Posts with tag sunsong-ranch

We've had some good times and some bad times with the Sunsong Ranch. Its original owner was more than just a little annoying at times, and there were issues with virmen and birds and all manner of extremely tiresome weeds, but it seems like the torrid affair may be coming to a close with patch 6.0. Blizzard Lead Systems Designer Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street tweeted the following over the weekend:

@russtrotter We don't want you to feel like you have to go visit it forever. It's a MoP feature. It will still be there for you though.

- Greg Street (@Ghostcrawler) July 13, 2013

When we last visited Sunsong Ranch in patch 5.2, it was to news of several improvements of the farming content. This included some changes to the Master Plow, some changes to the way seeds were planted, and to top it all off, the option to purchase your farm and make it your very own. This meant that the farm would turn into a rest point and an area where one could immediately log out of the game -- something that players had been requesting ever since they began helping Yoon and planting their own crops on his farm.

While we knew that the option would eventually be added, it was not available with patch 5.2's first iteration on the PTR. So we had no news on how much it would cost, what kind of reputation you would need to have, or what exactly would happen to Farmer Yoon after you purchased his property. The latest build to hit the PTR has now unlocked the feature, and players can now test out the content to their heart's content.

But uh ... you can't purchase the farm.

Work orders are in in the patch 5.2 PTR, allowing players to gain reputation with other factions by farming. You can see Matticus' character here being offered several work orders from other factions. Wowhead has datamined many of the quests, indicating that, for now at least, they are available purely for factions added in patch 5.0.4 and patch 5.1.

It's no great surprise that the new factions aren't included in these work orders, to be able to earn reputation for the new factions by farming would be rather strange when they have only just appeared. There doesn't, at present, appear to be any prior reputation requirement to get these work order quests, but you do have to have bought your farm in order to receive the work orders, so a considerable dose of Tillers work is required.

Edit: A blue post has clarified that you no longer have to buy the farm to receive and complete work orders, but you will need to be exalted with the Tillers and have all plots unlocked.

Once you've bought the farm You'll need to farm specific vegetables for specific factions, so, for example, the Golden Lotus want White Turnips. There's two quests for each faction, so continuing to look at the Golden Lotus, the first quest is to plant 8 White Turnip Seeds, and the second is to harvest 8 Ripe White Turnips, resulting in 40 White Turnips. Only the second part of the quest awards reputation, 300 at the moment, but both currently award 236,000 XP.

The general consensus seems to be that any way to gain reputation is a bonus, but these don't seem particularly fast. Do they strike a good balance?

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There's been plenty of talk over the last couple of months about Sunsong Ranch, the farm that players can adopt and use to grow various crops of their own. A lot of that talk revolved around whether or not Sunsong Ranch was the first step towards player housing, a feature that a lot of players have been wistfully wishing for since the days of vanilla. Earlier this month, we asked Cory Stockton and Dave Kosak if this was indeed the case, and the response was that while the ranch could be interpreted that way, player housing wasn't something intended for the future.

However, both Stockton and Kosak were excited with how well the farming feature had been received, and with how well it integrated with other features in the game. As a new feature, the farm works seamlessly with other professions in the game. Being able to grow your own resources has been a tremendous boon for players, but the question still remained -- how could the farming feature be improved even further?

Well ... how about as an additional means to gather reputation?