You are now in charge of WoD, how do you fix it before release?

[Narwhalosh Whalescream]

Can it even be saved?

[KOUNTERPARTS]

Not scrap the Shattrath City raid, instead put it in between Blackrock Foundry and Hellfire Citadel, and not have 6.2 last 100 years.


Story wise, add some story development for the other "warlords" to carry us through to Hellfire Citadel and scrap the whole "DRAENOR IS FREE!" ending with Grommash instead being pushed into a corner and in an act of desperation, ingest the fel blood to turn into Fel Grommash for the 2nd part of the raid.

[Varodoc]

I scrap it for Legion, nothing of value would be lost.

[Drusin]

I liked WoD the way it was, keep it the exact same

[Doffen]

By not releasing it.

[Selastan]

Before release? Other than fixing the buggiest launch in history, nothing. It's all about what happened AFTER release that killed it.

[Puri]

Switch challenge mode with m+, fixed.

[Pangalactic]

Remove it completely. WoD never happened, Garrosh stood trial and was executed or jailed or exiled or something, the story goes on without "break the glass when short on money" brining every single damn character a second time to life

[Culex]

Haters gonna hate, loved WOD, more garrison content!

[Amnaught]

Can it even be saved?

Literally any ingame discussion about how alternate timelines work would be nice. It was mentioned in a short story that there are infinite timelines and Kairoz' plan was to gather Hordes from hundreds of them and use that endless army to defeat Azeroth and the Legion.

So like. Why the fuck do we care about **this** alternate timeline specifically? Blow up the portal and be done with it. Why are MU goblins building towns in an alternate timeline of another planet?

[Nightstalker]

Drastically reduce the mission table outcome. Add simple and compact daily quest hubs and starting gear/cosmetic rewards for 4-5 existing reputations. Reduce the outcome of Mine and Herb Garden + add more needed effort than just 1 click per node to get the materials. Add a currency for finishing CMs depending on level to long term purchase the weapon transmogs as an alternative to pushing for all gold once (which was just 90-95% sellruns). Make the player more a manager/assistant of the Garrison than the owner, be it just through changes in dialogue/texts.

[JABoyle3875]

By telling whatever dumbass came up with the selfie cam that if they bring the concept up ONE MORE TIME, we will set up at all future Blizzcons a booth where attendees can take selfies with them right before said attendee gets to go medieval on their ass with a rotten salmon.

[Amnaught]

Haters gonna hate, loved WOD, more garrison content!

Don't get me wrong, WOD was *fun*, and *pretty*, but the lore was absolute trash. Velen sacrifices himself but it's okay because that was an alternate Velen. And then we killed Archimonde but that's important because there is only one Archimonde in the multiverse!!

[Beuargh]

depends if I'm in charge from the start or "before release", like after they wasted that much ressources into garrisons.

I think the big complaints were outdoor content and lore. they "fixed" (or their solution for) outdoor content was legion, and I don't know about the lore. to me the whole idea with AU is crap from the start. but IMO they pushed the housing idea way too far.

[Pakheth]

I would say just skip the whole damn thing as the Burning Legion could have found Azeroth and Illidan other ways.

But if it has to be a thing then these things:
-Actually give the warlords proper coverage, not just wasted in quests and start of raids.
-Remove Apexxis dailies completely or at least tone them down a fuckload.
-Create max level content in all zones that is not Apexxis dailies.
-Make leveling less on rails.
-Less focus on orc culture and actually allow the Horde to see more of the Draenei. Talador felt like nothing, especially since Shattrath was already lost to the demons. Horde had no quests in Shadowmoon Valley apart from Apexxis dailies which had no story or explanation to what we really did there.
-Actually release the Shattrath raid.
-Release the island patch.
-Make us actually pick the zone to place our Garrison in. I wanted Talador damnit.
-Keep the class design from MoP and not prune abilities.
-Make the store mounts released then, fey drake and the bug, actually be earned by their respective factions like Laughing Skull.
-Create better and more diverse mounts that aren't just more recolours with the same grey and brown tones. Why no Botani themed mount?
-Redo the talbuk mounts and make them closer to their TBC counterpart.
-Make Tanaan smaller to be more akin to Timeless Isle in size, removing the problem of never reaching the bosses in time.
-Make proper capitals instead of the dirt huts we got.
-Limit the amount of resources you would get from Garrisons, making going out in the world still lucrative.

And probably more, just what I could remember on top of my head.

[FelPlague]

Can it even be saved?

add a caverns of time patch where we get a few mini dungeons and a raid based on "alternate timeline" concepts, that happens after the hellfire citidal patch. reuse a lot of old assets but its still new and fun content.

reuse ICC but instead have it be filled with death knight versions of our legendary heroes, just need to make a model for each boss then rest can easily be just reused assets.

[MrLachyG]

Remove it completely. WoD never happened, Garrosh stood trial and was executed or jailed or exiled or something, the story goes on without "break the glass when short on money" brining every single damn character a second time to life

how would the Legion be summoned then with no AU Gul'dan?

[exochaft]

People tend to focus on the bad, but there was a lot of good things that were in WoD that just got overshadowed (such HFC, gathering professions having combat benefits, etc.).

One aspect would be detaching the garrison a bit from getting through the quest line. If you were Horde, you had the "pleasure" of not being able to progress the storyline in the starting zone because the surveying equipment you had to click to create your garrison (behind which all your quests were gated) was broken. End result was that you had to either wait for a fix or grind to 92 so you could quest in Gorgrond. While this is WoD-specific in terms of the details, it's something to keep in mind when creating content that gates everything else: make bloody sure it works and/or keep it as simple as possible.

The garrison itself should have been a better precursor to player housing or something similar. I know Blizz says it was, but it was almost designed in a way that made it destined to fail. Conceptually, it had so much potential. The choices and layouts were too rigid, as were the cosmetic choices, all of which could have been expanded while keeping to the same basic concept. I feel there were too many eggs kept in the garrison basket, which did not line up with the quality/quantity of the garrison we got. If I had to hazard a guess, something went wrong or couldn't be fixed during garrison development to reach the level that Blizz wanted it to be... but it couldn't be cut from the xpac considering how pivotal it was, so we got a more bare-bones version.

This expansion was when Blizz really started to go overboard with adding tons of mounts/pets/toys/achievements to the game... it's not nearly as bad as adding hundreds of pets and mounts every major patch, but you could see such things changing. The short version of my complaint about this aspect is that things about the game that used to be engaging of fun really started to turn into busywork. Basically, "things to do" turned into chores. The archaeology achievements exemplified this mentality, where you had an insane amount of random pristine artifact solves in order to finish achievements that was just paaaainful. Additionally, this was when Blizz started adding rewards for things that many players had already done that may have had high time investment... only to 'reset' it or negate the time investment. The end result is that collectors of things started to feel like the juice wasn't worth the squeeze anymore, and the sheer volume of work added cheapened what you had already obtained.

This was also when the content upon release started to get really buggy. Yes, the Horde launch debacle was big, but there were an increasing amount of smaller bugs that started appearing the game. The one I still remember was the mythic Gorefiend bug, where our guild kept running into issues where the "dying" mechanic would always actually kill people instead of teleporting them to the belly... and this bug lasted for over a month. We eventually cleared it while it was bugged, but there was TONS of outrage from our guild concerning how stupid and annoying it was, making the fights afterwards feel like a cakewalk. Regardless, it was the start of the game feeling more and more like a live beta test after launch.

So what would I have done to fix this?

First of all, I would hire way more QA testers and CM's, as this was the start of communication breakdown between Blizz and the players. In MoP, the communication between the players and the devs was great, but it just disappeared through WoD. Furthermore, it feels like the feedback for the beta/PTR phases of development either don't have enough bodies to parse through player feedback, or they just don't care enough. Although, I can sympathize a little if players aren't giving proper feedback (I know tons that do), but Blizz is also at fault for not providing instructions to the testers concerning what they want to test, what to look out for, how things should work, etc. It all comes back to a lack of communication, which leads to more bugs and issues in the game.

While the first part would likely help fix a LOT of the issues, if we're talking system specific changes I'd have to say the garrison should have been a more optional feature with more customization. I understand they probably have limitations with their game engine, but there was still way more that was capable with said game engine. One of my favorite aspects of the garrison was being able to change the music and collecting said music, as the concept itself was great while being a very simple thing to do. This simple concept could be expanded into other areas of customization, where you could reward exploring old and new content, and even make crafting professions useful in this regard. I wasn't too opposed to having the garden and the mine in the garrison, the real problem that it was better and more efficient than farming in the world, making it feel mandatory.

As a final thought, I would've added more development time to the expansion if adding more QA's/CM's wasn't enough. One big aspect of Blizz that has been lost in many respects is their commitment to their games being released "when they're done." Quality and polish was what made Blizz great, and this was when they really started to not live up to mantra in many aspects of the game. If the issues of the expansion could've been fixed by spending a few more months in development, I would've kept it in development. While people may complain about content drought, the real reason people complain about it is because the content they tend to currently get at the end of a drought isn't good.

[Ivarr]

I would swap the garrison for an actual capital. Draenor missed it. A weird and wonderful capital similar to the ruined Shattrath. Messy, dirty, exotic. all kinds of conclaves of various races doing their own thing. This would root the player further into this world and impress on them that there was a long and rich history before they arrived.

In contrast this garrison felt tacky and overly familiar on what's supposed to be an alien planet.

And less fairly, I genuinely believe Draenor would've been more appreciate if it was the first to include actual world quests. WoD is still one of the most beautiful settings and players would love to have more reasons to soak in it a bit more.

[MrLachyG]

step 1. add a Shattrath raid which set up the HFC patch a bit better.
step 2. sort out whatever the fuck went on with Grommash storywise - yeah sure dude, you killed thousands of draenei and fellow orcs but its cool, you can just be forgiven and everything