Because many believe that you’re not allowed to criticize World of Warcraft unless you’re willing to come up with considered solutions, this is the latest in a small series of posts suggesting improvements to a game that’s currently (given the information we have) haemorrhaging a million players a month.
Straight in, then.
Modernizing Reputations
Reputations, generally, have a chequered history with this game. There were some interminable grinds in vanilla, the Burning Crusade used them to release dungeon keys, Wrath brought in the tabard system that lasted through Cataclysm, and then Mists moved to the daily quest provision. According to Ion Hazzikostas, reputations in Warlords were tacked on at the arse end of the development cycle and are blunt mob grinds.
The issue is that reputations are supposed to be part of a story. When you build a reputation, you’re doing it with an individual or group that fills a specific area of the game world in a way that’s meant to be meaningful. At the moment, reputations could barely be less meaningful, and I think most people would agree that they’ve not seen much in the way of iteration over their time in the game, despite being a staple.
My conclusion is this:
Reputations should be the delivery vehicle for daily quests, while forming an endgame progression route for solo players or small groups.
There are, to me, some imperatives:
1) Means of gaining reputation need to be varied.
2) “Progression” should be story-orientated, as well as gear.
3) It needs understood that we’re rewarding “effort”.
4) Players need control over the speed they gain reputation.
With these imperatives in mind, I believe reputations should look like a cross between Domination Point/Lion’s Landing, and the Isle of Quel’Danas/the Molten Front. Here’s how it’d look, more specifically:
Players start at Neutral, and work up to Exalted; just like now.
Every faction provides daily quests.
Each faction has a “levelling” tabard that rewards either mob kills, or item turn ins.
At Friendly, Honoured and Revered a new set of individual story quests appear.
At Exalted, the player unlocks a solo scenario to complete the story.
At Honoured and Exalted, the game world changes for that player.
Once the scenario is completed, it becomes a queued group scenario for three players.
To summarise, then, you work through the reputation largely as you do now, but if you want to work on them faster then you can use a tabard to either grind mobs (including in dungeons), or see items drop from specific ones for turn in. At each stage you get more one-time quests to move the story on, and the entire grind ends with a solo scenario that you can then queue up for once it’s completed.
Now, let’s talk about rewards.
Friendly: You get the tabard.
Honoured: You get an appropriate pet.
Revered: You get some LFR level gear purchasable with gold.
Exalted: You get a mount, a title, some normal raid level gear purchasable with gold, and a full set of cosmetic gear.
The idea of the gear rewards at Revered and Exalted is that they will provide a player with a full set of gear, if all of the reputations are completed. This means all fourteen slots, divided by the number of factions available, and includes trinkets but NOT a weapon. Once you complete all of the factions to Exalted, a weapon or shield of your choice is automatically unlocked and will be at the heroic raid item level.
Now, naturally, there are some caveats to stop people getting twitchy.
- Reputations need to be lengthened so that gearing up via them isn’t too efficient.
- Dailies are the most efficient route, and grinding shouldn’t be too lucrative.
- All gear will have two secondary stats, and one will always be Versatility.
- Versatility is removed from all dungeon and raiding gear.
- Trinkets will house a primary stat with one having a proc, and the other being on-use.
Once the group scenario is unlocked, its final boss will drop a cache for each player that always houses a piece of randomized normal raid level gear, but it doesn’t have to have Versatility on it.
And that’s about all I need to put down for now. There are, clearly, some considerations.
a) The argument may come that raiders feel forced into doing these. Ultimately, that’s not a criticism of the system, and raiders have to start accepting that the entire game cannot be designed around them. That said, I’ve tried to mitigate how much of the gear rewards raiders would actually want. In the throughput terms that matter in raids, this gear will be far from optimal because it’ll always have Versatility on it; a stat that’s much more useful for solo players taking damage, than raiders looking for optimal stats.
In short, raid gear comes from raids. This content, and its rewards, are not aimed at raiders. If they choose to do it, it's on them, and the rewards are suboptimal.
b) Telling a story is what reputation factions should be about, and that’s largely the heart of this suggestion. Making the world change is a part of this, but so is the unlocking of one-time quests that move things on. There are other rewards that could be tied to these reputations, such as dungeon-boss summoning stones, profession recipes or special items such as archaeology keystones, but this is just a first example.
c) The biggest problem is getting players to group up for this. A system doesn’t necessarily need to encourage players to get together, but it certainly shouldn’t discourage them… And there’s a chance this might. Again, I’ve tried to mitigate that by having the world change only twice during the grind, but then you either have to offer the same circle of quests every day to every player (which means a person further along doesn’t “feel” they’re further along), or change the quests each reputation level (which separates players).
Okay, so, what do you think? I’ve even put in a handy poll for a quick answer if this was TL, DR (/winks at Kronox and Taelor).