How to actually bring players back next expansion:

[Fascinate]

Wish i remembered how i first found out about WoW, if it was a commercial or just word of mouth. I started in ~may of 2006 and before that i had no idea what an mmo was lol. What's even weirder is i didn't even consider myself a gamer, prior to that most of my gaming was done on an snes or PS1 a decade earlier. But ya, crazy good marketing for sure.

[Marrilaife]

The only thing that might help is for WoW to go B2P model.

Enjoy having all the cool mounts, transmogs and allied races for 20$ in the shop in that case, atm they're limiting themselves to a couple of pets and mounts per year, but if they drop the sub fee, watch the cash shop expand exponentially. Even things like larger bags or expanding pet collection size, that is atm in-game feature, to be monetized, as every non-sub MMO charges for inventory space (bags, bank, stash, crafting storage, you call it).

[Niwes]

My argument is more fundamental. Does M+ really need a measurement other than completing the dungeon successfully? I don't know but it's worth thinking about.

The timing stuff comes from some desire on the part of the developers to introduce competition through leader boards, etc. At some level they seem to want to make the entire PVE game competitive in one way or another. I'm not a fan of it. What would be easy enough I guess is to leave M+ as it is and introduce non-timed versions that simply rely on completion of the previous level to advance to the next. I might be in the minority here but I play the game mostly for fun instead of trying to prove anything about the skill level of my group or myself.

100% agree here.

[Marrilaife]

forget about tuning balance to the fiftieth digit, forget about everyone being exactly the same.

Oh, they forgot it about it long ago, that's why less than 1/3rd of all the specs existing in the game get commonly invited into mythic+ above 10, and that's why pugs struggle in uldir because "must have warlocks for ghuun, must have priests for zul" and that's on difficulty levels that are meant for casuals, i.e. not mythic.

[Orby]

There is no Blizzard only Activision.

And Activision doesn't listen to what consumers want. You will get what we give you and if you don';t like it you can leave, doesn't matter because they'll still make money regardless. Nothing personal this is business.

[Teriz]

Some have argued that there is an "A" team and a "B" team when it comes to the development of an expansion. WotLK, MoP, and Legion are all considered great expansions while Cataclysm, WoD, and now BFA are considered lackluster expansions.

So if history repeats itself, the next expansion will wash away the pain of the current one.

[Deleted]

Some have argued that there is an "A" team and a "B" team when it comes to the development of an expansion. WotLK, MoP, and Legion are all considered great expansions while Cataclysm, WoD, and now BFA are considered lackluster expansions.

So if history repeats itself, the next expansion will wash away the pain of the current one.

I can't believe cataclysm was a "B team" filler xpac with all the work for the world revamp, plus the new zones and features. Lot of people hated it, sure, but it's maybe the xpac in which blizzard spended the biggest amount of ressources.

[Hotsforyou]

Revert back to BC. No LFG/LFR/Xrealm anything and M+ in its current state and i would resub, other than that, nothing. I will go play classic when it releases.

[bufferunderrun]

~Sit down and figure out the most fun specs/abilities classes have had in the past 15 years and make the most fun spec you can. A good example of this would be a shadow priest with mana returning vampiric embrace from tbc combined with legion voidform. Or tbc shadow combined with shadow orb playstyle, you get the idea. (obviously for this to make sense you need to make mana matter again, hint hint)
~Bring back role playing elements (hunter pet system is a good example)
~Slow down the pace of progression/stop giving away epics. Im 371 and havent stepped into the raid nor done a single mythic + dungeon (aka no weekly cache). Pretty ridiculous that i have heroic gear and have basically afk'd the entire xpac blizzard.
~Bring back high end profession recipes that are locked behind rep, or rng based. People like being special, not everyone should be able to craft everything.
~Bring back profession bonuses to combat, people love the feeling of being rewarded to play the game, even if professions arent their most favorite thing to do.
~De-homogenize the classes. Stop trying to be fair to everyone, we dont all need to be within 5% of each others damage to feel useful in a raid. TBC shadow is again a great example of this. Go back to the role playing roots this game started from, fairness should be secondary to fun/class identity.
~Profession items should add more to character power (gems, enchants etc), like they used to. This not only makes sense from a game play point of view, it again encourages RPG aspects.
~Bring back reforging. You really dropped the ball on this one blizzard, sure it wasnt convenient to hearth back to a city to reforge during a raid but who cares, the beneifts far outweighed the negatives and reforging was an awesome way to tune your character to its strengths.
~Make pvp mirror pve 1:1 like it used to. You know you ruined pvp when you started balancing the game as two different entities, i could only imagine how low pvp participation was in legion. Balance the game the best you can as a whole like you used to and the game will be better for it.

I really want to add to that list a "remove collections" tab option but thats a bit extreme, i just think that is too much of a focus for far too large a percentage of the playerbase. Dont get me wrong im not sitting here trying to tell people how to enjoy the game, i just feel mounts/pets/achievements have become center stage for a lot of players, and that isnt what makes a good mmo.

I wrote this out in 5 minutes, feel free to add your thoughts if you have any chat.

why bring back old players? what blizzard need is thinking a way to pull new players into it; what wow and the mmo market in general need is an huge influx of new players it need to become an hot genre again.

[Powerogue]

-easier said than done

-mixed feelings, some of those sucked to upkeep. Did you know hunter pets could just up and leave you? Bleh.

-can kind of agree with that.

-that sounds dangerously like bringing back Nomi. Let him burn.

-professions with combat bonuses were more fun but lead people to try to profession swap to get the "best" ones.

-but you do need to be close in damage to get invited. Legion already did a lot of the de-homogenization anyway.

-profession items being more useful? sure I guess.

-reforging was a boring way to have gear upgrades cost more money. You'd look up your best stats and reforge to that. Why would that be fun?

-as in less pve/pvp exclusive balances? That would cause a lot of imbalance as what's a balanced chunk of burst dps in pve is overpowered in pvp and so forth, but at the same time I do really want some of my pvp talents to become baseline because they're that damned good.

[Lei]

why bring back old players? what blizzard need is thinking a way to pull new players into it; what wow and the mmo market in general need is an huge influx of new players it need to become an hot genre again.

I don't think you know what you wish for with this....

[Akka]

Yeah slowing down progression is literally what Blizz has been doing since WoD, im sorry but slowing progress is exactly the problem, not the solution.

I don't really see the "slowing down" when you can be decked in epics literally hours after dinging max level.
The problem is, as usual since WotLK, that the only "progression" in the game is "latest raid tier", everything else being either obsolete or inflated to this late tier level. And this retarded design means that there is BOTH an "artificial slow-down" (gating and the like) AND a ridiculously fast upgrade up to this last tier - so basically, the worst on both end.