression aspect at all.

The Follow-Up

On April 24th, 2024, after the Season 2 Turbo Boost post, Blizzard released a follow up giving more design insights and announcing an additional item that players can buy. You can read the full post here, but here’s a snippet

In this post, they make it very clear that Puzzling Cartel Chips are supposed to be bad luck protection while also allowing Normal raiders a form of gear progression.

The Outrage

When Blizzard announced the Season 2 Turbo Boost last week, many players were upset at the way that the Puzzling Cartel Chip system was going to work.

A Real Bad Luck Protection System

Compared with the Season 4 systems of the past, the Puzzling Cartel Chip system is a real Bad Luck Protection (BLP) system.

• Shadowlands Season 4 – BLP and Slight Gear Progression due to ability to upgrade by killing any Mythic boss.
• Dragonflight Season 4 – BLP and a lot of Gear Progression.
• War Within Season 2 – BLP only.

From a Mythic gear angle, this is the farthest that Blizzard has pushed a Dinar-like system away from Gear Progression and only into Bad Luck Protection. In addition, no other system in WoW has acted as a “real” Bad Luck Protection system, and not been tied to any Gear Progression that moves players up a tier. While things in WoW have been called Bad Luck Protection, they have always had a gear progression element to it. Even a system like Titan Residuum from Battle for Azeroth allowed a Heroic level player (who disenchanted a lot of Azerite Armor) to eventually buy a Mythic piece of Azerite Armor, even if it took a long time. A Normal level player could theoretically do the same but it was take even longer.

This is likely why there is so much extra backlash at this system, this system breaks the norm of WoW. Even if it takes longer, players have become used to and expect Bad Luck Protections to always benefit them. Even if takes longer, players are usually are able to get the best loot through a Bad Luck Protection system. This might be the first time that Mythic gear is locked behind a specific BLP system with no gear progression towards it.

A Bait-and-Switch Feeling

I believe this is the fundamental disconnect between players and the developers and why players feel like things were such a bait-and-switch. Players have come to expect that a Bad Luck Protection system usually involves them getting the best loot eventually through minimal change in their play pattern, and the Puzzling Cartel Chip system removes every way to do that other than Mythic raid.

I think part of the issue on this topic was communication. As someone that covers a lot of Blizzard interviews, finding these Blizzard interviews is really difficult at times and there is important information there that doesn’t get conveyed to a lot of players. Considering that the real only hint of a design change of the Puzzling Cartel Chip system was in an interview, many players went multiple months thinking that that this system was going to work similar to Dragonflight Season 4’s Bullion system. Even though the original post said that the intent could change before launch, I think the feeling of disappointment is very real and many players who weren’t aware of the possible change are rightfully disappointed. They expected one-thing and then got another. Players were asking for any Dinar news for weeks leading up to Patch 11.1.5 and I believe that Blizzard had to know this considering they put out an “announcement-of-an-announcement” post on Dinar news.

I think players are very understandably feeling disappointment or anger. I think in the future, Blizzard should try to more immediately communicate in a Blue Post when a very popular system has changed significantly, even if that means they need to change it again later. Design insights help manage players expectations and lead to more directed feedback when the design goals are known.

The Update

After the initial backlash and outrage from many players, Blizzard release the update which contained the following line, in addition to explaining the reasoning why the Myth track requirement existed and therefore wasn’t changing.

This post addressed:

• The feeling that after the system comes out you need to wait three weeks.
• Why they wanted this system to be Bad Luck Protection.

I personally think this change was realistically a miss from the point of the upset playerbase because it didn’t really address the root of their problems — that this was a pure Bad Luck Protection system. I think addressing the feeling of needing to wait three weeks is perfectly fine, but it was massively overshadowed with disappointment from players realizing they wouldn’t be able to buy the Myth track of their desired items. If they have nothing to buy, why would they care if the option was moved up earlier.

But that’s not all this point announced, as it added an extra item purchasable from Puzzling Cartel Chips. On the surface, this is likely a good change for some players especially if you play alts. But for the non-Heroic raiders and the players who were already upset and disappointed in the system, this likely angered them further and disappointed them more because that is more loot that they don’t feel like they need or want. For Mythic raiders, this is just another piece of BiS gear that they can buy at no change to what they’re doing, but the perception for other players is very much “the rich get richer” because they will be losing out on another piece of gear that would separate them from the top end and what they assumed they would get.

As someone who Mythic raiders and would heavily benefit from the system, I actually think the third Puzzling Cartel Chip purchase was likely a mistake. It very much moves the system more towards Gear Progression for Mythic raiders, while doing very little for the Heroic raiders who don’t want to or can’t progress to Mythic because they’re already gear capped. I would personally like to see players be incentivized to spend their Dinar immediately, rather than waiting for when they kill a new Mythic boss, or maybe in Patch 11.1.7 the system be converted to a gear progression system as originally mentioned.

I’ve Got a “Feeling”

Many players felt many feelings towards this system – from disappointment and anger to happiness and excitement — and feelings can often shape reality. I personally think that one of the things that could have made this system better is to flavor the system in a way that is “brand new”. This system was almost immediately associated to previous Dinar and Bullions, and Blizzard developers even used this wording in interviews with no push back aware from the system. It was very much imprinted in the community that this was going to be like systems past, and the system was designed that way too.

But for something that was going to be so different, I think it needed a completely different feeling from the very start. It was never going to “feel” good, when you got your Puzzling Cartel Chip and looked at the vendor and saw the Myth track gear locked out. If this was going to be the first true Bad Luck Protection system in WoW, I think it needed a brand new feeling — something that wasn’t get an Omni-Token and turn it into a vendor — the problem with this system is the universal Cartel Chip. For example, they could have made two different Cartel Chips, the Puzzling (Heroic) and the Confounding (Mythic) with the former dropping from a boss on any difficulty and the latter dropping from a boss on Mythic difficulty. This would show a intent to have this be Bad Luck Protection for Mythic and there’s a clear difference between them, making the first step at there being a difference in feeling between the systems and making a system that feels more like Bad Luck Protection.

The End

Knowing how much players care about gearing and power levels, I think the communication on the system could have been improved. Personally, I don’t think dropping information about a BLP system mid tier was great since it can and will inform decisions. A BLP system should be described in great detail before a tier starts so that all players know how it’ll work and when it’ll start. This gives players expectations on how and when to anticipate their big exciting reward moment, rather than leaving them in speculation, leading to massive disappointment.

I encourage Blizzard to continue experimenting with things, but keep the player base in the loop. Explain motivations and changes frequently along the development process and also let the playerbase know how the experiments went. Aberrus is a great example of showing how increasing the gearing speed can actually lead to a decrease in enjoyment or participation. After this tier, I would love to see any stats on this system, do they view it as good or bad, what would they change next time.