There is a good discussion on the World of Warcraft forums regarding what went wrong with the game. Most of it boils down to convenience over community and the move towards individuals as opposed to a social environment. I wrote a reply on the social aspects of improving the game, similar to a post I did here. That got me thinking about other aspects of the game that I felt is moving in the wrong direction on a whole. However, rather than delving into what went wrong with the game, I want to dive into how I would change the game for the better.
First, and foremost, I want the end of the loot based end game system. The real end game is currently all about loot. It’s the carrot on the stick that probably keeps most players going. It’s also a horrible end game notion. The idea is that you end up chasing loot until you manage to maximize what you can in each slot. But what happens once you achieve that point? You either can show off, switch to an alt and do the same or quit. Or you can work on other aspects of the game.
In the case of World of Warcraft specifically, it’s one of the ways of demonstrating personal progress once leveling ends for a given expansion. Unfortunately, the shelf life of gear is only for the current raiding or arena tier. So unless you’re a competitive player, gearing, in essence, is a horrible waste of time (note: I do like gearing to a degree, but the amount of time and effort put into gaming as opposed to doing something meaningful is completely imbalanced). The other problem with gearing as an end game system mechanism is that it’s directly related to the power of a character. Thus, levels have absolutely no meaning by this point once you cap.
I prefer the notion of what Diablo 3 did in patch 1.0.4 with Paragon levels. This is more of a traditional viewpoint of end game character progression where characters gain tiny bits of power through gradual level increases. However, like in other systems that use a near-unlimited type of leveling mechanism, the way you make such a system work is to cap a point where you obtain all the main abilities for a class and simply focus on the power levels for how a character’s levels interact with their abilities. A simple example is the fireball spell in 1st Edition AD&D. Here, fireball would increase in damage for each level of the mage casting it multiplied against 1d6. There was little for gear to help aid in boosting that damage modifier. So you could have a naked mage that could cast a mega powerful fireball and nuke a warrior from the distance.
With World of Warcraft, you would do something similar. I think a class’ main attribute (e.g. strength, intelligence, agility) do affect this, but the multipliers that gear boosts these attributes are disproportionate compared to when a character is naked. I think gear should provide minor boost on average but provide unique bonuses or augmentation to abilities. That would make the gear more interesting. Set pieces are the closest thing to this idea but I think that gear should have more utility than just acting as DPS, etc. increases.
That said, I would also randomize the gear that drops more. I’m not talking about having small loot tables that people farm. Or at least not make each item so specific to a boss. I would spread them out with better items coming from harder bosses. So a sword could drop between any upper echelon boss rather than just one boss.
But that goes into the idea of the whole idea of farming. I’ve seen people who can take days or weeks attempting to kill a single boss. After that they still will farm that boss (and others) while doing the same for the next boss. This is some of the worst ideas I’ve ever heard in a game. I know it’s Blizzard (and other companies’) bread and butter but it’s a shit idea that needs to be revamped entirely.
Here’s my belief: either make the boss extremely challenging and have loot drop once or decrease the difficulty of the encounter entirely for farming purposes. I think it’s just a horrible waste of time to constantly farm an overly complicated encounter. The problem I see with a lot of the newer encounters is that they become more clusterfucky with more useless mechanics. I don’t see the game as being an RPG style action game anymore. It feels more like Street Fighter combined with Super Mario Brothers. I think once you get a boss down, it should stay down and you should be rewarded for that effort.
Also, I really hate the way raids are set up. The idea behind 10/25/40 man raids are just logistic nightmares. My idea of a raid when it comes to numbers like that is more like the end of Two Towers (Lord of the Rings) or the battle at Minas Tirath where you have a mini army going into an epic battle. Outside of assaulting Stormwind, you really don’t get a sense of epic battles. You get clusterfucks with a lot of shit on the ground, tons of confusing special effects and just a ridiculous amount of meaningless coordination.
Something that I’ve seen how other MMORPGs are handling raids and the way D3 dealt with encounters is making encounters more participatory in terms of being flexible on the number of people who join and have that adjust the way the encounter works. Right now, there are only two combinations: 10/25 man. I understand from a QA point of view it’s easier for Blizzard, but I prefer the D3 model where you buff the hit points of mobs for people who join. Or if not that then make it more percentage based on the people who are part of the fight. Take Sha of Anger for instance. By the end of the week, it’s virtually impossible to find a group. It would be nicer making that encounter based on the participants. Let anyone join in at any given time rather than having strict roles and numbers for those roles.
Another amendment to the game is to kill the idea of a rotation. As I just mentioned, the game feels like Street Fighter because they want you to do a certain combo to react in an encounter. If I wanted to do combos in a game, I’d play Street Fighter. If I want to jump around, I’d play Super Mario Brothers. I think too much of the game now is too much stupid shit rolled up in every encounter. At any rate, the rotation thing is just annoying to me. There’s just too many abilities that honestly don’t do anything special. It’s just DPS, healing or protection. And if you break things down even further, you’re really just doing +/- hit points.
I think abilities need to be more situational as opposed to just going through phases. Diablo 3 is more ideal to the way I think play should occur (except that you’re far too limited in Diablo 3 at times). In that manner, the abilities become more meaningful as opposed to stupid, mindless clones of one another. I mean, outside of silly visual cues, how many truly differentiated abilities exist?
For me, it really blows my mind when you have a class like a boomkin, destruction warlock or feral druid whose rotation is ridiculously complex to do reasonable damage. It feels as though Blizzard went through so many different phases of these classes that they ended up becoming far more complex than they should’ve. And again if you look at the basic ideas of what these classes should be doing, you’ll realize how redundant things get. When you add the whole jump around stupid shit, it just makes fights unnecessarily complex and just a bigger clusterfuck than what it’s worth.
Next, I want to kill the idea of the three main roles in World of Warcraft. Seriously, they need to die immediately. I know all games have some sort of variation, but in World of Warcraft it becomes more of a liability and crutch than something useful. I definitely want to eliminate the healer role. I don’t want to eliminate healing itself but just the notion of a dedicated role. I prefer the idea of making a healer being able to do more by participating in combat with the ability to throw heals onto people. The best example is the enhancement shaman. I like the enhancement shaman because his maelstrom weapon can proc lightning or healing based spells. That makes the enhancement shaman potentially a great utility class.
Tanks too need to disappear. I don’t get why someone in plate armor can take less damage than someone else in plate armor. Worse yet, I don’t get how someone in leather armor can take less damage than someone in plate armor. There’s just some fundamental ideas which make little sense in the scheme of things. Otherwise, why not stick with a traditional model of having melee in general soak up damage while ranged and spell casters do more damage? In a game where you have so many different classes for a fight, enforcing these types of rules make less and less sense over time.
Gearing along these lines need to change as well. The current patch of 5.1 introduces a lot of bizarre ideas. For instance, Protection Paladins with haste. So now, you’ll see Protection Paladins in DPS gear. So already there’s this trend where the lines are starting to blur. Or look at Blood Death Knights and how they can output ridiculous damage. Idealistically for me, the ultimate melee class should use a combination of gearing. For instance, the infamous Blood Death Knight who solos all raid content uses Blood for her main spec but combines DPS and some tanking gear to maximize what she can do to handle old bosses. But it should not only be tank specs that can do this, but any melee potentially. Remember Enhancement Shamans with shields and Rockbiter as low level tanks?
The other thing is to do away with having three specs. If Blizzard wants World of Warcraft to have a simplified talent system, then I think they should follow it all the way in the direction that Diablo 3 did. To me, Diablo 3’s talent system is actually a decent idea in that you can come up with certain type of specs based on the combination of abilities you choose, as opposed to choosing a single spec and picking useless fillers. Add to that using certain gear with stats, you can create a certain type of class that works for a situation (e.g. Critical Mass Wizards for tanks and handling high Monster Powers or Tempest Rush monks for farming) Right now, the talent system for World of Warcraft is atrocious. It serves absolutely no purpose and makes no sense.
The older talent trees made more sense from a leveling point of view. The idea was that you would see progress as you leveled beyond some base abilities you purchased. With the idea of a talent tree, you could put points at each level as a reward for moving up in the world. The new talent system is the same across each spec but only awards a choice every 15 levels. Most of the time the choice is obvious and most of the talents are a waste except one or two. It feels that any goal of customizing a class just went out the window.
If you do have a talent tree system with tons of points, I think that it should be used to augment existing abilities. I’ve mentioned this before and on numerous occasions. Otherwise, you could build a different skill type of system like putting points into a specific school. Like axes or conjuring spells to make a class of abilities more powerful. Perhaps you could spend points on something more specific. I’ve seen games where the level of specialization affects the number of required points need for raising a skill (Shadowrun did this).
Something I would do is define parameters for abilities. Let’s say you have fireball. Then you have certain aspects like damage, frequency of hit, radius, casting time, cooldown time, etc. With a good talent system, you could modify those parameters. If you don’t want to put all your eggs in one basket, then you could spread them around. But then you might not be best at one thing. These are interesting decisions you need to make in distributing points.
A non-character based improvement is just the mentality of the design of areas. If you’ve ever been a DM/GM, you know that the ideal scenario is have players do everything in a linear fashion. In reality, this is the worst design choice. The thing is that players will always figure out a way to get around funneling. You cannot funnel players. They do not enjoy linear experiences. So Blizzard needs to stop enforcing this mentality within their system.
Take questing in the past two expansions. Cataclysm tried to do a better job in unifying the experience of questing by linking the quest chains more tightly. However, I think it hurt the game to a huge degree. In order to move on, you pretty much needed to complete an entire quest hub. But what happens if you hated a particular quest? Nothing you can do about it, especially in the higher level zones.
It felts as though someone inside of Blizzard looked at the QuestHelper add on and just realized that people were going to do quests in a certain order. This was especially true in Vanilla where everything was a lot looser. But I think by eliminating that level of looseness, the game lost a lot of charm. I feel now too much is story driven and sometimes purposeless at the end of the day. I’m still going to have to kill XXX number of mobs and collect XXX number of items for every hub. But why make that whole experience linear? The basic game play required is the same, but I’m going to skip all the text in between just to get my XP, gold, etc. Just a waste of time in my opinion.
I would prefer that there’s more options for exploring. Questing enforces exploring but not vice versa. You’ll end up uncovering a map by doing all the quests. But what if you just want to explore and uncover things by yourself? What if I want to break out of this linear experience? You can to a degree but it feels that there still is too much funneling overall, especially with phasing (and I hate phasing).
I’d like to see less questing and more of how one can uncover new things by themselves without having a quest send them in a certain direction. Or that there were more options for doing a type of quest than just a group of meaningless quests. Take rare spawns for instance or the hidden epics you can find. Those are cool things. But what about discovering a hidden tribe of enemies where you can decimate them with your friends? Why does it take a quest to kill 10? It’s just so robotic.
Also, I would like to see a far more dynamic world. I doubt Ultima 5 can be topped in terms of the ideas they had in making the game environmentally more advanced than any game previously. I always was struck how you could do more with the environment like pushing a chair, sleeping in a bed, etc. Sure, you can do this to a degree in World of Warcraft, but it feels that it can be more advanced.
Similarly, NPCs had schedules in Ultima 5 and all the Ultimas from there on out. One of those most profound things I read in a game article was the critique of how most games would shove an NPC into a single spot and that person or creature would not move. It’s like that scene from Return of the King where you had all these people sitting on top of a mountain waiting to light a big pyre. Everyone joked thereafter how these people must’ve had the greatest lives because they would just wait the entire life time for that moment.
With World of Warcraft, most NPCs are static. You’ll find them in a guaranteed spot. Mobs might move around a bit and you might see a wolf chasing after a critter. But beyond that, there’s really nothing fun nor interesting about the NPCs.
I mean I doubt that the environment Ultima 6 conceived ever could be beat. For instance, just the idea of milking a cow, churning butter, taking the milk/butter and converting it to cheese so you can sell for gold was mind blowing in terms of RP elements. You have some level of that in World of Warcraft like the new Farmville aspect and gathering food, but most just feels like you pick up items on the ground and/or kill mobs to get the items to create something. I really would love to see more that you can do with the environment. Right now, it’s just nice to look at but after seeing things once, there’s no real reason to care afterwards.
For instance, what if you could fill a flask with water by an ocean or waterfall? Not just for a specific quest, but at any time. Or what if you could destroy parts of the environment like Diablo 3? Or maybe do the contrary by purchasing a chair and making a permanent piece in the environment rather than something with a cooldown?
A lot of people who argue about immersion only talk about the art aspect. But it’s pretty useless after a while beyond aesthetics. To increase immersion, you need more elements to interact to gain an active role to become part of that environment. This is something that World of Warcraft lacks tremendously. It does not feel like a world but a conveyor belt.