So we can basically agree WoW got worse with every expansion.
So what would have you done differently? It's 2005 and you're tasked with creating the first World of Warcraft expansion. What would you do that differed from what Blizzard did in expanding World of Warcraft?
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>So we can basically agree WoW got worse with every expansion.
wrong
vanilla was great
burning crusade was great
lich king was great until toc, toc was garbage, icc and rs were ok
cata was ok until the first nerfs to difficulty and then was garbage
mists was great
wod was garbage
legion is extremely mixed, but overall ok
It got BETTER with each new expansion, until Cataclysm. Then it descended into the abyss.
WoD and Legion are cash grabs.
never make LFG/LFR or flying mounts, more world pvp, keep talent trees.
also, permadeath? y/n?
ulduar was the peak
you cant change anything differently, casuals will get their way no matter what.
Expansions up to and including WOTLK are okay. To "save the series" I would:
>Bring back real talent trees
>Give Death Knights the boot
>Group finder stays, but LFR gets the boot
>Remove heirlooms, "collections", make every character unique
>Make raids have harder mechanics in heroic in mythic mode, instead of larger health bars
>implying cata was better than mists
cata was a light in the darkness
i love permadeath as a mechanic in general, but it would NOT work for a game like wow.
some of the other ideas i've heard people come up with, like unrepairable items, experience penalties for death, etc., some of that makes sense and could be made to work i think. but permadeath just wouldn't work; dying is an integral part of how both pvp and endgame raiding work. you're expected to die a lot.
pretty accurate. id cut wrath more slack and i didnt like pandas much but cata was definitely the beginning of the end for me
I don't really think you can just name a few things to do differently. the game now is nothing like it was during vanilla/tbc
mists was a light in the darkness, rather
worst part for me is that cata didn't HAVE to be terrible. nothing in there was inherently wrong, it COULD have worked. it was just all so poorly executed and filled with terrible decision making by the dev team.
remove cross realm mechanics, remove garrisons, remove lfr, remove transmog.
also i seriously hope all of you guys support legacy servers
i have literally no qualms with you or your statement. good show.
while i sort of agree and disagree with all of those for different reasons,
>remove transmogs
for literally what purpose.
>Emerald Dream.
>Kill WAR by stealing it's RVR system before it even releases.
>Also steal Public Quests from WAR
>No Flying Mounts
>Expanded talent Trees.
>More Alliance content in Kalimdor
>More Horde Content in Eastern Kingdoms
>Towns in Contested areas can be captured.
>Maybe LFG but no expansion to LFR shit also no instant teleport to area. LFG just puts you in a fucking group, nothing more.
Also there are lots of little quality of life improvements that could be made to Vanilla WoW that you could change. Slightly improved EXP rate, maybe even like 1.2x-1.5x because you often run out of quests forcing you to grind. Quest drops drop for all party members instead of being forced to wait for respawns for fucking everyone.
Also my wish list. Expand the Defias Brotherhood. The story behind these guys was so full of potential before Metzen just went "Lol they are full evil".
Seriously, they are workers fucked over by the corrupt aristocracy of Stormwind and you go and slaughter them and their families for the aristocrats and Kulaks in Westfall who are being secretly controlled by Onyxia, without question. Honestly I would have expanded the Defias Brotherhood into a full on Peoples rebellion and made players feel real bad for continuing to slaughter these guys for loot.
Also tonnes of missed potential with Venessa VanCleef as well.
>its vanilla
>ding 43
>/played is 4 days 7 hours
>die to a lv 60 rogue
No permadeath. Player characters are played for hundreds of hours.
Burning Crusade was 100% pure video game kino
I liked Vanilla and BC (except for Arena).
Wrath was okay, in its own way, but it was the first time in WoW where I remember people blowing through dungeons at their level with aoe everywhere, no time required, no cc required, no marking required, no nothing.
I actually liked Mists for Panderia itself, but its raids and Siege raids were meh meh meh. Timeless Isle was decent. Probably the best end expansion zone since BC's Sunwell Island.
The problem with WoW is that it was never good. It was just babbies first mmo. Blizzard was huge back then, with SC:BW, D2, and W3. So they got a lot of players to pick it up - A lot of the more casual people too.
It was never good, it was just most peoples first experience with an MMO and everyone still thinks back fondly of their first MMO.
I think it's lack of decent competition that did this to wow slowly over the years
if you want something to get better healthy competition is a good way to start it
>Quest drops drop for all party members instead of being forced to wait for respawns for fucking everyone.
This would make the vanilla leveling experience worse though. You'd run out of quests way faster since reduced monster xp in groups.
Individual items dropping really isn't a big deal. The benefits of grouping up are already so, so, so huge in vanilla you don't need to encourage it.
It is only when the game became eady and mindless that the change was needed.
make it really easy to put together 5 and 10 mans and make them educational to players to learn the basic mechanics of grouping, staying together, dont stand in the X, etc. to about level 30 or so. then make a babby mode raid for new players to learn from.
so many hours are wasted teaching people the basics and many newcomers got discouraged and this was further compounded by elitism.
never ever ever ever never ever add achievements to the game
Didn't like Cata (flying in the main world was cool, but fuck Cata itself).
Liked WoD's intro story and stuff, but garissons, raid and its end expansion content were meh.
I'm liking Legion, but less as an MMO, and more as something that probably would have made a better single player Action RPG. At this point the archaic MMO tab targeting action bar system is holding back anything this game tries to do so very hard it may never recover.
>never make LFG/LFR
I will never understand this. How is spamming for people any better than using the game to search for you?
youre not getting legacy servers
nost isnt coming back
cuck
i just dont like transmog. i dont care for stylecraft and i like to know what gear my opponents are wearing. also i liked when people had some badass gear it actually was what it was. for me it takes away from the game more than it adds
there was lots of competition unfortunately it was a competition to see who could copy wow the best. wow single handedly both revolutionized and killed mmos. there is a cemetery full of fun games because they gave up their identity to be wow clone #198
Well when you redesign your game basically every expansion of course it's going to be shit
They got extremely lazy with gear design after implementing it
But don't all people end up looking the same end game?
>remove cross realm mechanics
i agree but on one condition: we need a way to enforce faction balance. realms like illidan-us should not be a thing.
>remove garrisons
legion went half-way with this
>remove lfr
i disagree with removing it altogether, but it needs to be heavily reworked. its current incarnation is just fucking stupid.
>remove transmog
that's just stupid
>Maybe LFG
no lfg, fuck lfg
premade groups is great and is what lfg should have been. there's no reason for lfg to exist when premade groups exists, it accomplishes the same design goal without all of the problems of lfg.
there are other ways to solve that problem that don't involve instant teleporting into a loot cave with four randoms from some other realm that you've never met before, will never meet again, and will probably never talk with unless they or you fuck up.
The only people who want lfg are shitty unwanted dps.
LFG removes the encouragement to add people as friends, and it reduces the ability to assemble a reasonable group, as now you have to kick all the fucking rogues and keep rerolling for a warlock rather than just finding a warlock.
Can't add anything to this, except maybe curtailing or eliminating CRZ.
imo premade groups is one of the best features blizzard has implemented in ages and is 100% a reason to do away with shitty lfg. i can't think of a single downside to it, it seriously solves every problem lfg meant to solve without any of the problems lfg created. it's fucking great and i have a huge hard-on for it.
of course not. before transmog you knew instantly if someone was freshly level capped or if they had mid grade purples or if you were going to get stomped by them. it isn't so relevant anymore because everyone has the same gear level but that's another change id make that cant be articulated so easily
>not removing difficulty tiers and replacing it with a reasonably hard standard tier
Easy mode cheapens the game. The nature of easy mode as it is implemented forces people to play it for "muh ilevels" too
>premade groups is great and is what lfg should have been. there's no reason for lfg to exist when premade groups exists, it accomplishes the same design goal without all of the problems of lfg.
I agree, this is why I said maybe, there are probably better systems than LFG. I didn't like LFG, but spamming General did get annoying.
>Can create WO for AK in phone app
>Don't even need to log into the game anymore
Finally they've perfected the WOW formula
Wrath had a decent amount of great shit (DUAL SPEC, Ulduar) but also some dumb shit (beginning of homogenization of classes, dungeon queue, ToC)
I stopped playing before cata so no comment beyond that
This
I'll never get the whole "game got worse every expansion." WoW's for some reason that one game where people are openly willing to defend worse gameplay for. Each expansion has only brought more engaging gameplay mechanics than the one before. It is fascinating to see when people's complaints about the latest raid was its aesthetic and not the actual gameplay attached to it which is still some of the top stuff in MMOs right now.
Combine nostalgia with the fact that the game only got harder as it went on, and you really get delusional crap like Vanilla's datedness or WOTLK's overtly casual bullshit somehow being touted as the best in WoW.
I guess that makes sense. I didn't play WoW for very long, but I always liked LFG mostly because I am not very talkative and/or didn't know where most of the instances were located
>Boot Death Knights
Yeah just get rid of the only class with an interesting class campaign
Not really. Considering droprates and shit seeing someone in their BiS gear was pretty rare, and that's assuming they bothered looking up what BiS was.
Nevermind how few people cleared enough of Naxx to get their BiS shit in the first place.
if you really didnt notice the shift in quality during cataclysm or wod than youre hopeless.
>vanilla was great
There was far too much grinding, and way too many bugs and glitches to call it great. It definitely did well for it's time and for what it was, but calling it great is a bit of a stretch.
dual spec was a good thing at its original price point of "fuck you." or maybe a bit less than that. it should not be something that's basically handed to you, you should have to at least work a LITTLE bit to earn it.
>(beginning of homogenization of classes, dungeon queue, ToC)
the homogenization of class thing is controversial because class homogenization was possibly "worst" during mists when most specs had a billion abilities, including many that other specs could do, but that also meant they had the highest skill ceiling where people who knew every ass-end ability their spec had could do some seriously crazy shit.
wod pruned a lot of these abilities and made classes less homogenized, but significantly lowered the skill ceiling. legion did the same thing again, although they managed to do it without crippling the skill ceiling any worse than it already was i'd say.
it takes two seconds to look up where the instance is located, though i do think that should be something that's in the dungeon journal. however, talking is part of what the game is supposed to be. it's not supposed to be a single player loot grind, it's supposed to be a team effort. vanilla was completely designed around this; even a lot of low and midlevel overworld content was hard or impossible to solo and seriously encouraged you to group with random people who happened to be doing the same thing. i honestly think you'd probably understand why it's better if you experienced it, it's actually a lot of fun.
Looking for groups was more of a social aspect, you got to know who was in your group and you made friends. It also allowed you to prove your worth when tanking/healing was somewhat challenging. it also promoted more communication within your group, like which mobs to pull or what to CC
once you level your first character to 60-70-whatever every alt you make after that has increased xp gain and gains rested xp at a much higher rate which stacks as the more max level chars you have.
i think it was great overall, especially in that it succeeded at being an actual mmo where it really pushed you to engage with other players.
i agree that certain endgame grinds were pretty over the top, though. especially some of those rep grinds.
bugs and glitches goes without saying, but i think it's telling that vanilla managed to shine despite them.
LFD/LFR was never the problem, cross-server grouping is. We have cross-server group finder now and it's almost the same thing. You might add one person as a friend if you have a good run, but the majority of people you do a run with will just say bye, leave and then you'll never see them again.
Blizzard destroying server community was probably the worst thing they've ever done.
Dont forget no server cossover so they were actually tight knit communities
I was more talking about shit like buffs and abilities that used to be exclusive to one class being spread around to make room for every dungeon having a 10 man option
But for fucking real why the hell would you give Pallies and Hunters Replenishment when it was like 80% of the reason you'd bother bringing a Shadow Priest with you to any raid before that. The other 20% was Warlocks (and other casters) sucking your dick for Shadow Weaving and Misery up on the boss.
Okay so I was mostly butthurt about Replenishment getting shared around, but still.
At least besides that they kept on buffing Shadow for absolutely no reason throughout Wrath, it was great.
Nostalrius II soon
That's the fun bit. Learning where all the dungeons were, figuring out who you share that server with, etc.
I rolled a tank so I had to talk more than the other rolls, and I was initially shy as fuck, but I opened up and had a lot of fun. Got deep into blacksmithing and befriended suppliers to get me the goods I needed too. Shit was great.
Now cross realms, no need to talk in dungeons, professions destroyed, and lfg.
i strongly suspect blizzard is going to make some announcement about legacy servers in the next day or two at blizzcon. in fact, this is probably the first time i've ever been really, really excited about blizzcon. i've said it numerous times, but we could see any of the following:
>sc1-related announcement
>d2-related announcement
>d4-related announcement
>legacy wow servers announcement
>"pristine realms" announcement (yes i actually liked the idea)
>wc4-related announcement
that's a lot of ground and i'm pretty excited
Something to remember with this graph, at least until Wrath, Asia was lagging an expansion behind. When you take that into account, the game started dipping in mid-Wrath which makes complete sense.
>I am not very talkative
Its a fucking social game, fucking socialize
>didn't know where most of the instances were located
then ask others or fucking explore yourself
why the fuck would you play an mmo when you dont even enjoy the basic tenets of what makes an mmo different from other games?
>shift in quality during Cataclysm
Cataclysm was the first iteration of WoW to really go all out on making the game become skill based. Just tank/spanking while wearing the right gear with the occasional CC wasn't enough anymore. Not to mention that boring old questing actually became fun again, with the new at the time questing system making older shit places like Stonetalon gain new love and respect.
WoD had a shit tier content release schedule, but all the content was top tier. HFC is still the most variable raid in an MMO with the raid actually feeling like a dungeon with the options given to the players.
blizzard is going to disappoint like always. you think people would just accept it after they some of the greatest franchises ever in to the ground.
Scrap expansions to begin with. No raising the max level. New content has to be earned. Gradually add some new content. Keep the old pvp ranking system and update new rewards on the stage of the current content, instead of it being free shit for everyone. No raid finder, just LFG. Keep it in Azeroth.
It's not happening. I've said this many times on Sup Forums, but opening a vanilla server is admitting they made the game worse in some ways when they were supposed to be developing it
Admitting that is absolutely heretical to software companies. Their egos cannot handle that idea. Releasing vanilla servers is admitting the past 10 years have been a waste.
biggest mistake was outland
it went from the world of warcraft to the place where you level/grind in order to reach the level where you can go to outland
they should have added only new zones within eastern kingdoms and kalimdor, kept stat boosts linear, and obviously not have introduced flying mounts
Me and a friend have been playing occasionally on Kronos for a bit, started a while after Nost died, not sure what I'd do if another Nost server actually came back. Kronos ain't perfect but we have but a decent amount of time in there (almost to 60) and I'm not sure if either of us would be up for starting over again. Plus I could easily see it being massively overcrowded and flooded with Chinese again.
>Admitting that is absolutely heretical to anyone with a public profile
ftfy
>professions destroyed
bs/jc here, they've really been eviscerated, the way it's currently tuned, i can tell you straight up that blacksmithing is not worth it. jc is kind of worth it, though. i heard inscription really got buttfucked too, i mean they removed glyphs so i can believe it.
that's disappointing
idk. even one of the things i mentioned being announced would be pretty big for me.
i disagree both with the idea that they won't do it and that it would mean that the past ten years have been a waste. there was a lot of content that newer players have missed and that alone would be enough reason for them to do some sort of "reboot" realms.
I do wish they had done some shit with the obviously planned or empty areas before Outland, like Hyjal, but at the time Outland was fucking cool.
If the contents of the expansions were kept the same and you just changed the order though, Northrend totally should've been before Outland.
Burning Crusade was great. Vanilla was NOT great, having only one viable spec per class was dumb and there were eighty billion bugs
WoTLK was good aesthetically but bad mechanically, overall it's been one step forward three steps back
i think they will sacrifice their egos at some point, maybe in a year maybe in 5. the amount of players who quit and will never come back to retail but would love to jump back in in to tbc is probably enormous.
increase time to level by at least 200% by XP gain alone
increase mob damage and health, decrease players
remove stupid specs like ret/prot for pallies, non resto for druids, etc
remove stats from gear entirely or at least severly neuter them, I dont want to see any +agi till at least level 50 or even 55.
make bands of opposing faction npcs roam the land since it's WARcraft
remove battlegorunds b/c they're casual
removes instances
there. perfect game
I've always felt this as well.
There's also a lot of dropped ideas from Vanilla that could have been expanded like basically everything to do with Night Elves and Tauren.
You work at Blizzard? Neat. Any cool ideas that were destroyed by the machine for stupid reasons?
Perfect piece of shit.
>they removed glyphs
Wait what the hell
What does Inscription even do besides Glyphs? Make those shitty 30 minute buff scrolls? I honestly don't remember
I doubt Blizzard will do true legacy servers.
I think they will do maybe Vanilla, but updated with WoD Engine changes and graphics and probably add some quality of life changes and maybe stuff like heroic dungeon raids and shit.
>remove stupid specs like ret/prot for pallies
Fuck off. I loved prot paladin. Get your no taunt memes out of here. It was a weakness, but it couls be mitigated with skill and strategy.
Main problem was the fucking gear. If Blizzard gave tankadins better gear rather than just giving up and rebalancing t1 gear to be healadin focused and never making tankadin gear again, it would have been fine.
You misunderstood. It was commentary about meta political and economic structure. Nobody ever admits to making any bigger mistakes as long as they can avoid it. If it happens, it usually involves a last resort kind of move.
Yeah, all the mana users that weren't healers or clothies had the problem of no fucking gear with the right stats for them. Even Hunters suffered to an extent.
Prot was entertaining in battlegroups at least, stack damage procs and laugh your ass off when Reckoning goes off and you just delete someone.
>So we can basically agree WoW got worse with every expansion.
Sure, it's technically true, but WoW was never good so it's really a moot point
Makes staves and trinkets iirc
>battlegroups
battlegrounds*
Brain pls
They make a raid consumable that increases your stats against a boss for the entire week. But you can only use one a week.
As good as people seem to remember classic wow was they always seem to forget all the problems.
Useless talent trees
horrible itemization on items
getting one shot
only 1 class could really tank and complained about being "pigeon holed" into the role endlessly
then cried about not being the only tanks once BC hit
broken quest chains
limited debuff slots on enemies making it so some classes were told not to use some of their abilities in raids, and stun locks just to name a few.
Those defias enemies in westfall that would take off most of your HP with one fireball
It did have some good too of course. No group finder tool meant that you had to actually try since if you got a rep for being a useless piece of shit or being a "ninja" it got pretty tough to get a group. Nowadays you can be as terrible as you want and just queue up for another one right after.
BC fixed quite a few of the problems that classic had. Some of them still were around though not to the same extent as they were in classic. Ret was still garbage unless you were a blood elf that could seal twist. prot paladins were usable but would run into mana issues at times (fuck that mana draining boss in hyjal). The raids were still fun and challenging, except for muru. fuck muru.
cosmetic glyphs are still around. and if you can make the DK wraith walk one you can make some gold off that. probably the only glyph required by any class. The skill sucks without it since it levitates you and gets you hung up on any slight elevation change.
Part of it is due to tier gear being a bit of a mistake. Forced a one size fits all approach, so for classes with specs that need different drastically different stats from each other, at least one spec is screwed.
Mostly because I'm lazy. Only played WoW for 2-3montbs because a friend wanted me to try it. I was big on SWG, after that died I just haven't been able to get into anything else
By "died" do you mean the combat update, NGE, or when they actually shut the servers down?
I just wish the story around ulduar and the titans was expanded more. I stopped playing during siege of Ogrimmar and I still feel like Uldum and the whispers within southern Barren was wasted potential.
Yeah the homogenization of classes didn't help either
Do all the TBC class changes so most specs would become viable.
Still add in Outland and still make maximum level 70, but make level 70 characters and items much, much weaker, so T4 would only be a small step ahead from T3, and heroics would be 5-man alternatives to T2.5 or T3
NO FLYING MOUNTS
No arenas either. Maybe let the existing arenas be used as FFA PvP zones but the endgame PvP should remain tied to BGs
No dailies, replace daily rep farm with vanilla style farm.
Keep shamans horde and paladins alliance.
Got no problem with draenei, but replace fucking blood elves with ogres or something holy shit.
I don't really care about the past, but I do have some thoughts on how they can fix the present.
My ONLY suggestion would be for them to either remove it completely, or shrink it to a fraction, the importance that item levels have in this game. The way this "feature" is being played out now is just pure cancer that is spreading to every single corner of this game.
If item levels were to be completely removed from the game these things would probably happen:
1 - Almost all loot drama will end.
2 - Complaints about group finder destroying the game will disappear.
3 - Almost all complaints about being forced to do "x" in order to do "y" will disappear.
4 - All scrubs will disappear from organized raiding.
5 - Attunements will finally be enjoyable, and feel rewarding.
6 - It will allow for the expansion of other features of the game (professions, pets, titles, housing(?) aka garrisons, PvP, and so on).
7 - It will make prestigious titles and mounts to be what they are supposed to be: Prestigious.
8 - It will make the entire world to be relevant again, at all times, not just a small portion.
9 - It will allow a steady increase in difficulty of raids, dungeons, and questing, emphasizing actual challenge, rather than just being a drag where people are forced to take part just for its rewards.
10 - Create actual, long-lasting, and distinguishable rewards, like titles, or well designed pieces of cosmetic gear.
There are countless, I mean infinite, ways in which wow would improve if this retarded focus on item levels was removed from the game entirely.
People who like to play wow, for what wow was supposed to be, would enjoy it a lot more as well. This constant focus on "progression" only creates a false need of urgency that taints really badly the longevity of any content, and especially the quality of new expansions.
>BC
Not make Illidan Kael or Vashj villains but make them faction leaders instead
New races are still draenei and blood elves but make them part of their own faction which is neutral to Alliance and Horde
Draenei are ugly like in WC3
Make it so you have to clear naxxramas to even get to outland
Make it so that classes can use all 5 stats instead of just 2 per spec
>wotlk
Fire the writers, hire good ones
Death knights are allied with the scourge and do scourge-only quests all expansion, which involve killing players from other factions
Death knights are only free to choose another faction at the end of the expansion
Death knight players actually get put into instances with other raids and have to slow down the other raids' progress to get loot
The item level cancer started back with Gearscore addons gaining popularity back during WotLK didn't it?
Boy between that and achievement linking to get into groups things started to get cancerous real fast. I wasn't in a guild at all when I played but I had a pretty big network of friends so I'd tag along to fill slots in other people's raids a lot.
Do you mean to make it so that gear doesn't change through-out the game?
I think between 0.8 and 3.2, it was getting better with every version.
Some bad ideas - quest phasing, no faction unique classes, PvP specific stat, but other than that growing very nicely and becoming more enjoyable to play.
Its after that point that things started going downhill for me.
I don't know how, I just want them to get rid of item levels playing the game for you entirely. Make it less efficient, make it mythic only, I don't know, and I don't care, just get rid of it entirely, it's cancerous, and it's the ONLY thing that's really killing the game from my perspective.
It wasn't anywhere near the bullshit it is today, that's for sure.
People wanting to be carried, niggers expecting free loot, others complaining about rep grind, or whatever, jesus fucking christ, everything is caused by this excessive focus on item level, it's absurd.
Oh yeah in addition, the Lich King would be an outdoor boss who is present at the start of the expansion, but is nigh-impossible to kill. And anyone killed by the Lich King is unable to resurrect until the Lich King is killed on that server. And rather than dying, the only way to defeat the Lich King is to freeze him in a block of ice as before, although he can still communicate to his minions, which negates the illogical "there must always be a lich king" explanation used to justify why there are still undead mobs walking around after his death in wotlk
Part of the problem was removing a lot of stats from gear I think
It's a lot more clear cut what's better now than it used to be even in WotLK
Im pretty sure it was just the numbers
>only 5 levels instead of 10 for the first time
>stats and hp breaking the comfort zone
>30-40k hp in wotlk to ~110k hp in cata, nearly triple
>new shitty talent system that I curse every day
>cross-realming catches wind and slowly begins to decay realm culture and community
Just really terrible, I don't even give a shit about LFG tool but stat hikes past the million mark are a good indicator of a brewing shitstorm
Wonder when 7.2 plans to come out, hopefully sometime in 2017 atleast
I'm a sucker for talent trees in games
I don't even give a fuck if everyone goes cookie cutter
Cata was fantastic at a gameplay level. It's the best the game ever was when it came to systems and combat.
But they fucked up and 4.3 was fucking trash and ruined most the expansion for everyone.
>>new shitty talent system that I curse every day
Something that really shits me is how you have to choose one specialization now, and can't use any spells from others. Like I'm supposed to be the class leader who is better than everyone else, but I can't cast fireball and frostbolt at the same time? Get the fuck outta here.