How I would fix WoW if I was a dev.

[Zandalariprelate]

After watching some streamings, anyone will do a better job than the current guys we have in blizzard, they even made me miss Metzen and Kosak and that is a huge miracle

[Celista]

Hello everyone.

This isn't intended to be a bitch or moan just a collection of things I would change in wow if in some alternate reality I was ion.

General combat:
This is what I would do to improve general combat in wow with the aim of making it a deeper and more compelling experience than what I currently find to be a very shallow burn down the health sponge affair for 99% of the mobs in game.

*divers and meaningful mob abilitys:
I belive it should matter if I'm fighting a caster or a melee mob and it should matter what there casting and what ability there using. It should also be meaningful that I'm fighting an orc or a dryad or a dragon, each should feel like a unique fight. Now ofc that would mean killing might take longer and harder so we should have a toolkit to handle things and experience / reward put to a level to offset.

*char attack abilitys that matter. This is part of the above. You abilitys should never just be does some damdge they should layer in to the combat and how you're controlling the mob, abilitys should be unique and compelling and serve a direct purpose.

*resistances were a good thing handled badly, weaknesses add on to this:
Resistances go along way to make fights unique and make players think about how they will deal with things also as I will expand on in customization when done properly where players have the flexibility in talents and gear to work around resistances they open up a deeper experience as far as gearing and planing for you char, as long as every class has the ability to spec and gear to overcome resistance and take advantage of a weakness it creates compelling gameplay like in monster hunter world.

Choices, choices, choices!
Things like stances were great choosing between berserker stance and defensive stance, choices between elements that boost parts of the combat gameplay in exchange for a cost to others. This all helped add depth to combat in the game that seems lost.

Charicter customization:

It's more than just apperance!

*wide array of talent options. The talent tree was the best way done badly. Cookie cutter happens not because talents can never be balanced against each other, cookie cutter happens from having shallow combat experiences. If every mob is just a health bar then you can't expect a compelling experience. Adding back resistances and weaknesses and more compelling dynamic combat creates the environment where like in monster hunter world you need to tailor your charicture to the challenge your setting of to face.

*stats that matter. Not just throughput increases, workers with deeper combat to make things easier.

*enchanting should be a much bigger thing. And I should want to customizer my enchants often. Same with gems and glyphs.

Pve:

*smarter more dynamic bosses. Wows raid bosses are possibly the most boring bosses to fight in any game. Every boss in wow can be boiled down to a health number and a movement pattern because of how little wow has left to differentiate bosses and mobs and how scripted the encounters are. Making bosses more dynamic, more reactive and with varying strengths and weaknesses makes bosses fun and challenging past the first couple time you beat them. Wow raiding has so little fun replay ability that it should be obvious why raiders burn out frequently and often feel like it's a job and a chore to farm raids, doing a raid should always be fun not a chore.

Pvp:

*solo que rated.

*personal rankings

*league typed play

*customization options

*dynamic cc ways to counter more than just trinketing.


Social interaction:

We need to get people communicating, any way we can Evean if it means removing lfd, that doesn't nesseseraly mean going back to spamming trade chat, I think some effort should be done at looking at aketernstive more social ways of doing what lfd does now.

Main hubs. The problem with each expansion putting in a new hub city, trying to recapture what IF used to be is part of what made IF such a great hub was that not only max level players were there. This exposed newer players to max level people and gave them something to strive towards and for high levels gave them a feeling of prestegie in there achievements showing of on mounts and there gear and such.



Alot of work needs to be done to put the rpg back in this mmo but also to put the mmo back in the rpg, because unfortunately as the game is now far too many people just aren't finding it fun and that ultimately is what we pay monthly for.

this goes into a lot of what and RPG is and why the RPG is being expunged from AAA titles and it applys to wow. especially the bits about combat at 10:30

This is all super vague. You might as well type out "I'm going to make the game 500% more awesome".

[Deleted]

You're mistaken I'm afraid. The most successful games are not frustrating in the slightest. You'll also note that as Megaman, xcom, etc progressed they too became more casual. Why? Because that's what does better in the market. I mean, according to the purists something like Arma is a better game than CoD/BF but CoD/BF outsell it by a landslide. Why? Because they appeal to a wider audience by not being frustrating. We're no longer in a day where bosses and enemies have to be exceptionally cheap to make games seem longer due to hardware limitations. The average gamer wants to have fun, not a frustrating experience.

You'll find that those of us that enjoy that ball busting challenge are in an extreme but vocal minority.

I'd argue otherwise. Arma isn't frustrating as much as it's boring.
There's types of frustration. One from having nothing to do like Arma.
But cod and bf are frustrating games as that's inherent from any pvp game. Any one who's played current cod for any length of time knows the frustration of being shat on by sniper or a knife runner, or having a hard earned score streak shot down befor it gets a single kill.

Also the process of having to unlock the good guns and then unlock all the attachments and in many cases being nearly useless till you get the right gun unlocked

I think it's a case that those of us who know it's cemplexity and over coming achivment that make a good game are a minority who vocalise it. But I do honestly see and feel that it is what makes a game extreamly good and those who want simpler and easier end up making vapid games that don't last after a few month.

Skyrim was one of the most popular games of all time, outstripping wow sales and it had the classic talent trees and crafting and some difficult frustrating fights.

[Skildar]

hell for a start your whole defense is to attack me and my credibility and experience, which is likely (even if it was a dip of the toe and not liking it) a lot more than yours.

Nobody attacks you on your credibility and experience, you just make cynical points about things you clearly do not understand fully as you trivialize it and back it up using your experience. Thus making others question it...

And as you continue to spit on multiple programming langages, it just reinforce this point : you're vision is narrow. Do you really think that if low level programming language made everything more interesting there would be so many other languages? Don't you realize that you're comparing a hammer and a pen?

And if your colleagues bitch about somthing as being an easy piece of cake, good for them, but it sure as hell doesn't make it so. I have many complaints about wow, but I know how to recognize that work has been put into the making of it and especially the new features of bfa.

[Sansnom]

yea like do you even know how to program? you can do anything in a lower language that is done in a higher one its just more complicated because less is done for you. butr theres plenty of SQL library's out there for c for data base querying and text file manipulation is programming 101 a 5 year old could do it in C.

do you actually have any idea or experience with any of this or are you just upset because you bought an over priced product that had next to 0 actual development put in because its coming across as the latter.

hell for a start your whole defense is to attack me and my credibility and experience, which is likely (even if it was a dip of the toe and not liking it) a lot more than yours.

I am questioning your experience and credibility in games development. Your posts seems to suggest you regard yourself as a superior programmer because you work in the firmware and low level programming and that game development primary uses scripts and other high level languages, which makes the whole process trivial because everything is done.

That view tells me your experience is extremely limited and narrow. Yes, games can and are made with Unity. Even commercial games such as the Shadowrun series. But not games uses Unity or scripts.

stop making excuse for blizzard under resourcing this game and shifting a vapid product. i gave the script kiddies the kudos for doing what they could to stitch something new together and praised the artists who are top notch as always but by gad im not gonna place them as equals to real engineers just as i wouldent put my self as equal to the scientists or they guys that write RTL

No one is making excuses and I do not understand why people like cannot just walk away from something they do not like and do something else. The need to constantly made their points heard and insults people who do not share their view.

and if you don't like it go to r/programming and make a bullshit meme and about java issues no one cares about. and see if the garbage collector will clean up hurt feelings.

R/programming? I assume you mean real programming? You seem to think your type are only real programmers. If your only experience with game development is with Unity, I am not surprised at your extremely limited knowledge of game development.

[Deleted]

Nobody attacks you on your credibility and experience, you just make cynical points about things you clearly do not understand fully as you trivialize it and back it up using your experience. Thus making others question it...

And as you continue to spit on multiple programming langages, it just reinforce this point : you're vision is narrow. Do you really think that if low level programming language made everything more interesting there would be so many other languages? Don't you realize that you're comparing a hammer and a pen?

And if your colleagues bitch about somthing as being an easy piece of cake, good for them, but it sure as hell doesn't make it so. I have many complaints about wow, but I know how to recognize that work has been put into the making of it and especially the new features of bfa.

Actually the mostly bitch about the poor pay and conditions where they work. Also management and how much power marketing has. There the 2 common rants.

You do know the whole point of making engines that have scripting interfaces like lua was so non software engineers could add there own content into the game without needing an engineer hard coding everything in right.

The whole point of higher level languages and scripting is to be easier. But easier comes at a cost of a programs efficency. Or if its scripting then at the cost of needing a heavy wait interpreter running. But there whole point was to make programming stuff where efficacy isn't a cencern trivial. But when you want efficacy you need lower level language. And in lower level language less stuff is done for you by 3rd party library's or auto compiled in as part of the language like memory garbage collectors. That adds difficulty as you as the programmer have to do those things if you need them your self (well you always have to keep track of a free pointers or you leak memory) .

There's a fubdemental reason why the quality of games has been going down and by that I mean the efficacy and the high number of defects thy ship with, and its due to more and more of the game being offloaded to scripters who don't have a fubdemental understanding of how there code executes and how the the program is aligned in memory everything out side the engine and there scripts is a black box to them.

And further more and what my point is, you can only do so much with scripts. The scripting language in an engine is only as powerful as what the underlying real code allows it to be. Its reliant on api's being developed to expose that functionality of the engine to it. New functionality has to be hard coded, old functionality can be stitched together to make things that look new, with some creativity, elbow greese and Alot of bugs. And when you look at the bugs generated in wow how they seem so disconnected from the change implemented it screams of scripts having to stitch vastly different things together out side of there intended use to make new gameplay rather than real engineering resources being allocated to wow to create that functionality properly.

And that's my point what we got in bfa is old engine functionality stitched together in a new package by scripts with some new art assets thrown on top, and fudementaly that's not worth the price of the expansion. And we pay for a full dev team including engineers to develop new functionality.

And yes scripting is trivial. Get over it. I don't think there's a singly python dev or javascript dev who would ever dare compare coding in python or javascript to coding in c and c++.
Every language has its place based on how easily and quick it makes creating something in its sphere but they are less challenging the higher up the stack and every programmer knows that. That's why the low level kernal, firmware and driver devs earn the big money.

[msdos]

How I would fix WoW: delete the concept of Soulbound loot. Make everything able to be traded. Delete titanforging and azerite gear. Introduce new currency that has the ability to enhance gear: so one form of currency would be the old titan forge system, but it would be broken down in rarity windows. the most common drop might only give +1 ilvl, the rarest could give like +15 or something. Harder content gives more rare currency.

How I would fix MMO-champ: start handing out infractions to people quoting giant walls of text and then responding with one sentence.

[Zephire]

Hello everyone. -snip-

"Oh, here we go again... another 'remove LFR etc' thread..." right, it's not? What a refreshing surprise! It's not a fix though, its a completely different game, I'd say. Sounds fun and interesting if I don't have to switch gear, talents, enchants and what not before every mobb. I rather stick to my toolkit and deal with whatever flaws it might have.

Still, nice points. It would be like turning a romantic comedy into a drama action. People expect and go to the movie with the expectation of it being a romantic comedy. Man, they'd be disappointed :P

[Drusin]

If I were a dev, I'd delete the current player base, then try and find a new one.

Yikes, I'd fire you instantly if you got rid of players who play simply because they've always played and won't quit because it might get better.

[czarek]

How I would fix WoW: delete the concept of Soulbound loot. Make everything able to be traded. Delete titanforging and azerite gear. Introduce new currency that has the ability to enhance gear: so one form of currency would be the old titan forge system, but it would be broken down in rarity windows. the most common drop might only give +1 ilvl, the rarest could give like +15 or something. Harder content gives more rare currency.

How I would fix MMO-champ: start handing out infractions to people quoting giant walls of text and then responding with one sentence.

Sounds good to me. More random afixes loot is much better for the game but much harder to balance pvp and pve. PVP was never balanced well so one thing is done. Tradeable items = win.

[Drusin]

R/programming? I assume you mean real programming?

https://www.reddit.com/r/programming

I'm assuming you didn't understand what he meant by r/programming, if you did and you're saying something else I'm not grasping just ignore me

[msdos]

Sounds good to me. More random afixes loot is much better for the game but much harder to balance pvp and pve. PVP was never balanced well so one thing is done. Tradeable items = win.

I don't think PVP needs to be balanced as long as everyone can have fun and earn the same rewards and if you introduce a playground for every type of player to excel in. Like maybe a class is horrible in arena, but awesome somewhere else? Then that needs to be showcased and supported and there needs to be a measure of equality (not: arena gives uber insane rewards and the place your spec actually excels gives nothing, we don't want that). I would also add protection to arena, I mean they did it with legendaries. Say if you lose too many arena games in a row, your chance to receive really rare currency shoots up all of a sudden.

[Deleted]

I am questioning your experience and credibility in games development. Your posts seems to suggest you regard yourself as a superior programmer because you work in the firmware and low level programming and that game development primary uses scripts and other high level languages, which makes the whole process trivial because everything is done.

That view tells me your experience is extremely limited and narrow. Yes, games can and are made with Unity. Even commercial games such as the Shadowrun series. But not games uses Unity or scripts.



No one is making excuses and I do not understand why people like cannot just walk away from something they do not like and do something else. The need to constantly made their points heard and insults people who do not share their view.



R/programming? I assume you mean real programming? You seem to think your type are only real programmers. If your only experience with game development is with Unity, I am not surprised at your extremely limited knowledge of game development.

My game dev experience is the mostly the source engine and building my own engine from scratch and using that, As I said, many times.

In games dev you have two sides, the engineers who make the engine and update the engine and the designers though the prefer being called devs nowadays, who use the scripting interface that engineers now commonly implient in all engines (unity, cry, unreal and even new versions of source), the original reason they do this is because engineer time is expensive, designer time is much cheaper and you don't want an engine developer tied up for to long having to hard code things. So the engine guy will build all the nessary functionality in the engine for a feature like battle grounds ( more like something more general like instance pvp combat and score keeping systems ) then a designer who knows the scripting language will make the individual battle grounds by stitching together the art assets and the bg functionality to make multiple different bgs leaving the engineer to work on fudementaly new features of the engine.

When I project gets under resourced on engineers the designers are forced to do more with scripts to try and create things that look like new features. So they will take what's available that was originally created to scenarios and stitch it together to be islands. Or they will take what was made to facilitate bgs and make warfronts. On the surface it looks different but underneath there's nothing new between what's going on in a war front and arathi basin.

And yet we pay full price. That's the reason every one's so disalusioned and saying we have no content and nothing fun. It's because there right, we have the same content as legion just repackaged and reinterpreted.

- - - Updated - - -

"Oh, here we go again... another 'remove LFR etc' thread..." right, it's not? What a refreshing surprise! It's not a fix though, its a completely different game, I'd say. Sounds fun and interesting if I don't have to switch gear, talents, enchants and what not before every mobb. I rather stick to my toolkit and deal with whatever flaws it might have.

Still, nice points. It would be like turning a romantic comedy into a drama action. People expect and go to the movie with the expectation of it being a romantic comedy. Man, they'd be disappointed :P

Yea I'd keep the similar restriction on when and where you can change.

That pushes making balanced builds that can handle all comers over specialising for a single encounter. Which "what's good" is a much broader church in all commer builds than singular focused.

And yea though I think if wow hadn't had the "be more accessible the everquest" philosophy ingrained since launch its a direction they might have gone in.

[Noxina]

Sounds like Trump and his "I'll make America great again!", "How?", "I'll make it GREAT!".


You're not really telling us what you would do, just how you would like it to be.
1. Mob type should matter: sure, but how would you do this without making it so people would (for isntance) never go for the dragons because (for instance) they got [Dragon Hide: Increase armor by 100%], so killing them wouldn't be worth the time.

2. Abilities does matter, you do them in an order, a squenze for a reason. Some have higer DPS than others, so they are prioritized over the ones with less DPS, some enhances the next ability etc.

3. Now resistances is one thing I really miss from Vanilla, sure it was tedious to have to go do Mara to get NR gear, but it was a part of the raiding experience in a way. Now you slam on what ever is highest ilvl and roll with it.
Not sure how you would improve it though?

4. Cookie cutter specs will always be a thing, doesnt matter if we have 1000 choices, or there are 100 different situations.

5. Stats do matter, you stack what gives you the best DPS per point. Sure they could come back with hit rating etc, but wouldn't really change anything.

6. Do you mean changing enchants/gems for the fight ahead of you? So you'd need to have 10 of each weapon enchant in your bag, just because one is better than another for different fights? Sounds horrible (and expensive).

7. Have you tried Mythic before you outgear it in Heroic Titanforged gear? Give it a try if you want harder bosses, it's actually challenging and fun.

8.
a. Yes please, a solo ranked system would be amazing, and I am actually a bit surprised it isn't a thing.
b. We have personal rankings.
c. What do you mean by "league type of play"?
d. Customization, as in transmog? Talent points? Azerite gear? A bit unclear there.
e. So for instance counter CC to stop their outgoing CC? LoS? Other abilities that stop incomming CC (vanish, anti-magic shield etc)?

9. Communicating is up to you, I'm social with those I chose to be social with, and whenever I am in a city I tend to write in the /trade chat if there is a conversation going on there.
What I do miss though is a sense of aknowledge, no one knows anyone except their guild-mates now, because of sharding and cross realms. That's one thing I miss from Vanilla aswell.

10. Your previous point pretty much explained as to why mainhubs are more dead now than before. We don't need them as much as we did.
Also, people are around in the world doing WQs while being queued up for dungeons/LFR/PVP, instead of sitting in a city spamming /LFG for 5 hours.


So again, you didn't really explain how you would do anything here.

[msdos]

Sounds like Trump and his "I'll make America great again!", "How?", "I'll make it GREAT!".

So I'm guessing you just go on to disagree with every single thing? You mean you can't find a single thing you agree with? Yeah that's just contrarianism and you could see it coming. You say all the ideas are a fail because you want them to be, it's very very clear from your post you aren't open to change whatsoever. Why even be in this thread? Lets see some of your ideas!

[Skildar]

I don't think there's a singly python dev or javascript dev who would ever dare compare coding in python or javascript to coding in c and c++.
Every language has its place based on how easily and quick it makes creating something in its sphere but they are less challenging the higher up the stack and every programmer knows that. That's why the low level kernal, firmware and driver devs earn the big money.

what?! please, stop talking about things you have no knowledge about!

[Deleted]

Nothing is going to make WoW combat compelling beyond a total rework. I understand that WoW being an MMO puts a limit on what you can do, but other games like ESO, Wildstar, and Neverwinter have made a more action oriented combat system work, and its great fun and more engaging than WoW.

[Deleted]

what?! please, stop talking about things you have no knowledge about!

You see you make this post claiming I don't know Evean though it's my profession, Yet the only one putting detail in there posts to explain anything is me, atm you have shown you have basicly no understanding of programming.

Tbh I doubt you even know any language.

So please do keep making vapid replys like "no you" and "shut up" because its making my case.

- - - Updated - - -

Nothing is going to make WoW combat compelling beyond a total rework. I understand that WoW being an MMO puts a limit on what you can do, but other games like ESO, Wildstar, and Neverwinter have made a more action oriented combat system work, and its great fun and more engaging than WoW.

Yea it's actually fairly difficult to see a path from the vary basic combat we have now to something more interesting.

Really is long past time for a wow2 and a fresh take on things.

I kind wish titan hadn't been canned from what was leaked out about it, it looked fun.

[grexly75]

With how things are going at Activision-Blizzard at the moment, I very much doubt you will see a WoW 2 anytime soon if at all..

[ornichi]

Remove a̶c̶h̶i̶v̶e̶m̶e̶n̶t̶ ̶f̶o̶r̶ flying.

Fixed it for you. Agree on everything below.