Everything wrong with WoW and top 12 tips to solve it - Clickbait Edition

[satella]

It all started with Battlegroups, a collection of servers melded into an entity that would seemingly solve queue times and enhance the player experience. It seemed like a really good idea, but it opened the doors for so many bad things.

First of all, Battlegrounds were created so that the servers two factions could clash in an organized manner, while gaining increased honor. It was a much more balanced way of testing your mettle on the battlefield against the opposing faction, since massive open-world brawls, although fun, usually had no defined end or goal.

Battlegrounds were always a familiar affair, in that you knew almost every single player on both teams. You knew how they played their character and you also knew their power level, from actually seeing the gear they had equipped. Normally when I wanted a Battleground to start, it was as simple as announcing to the opposite faction to queue up, while having your friends do the same. It was like a fairly large village, where your reputation really mattered.

Then the Fire Nation attacked, and brought with it Battlegroups. Oh boy. If you were playing alone, queue times were considerably shorter. You could just log on and queue up, run a Battleground and log off, simple. But it actually complicated things quite a bit. It was like your village turned into a city overnight, where you don't know anyone, you didn't level up with them, you don't know their personalities, and you hope they just leave you alone while you go about your business.

One of the most important aspects that people forget about as well, now you're not only competing with people on your server, but your entire Battlegroup! People like being the best of anything, but when the pool of players increases, the chances of you actually being in first place decrease substantially. There's a reason people transfer to dead servers to get server firsts.

Instead of fixing faction and server population imbalances through clever mechanics, they allowed it to continue. Why? Because of greed. It massively increases their revenue from server and faction transfers. Battlegroups allowed them to ignore the problem while making money.

Then the Fire Nation attacked again, and brought Sharding/Phasing with it. It's actually a really good solution to zone congestion, latency and all kinds of other things, but it brought so many problems with it that I think you all know about.

Now your server barely matters, the people you're playing with might as well be ghosts, the community is spread so thin there is a high chance you might never see some people again. You're not only competing with people on your server or your Battlegroup, but on ALL servers. The biggest selling point of an MMO is competing with other people, which gives your actions more meaning and value. When those other people might as well be NPC's, it unravels the whole point of playing an MMO.

If Blizzard adds a feature into the game that makes things easier/less time consuming, it becomes so for EVERYONE. Since you're competing with everyone, it just forces you to do the same actions more often. Doing the same thing more often severely decreases its value in your mind (Mythic+, 4 raid difficulties), even though the rewards may be greater on paper, it's all relative.

Everyone wants to feel powerful, and that power is purely relative. A former king on a server is forced to compete with other server kings, and realizes how puny he really is. Before there were as many kings as there were servers, now there is only one.

The solution?

1. Make all rewards/achievements based on your relative contribution to your faction.
   
   Instead of making regular items drop from Raid/Dungeon/World bosses or Faction Leaders, have their Essences drop, and make them tradable.
   You can then either sell them to players, trade them in for powerful items or improve your faction somehow (see point 3).
   A rank system would be implemented, and those with the biggest contributions would gain more rank points.
   Rank points could also be accrued through professions, PvP, and any activity that would improve your factions standing.
   Just like the Vanilla Honor system, relative Rank Points within your faction determine your standing. This will ensure an even distribution between servers and factions. Nobody wants to be stuck on a crowded faction having to compete for scraps.
   The best arena player would for example get more Rank Points, and harder bosses would reward more as well.
2. Only allow one difficulty of each boss and remove Titanforging/Warforging.
   
   Since people are only competing within a server, overall boss difficulty could be reduced, while increasing the relative difference of each boss within the raid. The last boss would then be much harder than the first, but reward a lot more Essences. The gear quality would stay the same, and only the rate of gear acquisition would be increased with harder bosses killed.
   Lets say 10 bosses in a raid, person A kills 1/10 each week and person B kills 10/10. For person A it takes 120 months to get all the best gear, for person B it only takes 3 months. But person A could buy Essences from person B if person B needs the money.
   Items would have to be more rare, taking many months to fully gear up, but with no Titanforging/Warforging, you feel a lot more satisfaction when it's done.
   After you fully gear up, you can then go into other ventures to gain more Rank Points. Killing World Bosses for example, which would be extremely hard, would require a certain rank to unlock and would have a long respawn timer.
   Killing faction leaders could cripple the opposing faction for a while, so defending your leader would be very important.
3. Make changes to the environment over time based on these contributions.
   
   A visible change in the environment, based on contributions, unique to each server. This could be stronger/more numerous guards, access to portals or fun machines, stronger faction leaders, more watch towers or any kind of improvement in the environment. The possibilities are endless.
4. Don't increase the item level of items gained from next Raid Tier.
   
   Instead of increasing power levels through item levels, each item could be made to be extremely hard to get, and unique. The next Raid Tier would only add more flavour to the game through more bosses to kill, transmogs, toys, fun abilities, all kinds of set bonuses and a faster acquisition of Essences. This would allow all Raid Tiers to be viable to the end, with power levels slowly increasing through more equipment slots filled with epics, things like perfect set bonuses and synergy of unique item abilities.
5. Make World Quests affect the environment.
   
   How many turtles can you really save until you see an overpopulation of turtles? Doesn't it affect the eco-system somehow?
6. Remove all remote and cross-realm queue systems.
   
   To be able to queue for a Battleground or Arena, you must travel to a destination. Quicker access to that destination would be rewarded through faction contributions. It's a given that being able to queue with other realms would defeat the purpose of this all.
7. Make professions great again.
   
   Make bosses extremely hard without the inclusion of something from ALL professions.
8. Make your currently logged on character an Avatar.
   
   This means that your Rank is shared between all characters on that faction and server, and all contribution on any of them increases your overall standing.
9. When a person changes server or faction, remove the rewards/achievements/rank gained on that server or faction.
   
   This would prevent players from exploiting server transfers and encourage server loyalty.
10. Remove Sharding/Phasing.
    
    Very important to remove Sharding/Phasing to facilitate player familiarity with each other.
11. Disable grouping with people not on your server.
    
    Very important. This would negatively impact friends not on the same server, which feeds into my next point.
12. Allow free realm/faction transfers for a set amount of time after these changes, limited to one per character, 12 per account.
    
    This would have to be done so that people get the opportunity to play with their friends.

This is just an example of how it could be done, and only serves as a base for an even greater system. My point is, World of Warcraft could be so much better, and with each quality of life improvement that they think will make the players happy, they grow more restless, because what people truly want is to be greater than their peers and to actually know who those peers are. Only a handful of people can really accomplish that in the current system, since the pool of players to compete with is way too large and depersonalized.

Your actions have no permanence and with each Raid Tier, the last one is completely invalidated. This really allows people to commit to the game as little as possible, but that is not what WoW is about. It's not an E-Sport, FPS or a MOBA where you can just hop in and play. It should never be that way. It should reward time spent, connections made and reputation earned.

[Bombrik]

I have to agree with these ideas. We need to merge up the servers to put each one at 400,000+ minimal population each (Server technology should of improved by now to support many) and given the new 'rules' we only need three types of servers: Normal, RP, (And maybe Warmode always On?)

Many miss Classic cause of community and community was destroyed due to sharding, phasing, multi-server grouping, frequent server hops. This will be the allure of Classic, when people actually learn to be a community again.

[Eggroll]

Nope, nope, nope. Just play Classic when it releases. You just can't turn back time.

[Razzako]

Probably none are going to happen, it's just not how in their game design architecture right now.
Phasing is the absolute worse I've ever seen, I think there's a video around where the horde was raiding the outsides of Stormwind and you couldn't even see them if you were inside the city gates because of sharding.

So. Stupidly. Bad.

[Zka]

Half of these ideas are literally HORRIBLE. I'm glad you're not a game designer on WoW.

[satella]

Half of these ideas are literally HORRIBLE. I'm glad you're not a game designer on WoW.

Which half?

[Oakshana]

Half of these ideas are literally HORRIBLE. I'm glad you're not a game designer on WoW.

While I get where you are coming from, MOST ideas brought to the table when designing games are terrible. But those terrible ideas are then discussed by the team and change and evolve organically. And while not every change brought to a game is going to be popular, all changes come from discussion in the group developing the game. This is why one person doesn't make all the decisions.

[Kushana]

OP, I am glad you will enjoy yourself in Classic WoW, but I want none of the things you want. I do not want my WoW more grindy, more show-offy, or more artificially restricted.

[Alroxas]

Only allow one difficulty of each boss

Sorry but that's incredibly horrible idea. Ok let's tune all the bosses to Mythic difficulty well shoot now 99.99% of the player base can't even raid. Oh let's drop it down to Heroic difficutly well now more players can access it but now you're top 1% is bored because they've cleared the entire raid in under a month and the next raid isn't ready for another 3 months.

Make changes to the environment over time based on these contributions.

All this does is cause more populated servers to become even more populated as more population = more turn-ins = more changes to the environment which probably leads to more QoL factors. I hope you enjoy long queue times just to log in because that's what you're going to get. Also don't forget that you'll probably have to deal with even more lag as the server is crowded.

Don't increase the item level of items gained from next Raid Tier.

That's incredibly short-sighted. The primary motivation for players is to get better loot. Take that motivation away and you have less players who want to do content. Simple example, if we took all the player power gains from doing M+ right now, how many players would still do M+? My estimate is very few.

Make World Quests affect the environment.

Remove Sharding/Phasing.

This is at odds with the sharding/phasing issue. Think about it... so if I did a WQ which blows a hole in the side of a mountain, that means that the next player would see the hole which means they won't be able to do the WQ (since it's objective was to blow a hole in the side of the mountain) unless there was phasing present.

Remove all remote and cross-realm queue systems.

This only works if the server has sufficient critical mass to be self-sustaining to do all the activities for both PvP and PvE on both factions. US-Mal'ganis would never be able to any PvP because there just isn't enough Alliance players for all the Horde players that want to PvP in arena or BGs. Functionally, removing these systems would be a major step backwards.

Make professions great again.

Do you enjoy being shoehorned into a profession because it's the BiS profession for your spec (and not because you enjoy a different profession)? If not, then no Professions can't have a combat bonus because those min/maxers will determine your profession for you.

Allow free realm/faction transfers for a set amount of time after these changes, limited to one per character, 12 per account..

Nope. All this does is massively screw over the balance of servers. Nearly everyone would transfer from a low/mid pop server to a high pop server (causing various ultra high pop server issues) and faction imbalance would increase.

[Azerate]

This is stupidity on such a level that not even hardcore purists want those things.

[Cyanu]

while some of your ideas have merit the others are attrocious just as your idea that uniting the servers was a wrong move, in fact in an ideal world there would be no seperate servers and the entire community would be united but that is impossible due to technical limitations

[Temp name]

#1 you say you want people to spread out across different realms and factions.. #6 and #11 means people will clump together even harder than before.

Also #2 and #6 basically kills the game for casuals, which is where most of the money comes from, game dead, good job

[satella]

#1 you say you want people to spread out across different realms and factions.. #6 and #11 means people will clump together even harder than before.

Also #2 and #6 basically kills the game for casuals, which is where most of the money comes from, game dead, good job

Thing is, your rewards are relative to how many players are competing. You would get a bigger slice of the pie on a low populated faction somewhere, allowing that faction, despite lower numbers, to still have an equal footing in terms of killing faction leaders.

You could even implement buffs for the least populated servers/factions. Like a handicap in golf. In this system there is a huge incentive to move to a lower populated server/faction. Which means they would even out over time.

Regarding casuals, they would still be able to get the same items as hardcore players, just over a longer period. They could get something akin to rested experience, but for Essences. Getting toys, mounts, transmogs and such would still be more than possible for them, even without killing all the bosses. Randomness would no longer exist, they get exactly what they work for. No free stuff through luck.

This system is theoretical and almost impossible to implement in modern WoW, but it's a thought experiment that I enjoy.

[Temp name]

Thing is, your rewards are relative to how many players are competing. You would get a bigger slice of the pie on a low populated faction somewhere, allowing that faction, despite lower numbers, to still have an equal footing in terms of killing faction leaders.

You could even implement buffs for the least populated servers/factions. Like a handicap in golf. In this system there is a huge incentive to move to a lower populated server/faction. Which means they would even out over time.

You're directly punishing people playing on low pop realms by not letting them play. You on a dead realm? Fuck you, can't raid, can't pvp, can't do dungeons, go farm WQ's all day.

Regarding casuals, they would still be able to get the same items as hardcore players, just over a longer period. They could get something akin to rested experience, but for Essences. Getting toys, mounts, transmogs and such would still be more than possible for them, even without killing all the bosses. Randomness would no longer exist, they get exactly what they work for. No free stuff through luck.

This system is theoretical and almost impossible to implement in modern WoW, but it's a thought experiment that I enjoy.

They're casuals, not idiots. Who wants to do 0-1 boss for 120 months, or more? Literally. Fucking. No one. That's TEN. YEARS. People in WoW whine if they have to do the same 10+ for EIGHT months, imagine 1 boss for 15 times that, people would just fucking quit.
I understand you like doing thought experiments, but they have to be realistic.

[XDurionX]

Congratulations, you've killed WoW.

[satella]

You're directly punishing people playing on low pop realms by not letting them play. You on a dead realm? Fuck you, can't raid, can't pvp, can't do dungeons, go farm WQ's all day.



They're casuals, not idiots. Who wants to do 0-1 boss for 120 months, or more? Literally. Fucking. No one. That's TEN. YEARS. People in WoW whine if they have to do the same 10+ for EIGHT months, imagine 1 boss for 15 times that, people would just fucking quit.
I understand you like doing thought experiments, but they have to be realistic.

The numbers were a representation of the exponential rewards for the bosses, it was not set in stone, it was just an example that the system would be exponential in nature. In that example person A only does the first boss of a single Raid tier, and in 120 months gets ALL the items he needs. There would probably be 3 tiers, which would reduce that time to 60 months at most. But we're talking only if he has no server Rank, does no PvP, has no professions, does no World Quests and only does the first and easiest boss of each Raid. That person gets rewarded for his effort, which was minimal.

Your server Rank would increase your rewards, and on low population servers, getting a high Ranking would be substantially easier. Being on a low populated faction would net you more rewards for less effort essentially.

- - - Updated - - -

Sorry but that's incredibly horrible idea. Ok let's tune all the bosses to Mythic difficulty well shoot now 99.99% of the player base can't even raid. Oh let's drop it down to Heroic difficutly well now more players can access it but now you're top 1% is bored because they've cleared the entire raid in under a month and the next raid isn't ready for another 3 months.



All this does is cause more populated servers to become even more populated as more population = more turn-ins = more changes to the environment which probably leads to more QoL factors. I hope you enjoy long queue times just to log in because that's what you're going to get. Also don't forget that you'll probably have to deal with even more lag as the server is crowded.



That's incredibly short-sighted. The primary motivation for players is to get better loot. Take that motivation away and you have less players who want to do content. Simple example, if we took all the player power gains from doing M+ right now, how many players would still do M+? My estimate is very few.



This is at odds with the sharding/phasing issue. Think about it... so if I did a WQ which blows a hole in the side of a mountain, that means that the next player would see the hole which means they won't be able to do the WQ (since it's objective was to blow a hole in the side of the mountain) unless there was phasing present.





This only works if the server has sufficient critical mass to be self-sustaining to do all the activities for both PvP and PvE on both factions. US-Mal'ganis would never be able to any PvP because there just isn't enough Alliance players for all the Horde players that want to PvP in arena or BGs. Functionally, removing these systems would be a major step backwards.




Do you enjoy being shoehorned into a profession because it's the BiS profession for your spec (and not because you enjoy a different profession)? If not, then no Professions can't have a combat bonus because those min/maxers will determine your profession for you.




Nope. All this does is massively screw over the balance of servers. Nearly everyone would transfer from a low/mid pop server to a high pop server (causing various ultra high pop server issues) and faction imbalance would increase.

You have either misunderstood my post, or not read all of it.

Instead of having 4 difficulties, you have a ramping up of difficulty with each boss. The first boss would be like a boss on Normal, and the last boss like a boss on Mythic. Like in Ulduar, you can then trigger a hard mode version of each boss for a higher reward.

No, each player will get a smaller piece of the pie the more people there are on the server. People will want to move to lower populated servers to get faster Rankings and all kinds of rewards. I mentioned this in the post with the word "relative".

Since there is only one version of each item, every player has a chance to get the same loot. Those that put in more effort through professions, PvP, world quests or harder bosses will get it faster. This is a much better system than we have now where there are multiple versions of each item and if you don't raid Mythic there is a very small chance of getting the best version. Even if you raid Mythic, you have to be very lucky to get the best version.

No, it is not at odds with Sharding/Phasing, since all changes are relative to the amount of players on the server. If there was ever a World Quest to blow a hole in a mountain, every player on the server could then contribute to the quest, until there is enough material to blow a hole in a mountain, after that the quest is done. It's very simple, you seem to have misunderstood this. It would take the same amount of time on a low populated as it would on a high populated server, but the players on the low populated server would get a higher reward, since the rewards are relative.

If you get a higher reward for time invested on a low populated server, a single BG could net you as much as 10 on a very high populated server. Why would I not transfer over to the lowest populated server then?

You're right about professions, nobody likes to be forced into professions. They would have to be reworked entirely. The profession system is outdated, bloated, unfun and a lot more useless than it was.

No, they would not transfer from a low pop to high pop, see my previous answers.

I thank you for the feedback, it's the most detailed so far... even though everything was wrong. Read it over again if you must, and try to find actual holes this time.

[Alroxas]

You have either misunderstood my post, or not read all of it.

Or you wrote it up very poorly for people to understand.

Let's look a specific issues:

Issue 1: Make changes to the environment over time based on these contributions. and Remove Sharding/Phasing.

The problem is what happens when the environment change is based on the completion of a WQ (or even a series of WQ). Players who haven't experienced the change is now left in a post-changed world. The Burning of Teldrassil is a good example. New players (or returning players in pre-BFA content) still see Teldrassil before the events of BFA. Without sharding/phasing, you couldn't do part of Pilgrim's Bounty dailies (because Teldrassil is destroyed). Consider the pre-Cataclysm Azeroth, any quests, mobs, dailies, etc from the pre-Cataclysm is lost if the devs didn't update those items/quests/mobs/dailies for a post-Cata Azeroth.

In fact, the only way to see that content is currently either going to private servers or wait for WoW Classic.


Issue 2: Server dynamics - High Pop versus Low Pop

In the original post:

A visible change in the environment, based on contributions, unique to each server. This could be stronger/more numerous guards, access to portals or fun machines, stronger faction leaders, more watch towers or any kind of improvement in the environment. The possibilities are endless.

So generally speaking, higher population servers would have more players contributing which means more changes. Let's say the contributions converts a small hamlet (village) into becoming a bustling City with towers/extra guards/more vendors/etc. This makes high population servers more valuable than lower ones. Add in this:

Allow free realm/faction transfers for a set amount of time after these changes, limited to one per character, 12 per account.

Why would players choose to stay on low pop servers? You'll have slower progression for contributions, you server may NEVER get that bustling City.

This is further compounded by your suggestion:

Remove all remote and cross-realm queue systems.

If anything, you want the opposite to happen. Remove the borders of realms so that the entire population of wow is brought together. This is supposedly already in place because warfront contributions are regionally separated. (The cynic would state that Blizzard probably has a heavy hand in tuning the contribution % as well) but regardless, the contributions from NA server A and NA server B count together which blurs the line between server A and server B. It doesn't matter if server A with 10x the playerbase is contributing 10x as much than server B. Server B still gains the benefit.

Imagine if that wasn't the case and warfront contributions are solely based on your server. Your server only has 1k players and it takes 100k contributions to finish the bar, sorry it's going to take longer for your server than this other server that has 100k players (but still only needs 100k contributions).

Also consider that same server 100k but split 80:20 Horde to Alliance, takes just a fraction of the time for Horde to flip the warfront from contributions to attacking, but takes days if not weeks for the Alliance to do the same. How fun is that kind of realm limiting system?

[Molis]

Which half?

First half and second half

[Deleted]

There are some good ideas in there.

I can see why some people would be annoyed because if you had a sensible server balance system then the cheaters abusing the system by paying for transfers to easier servers would be stopped.

[Marrilaife]

Just make megaservers already, and get rid of low pop dead zones, then we can talk about removing all the cross realm tech.

No, I don't care that random Joe wants to play on low pop to be the biggest fish in the pond, in that case let's make solo servers so everyone can be a special snowflake in their little box.

Low pop servers remove MMO from MMORPG. They have dead economy, dead guild landscape, nothing is ever happening on them except the same 3 clowns talking to each other every day on trade (if anyone talks at all that is).

Instead of having hundreds of servers, or even as many as 50, we should have 10, maybe 20 per region (maybe less in smaller language regions like for example French or Spanish in EU), and only then you can start implementing server dynamic stuff like events based on contributions.

Server-based pvp can't exist unfortunately, you will have to pit server against another server, because naturally over the course of wow every server gravitates towards 1 faction. There are no "balanced" servers. There's only a question how big is the imbalance, from 60:40 to 99:1, we've seen it all, it's just a matter of time, they all end up devoid of one faction (or both, becoming dead realms, if that's "balanced" good joke).

Unless there's a FFA pvp event that is not based on factions, then yeah, it could be server-specific.