Idea to improve the burn-out problem, flying-issue and boredom-problems

[schwank05]

If the game would have stayed the same with new bosses, zones, gear and abilities since BC I would still love the game. I could still be running Kara weekly to this day. If they had not gotten rid of 10 man my raid team would still be together and progressing Mythinc content as we did through CATA. If everything had remained the same before WOD I would still love the game I did however unsub for the first time since 05 towards the end of MOP because I got sick of the theme. The class designs were great, but the theme sucked ass. I just want 10/25 Man raiding back with no more mythic or activated Mythic or Hard Modes Ulduar was the perfect raid. I want Skill trees back where you could mix and match from more than one tree, I want Blood DPS DK back, I want Real Disc Priest from MOP back where you just did damage and healed the raid, I want Fast OH 1H weapons back and with it Combat Rogue so I can dual Wield Axes again, I want Real Resto Druid back where you just Hotted all the things and could single handedly keep 23-24 people alive, I dont play a Resto druid to cast heals. Basically bring back Pre WOD WOW and Ill be happy. I made it 2 months in WOD before unsubbing, 1 Month in Legion, and 2 weeks in BFA the game has just been lame and cannot compete with Modern Survival games for me.

[therealbowser]

Daze mount item done. Not having flying alters the way I play the game, I dont do much content / grinds / achievements until flying...It sucks.

Definitely. The speed alone is tiring and burns me out, as is taking the scene route for literally everything.

Dazing is frustrating for me though, and if we're adding a mount item as a quality of life feature, they should just remove dazing period. It's an antiquated mechanic and has no place in modern WoW IMHO.

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It's not actually necessarily a huge issue programming-wise (I mean, it might be, I don't know the specifics of WoW's engine, but probably not), it's more a huge effort in terms of generating the content, testing the content, and ensuring it doesn't break anything.

If you just added these systems to a new expansion, and only to that new expansion, that would be something you could integrate into building that expansion, and balancing that expansion, and you could just work around any issues such systems created (like not making quests to kill specific mobs that might in fact be rare or prevalent based on the fake ecological system and so on). But even then it would take up a significant proportion of the development budget for the expansion.

And it would largely be pulling work from the content team - i.e. the same people who write quests, place NPCs, balance content and so on, which I suspect is already an extremely busy team.

You'd need huge testing of stuff too - this is what people casually proposing these systems never think about. Yeah, it's easy to suggest a fake ecology and/or random encounters, but then you need to test both massively, and with a large number of players, to see that they don't go horribly wrong. With most content, you can fix issues by just boosting or reducing spawn rates, making more items to pick up whatever, but with something like random encounters, that's going to be hard to get right, and what works on private alpha or even public beta, may fail completely in the face of actual play, and cause absolute havoc and be very hard to get right. Based on games that do have fake ecologies, too, that's probably going to bug out in some spectacular and unexpected way eventually as well, which will cause huge moaning.

You can do this sort of stuff easily in Skyrim or whatever, because if it bugs out, it's "lol Skyrim" and/or it's a mod so it's on you that you used it. But in a MMO? That's not going to fly.

And yeah expanding the amount of terrain is just damn hard work as you say. It might actually end up slightly easier to populate it with a fake ecology-type deal and random encounters, but it's also going to feel a lot less personalized and WoW-ish (even by MMO standards, WoW is exceptionally prone to highly-specific, highly-fixed stuff, and always has been).

Re: daze, when did you last play?

I don't mean that in a rude way, but like, a few patches ago they put in mount items, and one of them is an item that makes you immune to daze in all specs, as Djuntas says. Tanks are also immune to daze.

Flying is just incompatible with everything else being asked for. You'd need something more like No Man's Sky to incorporate these requests and flying, and that'd be an entirely different MMO (WoW's biggest problem re: flying is that it doesn't have any mechanics at all - unlike say GW2's approach to it - if WoW had done that, and there's some evidence they considered a system a bit like that, then rejected it as too much work - then I think all expansions would have had flying as an option - albeit you might have needed different monsters/vehicles to fly in different places).

1. You're saying the exact same thing I did, almost word for word. It's not a tremendous job, but Blizzard is not willing to take people away from progression mechanical content for aesthetic content. I am not sure why you are responding so in depth but I don't mind your opinion.

I think it would be a cool idea but I don't think it will happen. I think that Blizzard could definitely give a little more leeway to content that isn't intrinsically connected to mechanical progression content, but I am not sure that will happen beyond, if we are lucky, allied races getting customization, or you know a new store mount, million gold reputation mount (for selling WoW tokens), etc.

2. No idea why you are bringing up Skyrim or modding, but hey I think it's a fun game so sure? I imagine Blizzard has more testers on hand than a skyrim modder, but I could be mistaken. After all they depend on players for beta and PTR testing, lol.

3. Yeah, adding more terrain would be a ton of work and not many people would appreciate it.

4. I can't help but feel like your comment on dazing is a swing at me or something, lol. I have a ton of alts and I don't think I should have to buy hundreds of these anti-daze items constantly. It's more I feel like this is a quality of life item, and it's something that should just be given for free at this point. No one likes dazing, and flying eliminates the risk... so if we absolutely have to have no flying, we can at least have no dazing.

I mean you didn't even mention whether or not you feel like dazing should be removed. The fact that tanks are immune is something I'm aware of and just further makes me feel like it's dumb. I apologize because I didn't clarify that I think dazing is okay in dungeons/etc, it just has no place in the open world. No idea why this is such a big deal for me to mention but hey. Dazing makes ground mounts suck. If Blizzard wants to keep their pathfinding flying system in, at least remove dazing. No consumable items required, just remove that obnoxious bullshit mechanic please, thanks. If they are willing to keep tanks immune and give items to prevent it as a quality of life feature, it's obvious they don't think much of the mechanic (except as punishing players for not buying consumables for a quality of life feature), so why is it still in game?

5. To be honest I don't feel like arguing about flying and I didn't say that "we must have flying or I quit" or any nonsense like that, so I am not even going to touch that. People who are obsessed with 'no flying' appeared after WoD and never existed before that point and act like it's some wondrous adventure to be stuck on the ground. I can appreciate it for a little while, but then the charm fades after about the first week or so into the expansion and I want flying to make getting from point A to point B less tedious.

I don't really want to know why you feel this way; you are entitled to your opinion. But I don't really feel like arguing against flying anymore because Blizzard isn't listening anyways. I'm just repeating the same thing over and over and I've been doing it for half a decade now nearly so whatever, lol.

[Wolfrick]

This is something I have wanted for a long time.

Lets hope that Blizzard after working on Classic understood that "World of Warcraft" is a game from level 1 to 60... so we always need to improve the lower level content aswell not only focus on Max level content, like they did since Cataslysm... there is a reason why shadowlands is so succesful, we can see its a good mix of Vanilla ideas and current wow ideas.

I am totaly with you that we need stuff like this, and island from BFA, did test on this stuff, so I hope we will see this in a future revamp of Azeorth.

[Dracullus]

There are 3 solutions for burnout:

- take 1-2 days break during week if you actively play WoW right now
- take 1-2 month break after you complete your goals for patch
- take 5-8 month break after expansion is done.

Assuming you like WoW in general, doing these regularly will only improve your experience, make you appreciate new stuff and stop you from nictpicking every downside of current patch.

[chiddie]

you are only seeing half the problem.. the other half is number of times a quest demands the same action.

meaning, if a quest says kill 10 boar.. just because the boar are far fewer in number and have a changing bag of tricks.. i still have to kill 10 boar.

changing how many boar are around, and making those few boar do something different... you must also reduce the number of boar needed to complete the quest. then you must also increase the reward rate. all of these factors contribute to the overall tedious feeling of repeatable chores.

i would rather advocate for mobs being less boring and the number of mobs needed to be reduced. the more interesting the mob, the fewer times i need to kill it.

really, players want to be rewarded for their time, Blizzard wants to increase the amount of time they play..

either: lots of highly rewarding and exciting mobs around (players choice)

or

lots of low reward, low effort mobs around (Blizzards choice)

You can’t make a mob interesting because the combat system is “stand still and press buttons” since 16 years (variations may apply but understand me).

It’s not Dark Souls where you can parry, roll, riposte or cleverly use environment. Every skill has tracking. If a witch casts a fireball to me, when the cast goes it will hit me even if I move behind a wall. You can’t play that much with mobs IA.

[msdos]

"Ideas to improve boredom problems"

The game is just fundamentally boring now because the world is so disjointed and dislocated and meaningless.

I don't see any replay value in retail anymore, the social aspect and the open world are separated from one another at the core.
For example, in retail, I don't get excited about taking the gear I earn in raids out into the open world with guildies to play around with, you effectively don't do this anymore because you don't know or care about anything in the open world, there is no permanence to anything, it's all sharded and phased and you don't do anything as a guild in the open world. You also don't care about your gear anymore beyond ilvl, which is done on purpose for some reason.

What am I supposed to care about in this game? I'm supposed to just be satisfied it's the same thing over and over again? How does that make any sense?

[nocturnus]

For years now, people have been complaining about 3 similair issues:

- The fact that they burn out of the world being the same, doing the same stuff over and over again
- The fact they either want flying or don't want it, to get as fast as possible from point A to B
- The game feels like it's stuck in a time-capsule, with months going by feeling the same

People long for the days of Vanilla, where we felt like the world was MASSIVE and everything was new. That feeling cannot return, but I feel like the game can improve on this.

Right now, for expansions upon expansions, the game has turned into a theme-park where every 2 meters there would be a mob, always in the same spot. Doing dailies, hunting rares or just traveling feels like chore pretty darn fast, whereas games like the Witcher 3, Grand Theft Auto V or Red Dead Redemption do not suffer from such problems.


Adding behaviours to mobs
We know we can find a mob by checking WoWhead and finding its spawn-location at the exact marker. But what if nocturnal animals only come out in the morning, evening and night, or animals can go out to eat or hunt themselves, NPC's actually have varying patterns in which they go about the world?

What if running past a herd of stag mounted, will cause them to spook... or what if certain predators can spot and track you from afar.

Then, hunting rares, traveling the world or doing quests will make the world and its inhabitants feel more alive, instead of them being mindless drones just waiting for you to aggro them.

We sometimes see this in certain area's where wolves hunt sheep, but this seems like a mechanised process where another sheep spawns right at it's place.

Knowing that a river will cause animals to go for a drink, will create oportunity for players to stalk them there.

Making the world bigger
Right now, no matter where you are in the world, you can always see something of danger/interaction near you. That isn't neccesarily a good thing as it makes the world feel small. Back in Vanilla, certain area's had a lower density of mobs, creating the need to travel more across empty stretches of land.

This can still be done again, making the world feel larger again.

Random encounters
With different behaviours for NPC's, random encounters/events could occur where players are asked by NPC's to assist them for a brief moment, help them fend off creatures, loot/rob certain NPC's or kill rares.

By adding these sorts of events to the game, every time you travel, something different happens.



I feel that by adding these things, all afor mentioned problems would be fixed;
- The world does no longer feel the same as NPC-behaviours will make the world play out different every time
- The world feels bigger and grander and also more alive, negating the need for getting as fast as possible from point A to B - you now want to cherish your travel
- Because the world feels so alive, every interaction with it can/will feel different.


I'd love to hear your thoughts!

All good suggestions, but ultimately not a solution to the problems you describe.

There's one solution and that's to play less. Allow me to elaborate: The people that complain about being burnt out or bored often do that to themselves by rushing through content, farming stuff ad nauseam because they want their loot 'now, now, now' and spend every minute of their free time behind a screen. No wonder you get burnt out.

Just play less. Go outside, do some sports, allow yourself to miss the game for crying out loud.

[msdos]

It's boring whether or not you burn through the content. Name a fun activity in Shadowlands that wasn't in BFA.

Don't bother, because there are none. But yeah, I'm sure going outside more is going to change this lul.

[nocturnus]

It's boring whether or not you burn through the content. Name a fun activity in Shadowlands that wasn't in BFA.

Don't bother, because there are none. But yeah, I'm sure going outside more is going to change this lul.

I like doing dungeons, doing the sporadic quest now and then, doing a tmog run, some pvp, you name it. The only thing I don't like is Torghast and raiding, so I don't do that.

Yes, I did these things in every other expansion as well, but because I never played more than a few hours a week, I never got burnt out; playing was always fun - as it should.

[shoc]

You can fix the burn out problem yourself by playing other games too. Playing only WoW exclusively and then complaining about getting bored, is great. 90% of the enjoyment of this game for me comes from being social with other players, the systems have never been good, they are just a means to an end, not the actual end.

[rrayy]

It's boring whether or not you burn through the content. Name a fun activity in Shadowlands that wasn't in BFA.

Don't bother, because there are none. But yeah, I'm sure going outside more is going to change this lul.

Torghast. That wasn't hard at all.

[cateran100]

Awesome idea....Guild Wars and FF14 is for you then....(mate..Blizz can`t design and/or code properly the current static world..WQs, dungeons, mobs are bugged AF..Just today I run a "6 minute until release" error at the world boss..this release issue goes back to 2003! and 1 bugged mob in Necrotic Wake right before Surgeon Stitchfest..The scripted spawn at the left side went untargettable..only the big boy..thhe small ones were fine..then he walked out from the room, jumped into the air then with strange jumps came back down to the floor and it was a normal targettable mob then..)

[Weeps]

I would get a lot more done if I had flying or a flight whistle, that's for sure.

I do a few things and then I see how far away a flight master is and just say, "eh, I'm just gonna hearth log and do this tomorrow."

[Alanar]

All good points, but looking at what made me burn out on the game is the fact that we are still doing the same thing for a long time.

Dungeons, raid and bgs, arena. Every thing else they tried besides mage tower failed. Breaking that chore will be hard, because there realy isnt much else you can do.

Thorghast had the potential for a real new thing that people seem to like.. only to fuck it up at the end of the beta.

World quests are boring and shadowlands managed to make the already chore feeling even worse by extending the time needed to complete that. I know there are less around, but knowing how long it takes for small amount of rep and the famous 35 anima. Ye no one cares blizz.

Pvp.. the mini game that people liked.. but the complains this time around are just very justified. Burst meta balance issues( 16 year old game still having the same issues) again no real new bg or mode that brings players.

On top of everything is that a big part of an mmo is getting gear or new items. They failed at making people exciting for rewards or things they want to get.

I am complaining here, but even looking at other mmos.. I cant come up with anything else that would spark that interest again for alot of people. Its a long list that has been the same for some years now if you think about it.

[glowpipe]

This is something I have wanted for a long time.

Lets hope that Blizzard after working on Classic understood that "World of Warcraft" is a game from level 1 to 60... so we always need to improve the lower level content aswell not only focus on Max level content, like they did since Cataslysm... there is a reason why shadowlands is so succesful, we can see its a good mix of Vanilla ideas and current wow ideas.

I am totaly with you that we need stuff like this, and island from BFA, did test on this stuff, so I hope we will see this in a future revamp of Azeorth.

no no no- Classic was a game from 1 to 60 because it barely had endgame. retail wow today is a completely different game, they need to add even more end game stuff. Not shit you outlevel and make obsolete in a week

The worst issues in SL now is the shit they implemented from classic. Let that shit die out in wow classic and and let retail move forward, not being stuck in the past

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whats been the most fun in guildwars 2, rift and warhammer was the public events. Wow need something like that. Not just boring solo wq's. Big events.
Raiding and dungeons is already good, gearing need to be fixed from the shit classic bs we have now and its perfect.

We need more variety in end game content. More focos on stuff like crafting aswell, things to engage you all the time

[msdos]

Torghast. That wasn't hard at all.

Torghast is fun now? I thought the entire playerbase hated it and the Maw? Everytime I defended it I got backlash, huh, strange.

Linear corridor with gray walls is fun for people? Wow, what a low standard. Probably lying to look good on MMO lmao.

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I like doing dungeons, doing the sporadic quest now and then, doing a tmog run, some pvp, you name it. The only thing I don't like is Torghast and raiding, so I don't do that.

Yes, I did these things in every other expansion as well, but because I never played more than a few hours a week, I never got burnt out; playing was always fun - as it should.

I log in once a week, if that, but it's still boring. What gives? I still raid 4 days a week on classic though. Something is wrong with people's logic on this one, I can't accept it due to the reality of my situation, which is: retail is boring, classic somehow isn't and I wasn't expecting it tbh.

[Big Thanks]

MOST WANTED leaderboard system to Warmode

[Queen of Hamsters]

I found that the only cure for burnout to a game, was to take a break. No amount of variety, access to flying and skips and even changed play behaviour, helped.

Same as how even if the game is reverted back to how it was, it'll still not be the same for the people that moved on because the game changed. Classic and soon TBC is a perfect example of that.

[Big Thanks]

I found that the only cure for burnout to a game, was to take a break. No amount of variety, access to flying and skips, helped.

True :3

But, but but....if you can create a "way of life" gameplay.
Some activity that is fun for the sake of playing it AND playing it alone...that is truly something

Create something like what "Random Battlegrounds" are for me...an activity i do for the sake of just doing it and having fun.
Or my most recent idea of a leaderboard system for warmode to see who is the most toxic person out there.

I call it...a way of life gameplay (UwU) im ahead of my time

[Sansnom]

I'd love to hear your thoughts!

I think your first problem is getting people to go out to the world. Besides questing, people are out farming herbs and mines. WQ gives a reason but people drop in, do the quest and then leave.

You can only explore the world so many times.