I've been playing since right around the end of the burning crusade, in the same guild from the beginning, I've seen a lot of changes to the game; good and bad. I actually think there haven't been too many truly bad ideas, just ones that were implemented poorly.
I was recently using open raid and it struck me how a lot of people and groups that I met on there to raid with were of better quality than say tradechat on my own server for the past few years. I was thinking of how it could actually be implemented into wow.
Cross realm is a big thing now, so that you have plenty to do at any time of the day, raids, dungeons etc. But the main problem with LFR at the moment is the lack of repercussions and the community aspect of it. If you compare something as simple as a site that uses red or green thumbs on peoples comments, a simple thing like that actually makes people act a small bit better than a site that's completely un-moderated. Just a visible thing to other people to see how you are behaving.
What if you had trade chat in game the way it is on openraid, where it's separated into EU-Alliance, US-Horde etc, where you can form groups and invite people cross realm. But more importantly you had reputation.
Everyone starts off with neutral reputation, and you get marks awarded to you for each boss you killed with a premade group like that, or a boss in LFR. A kick from a group or a dc results in some bad reputation. So that the system isn't abused, people can mark you up or down as well but this is a separate scoring. To be fair to new players and to people who have a bad week sometimes or a disagreement with someone, the first reputation would be reset every so often, say everyones reputation is reset every 2months. The time is obviously debatable but the idea of reputation and (lets call it happy points lol) happy points is what I'm trying to get across.
Now instantly I know some people might be annoyed and say "we don't want this to be like facebook" or whatever, and I know, I don't want it to be like that either, it's just a suggestion for some accountability so that you have more accessibility of raids with always cross realm trade, but also more community.
I'm not sure how it would work but you could also be given marks for helping someone out with the way they were playing in a good way, and you'd eventually get like a MVP status showing that new people could ask you things and you wouldn't bite their heads off.
I've noticed WoW usually absorbs mods and ideas that are popular and make them their own, for example outfitter or dbm. (Dbm is still better for warnings but at least you have dungeon journal now). Now when you open a support ticket it's like a mini browser in game so it would be cool to see something absorbed like mr.robot for new players, with an option for a new player or advanced help. (Since seeing all those numbers is a bit daunting at first.)
Anyway thank you for reading, I hope that it was at least somewhat different from posts blaming LFR for the downfall of humanity, I am just trying to think of ways to improve it rather than demand it gets removed. I would like to see new players get more out of their experience in WoW because I think it directly impacts older players, by way of recruitment pool. We need new recruits to keep doing what we like to do too.