How can Blizzard improve World of Warcraft?

[gamingmuscle]

Blizzard also turned this game into unsocial solo game by making it that you can Que to everywhere instantly and let the world become empty. The questing is also unsocial, Que, meaningles rush trough the game.

So in vanilla when the world was empty...and we didn't have queue tools...that was just a fluke right? =P

The world is only ever full when the majority of the server population is below max level. Once a sever is majority maxed out the population shifts into cities, occasionally venturing out into the world for something. All they did was remove 1 minor source of people in the world...traveling to the instance gateway. This may have led to small spontaneous world pvp fights, but it did not populate the world. To populate the world they need a reason to be out in it doing things, not traveling through it.

[Teebone]

The archetecture is ancient. Even with high-dollar cards, multi-core processors and a truckload of RAM the framerate can still drop.

The best, most humane thing they can do is no longer support it and create a sequel with a better base to build on.

[jbombard]

So in vanilla when the world was empty...and we didn't have queue tools...that was just a fluke right? =P

The world is only ever full when the majority of the server population is below max level. Once a sever is majority maxed out the population shifts into cities, occasionally venturing out into the world for something. All they did was remove 1 minor source of people in the world...traveling to the instance gateway. This may have led to small spontaneous world pvp fights, but it did not populate the world. To populate the world they need a reason to be out in it doing things, not traveling through it.

Honestly I don't remember too many times where the world was dead empty in vanilla. Maybe it was the servers I played on, but I played on off hours and even then even though it wasn't crowded their were people around, talking, trading buffs, helping with quests etc... Chat was not filled with anal spam, and when people asked questions we usually took the time to answer, and people who were rude, ninja'd loot, afked in groups, got blacklisted and avoided. There were a lot of things that were tedious and a pain in the ass, but community wasn't an issue where I played.

Anyway, there was a group of developers who asked themselves this very question, they left Blizzard and made Wildstar so there ya go. They have a lot of issues to overcome to get the kind of subs WoW has but I don't think they should strive to in the first place. WoW has become a bland soup that everybody can choke down but without a whole lot of spice. Wildstar has higher requirements so they lose a good chunk of potential players there, and the game actually requires skill so they lose a bunch more there. But ya know what the game is better for it, and the design is well thought out.

[psyquest]

For me two things.

in pve: higher difficulty raiding should bring unique rewards and arts. stop catering for "everyone untitled to everything".
in pvp: more balancing without affecting pve and vice versa. enough with immortal healers and CC madness. enough with counter class. Any class should be able to kill another one given a better player skill. currently your class can be hard countered and you can loose against a total noob.

[LeperHerring]

Bragging Rights

Make separate set of content (dungeons and raids) for mythic mode with TBC style progression without skipping or gear resets. In that model killing a boss is actually meaningful, i.e., gives you "bragging rights".

Class Specific Challenges

The problem is that this is Blizzard we're talking about. They put profit ahead of everything else. Why build 11 class specific epic quests, when you can just build one that everyone does. Every dollar they save on content creation is a dollar that goes directly into the company's bottom line.

Lore

Lets face it, the writing in WoW is terrible. Freshman-at-a-community-college level terrible. There are some gems, but not enough to be worth talking about. Unfortunately this will not change as long as their writing/lore is headed by a graphics artist (nothing against Metzen personally, he's just not the right guy for the job).

Housing

It's already clear garrisons are a screwup, I just hope they scrap them like they've scrapped large gameplay elements before (e.g., path of titans). They should take a hint from the new Everquest and let players claim a piece of land and then build on it (even if just to choose one building model out of a dozen). Zone areas with claimable plots in various areas of the game and you're very likely to get communities forming.

[Deleted]

Bragging Rights
I feel like this does not exist in the game anymore. When I walked around back in vanilla, I would see someone that had unbelievable gear. They would be sitting in town and you would see a bunch of people gathered around noticing them. I would get on websites and find out where it came from and see how much effort it took. I could never get to that level because I didn't have the dedication that person had. He earned a right to have that gear on. Have we become bored of this aspect?
My solution:
Different artwork for armor based on which difficulty raid you did. If you ran heroic mode, you should not just have a different color armor with better stats. You should have a different set entirely. Yes, the stats are better and the set bonus should be different as well. PvP does this so I think raids should too. I think Valor should only be gained by Heroic content and Justice by normal content. Casual players should be able to gain certain things as well. Through questing, they can complete certain challenges, just like the brawlers guild, to gain bragging rights. They may not have the time and dedication it takes to run a raid with a group but they can receive tokens and drops from difficult mobs that take knowledge of there own character to complete. Blizzard did a good thing when they came out with Brawlers guild, green fire for warlocks quest, The Benediction staff quest and the hunter weapon quest. Not everyone could accomplish these challenges, but when they did, it was truly an epic feeling..

You don't get bragging right any more.

Here's what happens:
- Hit max level whilst running some normal dungeons/pvp
- Buy any boe's/pve to get item level requirements for LFR
- Keep running LFR/Heroic dungeons

That's where most people nowadays stop and they get bored. They've already seen all the content and they dont really know or care who or what they're fighting.

But I suppose if you continue
- Join a guild. Run flex/normal
- Repeat on heroic.

No increase in storyline, no new items, just bigger stats on gear. That's it.

There is no epicness any more, no sense of accomplishment, no "mysterious" gear, no where left to explore that you havnt already seen on LFR.

That kind of takes away from the whole experience. It was good when you could actually get lost in a dungeon because it was so large.

Convenience is slowly ruining the game as demonstrated by flying mounts. There's no exploration, mystery, or epicness left. It's all pretty much slowly died off since wotlk.