Ion Hazzikostas and his team will have a hard time competing against Classic World of Warcraft to retain Players.
They are going up against a game with loads of customization (talents and itemisation), progression (Epics being Epic), in-depth and immersive questlines (Onyxia attunement), along with a Game design so strong, that ALL content, from Molten Core to Naxxramas, is always relevant, and isn’t abandoned with a new patch.
So what can they do?
Do what Runescape did
Blizzard Entertainment is actually late to the party when it comes to re-booting an old franchise. Games like Runescape, Everquest, and Lord of the Rings online have already released their own “Legacy servers” that succeeded in re-invigorating their playerbase.
They re-invigorated them so much in fact, that games like Runescape have more players in their Old School version, than they do in RS3 (Retail).
So why didn’t Runescape just cancel RS3 and keep Old School?
Because they knew they had two different audiences, those that wanted the original game experience, and those that wanted the game to evolve.
If World of Warcraft is going to compete with Classic, it will have to Evolve.
World Quests, are not Evolution. They’re just simplified and repetitive dailies.
Warfront are not an Evolution. They are an on-rails 20 player scenario that always plays out the exact same way. May as well as have a cinematic.
Island expeditions. Just Mists of Pandaria scenarios without all the ‘interesting’ stuff.
The game isn’t evolving, it is stagnating.
Here are a couple of ideas for how the game can evolve:
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Get rid of Item Level progression
Item level means nothing nowadays.
Lower item level gear can have better stats than a higher item level piece.
Having higher item level doesn’t mean you are a better player, it just means you afk’d warfronts.
Item level is not exciting…so what should we have instead?
New Gear, New abilities: Just like trinkets, a new Hunter helmet might unlock the Tranquilizing shot ability, to pacfy boss enrages. Even if you come across another helmet with better stats, you will still wear this helmet because it has an important utility.
This is what Azerite armor should have been, but instead we have a bunch of boring passives that you had on green leveling gear and are now trying to unlock on a mythic azerite piece. No sense of progression whatsoever.
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Player Housing:
And NO! Garrisons don’t count!
How is it that after 15 years, literally EVERY other MMO has player housing but not Wow? You could easily put a load of Housing items in old raids and make it into Transmog 2.0 in terms of how people will farm it.
You could even bake professions into it and boom, you made them relevant again.
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Lvl 60 MAX:
Instead of adding 10 new levels every expansion, and making gear +100 more powerful than the previous expansion; an unsustainable trend that will force you to keep doing a numbers squish every expansion, and making leveling that much more grindy as you eventually slog through 10 expansions just to play the new one…cap leveling at 60.
How would this work?
The current 1-60 leveling experience in Azeroth will become 1-50, and will be there to teach new players how to play the game and their class.
Every new expansion is 10 levels. So you could level to 50, then level to 60 in Battle for Azeroth, but if you went to say, Burning Crusade, you would only be level 50, and would have to level there too.
This way, new expansions can bring new dungeons and raids, and gear, but instead of making gear more powerful; which will just inevitably lead to another numbers squish, you can make the gear more interesting.
Ok, why don’t I bring my uber gear from the previous expansion and destroy content in the new expansion?
Brings me to my next point.
- Resistances 2.0 and Expansion-specific gear
Say in Burning Crusade, you had to farm gear with a certain “Fel resistance” stat in order to mitigate damage from the bosses. Also the gear you would get would have certain abilities that you needed to deal with bosses of that expansion.
Say, mages have a staff with the “Fel absorb storm” spell ability, that absorbs a bosses Fel AOE.
If you brought “Fel resistance” gear and “Fel absorb storm” into Wrath of the Lich King where you needed “Undeath resistance”, you would get completely pummeled, because your Burning Crusade gear is useless in WOTLK.
This way, expansion-specific gear allows for progression without resorting to the “Give 'em bigger numbers” situation in current wow, that leads to these problems:
-New patches need to offer higher item level gear, making previous content irrelevant.
-Constantly offering bigger numbers to players as incentives will lead to more and more number squishes like we saw in the last couple of expansions.
Yea, but what if the new patch offers better “Expansion resistance” gear than the previous patch, won’t that lead to the same problem?
Not if you do two things:
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Gear in previous patches have spells that you need to do the current patch dungeon and raid content. (New boss, Old ability, need Old item)
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Gear in current patches have spells that make previous content easier, encouraging people to farm it more, for profession materials, mounts, pets, and player housing stuff.
You will have a similar effect as in Vanilla where Hardcore raiders were still doing BRD with noobs; Noobs needed gear, Raiders needed mats, Content is always relevant, and new players aren’t walking around a Ghost town of old content.
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Alliance vs Horde should be PVP, not NPC
In an Alliance vs Horde expansion, and all we see are NPCs fighting each other.
PVP needs to evolve beyond “Spam BG’s to fill up a bar”.
Honor and Conquest have fallen into the “Apexis Crystals” trap, where all content is about farming this currency, but nobody knows why.
BFA is the perfect expansion for World Pvp objectives.
-Capture this Goblin workshop, and get a nuke ability for an hour.
-Capture this Tauren leather working station, and get a “Hide as a bush” ability.
-Capture this Alchemy lab, and get a Polyjuice potion to appear as the opposite faction, sneak into one of their bases, and assassinate one of their leaders, to get a Gold bounty.
-Capture this farm and get Food with Raid buffs that you need.
-Capture and Hold a Gold mine and literally get gold, while the other faction tries to take it from you.
-Capture a Mineral mine and start mining. (Profession)
Give players reasons to fight over objectives in the Open world, and guess what, they will.
Make Pvp less about farming some pointless currency, and more about having fun in PVP, while still progressing your character in some way.
Honor could go back to being a PVP vendor currency, and PVP gear could have cool items that make you invisible if you’re not a rogue, or throw some explosive traps with knock back if you’re not a hunter. (Eye of the Storm specific).
And as all of this is happening, guess what, you actually have a REAL Faction war instead of us fighting NPCs, or NPCs fighting NPCs.
Battle for Azeroth was marketed as a PVP expansion, yet there is no reason to PVP.
And Finally…
- Make a Game for Gamers, not Shareholders
Fixing World of Warcraft isn’t possible if you want to rehash previous expansions because “Cost-cutting”.
Giving the Alliance a bunch of re-skinned Horses because all the good stuff is on the Wow store, is not going to move the game forward.
Milking this game to death like Guitar Hero, to hit those financial targets, is not sustainable!
You can’t fix World of Warcraft if you don’t start making a game for your players, and not some Mobile market, or whatever nonsense Activision is doing this time.
If all Ion Hazzikostas wants to do is answer Pet battles questions during Q&A’s and remain disconnected, then that’s his choice…but the game will suffer for it.
Blizzard needs to change its attitude to creating a game that people will buy because the game is good quality, not whatever min-maxing they do nowadays where they put as little money and development in, and overprice and micro transaction as much money as possible out.
Conclusion
The World of Warcraft is stuck
It can’t evolve because all the Activision red-tape and “Cost-cutting”, it can’t fail because they still have a loyal playerbase that believes in the game, and will fork out oodles of cash on their overpriced micro transactions.
Result: A mediocre game that never lives up to its promises, but has no shortage of potential that keeps giving players hope.
If you don’t save this Franchise, then Classic will
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