WoW would stop treating players as "Champions", and instead just "Adventurers"

[Ticj]

Because of the insanity that is ingame lifespan it would have to be timeskip straight to WoW2 to make sense. Even thousands of years later there will be people around who knew us.

Eh, not really. Even with the elves and draenai who live a ridiculously large amount of time, they seem to just forget about things after a certain point. (Like how Malfurion basically forgot about the prison of his brother in WC III)

[Vilendor]

Treating players as "soldiers/adventurers/mercenaries/bounty hunters/nobodies" after killing (or participating in killing) a gazillion world ending bosses is beyond stupid. Soldiers get all kind of badges and promotions for doing 1 heroic deed. We have 16 years of history saving the world from baddies.

[Gurahk]

Ah yes, me the adventurer who happened to be there while stopping Deathwing, Arthas, Kil'jaeden, a weakened titan and N'zoth. Oh, I also had one of those very powerful artifacts that was used to stop the world from going kaboom.
But I'm just an adventurer, promise! Stop acting like I'm somehow a powerful guy that kills anything that moves for a couple of gold coins, and don't you dare call me champion!

[iosdeveloper]

Classic doesn't have this problem

[Razorice]

As much as I'd love to be an adventurer, it's impossible considering all the shit my Character(s) went through.

[Thage]

You can only kill so many gods while maintaining your anonymity. That cat was out of the bag as soon as we killed Ragnaros back in the day, unless Blizzard opts to steal more achievements from players in-lore and give them to NPCs.... and seeing the community response to Varian stealing our kill on Onyxia, I don't see them doing that again anytime soon.

[Nnyco]

Depends.
If i make a new character he hasn't done shit. He still is treated as a Champion.
Many people who don't raid haven't killed all those Gods. I don't think everyone should be treated as if he completed every raid and quest. Because most haven't (or at least not when it was current content).
And that is not some elitism shit, i stopped raiding after MOP and i haven't done all the shit the NPCs praise me for. It's really strange.

I mean they clearly can do that, since they done it before. In legion Xe'ra was not pleased that you killed illidan, if your character had the kill.

[Elise the Seeker]

This needs to be on the wow forums so blizzard can see it.

I agree completely. Being an adventure, perhaps a well known bounty hunter, is way better than being a commander or champion. Like yes let us lead sometimes, but having the entire storyline fall on us is kind of annoying. It feels better to just join into the story and have this feeling of doing what we want and experiencing the world, rather than being forced to do a storyline that feels like it revolves around us.

Totally ruins the mmorpg aspect of it. There's many heroes, not just us.

[Sansnom]

I love FFXIV and all, but its approach to storytelling is VASTLY different than WoW's Because of that, I think treating the player as a "Champion" or "Hero" of their given faction can often times feel very frustrating.

Now, when I say "players should be treated as Adventurers", what I really mean is that we should be treated as random mercenaries. That's not to say main characters dislike us or anything, but our involvement in our factions should be something that is largely left to our own devices. If I am a Dwarf, it might be IMPLIED that I serve Ironforge and by extension the Alliance (thus justifying the opposing faction treating you with hostility), as an "Adventurer", you would function largely outside of it. You are not a soldier, you did not sign-up for the army, you are an adventurer whose goals are your own to define.

That does not work with previous expansion. It seems this whole "mercenaries" only looks at the BFA with the whole Sylvannas story line. If I were to use your US President analogy, who should he send on the mission to assassinate Osama Bin Laden? The US own trusted solders or some mercenary?

We are the champions because we are the one saving the world in our story. Sure everyone is playing the same story but it is their story, not ours.

[Deferionus]

I agree with posts like this one where it feels better to be the random adventurer / mercenary instead of a god tier super hero in the story. Right now we are at the point of rolling out eyes and saying "of course, we're going to win this, and he will be hyped up, but it doesn't matter."

I've seen the time skip mentioned in other threads and it does offer them a way to correct things. Imagine the potential for WoW if we lost to the jailer and was imprisoned and we start the following expansion being freed by some random person and brought back to Azeroth from our imprisonment where no one knew us and we got to explore the gameworld over again. Dark portal powered down. No one remembers the scourge. Ruins of Stormwind that we failed to defend. New night elf capital. They could essentially restart the game without making an entirely new world of warcraft. It would be awesome to go out and rediscover the world again. And you have Chromie time and phasing to play the old content so that isn't lost.

I think this is likely too large of a expansion to really do, but it would be very fun to play through.

[Jujudrood]

This is a symptom of the game being around for so long as us, as players, partaking in these battles of ever-growing importance.
It's hard to be "just an Adventurer" when I've saved Azeroth multiple times and have killed (in no particular order): Dragons, Elemental Lords, Liches, prevented an Arachnid swarm invasion...
Then BC happened.

It just got so big over time e that, to go back to the "random hired sword" kind of role story-wise would feel extremely... off.
Like, the King of Stormwind/Warchief of the Horde are like "you totally did all these things and saved us a bunch, but you're not really that notable to us at all".
It feels cheap, I guess?

I mean, coming out of Shadowlands, if we get the time skip that some of us think will happen (100 years+ would do it), and if by going there, our deeds are sort of "forgotten" or we are otherwise looked at as if we abandoned Azeroth in its time of need, then we can go back to being the lowly Adventurers for the new wave of NPC leadership.
Even then, though, I still have trophies sitting in my bank that shows I saved the world N times.

[Tvmad212]

The problem I have with this aspect of WoW story telling is that it feels like Blizzard cannot make up their mind. One minute, the quests are treating us like we're a random adventurer, or Jeremy the ordinary soldier. The next moment, they are calling us something akin to the Champion of Azeroth. Even when they talk to us like we are a great champion of *insert faction here*, the quests they give us, the story they send us on spends most of it's time treating us like we're nothing special. Even when they do send us on quests that correctly portray us as this great hero more often than not, some faction leader or lore figure comes along and either steals our thunder or does something that makes us seem like we're little more than an ordinary soldier in comparison.

Just looking at one easy example from BfA. Jaina once again demonstrates incredible levels of power, creating great walls of ice as strong as stone with little to no apparent effort whilst simultaneously maintaining a swirling storm of ice around her and raining ice spikes down on big areas of the city of Stormwind. There are plenty of other examples of plot characters conjuring powerful magic in an instant that we players can't even dream of. Yet despite all this.... WE are chosen as the Champion of Azeroth.

There is a total disparity between what the story tells us, what we experience and what we do. Blizzard need to make up their mind. If we are powerful champions, give us a story and cutscenes that make us feel like powerful champions. If we are standard soldier/adventurer then give us a story and cutscenes that make us feel like that. Stop flip flopping between the two and give us some consistency. This inconsistent experience is one of the major reasons why for me, WoW's story doesn't even make it into my personal top 5 for mmo's when ranked by story at the moment.

[Eurhetemec]

There is a total disparity between what the story tells us, what we experience and what we do. Blizzard need to make up their mind. If we are powerful champions, give us a story and cutscenes that make us feel like powerful champions. If we are standard soldier/adventurer then give us a story and cutscenes that make us feel like that. Stop flip flopping between the two and give us some consistency. This inconsistent experience is one of the major reasons why for me, WoW's story doesn't even make it into my personal top 5 for mmo's when ranked by story at the moment.

Presumably FFXIV and GW2 would be, but what would be the other three ahead of WoW? If you say ESO I am going to have to go right ahead disregard your opinion lol. Hell, GW2 is pretty dubious. FFXIV is clearly ahead I admit.

I do think your criticism is a totally valid one - WoW is inconsistent on this point. We are no longer ever treated like total randos (except by strangers, which is fine), but they do alternate between treating as like "just soldiers" and actual "champions". Part of the problem I think is that we're neither. Power-wise, we're far stronger than common soldiers (ignoring the dodgy blocks of HP that defend towns etc., they exist for a different reason), but we're also not nearly as powerful as the upper tier of lore characters, who can often face five to twenty of us and live.

I think if they consistently treated as champions, it would probably work, because there's like, champions, and then there's like, superheroes, and lore characters tend to be the latter, and it's fine to have that going on. The problem is all the treating us like rando soldiers or functionaries and setting us to do all these minor/trivial tasks.

I think it's easy to be too harsh though. WoW has been going for 16 years. The issues here have gradually crept in. The initial deal was very much that we were soldiers/adventurers, but after a certain point (somewhere around WotLK) that no longer really became plausible. And they've tried to keep a sort of balance there, but as we've done more and more and more it's less and less plausible to have us as just soldiers. Yet some players keep demanding that, no matter how irrational it is.

I think if WoW had only lasted 5-10 years of truly active development, like most MMOs do, we'd never really have noticed this issue in a major way. But at 16? It's harder to deal with. I think they need to think about making it more permanent, and getting rid of us ever being treated as like "just soldiers".

[rrayy]

I love FFXIV and all, but its approach to storytelling is VASTLY different than WoW's Because of that, I think treating the player as a "Champion" or "Hero" of their given faction can often times feel very frustrating.

Now, when I say "players should be treated as Adventurers", what I really mean is that we should be treated as random mercenaries. That's not to say main characters dislike us or anything, but our involvement in our factions should be something that is largely left to our own devices. If I am a Dwarf, it might be IMPLIED that I serve Ironforge and by extension the Alliance (thus justifying the opposing faction treating you with hostility), as an "Adventurer", you would function largely outside of it. You are not a soldier, you did not sign-up for the army, you are an adventurer whose goals are your own to define.

This serves two purposes:

First, it makes it more believable that NPC's of the "opposing faction" would be willing to work with you. If the President of the US launched a nuke at China, then it is unlikely a Chinese General would be willing to work with an American General. However, some random American bounty-hunter or something? Possibly. Case in point; it wouldn't make sense of Tyrande to work with a "Champion of the Horde" who could've prevented the burning of Teldrassil. Some random mercenary who couldn't have stopped it even if he wanted? Far more plausible.

Second, it gives Blizzard the freedom to make more bold decisions on behalf of the factions at play. Sylvanas burning Teldrassil pissed a lot of Horde players off, too because as Warchief of the Horde, they were also culpable for her actions. As Adventurers who were simply "paid to be there, in case they were needed", players would have the freedom to condemn Sylvanas, without feeling like there characters are obliged to follow her blindly.

It may seem a minor point to stress, but I truly think this distinction between "Champion" and "Adventurer" would just really absolve a lot of the ongoing issues with WoW's storytelling, and how it often affects players and their characters.

Go play classic. Problem solved. Or, create a new toon and start at one. Problem also solved.

The game is fine as is. Massive changes shouldn't be made because players can't handle being called champion.

[Loveliest]

I don't think people are reading the OP, just the title. At first I was the same, I was thinking "I like being the Champion", but after actually reading I get what you're saying, you mean to make things faction-independent in a way. And yeah, I guess that's one way to solve things - for example everyone seems to be punished for their actions BUT the player, who's always front and center and never held accountable. Or they could make us involved canonically and bear consequences - for example when Baine is imprisoned for betraying Sylvanas, we're also imprisoned (because we helped). Either way, we're there but we're not really there so it should be fixed in a way.

[kappalol]

How do you want to be just an adventurer after defeating one world-ending threat after another?

I hate to be a hero but there is no way back in the current game.

[Dystemper]

As others said, the cat is out of the bag. No going back now unless they created a event that either time jumps you , or magically wipes your presence from the collective memory of the world. They could even have a quest chainset up for you to gain a new Identity . As it is we are Immortal Gods where death has no meaningful impact on us. Shit if I had my way , We would have consequences for our decisions. Kill Townspeople? risk getting arrested then being forced to break out get your gear back and hide. Stealth would be a play style. Disguises, illusions etc would be needed to go into cities. Would set up a entire new way to play .

[rrayy]

Or they could make us involved canonically and bear consequences - for example when Baine is imprisoned for betraying Sylvanas, we're also imprisoned (because we helped). Either way, we're there but we're not really there so it should be fixed in a way.

Except that we didn't betray Sylvanas. Everythign we did, we kept Sylvanas apprised of and in more than a few instances to go along with it and report back to her. Sylvanas had no reason to imprision us as we were following her orders.

[Chonar]

I've bitched about this before because I hate it, but the unfortunate truth is that the cat is out of the bag here. They've already escalated players to god tier in the storyline, and it would be weird and nonsensical to suddenly have NPCs act like you're some rando adventurer after all that.

Perhaps after a time skip where we've been gone in some sort of.. I dont know, realm where time works differently for so long, our deeds have passed on into legend and no one recognises our faces anymore...

[Garybear]

Wouldn't be a problem if most MMOs, if not all, are quick to build the player character up into something more right off the bat. WoW was probably the only one not to do it early on. It's bound to happen, it's easy enough to fix going on through expansions, but they won't do it.

How would you fix it?