Oh WoW, What You Could've Been and What You Can Become

[Kent088]

With all the Classic+ discussion, I am aiming with this post to create an alternative to merely listing things I hope for, but rather a description of what I think the game should have done in its progression. Hopefully this will shed light on future direction with classic servers now in operation.

WoW contemporaneously and historically suffers from design flaws stemming from a lack of vision by Blizzard. This includes parasitic game elements, unnecessary overhauls, graphical inconsistencies, and a mentality on pushing content out too quickly. This has exhausted the game's potential and we are witnessing a trend of marginally decreasing content quality and quantity around and in the game.

So to get into it, I have created an example timeline of WoW expansions with example content. The philosophy is that expansions should meet four criteria:

One, Expand on the existing core game
Two, Explore new content as fully as possible
Three, Be meta-thematically consistent
Four, Respect existing lore as much as possible

These can be summarized into WoW expansions necessarily respecting the base gameplay and base aesthetics.

Timeline:
World of Warcraft 2005-2010
The Burning Crusade 2010-2013
Wrath of the Lich King 2013-2017
The Roiling Tides 2017-2020
Rebirth of the Dragon 2020-2023

The basic timeline here requires a lore overhaul, with a summary below.

Vanilla carries mostly similarly. The Burning Legion stays more distant and manipulative - They are the end big bad. They become somewhat more real in Outland. Us in contact with the Legion again, Arthas re-awakens his Scourge to prepare for its inevitable invasion and we take the fight to Northrend. Whilst occupied in Northrend, Azeroth's over-extended kingdoms are losing grip to a series of minor powers that were previously in a state of weaker submission. Finally this culminates in magic-political chaos that manifests the Old Gods, and the Dragonflights intervene as their role dictates to restore some semblance of order.

This is the overall story arc specific to WoW. No world soul, void lords, First Ones that totally aren't Titans, etc. - These new cosmological roles are just endless rabbit holes that are not fitting WoW well.

Now assume existing iterations of the game have the generality of their content realized in this timeline as well. I will focus on additions or changes. This is not wholly comprehensive as that would be too long of a post. This implies and ignores some lore changes mentioned above.

Vanilla, 2005-2010
+New Zones: Hyjal, Uldum, Ahn Qiraj, Quel'Thalas, Gilneas, The Red Forest(Scarlet land Northeast of Plaguelands that's currently unused), The Highlands(Twilight Highlands but no Twilight).
+New Dungeons and Raid Areas: Karazhan, Dire Maul, The Scarlet Cathedral, The Caverns of Time, Silvermoon Citadel, Grim Batol, The Emerald Dream.
+Raid difficulty system: Raids are single difficulty, with some challenge based higher tier or extra rewards. New raids may be higher or lower tier difficulty than existing ones. Dungeons follow this logic too.
+Expanded Class and Race quests: Lore demands certain groups did certain acts, such as the Horde ultimately stopping the Blood Elf threat, the Alliance beats Karazhan. Classes and races get more racial lore and gameplay, specific armors, and flavors for their classes.
+Professions Expanded: Even greater use for professions with more recipes. Solo prpgression attainable through long and arduous crafting end-game.
+PvP Expanded: Gearing through various world objectives, and looting of other players (Not literally, the game would rarely make a Bloodforged copy of a player's gear to loot in honorable combat. Bloodforged gear can be redeemed based on honor rank and armor quality).
+Worldbuilding by Devs: As Vanilla goes on, the world is built up to finish being cohesive and breathing. Gnomeregan and Echo Isles become smaller racial capitals connected to Ironforge by Tram and Orgrimmar by Boat, respectively.
+Small QOL improvements: Trade orb terminals in every capital city allow you to trade to another connected player in another city so you may reside on your favorite hub.
+Language Secondary Skill: Learn your faction's languages and complete associated content with language requirements.
+Reputation Rework: Reputation is both a bar and set of requirements, such as learning the Dwarvish racial language before becoming exalted.

The Burning Crusade, 2010-2013
+High Elves and Goblins as playable races. Unique to them: High Elves are neutral and able to quest with and within Quel'Thalas, an otherwise Hostile faction. Goblins may trade cross faction and use a neutral auction house. High Elves start in Quel'Danas, Goblins in the Azuremyst Isle.
+Draenei are a sort of Pandaren in Outland; Neutral but have two faction reputations similar to Scryers and Aldor focusing around the Tribal and Holy wings of their society. They are native to Draenor but grew in numbers when the Orc society collapsed, and were shielded from much of the destruction. They are not spacegoats. They are why the Legion could not come back to Azeroth so quickly.
+New Raids integrate with the raids of Vanilla in the difficulty system. More raids and dungeons than normal TBC.
+Skill based flying and 150% speed ground mounts.
+World Challenges: Completing the Sunwell raid as a non High Elf allows neutral status in Quel'Thalas.
+Jewelcrafting allows for a neck socket that, with a class questline, may alter spell appearances and effects. Change your gem for different effects.
+PvP Expanded: More PvP rewards and objectives, such as capital raids, Gurubashi Arena objectives, etc.
+Level Cap Remains at 60: Completing certain expansion challenges similar to Pathfinder gives additional talent points in the existing(assume gameplay balance rework to the trees) Vanilla trees so players grow stronger by taking advantage of their class' full abilities. Power creep severely reduced and ultimately respects the core game.
+Additional low level content
+No Alliance Shaman, Horde Paladin
+Alt currencies paired with gold with their purchases. You cant buy your way to power but you MUST sink your gold. In themepark MMOs, devs should be actively trying to make players poor so they play the game, and so inflation does not skyrocket. More gold sinks.

End Raid: Sunwell

Wrath of the Lich King, 2013-2017
+Neutral Cities: New Heartglen, the Argent Dawn's main and massive Northrend base in Dragonblight. Dalaran bubble is opened as a neutral city and also allows portals back and forth.
+Death Knights are playable to Orcs, Undead, Humans, High Elves, Dwarves. Themed around third war, not new scourge invasion.
+All classes get 15 pathfinder talents and a fourth talent tree. I am a large fan of classic wows bring the class, not the specialization idea. Level cap 60.
+New Raids/Dungeon areas: Malrannas(Naxx can stay in EPL), Scarlet Harbor, Gundark, Niffelheim, Wyrmrest Temple, The Kaluak Hunt, Crystalsong World Bosses.
+PvP Raids: Instanced PvE raids with npcs that are more player-styled encounters where depending on the raid, npcs will cc heavily, be mobile and brutal, trash heavy for PvP rewards. Other raids will involve two competing faction teams that will at times fight one another.
+Inscription Expanded: Glyphs do more, from cosmetic to gameplay.
+Scourge Infection: Various temporary scourge infection and invasion events in Northrend settlements.
+Expanded Guild System: Guild housing, rewards. Rewards include achieved progress, and potential progress so small and large guilds alike have access. Players with all faction reputations exalted who are also in a guild may earn the title "The Diplomat" and gain the ability to speak the main language of the opposing faction.
+Player Cottages: Housing that allows displaying of achievements and very minor gameplay aspects (No AFKing in garrison). Highly customizable and players may gain multiple income/material generating estates in the world. Highly popular, RP-friendly, or niche-specific estates gain more. Account wide so choices matter and you dont have 50 income generating estates on your account.
+Continuation of Alt Currencies + Gold mechanic
+Survival Mode: Add challenge to your gameplay by partaking in Survival mode for increased rewards.

End Raid: ICC

The Roiling Tides, 2017-2020
+World update a bit but not a total conversion; Made for flying, which is still skill based.
+New Zones: Kul'Tiras, Tel'Abim, Maelstrom, Zandalar, Vash'jir Islands.
+New Raids and Dungeons, some focused on Azeroths kindgoms being challenged by smaller powers: Steamwheedle, Venture Co, Zandalar, etc.
+Level Cap Still 60, +10 talents.
+Talent rework to make it a bit more modern
+Archaeology Profession
+No new races but hordes of new character customization. (Allied races are a stupid concept imo)
+Very light amount of new race/class combos: Up until TBC your race was a very specific instance of a class(Ex: All paladins were Silver Hand knights)(Who remembers being shocked at Dwarf shamans when a shaman wasnt just any random nature elemental wielder but a specific, tribal type) Human/Gnome/Undead hunters, Troll Warlocks. This also helped balance the racial situation a little bit so it should be kept IMO.
+Player ships: Additional light housing option, where everything from rafts to battleships are available. Alliance boats, Horde Zeppelins. Boats move incredibly fast in water, faster than many flying mounts, Zeppelins offer highly safe travel that defends from air enemies that knock off fliers on normal flying mounts.
+Twinks Abound: Low level content added for more twink items, voluntary exp loss.
+Level Prestige: Prestige at 60 back down to level one where you can start with some abilities from higher levels, cosmetics, and gain new rewards.
+Class and Race Spirits: Combine characters by completing a questline to "die" unique to your class (warrior heroic battle, warlock sacrifical altar) and integrate abilities, cosmetics, or other bonuses such as a third professions onto another character. Useful if you like making alts but want to focus much energy on your main or want OP human racial (at this time) on a Tauren. Collect all spirits for powerful bonuses. Gain other race's racials, unlock unique race/class combos.
+Transmog tab and collection from day one, option to disable in PvP.
+Transmog competitions, and quests that rely on certain scores, or disguises such as breaking into Ravenholdt!
+Low level reforging
+Zone Invasions: Zones temporarily face unrest and chaos, where players prevent the poltical upheaval and Old God resurgence in the land.

End Raid: Azshara's Palace

Rebirth of the Dragon, 2020-2023

End Raid: Titan Watchers

[KOUNTERPARTS]

I don’t even know what this post is supposed to be, but the fact another fresh account’s first post is a ranting thread about something is dissuading enough.

[Kent088]

If you think this is a rant, you are mistaken

[Tyris Flare]

a mentality on pushing content out too quickly.

The real gem buried in here

[Luxeley]

I agree with everything, but there are a few exceptions. Perhaps the last two xpacs Blizzard pumped out a bit too soon, but prior to that - NO WAY. The last patch of pretty much each and every xpac lasted anywhere from 10-14 months. They've had plenty of time to complete the required tasks in a timely fashion, they are not an under-funded indy company. Those content draughts promoted an opportunity for players to give the competition a fair shot and a fair amount of players never returned. Another problem with WOW is the same problem Game of Thrones suffered from, they ran out of legit source material. As a whole, lorewise, very little made sense and what little sense the lore made only "worked" because of massive retocon efforts.

[Kent088]

Luxeley, I agree with you actually. I proposed that expansions should have filled those droughts with new raids, etc.

Their solution to droughts was to overly exhaust their source material, and the solution should have been to add more raids, content, etc.

[Kilpi]

Most of these features sound like things that would be great in non-MMO RPG. I do like the way you think though. But then again, even after playing WoW from 2005, I would currently enjoy another branch of Warcraft RPG's, that would be singleplayer/co-op, with actual RPG mechanics. Those would also allow a much more lore-friendly mechanics without having to think as much what it means for the player base. For example, I understand why Alliance got shaman and Horde got paladin, even if it would've been cooler or better lore-wise if they didn't.

[Shadowferal]

Hmf...I'm more about rewriting the lore and races/classes stuff.

[Kent088]

>SuperKarateDeathStar

Blizzard is capable of content because they used to push out quite a big deal of it with a smaller team size. You have greater innovation on some private servers on core mechanics than retail in all honesty. And it's decently polished at that. Now my post is not *overly* critical of Blizzard, but they are showing marginal decreases in output. Not necessarily total decreases.

On another point, the technology has already been done for some of this, and so that would speed up implementation on any contemporary or earlier game version.

>Kilpi, could you explain a bit more why you think these wouldn't work in an MMO? I had ideas I have sidelined because I thought similarly about them, but these don't seem to conflict too much at all in my head.

[Elbob]

yep sitting at 60 for 10 years with raids all being added at ~the same difficulty despite getting 10 more talent points every few years. Meaning raids are trivialized as soon as you hit the first "expac". Cant imagine how much fun it would be farming the vanilla raids for people's alts or new recruits to get bis items 10 YEARS after release.

[hzjf]

I agree with everything, but there are a few exceptions. Perhaps the last two xpacs Blizzard pumped out a bit too soon, but prior to that - NO WAY. The last patch of pretty much each and every xpac lasted anywhere from 10-14 months. They've had plenty of time to complete the required tasks in a timely fashion, they are not an under-funded indy company. Those content draughts promoted an opportunity for players to give the competition a fair shot and a fair amount of players never returned. Another problem with WOW is the same problem Game of Thrones suffered from, they ran out of legit source material. As a whole, lorewise, very little made sense and what little sense the lore made only "worked" because of massive retocon efforts.

you cannot run of out Lore if you are the one creating the Lore

[Biomega]

This is basically just a big nostalgia circlejerk, where the imagination of "what could have been" is always better than reality - regardless of whether or not that really COULD have been or not.

The devil is in the details. It's easy to just offer a broad-strokes idea in a paragraph or two and make it sound epic. But that's not where the actual work lies. That's all about how things ACTUALLY work, what the mechanics ACTUALLY are. An interplay of many small things, none of which are illustrated or even conceptualized in a grand generalization like this one.

This is basically nothing but a flight of fancy, projected backwards with 20/20 hindsight. It's like people going "if only we'd done XZY in the past, we'd now have flying cars and live on the moon". Bullshit of the highest order.

[Ashana Darkmoon]

>SuperKarateDeathStar

Blizzard is capable of content because they used to push out quite a big deal of it with a smaller team size. You have greater innovation on some private servers on core mechanics than retail in all honesty. And it's decently polished at that. Now my post is not *overly* critical of Blizzard, but they are showing marginal decreases in output. Not necessarily total decreases.

On another point, the technology has already been done for some of this, and so that would speed up implementation on any contemporary or earlier game version.

>Kilpi, could you explain a bit more why you think these wouldn't work in an MMO? I had ideas I have sidelined because I thought similarly about them, but these don't seem to conflict too much at all in my head.

Producing content in 2022 in an ancient game is way more expensive and time-consuming than it was 15 years ago!

(not an excuse for them taking too long, but just look at the complexity of a single raid zone and mechanics compared to classic)

[Kent088]

>Elbob

I'll draw it out differently. Say, instead of four raid difficulties, you merely designed the raids as single difficulty with your four difficulties as a design and office guide and then implemented them so players know "This raid is casual friendly, this raid is hardcore".

Every expansion you would have raids that give better gear, so in a few expansions there will be a huge difference between a fresh 60 and geared 60 between stats and talents. Progression is still there.

But the difference here is that there's also alternatives so that MC gear is still relevant in, say, Scarlet Harbour.

Hardcore raiders can keep their hardcore progression going, while old content is not completely invalidated. If you want to only do new content, that is your choice, but if a guild wants to run MC, that gear is not worthless.

I believe players may naturally navigate to more medium difficulty encounters, and they may find newer content ultimately more enjoyable due to more modern mechanics. But defeating Ragnaros is not worthless in comparison to defeating some scrub in Wrath Naxx.

Hard raids will still be hard, easy raids will still be easy.

The Vanilla highest difficulty raids will never offer gear higher than the highest difficulty raids of the next expansion, and expansions already invalidate previous iterations raid gear, which wouldn't happen under this proposal.

- - - Updated - - -

>Biomega

The difference being that there literally is the past, ie, classic servers, in the present. This allows them to, let's be honest, just copy certain things over to Classic from Retail while retaining the Classic feel.

[Stickiler]

I'll draw it out differently. Say, instead of four raid difficulties, you merely designed the raids as single difficulty with your four difficulties as a design and office guide and then implemented them so players know "This raid is casual friendly, this raid is hardcore".

Every expansion you would have raids that give better gear, so in a few expansions there will be a huge difference between a fresh 60 and geared 60 between stats and talents. Progression is still there.

But the difference here is that there's also alternatives so that MC gear is still relevant in, say, Scarlet Harbour.

Hardcore raiders can keep their hardcore progression going, while old content is not completely invalidated. If you want to only do new content, that is your choice, but if a guild wants to run MC, that gear is not worthless.

I believe players may naturally navigate to more medium difficulty encounters, and they may find newer content ultimately more enjoyable due to more modern mechanics. But defeating Ragnaros is not worthless in comparison to defeating some scrub in Wrath Naxx.

Hard raids will still be hard, easy raids will still be easy.

The Vanilla highest difficulty raids will never offer gear higher than the highest difficulty raids of the next expansion, and expansions already invalidate previous iterations raid gear, which wouldn't happen under this proposal.

How do you justify the financial and emotional investiture required for content that a fraction of a fraction of players will see?

[enigma77]

The lore today is absolutely abysmally bad. The whole comsic forces nonsense is just that, nonsense.

The game's story was good when it was about the Scourge, demons and the faction conflict. Yeah even then we had Sargeras, as the uber big bad cosmic evil guy, but he was always distant and only indirectly a threat. We had interesting characters and "realistic" conflicts.

Looks like Dragonflight could be a small break from this bad development, but I'm sure the expansion after it will continue the trend of digging themselves ever deeper.

[Kent088]

>Stickiler

How do you justify it now? All those hours are just wasted with a new expansion when it would be significantly more profitable to basically get players more addicted with more content and have your old content at least generating some kind of player interaction and revenue.

[Private Matters]

It's easy to put words into a forum and be like see this would have been amazing but it's 100% nothing more than an unrealistic fantasy. You don't have any deadlines, you don't have any development time, you don't have anyone telling you you need to change this or that, and you have ideas that don't need to be iterated on. I mean Blizzards goals for each expansion probably look very similar to some of this stuff initially but due to time constraints and what not a lot of it doesn't happen. WotLK was supposed to have nerubian zones, nerubian raids, Vrykul raids, troll raids, Crystalsong was supposed to be an actual fully realized zone, but none of it came to pass because of development time

Yeah this would be a bit of nice nuance if they weren't peeling back content and the employees that could produce them while they continue to get bigger and bigger profit margins, while all of that sounds reasonable in an ideal world, when you actually just only referenced the last expansion they did that probably didn't have crazy amounts of oversight and iteration, which feels disingenuous to the spirit of OPs point. They could've done better but apparently making sure shareholders have their diapers changed is more important to companies or those oligarchs might just take their ball and go home then everyone loses right?....right?

[Kent088]

>Ashana Darkmoon

I am convinced you make a really good point. But given the resources now, I think we can both agree that even if you call this all a pipe dream, Blizzard is struggling to match their old school productivity.

My one counter would be the content you see on private servers that seem to quite regularly push new ideas out, retain players, while being encumbered by a lack of professional skills. Blizzard shouldn't be afraid of taking risk because they can absorb it quite a lot more easily.

[Stickiler]

How do you justify it now? All those hours are just wasted with a new expansion when it would be significantly more profitable to basically get players more addicted with more content and have your old content at least generating some kind of player interaction and revenue.

In the current system, every player in the game has the opportunity to see every raid, whether through organized raiding for mythic/heroic, pugging for normal/heroic, or just queuing for LFR. This means the investment covers a significant portion of the playerbase. That's how it's justified, and why we've had such big budget, beautiful, fantastic looking raids in the newer expansions.

I think it was Ghostcrawler who said that LFR is how they justified the breadth of investment in the raids.


Once the next expansion comes along, the older raids are still run by players seeking transmog, which means they're never really out of use, just their use changes.