Making Content Last Forever

[Blayze]

We've got Timewalking; scales players down to the level of content and scales the rewards up to a point where they're useful. Brilliant, fantastic, but why stop there? It's not available all the time, and there's more you can do with the system.

And in Legion, there's Challenge dungeons or Mythic Plus or whatever it's being called this week. This sounds good, this sounds very good; the content theoretically scales until it snaps you like a twig for daring to look at it sideways. But again, there's more you can do with the system.

Even the world content scales in Legion, and that's the key to success here.

The most successful content in WoW? Battlegrounds. These things have paid for their own development and art time and resources God only knows how many times over. That's the sort of thing we need for raids, which get no-lifed into the ground until the next one comes out and then gets virtually forgotten.

So let's fix this, let's get all raids and dungeons in the game lasting forever. Remove Timewalking for a start, and bake the functionality into all raids and dungeons. You go anywhere, it scales to your level and so do the rewards.

And every time you beat it, it gets a little tougher--but the rewards get a little better too.

By all means, find the one sweet spot halfway through the levelling range where the bosses blow up in seconds; it won't do you much good, because the rewards will be low-level variants and worthless once you get a few more levels under your belt.

No timers, though. This is a test of skill, co-ordination and teamwork, not a sprint to the finish.

Regardless, that's how you make content last forever. Ulduar? Current content. Sunken Temple? Current content. Grim Batol? Much as I wish otherwise, current content.

Now we've got content that scales infinitely, we don't need multiple levels of difficulty. Heroic? Mythic? You'll end up there in the end if you're good enough, no need to have countless UI buttons to click. Raid size? Doesn't matter; we've got flex. Make it all flex if it's not already.

Raid Finder? Let's fix it.

Broken Shore spawns in NPCs from what I hear if there aren't enough players. Use that, like the event at the end of Hyjal with Cenarius or the legendary quest with Khadgar and Chromie.

Call it Story Mode. Use it to keep people like me out of the raiders' way. Don't hold bosses back from us, though. Sinestra? Ra-den? I want to fight them. Who the hell is Ra-den? I want to know. I want to punch his smug face in.

So anyway.

Story Mode. Challenge Mode.
Nothing expires, everything scales.
Everything lasts forever.
Everything is current content.

Boom.
Content drought? Fixed.

Next expansion? Flatten the iLevels, reset Challenge Mode, start all over again with more dungeons and raids added to the mix.

Bring back Scenarios. Make them scale too.

Done.
Cut me a cheque.

[Queen of Hamsters]

And watch people bitch and whine that "they're making us do the same old content over and over instead of creating new stuff!". I have no doubt that they'll make good use of the scaling tech for the world and the Keystone system in the future, but alas...

You'd also want to kill off the soloing of old content? At least I'm hoping you're thinking that the scaling would be optional...

And Mythics being so tightly tuned = thanks to the set raid group. I don't want that to go away in favor of your ideas. And LFR is already a non-issue to me as a raider, so not sure why it needs fixing. It needs to be as good as ToT LFR was, and that's it really.

That cheque ain't as clearcut as you'd like to think.

[Spotnick]

Only way to make this interesting would be to have a weekly random raid boss that is random from all previous expansions bosses, scaled to proper difficulty, and giving you a loot box and a seal at the end of the encounter.

So you do your own group, you queue (like flexible in SoO) and it ports you directly to that boss room.

That's 52 different encounters per year and increasing pool ever expansion.

Biggest issue would of course be the raid size being different every week, 10, 20, 25 or 40. You can't expect them to revisit every encounter in the game and make them flexible it would be a colossal task.

You had that in WOTLK, the boss-to-kill-this-week, and it was quite popular... pretty sure people enjoyed pugging those 1 raid boss instances we had in all previous expansions prior to MOP where for some reason they stopped doing.

Sure they could scale the loot, but that would be a BiS disaster if they did, better give you items in loot box like they do right now.

That would keep every encounter in the game relevant forever, they would just need to do a tuning pass every xpac. Beats Garrison caches for sure.

[Astynax]

It would get so messed up where some classes and specs would need the entire group to go back to some 3 xpac old raid and actually do it in order to get that OP BIS tier bonus and trinket at zero benefit for any other class if their BiS trinket/tier items weren't in there

The game and raids also tell a story. What's the point of going to kill firelands rag, then MC rag and old MU chogall? Just because?

[Blayze]

Like this game gives a shit about lore.

[Deleted]

Why not make everything ever scale with our level and ilvl in essence making levels and items redundant? The reason why everything does scale is because you lose the sense of progression you get when you acquire a new piece of gear, farming HFC now for god knows how long shows how our characters grow in power because of the items that we acquire thus making content that used to be hard easier and clearly show us a substantial increase in power.

[Deleted]

So anyway.

Story Mode. Challenge Mode.
Nothing expires, everything scales.
Everything lasts forever.
Everything is current content.

Boom.
Content drought? Fixed.

Next expansion? Flatten the iLevels, reset Challenge Mode, start all over again with more dungeons and raids added to the mix.

Bring back Scenarios. Make them scale too.

Done.
Cut me a cheque.

Going with such a playstyle, this game would of been dead 3 expansions ago. So you'd be the one cutting Blizz the check.
Timewalking in itself is tolerated content. Its tolerated because its periodic, easy and extremely rewarding in terms of toys/mounts/bonus seal/etc. Imagine the uproar if Blizzard would say: you know what, we decided for the next expansion we're just increasing your levels by 10 and nothing else. Why would you even be paying a subscription or buying the game? Yet by having everything timewalk, the amount of repeated content increases, while the amount of fresh content as a % decreases. There are currently 6 WoWs+ Legion coming, which means the amount of new content in your dumb idea is 1/7. Next expansion its 1/8...Additionally, the boss tactics are already known, so the discovery part dies.

Scaling as tech is overrated. The mobs you face in Draenor are quite undertuned so they don't pose any difficulty while leveling. They don't get new abilities, there's no threat about them, nothing. In fact, they are so dull and uninteresting, that each zone has a lvl 110 zone and there is Suramar as 110 endgame anyway.

The Broken Shore event is soloable. That's its base tuning, the NPCs and other players just speed it up. Also its really difficult for developers to make NPCs that fight LFRs for you. Encounters like Kairoz or Proving Grounds took a lot of development time to get to that point. Entire raids would take forever. Also it would be a massive gap between someone only playing lfr and someone playing normal/heroic raids.

Encounters like Sinestra/Ra-den/Cho'gall are meant as special rewards for the highest level of raiding. They're also available to you after the dungeon is no longer relevant through pugs or a few expansions later solo. Many games have some things only available to better players.

[cFortyfive]

Might last forever that way for quite special people ^

[bicycle]

No thanks. I like having an incentive to actually clear new content instead of just picking the easiest dungeons and clearing them every week with scaling for higher and higher ilvl rewards.

[Kryos]

First of all, they still need to add new rides in their Themepark (WoW is a themepark MMO, we enter it, enter a raid sory ride and after running it many times it becomes boring and we need a new ride). But they could use the system you talk about and bring back old rides every few months. Then they will feel at least a little bit fresh (since nostalgia will also kick in). BUT and that's a big BUT they still need to add brand new rides on a regular basis. If they don't the game will be dead and boring pretty fast. People are not so stupid, they know when you make them pay and play the same thing over and over. That gets very old. So your system could be used to spice up things and have a random element, but that's about it.

[Deleted]

The way i see it is that everyone would just raid the Raid with the best weapons procs and trinket procs.

[dd614]

Want content to last forever and be relevant? Legacy servers. Boom, done.

Retail fans won't be happy, though.