How I would fix WoW if I was a dev.

Deleted · 2019-01-10, 01:51 PM

Originally Posted by Laozi

Here is the thing, There are different forms of balanced. People in wow the players have become very used to the current watered down and simplistic gameplay so for us it's always been a pure numerical thing. Boss's are health spounges so balanced is a simple raw how much dps or hps can you put out and how close is that number for each class.

In a complex game balanced becomes much more nuanced. What is balanced in a complex game with multiple facets in combat and things to overcome is often more a question of what is useful rather than is your raw dps / hps within the acceptable bracket.

Let's take monster hunter world for example.
There's multiple weapons in the game and the community considers them all perfectly viable yet each varus massively on there dps output.

Great sword is by far the highest dps weapon. It hits fore insane amounts. But it is balanced because it slows your char movement down and requires a wind up to hit, there's a high skill cap on sheathing it to run and dodge properly from boss attacks and using it in just the right windows where its safe to get a hit in on the boss.

The light bow gun does far far less dps but it's mobile and I can always be hitting a boss Evean when it's flying. I also have massive utility to apply poisen, paralysis, or elemental damdge as well as have healing ammo for my team.

Classically rpgs have these benefits and drawback on weapons and classes and deep complex stat based combat because it helps not hinders balancing the game and crests deeper more compelling combat.

The simpler the game the worse it is to balance because people start to look for pure numerical output as balance, because that's all that matters. And as wow has never had good balance no matter how much its simplifies the game, has it been worth increasingly shallow gameplay?

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How am I wrong?

Just saying your wrong and throwing an insult sounds like I touched a nerve and you feeling salty and need to lash out more than give any feedback.

What has bfa added to the game that wasn't all ready there in some form?

Legion added the artifact system, added the invasions, added the mage tower.

BfA added auto win bg's with npc's, island scenarios with no story and artifact light with the heart.

If you disagree point to it. Or I suggest that you stop embarrassing your self.

Yes, but can you imagine the backlash here!? If Class X is performing even 1% less than class Y hell breaks loose... I also want complex gameplay and I don't mind that my class because of this might bring something else than pure DPS. But we are in the minority here...

Ever played witcher 3? There many guides out there that tell you the best damage output setup as well ... instead of just play what you like and what you think is most fun ... it's a mindset and it will never return. Not because of blizzards fault...but the player base... complex systems do not serve the major public wow has they would have to release a new game for that.

Wildstar was more complex, and we all know what happend to that (RIP)

Deleted · 2019-01-10, 01:54 PM

Originally Posted by Yriel

In wrath you could get very good gear via tokens and the three new dungeon at the end had drops that were on par with the earlier raid gear. So i guess you will have to go back further although magisters terrace had epic gear, too and bg pvp weapons were on par with the best raidgear in TBC so i guess you'd have to go back to classic.

I find raids just terribly boring and unfunny, i tried it several times over the years and was happier every time i quit the raid group. Just my opinion but still...
So resticting gear to raids would leave me with nothing to do. The non-raid endgame is far from perfect right now but at least it exists.

Im fibne with the wrath model. But im curios, since u dont like raiding how do u get ur gear? Just m+?

**Alphaorc** · 2019-01-10, 01:55 PM

1. Stop spoonfeeding content.

2. Give challenge mode to people leveling alts with increased XP and maybe titles or mounts for reaching the highest level, so leveling can be fun again.

3. Allow people who have all classes at level 120 start a new class at higher levels but with one month cooldown.

4. Add a level 120 row with 3 abilities to all classes.

5. Add more races to demon hunter class.

6. Improve costumization in character screen by allowing people to control the hairstyle and beard style on their characters.

7. Screw Azurite, give neck abilities instead.

8. Put Warfront as bgs, allow pvers to do the regular VS ai if they want to.

9. Bring back reforging.

10. Bring back more stats.

11. Make professions feel useful.

12. Increase world quest rewards based on your rep.

13. Make warfront zone areas more usefull by adding respawning very rare mobs and adding Resources to farm, like Tanaan, even if you dont control it.

14. Allow mythic + mobs to drop stuffs, such as profession items and transmog.

15. Allow people who transmogged to keep the transmog when they switch items, instead of making them go back everytime they find an upgrade.

16. Reduce the price to 10 bucks for server migration, but give it a 3 month "cooldown" by increasing the price to 25 bucks.

17. Delete the bnet accounts of people who thinks that my ideas are bad.

**Skildar** · 2019-01-10, 01:55 PM

Originally Posted by Laozi

I'm a computer programmer, a dev in the science industry

I trust that you are a programmer, but then you must lack of conceptor skills because it ain't hard to see that the features you gave as example are the ones where the most work has been put into this expansion.

Deleted · 2019-01-10, 02:12 PM

Originally Posted by Grumpymuppet

Yes, but can you imagine the backlash here!? If Class X is performing even 1% less than class Y hell breaks loose... I also want complex gameplay and I don't mind that my class because of this might bring something else than pure DPS. But we are in the minority here...

Ever played witcher 3? There many guides out there that tell you the best damage output setup as well ... instead of just play what you like and what you think is most fun ... it's a mindset and it will never return. Not because of blizzards fault...but the player base... complex systems do not serve the major public wow has they would have to release a new game for that.

Wildstar was more complex, and we all know what happend to that (RIP)

We get that anyway right now it's a constant bitching of classes out by 1% here or there.

At least with more complex combat you get more opportunity for classes to be needed and feel useful outside of raw output.

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Originally Posted by Skildar

I trust that you are a programmer, but then you must lack of conceptor skills because it ain't hard to see that the features you gave as example are the ones where the most work has been put into this expansion.

Very little work. My degree is computer games dev (the programming side, making renderes from direct x, animation engines, sound engines, AI)
And I can tell you 100% that what was added to wow in bfa as far as warfronts and islands and such is from a programming point of view extreamly trivial and stinks of there being 0 back end development done and all of it being script dev bollocks and new art assets.

I don't like paying expansion prices for some story a bit of script and some new skins / models. No offence to the guys at what ghost crawlers level used to do stitching together bits of the back end with lua scripts to make something the has the feeling of being new and the art team who do exceptional work. But I ain't paying a sub every month for dev team of only artists, designers and fucking script kiddies.

**Bane-Thunder-God** · 2019-01-10, 02:13 PM

Originally Posted by Saphano

I would remove pathfinder and allow flying purchaseable at max lvl and design zones with flying in mind
i would remove ap
i would remove mission tables
i would remove wq and readd dailies
i would make m+ reward cosmetics and other rewards apart from actual progression gear, like challenge modes
i would remove LFR and normal and only keep hc and mythic (which is what normal and hc in the past used to be)
i would readd talent trees
i would readd all lost abilites pre-pruning
i would add a max lvl so that ability bloats and talent bloats doesnt become a problem but that progression after max lvl is still possible in some way
i would readd glyphs as not only cosmetics but as a form of customization that affects gameplay like it used to be
i would readd more stats to add more variety and possibilites like it used to be
i would remove titanforging and gear being rewarded from every direction
i would readd pvp vendors and remove honor talents
i would remove LFG but instead keep group finder so theres a platform for fiding groups, essentially keeping the ease of finding dungeons but removing the instant summons
i would remove sharding
i would remove cross realm grouping
i would remove phasing used to realm hop and instead keep it to dynamically tell stories like it was meant to
i would readd rpg elements that were removed
i would instead merge servers that needed merging to fix low pop and faction imbalance, which would then allow me to remove warmode and readd pvp/pve servers
i would remove scaling in lvling and combat
i would fix the lvling process
i would remove lvl boosts as a service
i would remove a lot of timegating and only keeping it where it makes sense
i would readd badges and currencies for gear and tier sets
i would readd linear gear progression so that you get gear from dungeons and proffessions in order to raid and the raid gives you the better/best gear, gear regains meaning
i would remove catch up mechanics and only keep it where it makes sense and doesn't render everything pointless

Glad you're not a dev, your game would suck! like Wildstar is the prime example of thinking those decisions work in todays world. They simply do not.

As for the OP it's great saying I would make better combat but you can't elaborate on how you'll make it better? Anyone can say what you've said but you haven't detailed how you would actually make improvements.

**Skildar** · 2019-01-10, 02:15 PM

Originally Posted by Laozi

Very little work. My degree is computer games dev (the programming side, making renderes from direct x, animation engines, sound engines, AI)
And I can tell you 100% that what was added to wow in bfa as far as warfronts and islands and such is from a programming point of view extreamly trivial and stinks of there being 0 back end development done and all of it being script dev bollocks and new art assets.

Well then there is no discussion, you're in denial and you're bad at your job.

Deleted · 2019-01-10, 02:25 PM

Originally Posted by Skildar

Well then there is no discussion, you're in denial and you're bad at your job.

Guess that's why they pay me so much and made me a team lead. *shrug*

If you want to pay for half a product, that's your choice.

But from my experience what you paid for was a bit of scripting, some new art and maps and a basic GOAP A.I system for island opposing teams. (GOAP systems are so easy you make one as part of basic AI lessons at uni)

Deleted · 2019-01-10, 02:37 PM

Originally Posted by Bane-Thunder-God

Glad you're not a dev, your game would suck! like Wildstar is the prime example of thinking those decisions work in todays world. They simply do not.

As for the OP it's great saying I would make better combat but you can't elaborate on how you'll make it better? Anyone can say what you've said but you haven't detailed how you would actually make improvements.

Lol. So wow today is ur answer? Cuz look where thats gotten wow lul

Wildstar is not my example. Tbc wrath is

**Norome** · 2019-01-10, 02:49 PM

Originally Posted by Jujudrood

But let's say all that Advanced stuff boggles your mind or you simply don't care.
There's still Basic.
It's called 'choice'.

No, it's not. In WoW, what most people would do is search for the best build/talents and spend all their precious talent points according to that. Combat mechanics in WoW are pretty shallow, so there is no real incentive to spend your time min-maxing it yourself (and it's far from rewarding), instead of just googling what someone already did. Because most people already know that they wouldn't come up with anything better themselves.
You don't get a heureka moment like "oh, if I put my talents like this and equip these two items, it'll completely change my game experience and raid performance!".
Most talent choices you do are based on whether you might gain a slight advantage in a probably very niche situation, possibly by also adding a tiny complexity to your rotation. And as soon as you gain that knowledge (aka reading it online) about the talent/situation, you're gonna pick that and stick with it everytime you do the encounter. Because there is no real reason not to.

**Coombs** · 2019-01-10, 02:59 PM

The first three rules one must consider when developing game systems.

1) "What would an asshole do, and how do I design my system to prevent them from being assholes?"

2) Know your audience

3) What is the goal of the product

Of course game design these days is a skeleton blue print for highly refined Skinner boxes, and then a distracting graphical overlay is placed on top of these schematics to exploit fools out of every "disposable" dollar they earn.

**Vaelorian** · 2019-01-10, 03:12 PM

I doubt that anything now can fix WoW. The players that are like me are probably gone already and not much willing to come back.
The players that currently inhabit WoW are perhaps the target audience? I don't know. But there is a lot of negativity about BFA and a yearn for systems and playstyle that we had previously.

But if Blizzard were to ask me to get my input on how I personally liked WoW best, I would give the following input:

1. remove anything related to crossrealm tech. Sharding is not bad provided it is for people from your own server.
2. merge realms/servers and keep on merging them if required every so often
3. remove flying and compensate everyone their purchase 100% (won't happen, duh)
4. remove leveling itself. Instead invent a system where people learn to use certain skills/techniques to be able to play at higher levels. This as a result will make creating alts, a lot smoother. (I don't care about alts themselves, I rarely play any). You earn skills in a skill book. Before you get the skill intended, you have used it properly and know what it is for due to quests.
5. LFD-tool can exist but without instantly teleporting towards dungeons (remember that crossrealm stuff did not exist)
6. Dungeons should supposed to last about 45 min to an hour or even longer. If you are super skilled/geared/skipped a lot, you could run it quicker obviously.
7. Attunements are a thing again, but always doable outside of raids. Attunements should not involve PvP if the activity that gets unlocked is not for PvP.
8. RPG elements like flint and tinder + visiting trainers (various trainers for various skills are scattered over the world) are back again
9. open world quests have degrees of difficulty. Currently ircc it states color and numbers of players required. But in the end anyone can solo anything. So I want the quests requirements to really be requirements. Really skilled groups can perhaps "shave" a player off if the requirements would be 5.
10. communicating between players in a dungeon or raid should be required. If this is not the case, the dungeon simply is too easy.
11. CC should be required and not every class should be able to CC or should only be able to CC a certain type of mob
12. Classes should feel unique. Warlocks and Paladins were granted nice quests in Vanilla. This should be for every class. In Legion Blizzard gave attention to classes via order halls.
13. Having more and more classes to play does not mean that the game is better or more exciting. I think we have too many classes already. If I look at my taste, the only classes that could see daylight in my version would be: Melee/Ranged(hunter) DPS and Protection, Caster DPS, Healing,
My favourite class and main is Paladin. So where is this one? Well this would be a specific spec from the Melee/Ranged DPS. Or a specific spec from Healing. Depending on your role. You would get so many custom stuff that selecting skills for that specific type would be great. All the while you would call yourself paladin and the game would respond to you as such. And classes like warlock, shaman, hunter etc are all incorperated as specs in the other types. Switching specs should be very costly while switching talents within your area of spec should be easy and cheap.
14. quests that you completed should have an effect on the world. So if you revisit the area, npc's should respond to you as such. And if your quest objective or result should be that the enviroment should change, it should remain permanently visible. Every province should have a few of these quests. I personally hate to see Elwynn currently burning.... and remain burning with orcs everywhere. And like I said. This should not always be the case that everything changes. Else you cannot help out friends who aren't as far with certain quests.
15. Raid would have 1 difficulty. But how farther we get into an expansion, the more difficult the raids become.
16. Dungeons have 2 difficulties. Normal and Heroic. Heroic dungeons are equal to how TBC heroic dungeons were at launch (in terms of how hard mobs could hit) or equal to Cata launch heroic dungeons. With normal gear people would be able to enter the first raid.
17. Leaderboards could exists for Mythic Dungeons. But this would only be epeen. Rewards would be the same as Heroic but perhaps with "mythic" stamped on the item.
18. danger in the open world is back - elites wander around and could potentially sneak up on you.

**d00mh4cker** · 2019-01-10, 03:28 PM

The issue is, in early wow (vanilla - wotlk) it felt like the developers tried to the make the game better then last expansion, which was great.

But now it feels like the developers focus is on how to make the game as addictive as possible. This is what you see in mobile games.

It's sad. Blizzard once made awesome games, you automatically had high expectations because it was made by Blizzard. First time i saw Overwatch i thought "this game is gonna be awesome because its blizzard".

But regarding wow, starcraft, diablo, their beloved franchieses, and now even overwatch, i have ZERO expections.
There are TONS of indie developers out there making 100x BETTER games, that are addictive by just being good, like wow once was. You didnt have to force your fans to log into wow, they wanted to because the game was awesome.

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Originally Posted by Axaion

>Purchaseable gear with tokens.
You cannot be serious, claiming people dont want to earn gear, then suggest buying gear for tokens, get the hell out of here with your pay 2 win bs.

Maybe i expressed my self wrong.
I ment a system like we saw in wotlk, where the best gear was purchased by tokens dropped from bosses.

Insteead of this lotttery casino titanforged system.

**schwarzkopf** · 2019-01-10, 03:30 PM