If 9.1.5 isn't making you come back, what would?

[Venziir]

9.1.5 is a bandaid patch, it doesn't deliver any content (at least now NEW), so I doubt many would return solely because of this patch.

[Dacia Ultan]

For them to address this ethics scandal of theirs. (And also: for me to get a decent job.)

[Deneios]

Remove Zovaal, remove the stupid retcons, SL to be a fever dream, Update on the azeroth zones still messed up by deathwing and firing of Ion or demoted back to raid encounter design.

[IdowhatIwant]

Fire Ion.

Also fire any dev that made it a point to trash the player base on social media.

[Nelle]

Cancel Cancel Culture

[Swnem]

List in priority order:

1. More core content, yeah covid and stuff i get it, just make sure to deliver a bit more and more timely than stuff like korthia, raid and a one and done dungeon.
2. Class feedback and work was actually decent in shadowlands beta, work more on the base kit of classes/specs with the coming patches or 10.0
3. Tier sets (and never remove them again) and actually fun borrowed powers like artifacts and essences/corruptions (the gameplay impact, not the garbage acquisition) from the start of every expansion.

My list seems a bit pve/raid focused? Well can we get real here?
WoW can not compete on transmog aesthetics with modern mmos.
WoW can not compete on mount aesthetics with modern mmos.
WoW can not compete on housing (if it'll even ever be implemented on the 20 year old engine) with modern mmos.
WoW can not compete with story compared to other mmos, try to play through the new player experience (exiles reach>bfa>Sl) and ask them if that disjointed mess makes any sense to them or draws them into the story.

WoWs strength are their classes and combat moment to moment gameplay, if that's not top notch they can't compete anymore.

Your post reminded me of something that characterizes where WoW development went wrong.
Where the original devs said they were making a game for themselves, they were players not long before. Nowadays they make a game for themselves as developers.

The reason why class sets were removed had little to do with gameplay or the fact players liked them. It was cause the art team were tired of making them. What the player wants doesn't matter, they are making a game for themselves.

That is where the mantra failed, and this is the danger (amongst other things like having to unlock flying half a year to a year later) of praising the art team too much and increasing their power within the team, over designers.

[Gratlim]

Different things: get inspiration for FFXIV and respect players time, stop focusing on the top 5% of players. Care about your casuals. Those mostly left the game. Same for Classic. The game is currently only catering to wales or hardcore /boost-selling crowd.

[FossilFree]

The biggest problem with Shadowlands for me is how they divided the content up by 4, effectively making the expansion feel really small for anyone who plays a single character (or people who like their alts to be a New Game+ style of skipping everything you've already done and not a second, third, or fourth main). Easier covenant switching in 9.1.5 will definitely help this problem, but it could have been so much better.

I would have rather it was designed so you had to complete all four covenants and their stories on your main to advance the main storyline, but you could pick what order to complete them in. This would have allowed you to see all of the new lore without having to regrind everything again on an alt to see what you missed, or lose your progress by switching and start the grind over.

The mission table could have been a neutral thing in Oribos not tied to any covenants. The anima grind for covenant upgrades, anima conductors, and cosmetics would have been shortened to a more reasonable level, taking into account that you'd be doing all four (not trying to stretch one covenant out to last the whole expansion). The rewards would stay unlocked when you progressed to a new covenant story, and you could eventually have all four fully fleshed-out at once.

Finally, they could have added a special final talent row with four options instead of three, and each time you completed a covenant storyline you'd unlock their covenant ability as a talent option. Signature abilities could have been either bundled with the covenant abilities or they could have been a separate row. You wouldn't have to be a dedicated member of the covenant to use them and could swap them at will.

If Shadowlands had been designed like that, it would have been a great expansion.

[Accendor]

I know these are some bad times and people are angry, sometimes even rightfully so. But I think we can all agree that we love the game and we don't want it to just die.

9.1.5 is being done with quite a few steps in the right direction, I feel safe in saying that. But I also have to say that 9.1.5 is not enough for me, I won't resub for it, even though I really liked most of what they've done.

So I got curious. A lot of people are into the game "for better or for worse" and haven't even unsubbed. And I'm sure tons of people are coming back for 9.1.5. But what about the last group? What about people who still care about the game, but won't come back for 9.1.5? What would make you come back?



As for me, I really enjoyed the ripcord being pulled so that we can flush the systems' most egregious faults down the drain, and the new customisation options alone were enough to entice me to come back, I really really wanted to resub just to play with them. I'd love for class design to go back to what it was before Legion and their "Your class is your Spec, not your Class" design philosophy, and the end of the mandatory grinds, but ultimately, I figured out that there's just one thing that will actually make me resub:

Cross-faction. Because it doesn't matter that the new customisation options are cool if I can't use them, it doesn't matter if the systems are not so bad anymore, since it makes no difference in a dead faction, it doesn't even matter if the classes become good again, for what's the point when the most difficult part of the game is finding a good group to play with.



I'm not creating this thread for us to yell at Blizzard, but rather for us to talk about what would it take for us to come back to the game. Maybe in the hopes that Blizzard will hear about what people want in some way, and then maybe they can direct their efforts into that direction. I've added the poll so that it can also be quantified in some easy-to-see way, since it's already pretty unlikely Blizzard would hear from this thread in particular, let alone read every post, but numbers are easy to pass through, and all it'd take is a single dev looking at them.

Like, we all know Cross Faction would be good for the game, but for that to be implemented it has to be quantified in some way, and right now we have a lot of folk who just keep trucking through the dead faction, even more folk that simply rerolled horde, and tons that just...left. How many of those who left would come back for cross faction? Would it be enough to warrant the development costs? How many people left over the class changes? How many people would come back from whatever game they switched to if the classes went back to the old design philosophy?

What does Blizzard have to do to get you back? Just you being here says you still care about the game, possibly even hinting that you want to come back. So what's the one big issue keeping you away? The one thing that you won't budge on, your "This is why I'm not resubbing".

Content. Good content. It's really that simple. A lot if good content.
There is none with 9.1.5, so no reason to play.

[nanoneo]

Atm playing through New World. But I def will come back. I would wish to have more content, like in expansions pre-SL.

In legion we already were right before Argus patch to launch at this time of an expansion. In MoP we already were in patch 5.4.

Content patch release cadence is just too slow atm.

[Flutterguy]

Go back to Azeroth. Stay a while. Kinda tired of the cosmic shit. I want to give a shit about the characters again.

[NatePsy]

Removal of token (I can dream big, I know), Cross-Faction, more customisation options & less stubborness to change systems until it's too late.

[Rootsbum]

They need to breathe life back into the world.

Factions was the shit when the population peaked, super-cool.
Make older content viable with some new timewalking faction with actual cool rewards, not just instanced stuff
More customization
More NPCs, towns and such
Patch in more transmog
Let us interact more with the world
Add small quest-chains with exciting stories from time to time outside of the major main ones
Put m+ i lfr (0-5)
More minigames and mysteries

I know there is loads of content,but I dont like doing older raids aka running-simulators

[Sughs]

What's there to do? I will clear the Mage Tower the next time Legion timewalking happens during 9.2.

[AtomR]

I'm probably coming back in 9.1.5 because I left at the start of 9.1 to play FFXIV. Now that I've finished FFXIV story, for now, I'm coming back to experience the wow storyline. The changes that come in 9.1.5 are not a reason to come back, it's just coincidence.
Now what changes I'd like to see done to wow to make it better?

The one thing that is almost game breaking for me is the systems upon systems upon subsystem associated with our power and our skills. Enough with the artefact power skill trees, azerite armor trinity skill trees, the countless legendaries associated, the corruption crap, the covenant powers . This is just boring stuff that makes me have to keep learning how to gear up my character.

I'd like factions to be able to play with each other. It doesn't make sense in any way (storyline or otherwise) for these "people" to be unable to understand each other, or group up when it suits them. That same thing happens all the time in the storyline with many horde/alliance groups that we've played with and worked for.
Along with a real massive server merge this would probably fix the problems of getting groups to raid or just being in depressingly low pop server.
To merge the servers without worrying about player names they could keep the current player names and force every player to choose a "family name" and that name would have to be unique not the character name.

I also hate the excruciatingly hard to navigate geography wow has since MoP. Fix that and people will probably not miss flying mounts so much.

Add a timewalking feature that allows us to play old content in the level it was designed to do, with rewards that affects us at the current cap.

At this point in the game lifecycle, we'll probably never be impressed again by gameplay/combat changes. Everything that could be done with this has been done. And the legendary systems that have been added since legion doesn't really help it be more interesting. So just focus on giving us story content more frequently. That's what drives the game forward. Story associated with raids/dungeons/zones/pvp settings. But trim down on the spectacle creep that the story has reached. Let's go back to azeroth and play around with game of thrones style power plays, and political drama.
I'd even argue it's time for xpacs to be a yearly thing. *runs away screaming*

[dewd]

legion levels of reworks of every spec. cant stand how any of them play since bfa

[Byleth]

The ONLY thing that would bring me back, is solid steps to address the toxicity in the community.

Nothing else will ever sway me.

Though I will say that they are starting to take baby steps in the right direction...

For them to address this ethics scandal of theirs.

Yes, that would also help.

[Bogzeh]

Bad poll options. An expansions obviously, so nothing in current expac.

[nvaelz]

I think conduits make having alts way less fun and it's too time consuming.

[Accendor]

I think conduits make having alts way less fun and it's too time consuming.

You get all the conduits you need in like 1h per character in a low base version (which is the most important, since the higher itl only increases the secondary functions (damage) and not the primary ones (Mechanics/CD reduction etc.).
The difference between e.g. 220 and max is minimal.
There are a lot this to complain about, you can even complain about the existence of the conduit system in general, but disliking it only because of alts of something I simply can not agree with.