Hello Blizzard team and fellow players,
I’ve been a long-time player of World of Warcraft, and while I appreciate the incredible world-building and gameplay experiences the team has crafted over the years, I’d like to share my thoughts on some of the current systems that, in my opinion, hinder player engagement and enjoyment. Specifically, I want to address the time-gating mechanisms, the randomized nature of best-in-slot (BiS) gear acquisition, and the mandatory quest system.
The Problem with Time-Gating
Currently, much of the game’s content is heavily time-gated. Gear progression and currency acquisition are capped, limiting the amount of meaningful progress players can make each week. While I understand the intention behind time-gating (to prevent burnout and maintain long-term engagement), it often has the opposite effect. Instead of feeling rewarding, these limits make progression feel artificially slow and frustrating. Players log in, hit their weekly caps, and are left waiting for resets rather than feeling like they can continue working toward their goals at their own pace.
A growing trend among players is to intentionally skip the early part of the season and only return later when catch-up mechanics are implemented and time-gating is removed. These players prefer to wait until they can fully engage without restrictions, which directly counters the intended goal of keeping players engaged throughout the season. This system ultimately discourages participation in the early weeks of a patch or season, making the time-gating system feel more like an obstacle than a safeguard against burnout.
Randomized Gear Acquisition
Another major frustration lies in how the best-in-slot (BiS) gear is currently obtained. Right now, the top-tier gear is tied to a system with a one-week cooldown and a randomized reward structure. This means that even if a player puts in the time and effort, they are at the mercy of RNG (random number generation) to get the items they need. For many of us, this feels disheartening—it takes control away from the player and places it entirely in the hands of luck.
No matter how skilled or dedicated someone is, the current system often leaves players frustrated because their progress toward optimizing their character is limited by factors outside their control. This also creates an unfair playing field, where luck determines performance potential rather than effort or strategy.
Issues with the Quest System
The current quest system is another point of frustration for many players. While players aren’t entirely locked out of content, they are unable to fully engage with all of it until they complete lengthy, linear quest chains. For example, critical features like unlocking zones, accessing higher-tier content, or participating in specific activities are tied to the completion of these quests. This creates a significant barrier for players who aren’t interested in the story but want to enjoy the repeatable content like dungeons, raids, or battlegrounds.
Adding to this frustration is how these quests affect account unlocks. Currently, players must fully complete the quest chain on one character to unlock skips for other characters on the same account. While this is intended to streamline the experience for alts, it still forces players to go through the entire questline at least once. For those who find the story tedious or unrelated to their gameplay preferences, this can feel like an unnecessary grind. Worse, if players wish to bypass this system entirely, the only option is to purchase a character boost. Boosting a character not only skips the questline for that character but also unlocks the skip for their account.
This approach sends the message that skipping uninteresting storylines is a paid privilege rather than a quality-of-life feature accessible to all players. It forces players who don’t enjoy the story to either pay real money or spend hours engaging with content they don’t find enjoyable—just to access the activities they actually want to play.
This forced engagement feels like a holdover from older RPG days, where the bulk of a game’s content was tied to questing. In today’s MMO environment, the majority of the meaningful content lies in repeatable activities like dungeons, raids, and battlegrounds. While some players may enjoy the story, others feel it gets in the way of the core gameplay loop. Locking players out of parts of the game until they finish an exhaustive story arc doesn’t align with how many players engage with World of Warcraft in 2024.
Suggestions for Improvement
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Remove or Relax Weekly Time-Gating:
- Allow players to earn more gear or currency beyond the weekly cap. This lets players who have more time to invest feel rewarded without punishing casual players who stick to a slower pace.
- Consider reducing or eliminating time-gating earlier in the season to retain player engagement consistently throughout the patch.
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Replace RNG with Currency for BiS Gear:
- Reintroduce a currency system that rewards consistent effort.
- Let players save up and purchase their BiS gear rather than relying on weekly rolls and RNG.
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Optional RNG for Those Who Enjoy It:
- Keep the RNG system as a bonus, not the primary method of obtaining BiS gear. For example, let players earn tokens or other rewards to offset bad luck over time.
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Provide Quest Skipping Options:
- Introduce an in-game mechanism for players to skip quest chains, either through in-game currency or upon reaching certain milestones.
- Alternatively, allow players to “opt out” of the story and automatically unlock the relevant content after a set amount of time or gameplay activity.
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Account-Wide Unlocks:
- Make quest unlocks fully account-wide by default. If one character completes the quest chain, all characters on the account should automatically benefit from the unlocks—without requiring a paid boost.
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Respect Player Preferences:
- Recognize that not all players are interested in the story. Make it optional to engage with the questlines for those who enjoy it, while providing alternative paths to access endgame and account-wide features.
Closing Thoughts
These changes would make World of Warcraft more engaging and rewarding for players of all skill levels. By giving us more control over our progression, respecting how players engage with modern MMOs, and removing the frustration of arbitrary caps, RNG, and mandatory storylines, you would encourage more players to stay invested in the game for longer periods.
Thank you for taking the time to consider this feedback. I’d love to hear what other players think about these systems and whether they feel similarly. Together, we can help make World of Warcraft the best it can be.
Looking forward to your thoughts!