It'd be so much fun if every expansion was chained together--WoW Ultimate Edition!

[garicasha]

This'll never happen but what if every tier of every expansion was just treated like a sequential phased quest chain? (with anything time-gated removed)

Player kills Ragnaros, BWL is instantly available to that toon.
Player kills Nefarian, ZG + world dragons are instantly available to that toon.
Player kills Hakkar, AQ20 and AQ40 are instantly available with no war effort.
...
Player kills Kel'Thuzad, player can now go through the Dark Portal. When they do they get patch 2.4 talents BUT if they enter a vanilla dungeon they scale down to 60 and go back to vanilla talents.
...
Player kills Kil'Jaeden and can now board a boat to Northrend
...all the way to Shadowlands

The gear could also work like how transmog works, where you unlock a piece and then can summon it. So people playing BC could attend their guild's weekly Naxx raid to help guildies unlock BC, or hell, even just run it for fun and maybe unlock a few more pieces!

World-first players would obviously crush this but the race would be so GD long it would still take months. Weekly lockouts would still be an issue. They could get through vanilla probably in a few weeks but 2-3 weeks later they'd be trying to do something like Archimonde with extremely limited gear and it just wouldn't work. And there's no way to do splits because the process of leveling an alt through every freaking raid would take weeks or months!

Even casual guilds might have fun because the raid content would be so mixed up...a casual guild would maybe do a BWL/AQ40 farm on Tuesday, then Karazhan group 1 on Wednesday, Gruul with the tryhards from an allied guild on Thursday, and then the following week could be a Naxx full clear Tues/Weds/Thurs to get a group through to BC. Hell if a guild was big enough, months in to the game there could be something like Team 1 doing Cataclysm, then using their stockpiled gear to help Team 2 finish off Lich King, then the next week crushing Naxx to help Team 4-5 move on...

It would also open up some things that never happened in the actual game. For example, the world-first guild to get Sunwell done would have a gimmie that they'd also get world-first Naxx/OS/Malygos clear...so then like 24 hours after clearing Sunwell they're already in the middle of Ulduar trying to do s--- like Mimiron Firefighter or Freya + 3 in one week's worth of Naxx gear. It would make for some GREAT streams, it would be a LOT of fun to watch the world's best players trying to do these fights wearing rags.

So questions:
--Would you have fun?
--How long until Battle for Azeroth would get cleared?
--How would you handle the different difficulty levels?
--To accomplish the absurdly difficult task of getting 8+ versions of the game working seamlessly, how long would we have to chain Elon Musk, Brent Spiner, and Bill Nye to a desk in order to get this done?

[Koward]

While this might seem great for the RPG part of the game, the problem would be the MMO side.
"Late" players might find themselves locked at a stage where barely anyone is playing. But even if for raids you can get support from higher stage players, the "worse" version of this issue would be during leveling, as people would be spread a lot. All multiplayer gameplay during leveling would be lost.

[Creedo]

I like this idea a lot. I would have a lot of fun and those who didn't want to progress right away could stay at the 60 content and farm/dungeon/raid as much as they wanted before progressing. I have always hated how the next expansion (in many games) makes the previous useless. I would love the inclusion of past content in this form. You could kind of see this as a Season in Diablo where you create your character and see how far you could get.

--I would certainly have fun and know many friends/guildies who would love this idea. We are casual so it would take us longer, but who cares!
--I could see this taking only a couple of months as top tier players will brute force the entire thing no matter what. Would be fun to watch.
--I don't foresee anything bad with the difficulty levels, but when we get to Heroic/Mythic, would probably not touch Mythic.
--Its fun many games have had scaling that works great such as in Rift. If they iterated hard and tested, they could certainly accomplish this; it would take some time though.

[garicasha]

They'd have to do something like Mythic-only to progress for the first 500 guilds, then everyone else could just do normal modes to advance to the next expansion.

I think it's worth repeating that it'd be super fun to watch world-first guilds bang their heads against Naxx, Hyjal, Ulduar, and ICC in like one week's worth of gear + quest greens.

[Mosha]

Cool idea in a perfect world, but not practical at all. This assumes A. Everyone wants to raid and B. Everyone wants to raid every expansion.

I would love this myself, but I’m not a serious raider at all. I hate every vanilla raid personally. I would raid tbc-wotlk for sure but I also wouldn’t like having it a requisite to kill kiljaden in order to level through northrend and do arenas in wotlk.

[Lucetia]

While this might seem great for the RPG part of the game, the problem would be the MMO side.
"Late" players might find themselves locked at a stage where barely anyone is playing. But even if for raids you can get support from higher stage players, the "worse" version of this issue would be during leveling, as people would be spread a lot. All multiplayer gameplay during leveling would be lost.

Exactly. It was one of the reasons they removed attunements from raids after BC. It was making it harder for returning/new players to return and raid with friends and such without them all having to run old content to catch everyone back up with attunements.

[arkanon]

This wouldnt work in practice - you would thin out the already thinning numbers. Sure, on the 2-3 busy servers it wouldnt be too bad, but even then, the economy would be a dumpster fire, with guilds spread literally across entire expansions - TBC greens selling on the AH and still in vanilla? not anymore! equip those bad boys and 2 shot all the bosses!

Im not against new ideas, but this one just wouldnt work in any shape or form - the ONLY way it COULD work is in retail, with a Timewalking alternate reality, where you commit a toon to travel back to lvl 60 and start progressing through raid tiers, with successive tiers only opening once the previous was cleared.

[garicasha]

Cool idea in a perfect world, but not practical at all. This assumes A. Everyone wants to raid and B. Everyone wants to raid every expansion.

I would love this myself, but I’m not a serious raider at all. I hate every vanilla raid personally. I would raid tbc-wotlk for sure but I also wouldn’t like having it a requisite to kill kiljaden in order to level through northrend and do arenas in wotlk.

All you'd have to do is get a few carries and you'd be off to Northrend. Although correct, we're never gonna see this.

and start progressing through raid tiers, with successive tiers only opening once the previous was cleared.

What I'm describing is literally what you said. TBC greens wouldn't be available to people that hadn't cleared vanilla. I guess therefore there would be 8 different auction houses.

@ Lucetia My dream for this would just be one enormous server. Although it's maybe not all that ridiculous because each server is 8 servers linked to one. Every expansion's "server" would have its own ruleset, they might as well just be separate hardware.

But yah this whole idea is much more geared to raiding than RPG or PvP. Although PvP could be a blast, though. For example, someone that loved vanilla PvP but hated clearing Molten Core each week could do Wrath/Cata/Panda raids and then pop on their T3 set to go wreck people in vanilla AV.