What I dislike about WoW:
Personal information:
Been playing since World of Wacraft was launched. I have over 450 days played on 1 character (Vaelorian) and some additional time on other characters. You could say that I have played a lot. I am unsure if you could check, but if you could, you could see that I have played less and less over the last few years. I started playing World of Warcraft when I was 25/26 and I am now 33/34. So sure I have changed. Perhaps this isn't the game for me anymore. But I don't buy that, since Blizzard said that this game is more catered towards the casual player. I am now a casual player and I don't really see what Blizzard means.
I know:
•I have other priorities in my life then I did before
•My taste in games has changed a little due to the above (be it forced)
•I am perhaps more critical due to experiencing such a fine product as World of Warcraft (as it was) and a few other games
World of Warcraft has strafed from my personal level of enjoyment for a long time. Gradually making the game less enjoying.
What World of Warcraft had going for itself was the lore that was made before the MMO came along. The lore lasted until about Wrath of the Lich King in terms of a feeling of being immersed in a storyline. Cataclysm was also part of the lore due to Deathwing and other (again resurrected Onyxia, Nefarian and Ragnaros) characters, but far less. Cataclysm was underwhelming as a whole. I loved Cataclysm and the road to Cataclysm until the end of tier 11. I loved the harder dungeons (until the nerfs...). I played a bit until tier 12 then quit and came back later to experience tier 13. The last 2 tiers of that expansion felt empty. It became a game that was no longer epic. For me there was nothing to do. Heroics (5 man) felt like a complete waste of time as opposed to "Vanilla, TBC and WotLK". Yes WotLK dungeons were easy but I could atleast have fun with those without any healers or tanks. Cataclysm sorta ruined my "offraid-time experience". I am not a grinder of materials, daily farmer or pvp-player. I am a dungeoncreeper if you will. I love to play with 5/10/20/25/40 people vs "artificial intelligence". PvP I enjoy rarely. If I do, it is with other people from my own guild or server. I will tackle this further in my post about CRZ etc.
About the lore. I read a lot of WoW comics and books if not all. So apart from not buying your cardgame or boardgame, I am pretty immersed in WoW and know a lot about the storylines. My hopes for any future expansions would be that we take this war on Azeroth to other planets/realms such as Outland was handled before, but then more close to the Titans/Sargaras. Since there really isn't much lore around anymore apart from vague stories, this is something you should dive in.
Cross Realm Zones and anything cross realm related (LFR/LFD/PVP):
You made a budget mistake from my point of view. These cross realm things look like a nice solution but aren't.
Positives:
•full zones again like it was in Vanilla
•more people to play with on the subject you want to play = shorter queues
This is really what it is all about, good that you tried to fix it.
What you should have done (and I rarely see this in any forum posts) is MERGE SERVERS. I mean sure you come across a few bumps on the road. But really, if banks can merge (with everchanging flow of money) and move their clients from one holding to another with a different system, then you could too. To be honest it should be simpler even. The only thing that would affect a client in a bad way, could be that their name is not available on the new server. Big bummer but my guess is that people rather would have a more pleasurable game to play then to hold onto a name. To make the transfer more smooth, you could freeze an X number of accounts at a time for a day (concerning players couldn't play that day) from a specific server. Also to make the impact on ranks and progress less; merge servers with a new server or server that is almost completely empty without any real progress guilds (compare rank). You only need to have this new server available once. Cause after the transfers of account, you got perhaps 2/3 empty servers again.
Suggestion:
•freeze a number of accounts (players couldn't play) for the day of transfer
•these players are preferrably all from the same guild
•Blizzard should investigate what rank the guild has and should transfer all guilds that are above rank X at the same time to avoid progress penalties for transferring guilds
•give some form of reward to the transferring account (playtime?) for the inconvenience
But no, instead of merging servers you said that it was not possible at this time. I cannot believe that for one second. It might be more expensive for the compagny, but CRZ and other functionalities you made are basically an insult. Why? It has been said many times in different posts on the forums. I am positive you have read them.
•Unaccountability.
How many threads have we seen about the community being bad? Have you seen these posts when CRZ and its other features were not available yet? I haven't. I have played League of Legends for a while and was shocked at the level of immaturity there. I was so happy that in my (at that time) favourite game WoW it wasn't the case. No longer... If you merged servers as your clients have been screaming, you wouldn't have this issue. But you would have all the benefits.
•Recruitment.
You cannot recruit properly. A lot of players don't want to transfer servers (pay money for it or lose their friends). Don't say that RealID solves this for all players. Some players feel attached to a server and want to see their friends instead of chat. They value that. So as a recruitment-officer, the people you play with are mostly a waste of time to speak to. Sure it is not impossible to get recruits from another server, but it is far less likely. Talking to people ingame isn't the only way to recruit ofcourse. But for me it was the most succesful. Having an empty server makes this less and less easy obviously. But having "fake" people roaming around doesn't make it easier.
•Economy.
I don't particularly bother with this, but I can see fuller servers having an impact via CRZ on a emptier server by grinding "their" nodes. Increasing spawnrate won't particularly make this better for emptier servers, but it will affect the fuller servers due to a bigger supply.
•Sitting in the city.
Then we have the "sitting in the city and never leaving" culture we got going on. Sure we have dailies now to do... wooptidoo. But we can still queue up and instantly teleport to a dungeon we haven't even visited. I am not saying we should bring back the requirement to first visit the particular dungeon. I am saying to remove the feature of teleporting to the dungeon. More people travelling is better. It would improve worldpvp a bit (the chances would be higher to encounter stuff like this). Perhaps only make the random dungeon queue an instant teleport but when done, you would be outside the dungeon instead of back in the city. And specific dungeons would require you to fly. Would it be annoying? Sure since we are all used to being teleported. But the immersion would be higher.
I can name more, but most of it falls into the catagory of "Unaccountability". If people were from the same server they would be branded as a bad person and no one would play with them until they changed their name and changed their immature ways. The repercussions were enormous beforehand. Now there are next to no repercussions. Even if you could ignore crossrealm players, that would not change those players. They won't feel the pinch. They would go on griefing as always and wouldn't even know they were on someones ignorelist. Reporting them (if this feature becomes viable/available) won't make a difference much either. If they were on their own server, they wouldn't do this or just once....
So merging servers would solve LOADS without drawbacks apart from perhaps 1 day of no play, the namechanging and losing a few points towards worldrank due to this one day of no play.
The issue of dailies.
Many people have complained about dailies on the forum. I too am not in favour of having items that, let's face it, everyone wants (before LFR/normal raids). What was wrong with the way it was before? You had saved up valor, went to a vendor and bought the stuff. If anything you could UP the price of those items or decrease the amount of valor you get per run. As I said before, I love dungeoncreeping. Repeating those dungeons always gives me a new experience (new players = new experience). Doing the same quest over and over and over again, is really annoying. But most annoying is that because I don't play everyday, I cannot do dailies everyday and for me it would take longer then people who can play everyday. This is even the case when I could play 12 hours on saturday vs a guy who can play 1 hour each day. Who puts the more effort in timewise? So in other words, the game has taken a stance that you need to log in everyday to get the items you want. Eventually if I did do the dailies, I could have the items that I wanted. But really by then I would have full raidgear from LFR or other sources. So in other words, I wouldn't need them if I continue to do LFR. Which is fine. The question does arise then... Why are these items in the game then anyway? These items seem to cater to the player that can log on daily. Cause if you cannot log in daily but could still play a good amount of time (one day a week 12 hours) you couldn't go for this gear. By the time it would be available, it wouldn't matter anymore. The other issue I have is the way I could gain reputation. In expansions before, I could just run heroics to my hearts content. In TBC you got corresponding reputation according to what dungeon you were doing. Which was fine. Then came the tabards, which were fine aswell. Why has this feature been removed. It worked well for every party. Hardcore players could run it to infinity and beyond, could be exalted in no time (which is was they wanted). Casual players could just rep. up at their own pace without being forced (yes forced, you know what I mean) to log on everyday. And you could focus your attention on that particular reputation.This changed with the daily gating. You can only do so many dailies a day. And then you have to wait for the reset.
Now I am not saying that dailies are bad. I think there are a lot of people who like doing dailies. Repetition is good for some people and they might enjoy it. But why gate gear behind it? Mounts/pets/recipees are ok to be gated that way, but only if for example the enchants-recipees are ALL covered by ONE faction. Not spread around on different factions. So people who have a specific profession can just do dailies on that particular faction and be done (unless they want all reputation on exalted). Actually why is gear spread around aswell? If you don't want to change the daily system, atleast make it so that all plate users can go to faction X and all leather users go to faction Y etc. At that rate I would actually have the will do perhaps log in a bit more or atleast know that if I put X amount of time in it, I would still get a pretty good benefit before I get LFR gear.
Slowing the progressionladder is not an argument. I see this posted as a counterargument every other post. Which is pretty much nonsense. If you can progress without this gear, it is not really slowing you down is it? It is only marginally better then heroic gear, so what is the problem? Either don't have it available at all, or make it available like it used to be.
LFR lootsystem:
I did a LFR the other day. Ofcourse as a former hardcore raider I despised it. This is not raiding, the bosses are targetdummies. But the lootsystem really cracked me up. Not only do I get duplicate gear (which I can shard, so it is not a total loss), I got an offhand that is meant for priests/druids! I am a shield-offhand user. As a paladin I have no use for other offhands then a shield. Sure I could use it. But why would I? So I sharded it. I also feel horrid everytime something like this happens. My item could have benefitted someone else. Yet I cannot trade such an item. Why has the trade function been removed?
Idea:
•I loot an offhand that is not a shield or a duplicate item that I already have or a better version
•I trade another player of the raid this type of loot - the player can't trade me gold so all is well
loot should still be anonymous else you get begging/threatening messages
So how is this bad? Before you had /rolls and you could need or greed. Discussions would arise that way. Since that is out of the way now, why not allow trade? Guilds could not make bad use of this right? Sure they would trade their items perhaps between eachother but who cares? There is still only 1 player who without needing or greeding got an item. So all is fair imo.
This lootsystem should also be implemented to regular dungeons and then only for the spec you have learned. You learn 2 specs so if you have a 3rd4th available, you won't get loot for it until you remove another spec - as a paladin I don't have a tankspec learned - so I won't get tankloot until I learn that spec in favour of another.
25 mans and 10 mans:
I was GM of my own guild before tier 12. We were a succesful 25 man guild for about 5/6 years. We had our issues ofcourse, but it became harder and harder and harder to recruit people for 25 mans. You cannot possibly come and say that I didn't do enough effort. I took holidays, went home early, called in sick and neglected my real life in order to have recruits. I went through every popular website - bumped my posts an insane amount everyday to stay on the top page while at work. I browsed official, non official recruitmentforums and realmforums to check potential recruits. Went to talk to them on their realms or e-mailing them. All this while managing my guild. But 10 mans were massively more popular then 25 mans. People who would under other circumstances try a 25 man raidingguild, would now rather stay with the select friends they had in their own small guild then hop over. A lot of these potentially good players just weren't about to leave their friends even if they were bad at the game. And who could blame them? If Blizzard makes it viable to raid with a small group of your real friends, wouldn't you stay with them? Instead of going in a boat with 24 total strangers and try to bond a bit? Now I personally back when I was hardcore, would rather go with a good bunch of people that I could become friends with, then stay with my friends that suck. The frustration would be too much for me. But now that I am casual, I would def. stay with my friends. Other then that, everyone and their mom suddenly made a guild. So the playerpool became spread too thin.
This is perhaps a good thing for people. But to 25 mans it is def. not a good thing. So please, just cut the crap and just disable the 25 man raids. They seem to have lost their place in WoW just as 40 man raids did. And do not try to deny it. Also upgrading a 10 man guild to a 25 man guild is almost not doable. How would you go about this? You cannot ask a potential recruit for the 25 man section to just not raid until we have enough players (rotating isn't an option really either)? And what do these extra players do while you recruit? The only viable way is to make a list of people who would come over to your guild as soon as you have the right amount for the guild. And when it is that time, how many recruits of that list are still interested? You can easily scratch 50%. And then those that said that they will come over, will now have serious issues trusting you to get those recruits that we now lack. Merging with another guild would be an option if you sort out the leadership well. Else it will smack you in the face.
Transmog:
I must say that I wanted this feature since 4ever. Perhaps with the addition to COLOUR your own sets. Hell I would pay real cash to be able to do this. I love it to bits. Sadly you Blizzard made a few mistakes. I have a legendary item that I worked very hard for with the guild. It stands as a symbol of accomplishments for our guild. I don't particularly see the point in Blizzards view that everyone and their grandma will walk around with legendary skins. I bet this would be true for the first few weeks. After that everyone will get bored. So why not include them in the transmog? Also the main hand/one hand issues (note I didn't say offhand). I am sure this is due to the skins. Seems weird to me. Blizzard has had ample time to fix every issue in that catagory. So they could fix this too. Then we have the vanilla pvpgear and whatnot. Just make it available guys. You're annoying more people then you are pleasing by witholding these items from everyone. Availability is good.
Promises:
Afaik Blizzard promised a lot and delivered a lot of comprises. To name one: itemlevels and pvpgear. People complained (rightly so) that they were sick of seeing people with pvpgear queuing for LFR. So Blizzard said that they would fix that with a lower itemlevel or somesuch. So yes they did make the itemlevel lower. It became 450 for an itemlevel. Which still enables people to use PvP gear to go into LFR. Sure those peoples characters aren't entirely made up of PvP gear anymore but a few pieces here and there and voila, you can queue for LFR. Not to mention heroic 5 man. Now I don't remember Blizzard saying anything about these. But isn't it obvious that PvPgear should only be used in PvP enviroments? You can still make a fresh level 90 and instantly get him 450 gear by going to the AH. Instantly queue for heroic 5 mans. Where is the learning process? And then I am not even talking about how loot is used by people to upgrade their itemlevels. Some guilds even have crafted Epic BoE gear specifically put in their guildbank for guildies to cheat themselves into LFR so they can gear up quicker. As long as it is in their bags they can get away with murder....
Now by the time of this posting some of this could have already been fixed. But I won't hold my breath. I also want to say that I still even after my rant and believe me I got more, still love playing WoW. It might not seem so but I do. I've played it for so long and still love the players in my group. So I continue my quest. But things would have been a whole lot better if they just MERGED SERVERS. Doing that solves A LOT. In the beginning a lot of people will most likely won't like it or atleast complain about it. But what about new players? New players will find FULL and balanced servers. While the old guys will get used to having a good full server again. LFR/LFD can be serverwide again instead of crossrealm/server. Everything will be as it once was and the community-feeling will grow again.