What Would Bring You Back to WoW?

[Cæli]

both of those:
banning anything related to FOMO business strategy
WoW 2

[Rafal]

10 man raiding

[bruxx]

Honestly? Being told that a certain 2 guild members are gone and I wouldn't have to tolerate them anymore, all problems with wow are secondary to that to me.

[saixilein]

I still play wow, but my wishes:

- (More) Rewards for Guilds & Longterm Teams. Like giving Guildgroups 1 more Itemdrops/More Gold/Actuall Bufffood & Flasks whatever. Let people create Arena & RBG Teams, people can grind Rep in this Teams to get more Honor/Conquest or more Points per win whatever. Just bring back some social aspects of the game

- Making Outdoor Content exciting, challengeing and REWARDING! 1-2 weeks after launc outdoor content is just a repititive grind with Rewards most noone needs or are undertuned as fck. I mean look at the covenant outdoor sets. You can upgrade it ti 197er itemlevel... for what ever reason i should upgrade/use them?

- Giving each endgame content (m+, pvp, outdoor, Raid) a specific Set with boni for that kind of content + increased itemlevel when using this items in this content. So Some1 with BiS Raidgear dont have an advantage against someone with good m+ gear if he is doing a m+ dungeon. Like PvP Gear works now, but for all 4 aspects of the game.

- Rework some Classes/Specs, like Monk - bring back good old class designes!

- I dont know why this happened, but back then most enchants were pretty expensive, same as gems. Now they are all so cheap that its hard to make gold with them. Change that.

- bring back more Class & Spec specific Transmog Sets. Its so boring that all cloth/leather/mail/plate sets look the same. I really liked it back in wotlk/cata where the pvp set from s1 looks "cheap" and get even better with every season. And every Class have their own Tset Designe. I want that back.

[janeSmith]

1. true and visible dedication to go against sexual harrassment. Just fruit bowls ain't doing it for me. Stop groping people and stop drinking alcohol at work.

2. fair payment and bonus system for employees and all out sourced workers that still do work for the company.

3. a better experience for new player: the lore is confusing, sometimes NPCs appear, disappear, are enemies, then friends. The first experience should be linear and give you the most important keypoints to get deeper into the lore

4. dump the faction stuff. Dividing the people into 2 factions causes toxicity by the storyline ("Your evil Sylvanas did this and that - you Horde people suck", e.g.). It divides people over the game. Storywise is makes no longer sense.

5. Add in regional armies you can join. They all have their own banner, but are united and run by the unified races. PvP: BGs, Arena, World PvP is training for the emergency case against any kind of upcoming true enemies

6. get a DECENT lore

7. No more systems. Only minor things

8. OLD content must stay relevant. Scaling dungeons / raids of old content

9. Push the focus more on the character that is played. That is the true hero.

10. more voiced cutscenes. But not only battle cutscenes, also talking / discussions, emotional scenes, showing friendship. And cutscenes dont need to be always the MOST EPIC DOUBLE FLIPPING BLING BOOM BANG scene. Just normal scenes would also be nice and add more immersion

11. fix the professions. They are a mess and plain boring

12. housing

13. boss music. Each boss has their own music

14. more emotes for (nice) social interaction

15. class designs: give them the abilities to change e.g. the colors of their spells

16. M+ : drop the key stuff. You can buy any key +1 of the level you already did. Keys are not destroyed.

17. outdoor events

18. stop repetative content and grinds. Let people play the game and focus on levelling alts, doing content.

19. Lore / story has to make sense over the next expansions. WoW Devs, etc. need to do a roadmap before they add story. And not add things just because "they are cool". Story development takes time and must not be just a sequence of cool things happening.



MOST IMPORTANT RULE for the DEVS:
- everytime you add a feature / change something for WoW - ask yourself: Is this fun? Does this add fun to the game?

[pfbe]

There are two major pain points at this time, for me.
Tanking m+ isn't fun, and m+ is the thing I like the most about PvE.
The gcd and pruning changes, even with the small reverts they did recently, make pvp feel clunky to me. Back in wrath/cata/mop. pvp felt so much more fluid, and I would like that back.

Either of those would bring me back full time. As it is, I play each patch for one or two months, so around 4 months total playtime a year atm.

[Vampyrr]

Reforging! What a useful thing to do to make all pieces useful and then to just remove it is dumb.

- - - Updated - - -

8. OLD content must stay relevant. Scaling dungeons / raids of old content

Going to say please dont ever consider this. I do not WANT old outdated content to be relevant. I do not want to revisit old dungeons or raids outside of the occasional optional timewalking. There arent enough hours in the day to make this a good thing.

[Ekis]

In terms of retail? Returning WoW to its roots for me.

1.) Unique classes - The game as it currently stands has been homogenized to all hell. Every class has a form of interrupt, CC, ranged attack, etc. that doesn't mesh well at all for me when it comes to class fantasy. I miss the Rock>Paper>Scissors aspect of the game. Or how all these pieces make a definite whole when it comes to group composition.

2.) No more borrowed power - These additional one-patch/expansion systems have taken away from the game in ways that I don't even care about typing up. Also, having to work on these arbitrary systems just to do the one thing I like to do only compounds on this.

3.) Linear progression - I like being able to plan out and have an end goal in sight. All of these infinite systems are a drag (if I wanted to play Diablo, I'd play Diablo. I don't need a treadmill in WoW to get that same feeling). I don't want to feel like I need to continuously run Mythic+ dungeons to get gear to raid or vice versa.

4.) Optional world content - This ties into number 3 above but the one thing I enjoyed about the earlier expansions and currently Classic/TBC is that I can do content whenever I felt like it and it not feel obligatory. I could pick up on my dailies in TBC whenever I felt I needed gold or resources and it NOT feel like if I didn't do it for a day or week or what-have-you that I'm hurting myself. Sure, they can have unique and powerful rewards tied to an certain rep level but damn having to do content not because it's fun but because it's mandatory is probably the number 1 thing that killed off any interest in retail for me.

5.) Professions that remain good throughout the entirety of an expansion - Something happened I think starting in WoD or MoP but professions were straight gutted to where they are either not profitable or in some cases even worth having anymore. I do not know why but I wish they'd go back to at least having professions worth having.

[Maruka]

Id bring back the player base

[hzjf]

not being forced to log in daily to complete very boring things

[Konteil]

Get rid of time gating
Get rid of borrowed power
Get rid of raid finder it doesn't let you see all of the story anyway
Bring back 10 man raids
Rep tabards we're awesome
Content in a regular and even paced delivery
Make crafting relevant for the whole expansion. New recipes to craft gear with each tier so people like me that have been in a profession for 15 years in game haven't wasted our time. Wrath had new patterns drop or buya me every raid tier crafting was good thru the whole game. Hell some crafted items were BIS and kept the economy rolling

I know I'm gonna catch hell but that's my wishlist

[odamienskii]

I just wanna be able to raid without having to farm 3 different systems and m+ and pvp in order to be optimal,also player housing

so you want to be the best but you dont want to have to put effort in, gotcha, another simplify please blizzard!!! games too hard

[october breeze]

Nothing sadly.

I think the story is beyond salvage now. It is a deal breaker factor for me.

Plus, i will never get my time, youth and energy back. Im getting older

[Wazooty]

Make the last expansion or two (or three I guess) put us on the track to end the story of warcraft with a bang. Finish this ultimate cosmic battle while there's still juice in the tank. Definitively declare that they're ending the main story and any future stories will go back to the more basic fundamental adventures akin to vanilla. I would love to get back with the friends I've made over the years for one last hurrah and relive the glory days by "finishing the fight" as it were.

[Klingers]

Honestly?

WoW needs to waste as little or less of my time than FFXIV. And that's everything.

Game system progression. Travel. Feature unlock speed. Dungeon queue times. Flying unlocks.

And, you know what? Now I've had multiple classes on the same character, fuck all this re-grinding bullshit. Shared everything. Unlocks, reputations, you name it. Too hard? Not my problem. I don't mind grinding for something at my own pace, once.

WoW's development team is competing with a game that doesn't cajole or punish players with time-gating and repetition, and doesn't lock highly valued things like flight behind forced engagement with unpopular systems. It's 2022, they're not on top anymore and they don't write the rules.

[Argorwal]

I really hope they double down next expansion. It would be really interesting to see how many raiders/m+ player there actually are.

It’s funny because TBC and Wrath were vastly less rewarding for non-dungeon or raiders than SL yet they were “peak WoW.”

[Tiev]

Oh this is a fun thread. I'm assuming you mean return to playing retail, so here goes:

The most important things:

- Do not make me feel like I have to log in every single day or I'm falling behind. There have always been dailies, but you should do them because you want something out of it, not because you feel like you must just to keep up. I want to play other games too.

- If you're going to have different storylines to pick from, do not make me pick the one I have 0 to no interest in simply because if I don't I'll be kicked from groups. You shouldn't have to choose between doing content where you're expected to min/max and enjoying the game's story and solo play. Saying you're going to balance your meaningful choice later down the expansion doesn't help because you've already gone months playing something you dislike. If you balance it at all.

- Make loot be loot. I want to look for the dungeons that drop the loot I need and run those dungeons. As soon as the loot drops, I don't want to have to run a slightly harder version of that dungeon for a slighter higher level version of that loot. That dillutes the experience of getting a piece to finally drop so much. This ties in to:

- Don't force me to run content I don't enjoy in order to get gear to be ready for content I do enjoy. I don't want to have to pvp to be optimal for raids. Don't want to have to run m+ to get a drop that is BiS for a slot for pre-raid. I want to run m+ in order to get gear that makes me better at m+, I want to run raids and difficult but not timed dungeons to get gear that will make me better at raiding and difficult but not timed dungeons. M+ can be a lot of fun, but they should be their own progression system. Not everyone likes speed runs of current content, small droplets of gear upgrades and never reaching the feeling of completion.

- Bring back the social aspects of WoW. I want to feel like I'm part of a community of my realm, with stories and people that are familiar to me. I want to go in a dungeon, PvP or raid and feel like the people I'm running things with are part of my neighborhood, my town. Robsbawn the hunter that always kills me in AB, Blastwave the mage that helped me survive a pack of enemies I was almost dying to, Trololol the troll who solo healed some PuG raids I did and gave me a piece of loot I wanted badly even when he won the roll. I want these memories. I want a community existing in the world, not just in text.

- Remove systems that add ANY SORT of randomness to progress beyond loot drop chance. This game already has that, anything more and it feels like we're wasting our time.

- Focus on FUN. That's the keyword here, that's what we're all here for. If you feel like a system is fun (Torghast) but it's going to be abused by the top mythic raiders and result in them burning out, don't touch the fun aspects. Not everything has to be an e-sport. Let things be silly if they're fun.

- Make every sort of important story telling be experienced IN THE GAME. I don't want to be required to follow supporting media to understand what's going on in the game I enjoy. As much as your product people want to believe you should think big and expand your universe into different media, someone from inside who has any sense should cut that in the bud. Keep it in the game. The game is number 1. Which also ties into:

- And finally, I play World of Warcraft because of Warcraft 2 and 3. Orcs vs Humans. Dwarves, Elves, Trolls, etc are the base of this world. I do not know or care about any sort of afterlife, cosmology, pantheon or any of that nonsense. I have never felt less connected to the world of warcraft as I do now with shadowlands. We, the players, and our factions interacting with each other should be driving force of the world.


Those might be things that might make me go back to retail beyond checking it out for a month. I want to feel like I'm playing World of Warcraft again. Because Shadowlands isn't it.

[Alcsaar]

A proper necromancer class. Beyond that, nothing really - and even that would likely be short term. The game is just old and boring at this point.

[Toby451]

Honestly?

WoW needs to waste as little or less of my time than FFXIV. And that's everything.

Game system progression. Travel. Feature unlock speed. Dungeon queue times. Flying unlocks.

And, you know what? Now I've had multiple classes on the same character, fuck all this re-grinding bullshit. Shared everything. Unlocks, reputations, you name it. Too hard? Not my problem. I don't mind grinding for something at my own pace, once.

WoW's development team is competing with a game that doesn't cajole or punish players with time-gating and repetition, and doesn't lock highly valued things like flight behind forced engagement with unpopular systems. It's 2022, they're not on top anymore and they don't write the rules.

No one cares about final fantasy.



Every single one of these Final fantasy posts just reek of desperation frantically trying to overhype a game most people just don't care about.

[MoanaLisa]

Technically I've never left as a final thing but it's true that I play a lot less than I used to and unsubscribe for about six months out of the year. The rest of the time I play a couple of times a week, mostly on weekends.

I honestly don't know what it would be that would make me interested in playing more. I have to say that the game is difficult to re-enter after a long while as so much stuff can change over a patch and there's no real guidance in game as to what you're supposed to be doing. I've got other games (including other MMO's) where I don't have to chase down nearly as much information out of game so that would be one thing along with the improvements that would accompany that.

I don't mind that there are grindy things in the game. I never overdo them. In a weird way that will make practically everyone step back from me I could wish that there were more of them so I could have a choice of more pathways to the same amount of progression. I understand how some players think they have to do everything but I'm not one of them. Give me six grindy things to do that lead to the same end and I'll pick the one or two I enjoy the most if that makes any sense.

I wouldn't mind if they stripped the game of most currencies and let gold and reputation be your access to progression. I also believe that the current design puts rather severe caps on progression based as a lot of it is on difficulty. I believe this to be bad business. It drives off players with less skill and it's pretty clear at this point that 'less skilled' is about 75% of the player pool. It would be fine if I could get the same level of gear as raid gear itemized for non-instanced (world) play and taking 2X-3X longer to get as long as the progression path to the end was fairly smooth and straightforward. Lots of people think that's terrible but it's observably true that a lot of that is just ego talking and a sense of elitism that speaks to the idea that "you're not good enough for this." I hate using the word 'work' with respect to the game but if world content required as much or more 'work' as it were than raiding that would seem fine. The world could also be a lot more difficult to navigate with that sort of system as well. Stuff could be hard but you could eventually overcome it as you progress. That in essence is what progression is. It's not necessarily cap one style of play and then move to some other style of play that you may not enjoy to go further.

I want to close out a two-hour session feeling as I've accomplished something. Too often, that's no longer the case. Minority position I'm sure but that's what it would take for me to engage more with the game.