Would it kill them to try new things?

[Forumchibi]

The context was that OP was complaining about how Blizzard never tried anything new.
The point was that blizzard does try new things, like treasures to be found by exploring, something which wasn't previously in the game.
The point wasn't that it's something that's never been done before in the game industry.

Ah, thank you - I see the original post now, I had only seen the one at the top by the mod and couldn't find the post where it came from, so I was slightly confused.

[Benggaul]

Based on what I've seen so far, I'm not entirely convinced the OP isn't trolling.

On the off chance that they're completely serious, however, I'll just say I've been playing since very nearly day one and still have not done everything there is to do in the game (despite playing a moderate amount weekly (20 hours-ish)) and, while I've tried nearly every other MMO out there, none of them have thus far held a candle to the variety, depth and enjoyment I derive from this game.

Also, being "innovative" is more than just saying "there should be Naval battles!". There is a lot of "Okay, how is this implemented/regulated/accomplished?" in-between an idea and an innovation. They've made many, many gradual changes since WoW was first released (as well as more than a few rather largish ones, not least the entire revamp of 1-60 zones), and while these may not be the grand, sweeping design revamps you're screaming for, I've got three words that should drive the point home on why these overhauls aren't necessarily a great idea:

Star Wars Galaxies.

You have only to utter another three words--New Game Experience--to any former fan of that MMO and watch/read their reaction to see how well that turned out.

I can understand wanting them to add new things to the game, and they are. Quite a lot, really. If none of those things appeal to you then I would consider dropping the sub for a while until they add something that does. I can assure you there are quite a few of us who, despite your low and quite frankly insultingly biased opinion, are liking things well enough as they are. Good day!

[Drilnos]

The OP's plea has softened the stone hearts of the devs. Some of them wept openly. The next expansion's entire concept has been thrown out and replaced with:

World of Warkart

The Burning Legion returns and challenges the Alliance and Horde to a world-spanning go-kart death match tournament. Old hatreds are set aside to join forces against this unstoppable juggernaut at whiteknuckle speeds in excess of 20 miles per hour! Go-kart tracks will be added to every old world, Outland, Northrend and Pandarian zone. Mount physics will be reworked to allow for drifting and stunts! Thrill to mounted combat, launching fireballs and arrows and swinging colossal weapons to make the demonic hordes spin around and go owowowowow. Defeat and add to your roster fearsome enemies of Azeroth, including Queen Azshara, N'zoth, Kil'jaeden, and Dry Illidan! As mighty infernals crash down around you, challenge the Lord of the Burning Legion himself, Sargeras, to match you turn for turn.

Prepare yourselves. The World of Warcraft will never be the same again.

[Fenixdown]

It's actually been a long time since I've felt the need to put someone on my ignore list. OP, thanks for ruining that streak. : /

Show me a game in any genre that really is "innovative" anymore. You can look at any game in the last three years and take it's systems and say "that's similar/exactly like X".

Innovation nowadays is taking systems and making them better. I'll be perfectly honest, I am a Pokemon fan and I think pet battles are a better version of Pokemon. I like Marvel Heroes (I am a beta tester), which has open world bosses, and I think WoW's new world boss design is better than that, and certainly better than the old systems they've used. I like Diablo 3, and I think WoW's talents and glyphs system is an improvement to D3's.

WoW is innovative in this day and age of gaming. Nobody can really make things fresh or new anymore. Not until someone comes out with a game that is played without a controller or a motion sensor, but with a VR helmet attaching nodes to your brain so that what you think is what you do. Which we've seen tons of times in various sci-fi shows. As I stated, I am a beta tester of Marvel Heroes, and to put it in a nutshell it's an easier version of D2 with superheroes. It's certainly not innovative in the sense that it's a dynamically radical design, but it does have features that are different from those styles of games that make it unique in it's genre. Just like WoW.

[det]

Pet battles- pokemon (nothing new)
LFR- easier access of raids (nothing new)
CRZ- How did this change anything significantly? All it did was add players to a few zones so more 90s could grief lowbies...
Scenarios- dungeons that take place outside (nothing new)

Well then...do you never buy or play any run and jump after you played Super mario? Do you never buy or play a FPS after Castle Wolfenstein? No racing game after Mario Cart? No strategy game after civilisation? No isometric dungeon crawler after Diablo1?

How come all those other MMOs fizzle at 2-3 million and then trickle down? Oh..could it be because the listen to the forums where people screamed: "We hate this and that about WoW and go try sth totally new"? Well..LFRaid or LFD hasn't been done before. Funny there are always hate threads about that.

Let me not even go and start on films. Everything has been done before.

[Justignoreme]

Lose 7 million players? So what, WoW did fine its first years with only 1-2 million.

Did you really just say this? People these days have no concept of numbers. Never run a business. Ever. You will be broke and in debt wiyhin a week... Keeping 7M players and losing the insatiable .0001% of players, like you is a loss they can handle...

[Ruak]

How come all those other MMOs fizzle at 2-3 million and then trickle down? Oh..could it be because the listen to the forums where people screamed: "We hate this and that about WoW and go try sth totally new"? Well..LFRaid or LFD hasn't been done before. Funny there are always hate threads about that.

Ever heard of the words "Successful IP"?
How about WoW having a 15+ years of background in this universe? Blizzard + Warcraft = many people would buy/play this just because of that combination.

Ever heard of the fiasco called Diablo 3? Any idea why it sold 12 million (!!!) copies? Because of the IP. What does the number of sales have to do with the quality of the game? Nothing, the game sucks balls and that's admitted by a huge part of the community. Bye bye, Jay Wilson, anyone?

So can people please stop with the crap about numbers? Hell, RIFT probably has 0.5 mil subs and is still rocking their niche. WoW appeals to the mainstream community. Sad but true. Justin Bieber has the highest viewcount in Youtube. Do you listen to Justin Bieber and do those 500 mil views equal q uality music? Please....

[Xeraxis]

WHAT

EVER.

4 expansions and 90% of new content gets finished in a month, followed by 3-4 months of grinding static bosses which have no effect on the world itself and offer no sense of danger to the player.

WHAT.

EVER.

People like you probably defended tape casettes because CDs and DVDs meant re-buying all your collection.


WHAT.


EVER!!

Cassettes fit in the back pocket of my jeans just fine and they didn't skip when moving the boom box. Those reasons enough made me hold out on buying a cd player until I bought my first stereo system for my car.

[Goatfish]

Being innovative doesn't mean it has to be new to the genre entirely. Those are features that were not found in World of Warcraft until now and they attract attention from players who enjoy that sort of thing.

Clearly we are using two different definitions of Innovation:

1: the introduction of something new
2: a new idea, method, or device

While you are using 1, and taking it quite specifically at that, I am using number 2, quite broadly. Using two different definitions for something in the same argument doesn't work, and under your definition you are right, under mine, I am right... so this is really a dispute that can't be settled unless one of us switches definitions, and I definitely am not going to change mine, because mine is what many customers look at when gaming. If WoW added Tetris to the game under the name 'Tartris', customers are going to look at that and realize that while it might be new to the game, it's definitely still Tetris, and definitely not new and innovative.

What was innovative in launch condition WoW besides being much more casual friendly than all the other MMOs?

You mean besides things like severe reduction in loading times (Used to be every zone change, sometimes even multiple within one city), instanced dungeons and raids (remember fighting for spots in X area so that your group could sit there and pull one mob at a time?), combat flow that was years ahead of its time (Hi, I'm going to auto-attack for 5 minutes til my one ability comes off cooldown.), Quests with real story behind it that had multiple single player games and books of lore behind them (Please go collect rat whiskers for no apparent reason, and do it 100 times so you can move to grinding other mobs instead), and so on, and so on? Even some of that casual friendly stuff you put out were real innovations at the time, such as graveyards and miniscule death penalties for instance, it never felt good dying and losing a level and hours or days worth of work. I remember spending 2 hours one night on Everquest just trying to get back to my corpse through loading screens and having to walk all the way there from the most convenient bind point (Plane of Knowledge). While the majority of the innovations in vanilla WoW were systems designs, they were designs that greatly influenced how you play the game, as opposed to LFD and LFR just making it so you don't have to look at trade chat or have an in game community in any degree, or CRZ giving small servers all the negatives of being on a large server with miniscule positives attached.

I did notice you didn't even try to counter Burning Crusade bringing innovations into the game (and genre), and that's probably a smart move.

[Socialhealer]

best nerd rage in a while /clap

[Kangodo]

Clearly we are using two different definitions of Innovation:

1: the introduction of something new
2: a new idea, method, or device

While you are using 1, and taking it quite specifically at that, I am using number 2, quite broadly. Using two different definitions for something in the same argument doesn't work, and under your definition you are right, under mine, I am right... so this is really a dispute that can't be settled unless one of us switches definitions, and I definitely am not going to change mine, because mine is what many customers look at when gaming. If WoW added Tetris to the game under the name 'Tartris', customers are going to look at that and realize that while it might be new to the game, it's definitely still Tetris, and definitely not new and innovative.

Then we can conclude that you want Blizzard to do the impossible.
Everything has been done already, the rest is all system-related innovation.

[drwelfare]

It might kill them. I feel a decent number to people who quit do not intend to come back. Major changes may run off more subs who like something old and familiar.,

[apepi]

I can kill to try new things.

[Goatfish]

Then we can conclude that you want Blizzard to do the impossible.
Everything has been done already, the rest is all system-related innovation.

You heard it here first folks. The almighty, omnipotent Kangodo has spoken. Nothing shall ever be invented ever again... ever.

[Orangetai420]

So what if it would allienate all these fossil players who live to reminiscence about the "good ole days", as if it were 20 years ago, what if it would change the PVP and PVE formula from grinding gear to just plain ole fun? Lose 7 million players? So what, WoW did fine its first years with only 1-2 million. Most MMOs would kill to have that kind of active player base. EVE only runs with a couple hundred thousand, yet it still runs great.

Assume the devs did something to WoW like creating world events PVE instead of quests, assume they made Naval Combat PVP and removed arenas and focused on massive scale PVP BGs and world PVP objectives...

I stopped reading there.

[Paulosio]

They've added a ton of things that were different with MOP. Even some of the things you suggested such as bosses attacking cities has happened a few times although I think they should do that more... then again if it was a common occurence it would probably get boring really fast.

[Voyager]

bosses attacking cities has happened a few times

Yeah, they do that when I kite rare mobs from the Vale to the Shrine, where they annihilate afk players with Blade Flurry and Rain Dance :P

[Haven]

So you want them to put innovative stuff in it..
But then attack them and rage if they put innovative stuff in it?
The irony is delicious!

Pet battles, innovative? Let's be honest here, it's a blatant, obvious way to kill time and occupy your OCD, and nothing more.

Cross-realm zones? It's a good one from a technical POV, but does little to nothing to the gameplay itself. Yeah, now there are other players around, tagging my quest mobs, stealing my nodes, and camping my rare mobs. Yay. In essence, it brought more frustration than use, because there's still no reason to group and do stuff together, the other players are there just to give you an illusion of MMO.

Scenarios? An amalgamation of a dungeon and a quest, it feels nice, but I personally had the feeling it had to be there since 2008.

Other MMOs, even though they didn't make it, had really good ideas, which WoW ignored. The point is, WoW has become anti-social. You're locked in a bubble. You don't have to group with other players while leveling - you can basically play 1-90 as a singleplayer game. The world is static. Mobs wander around spawn points, waiting to be slaughtered. They never attack towns, they don't form roaming bands, they don't clash with each other for territorial control. Never does an NPC hunt you. WoW could take some lessons from Guild Wars 2 in grouping, shared effort, and dynamic world. Even though changes are cyclic in GW2, it is still a big step forward. Rift gave us invasions, a way for the world to invade your personal space, a way for the world to live. WoW is still almost the same game it was in 2006 in the core.

[mistuhbull]

So...you want Blizzard to release and expansion or patch that basically turns it into an entire other game. At that point, it's not WOW, it's some other MMO in the warcraft universe (in regards to playstyle)

[Kangodo]

You heard it here first folks. The almighty, omnipotent Kangodo has spoken. Nothing shall ever be invented ever again... ever.

If it's so easy to come up with things, than why are most proposed things in this thread "stolen" from other games?

But let's just drop this..
Your bias towards classic is obvious if you call "no loading time between zones" innovative and stuff like LFR not.