How to insentivise group activity and make the game more challenging

Community General Discussion
1

I know Blizzard is looking to try to incentive group acitivity and I have thoughts on how to achieve this. But first im going to describe the problems related to this:

Combat is too easy. No reason to group because most things are solo-able, also with most quests everything is spelled out for you where a thing is or how to do a thing, theres no challenge, no thought, no competition, no fight.

Everything is too streamlined.
Most classes are similar, they challenge fights in the same ways, nothing really makes them special. There should be things easier for some classes than others. In vailla you had special buffs for many classes, rogues could detect traps, warriors had a hard time recovering from fights incentivizing food, hunters had to purchase ammo, these things were a little bit bad but it encoraged cooperation, and stimulated the economy.

The most obvious solution is to make quests that stretch across zones in a non-uniform way, imbalance gives life beauty, add resistance to damage types so you could switch specs if you are fighting in an area, maybe hire a paladin to help you fight void monsters or a mage to help you clear out a forest that is resistant to physical attacks, you don’t have to make it impossible but you could do like a 50% resistance to physical damage and 50% weakness to flame and slashing or whatever, encouraging people to carry different weapon types and or group up for a task.

Also make it so quests are not so straight forward, make us figure out stuff, dont put markers on the map for everything, make people ask eachother for help.

Also combining low pop servers would be cool, maybe a mix of like an na/european/oceanic and asian realms with auto-translation so no matter when you hop on its busy.

We are facing dead zones, and boring content loops, do some weird stuff
Add a competitve aspect like every 30 min theres a lights gambit tournament or whatever or a pet battle tournament or fighting to be koth

Theres other ideas but i’ll stop here

2

While I respect your position and encourage everybody to ask for what they want, it’s important to know there are some gamers out there like myself who don’t fit any of these criteria. In fact when I looked at the title two words just hit me the wrong way: “group” and “challenging”. I mean, they pretty much already have mythic plus for this. It would be nice to see them. Focus their efforts elsewhere for some of us, solo players who enjoy open world stuff. If people want challenging group content, I’m sure they can just queue up for a +20 and enjoy themselves.

7 Likes
3

What’s the difference?

/looks at camera

:laughing:

Says Human, but all signs point to High Elf.

4

When is the last time you had a conversation in warcraft with anybody?

5

You want people to group up? Give them things. Players want rewards not gimmicks and tricks.

3 Likes
6

Do you really not understand the difference between figuring something out and having it pointed out to you? The point is to encourage the social aspects of an MMO that you right now can ghost through without ever connecting with another person. It’s boring.

7

Let’s see I said hello to four random strangers in five different time walking dungeons yesterday as I was tanking. And the day before that I was in discord chatting with three friends while we were running old content. Three days prior I was in discord talking to 22 people while we were doing a role-playing event. And two days before that I was chatting with Myzrym and his wife while we were running a +2 and a +3 late on a Friday night.

All of the conversations were most enjoyable!

8

What you are proposing would not get people to talk in game to figure it out. It would get them to just go to Wowhead to look up where it is. I do not love that they made quests super vague and just added markers everywhere, but keeping them super vague and taking away the markers is not going to encourage socialisation. It will just encourage alt tabbing.

9

And the idea of being in a situation where you need to think before you pull or communicate with strangers being encouraged is a problem for what reason?

10

Or you just go to wowhead in a browser tab and find the instructions there. There are secrets all throughout the game already to incentivize people to group up. Yet most people to go wowhead or discord for the answers instead of asking in game.

Why you might ask? Because when you ask questions in game you are more likely to get ridiculed and and shamed in chat than get an actual answer. Nothing Blizzard can do will change this until they start mass banning people being rude to others. That hasn’t happened in 20 years and it isn’t going to start happening now.

1 Like
11

The challenge is killing your 275th Zhevra and praying that it has a hoof. I mean it had 4 of them when i attacked it…

2 Likes
12

If you played in vanilla rude people have always been a thing, but the cool ones end up being friends and rude people are ostracized just like in real life. But the struggle is why the game was fun, every year they make the game easier, more homoginized, legion tried to add class fantasy and the expansion was well recieved, everything pre-cata was popular and then they made the game easy and popularity declined.

I dont have to think before I pull because every fight is the same and nothing can even damage me except group content and even that can never hurt me enough to kill me even if I pull everything in reach.

In games like grounded or fallout you have to think and plan before you engage enemies, i havent needed to use food or potions in like 10 years.

13

Back in Vanilla this was possible because each server was its own community. With Cross-Realm Zones, sharding and whatever else they do to artificially increase populations, this is less likely to happen. People do not get ostracized in today’s WOW. They just keep on doing what they do. Not only that, even if you ignore one character they can just log into another of their 65 characters to harass you. Not the 10 per realm back in Vanilla.

2 Likes
14

And if wowhead told you that your class is weak against a monster type and to group up with someone of a different class… are you going to wowhead your way out of the challenge?

Do you ever need anyone? Does anyone ever need you? When is the last time you made a friend? It’s an MMO, you should be making lots, how do you think newbies feel playing a game where nobody talks?

15
  • Nope. Never need anyone, I’ve been playing solo since MOP.
  • Don’t know. Everyone on my friend’s list quit years ago.
  • Don’t care about making new friends in the game. Even if I join a guild, chances are I am just going to keep playing solo.
  • Do new people even play? I think 20 years of game play is a large barrier to joining an MMORPG. You’d never catch up, even if you had friends.

Being an MMO does not mean people have to talk to each other or even play the game with each other. It simply means that there are Multiple People Online at a time. If interaction was enforced, it would be an MMOC. Multiple People Online Communicating. Now, if you want to make friends and play in groups, that is all good for you. I encourage you to do so.

If the game isn’t a challenge then you request something like World Tiers or Levels where you can take on a more challenging mode. With scaling in WOW, they can even do this without affecting others around you.

This is something I have requested for decades. City of Heroes had this feature where you could make your instances easier or harder based on your desires or even your current team. Instances also scaled from 1-8 people so you could bring friends if you wanted. And there was no Trinity in instances. Tanks and Healers could make things easier but weren’t needed. It even had a feature to encourage new players. They could sidekick to another player and be 1 level lower than the friend for all “sidekicked” content. It is an older game than WOW.

2 Likes
16

Solo games are that way →
This is an mmorpg, doesnt sound like any of that applies to what you want from the game.

Actually why even play the game? Just go read wowhead what happens, happy to save you 13-15 dollars a month.

17

Open world content, by default, is not challenging.

Open world content can always be absolutely trivialized.

Open world content is designed for everyone to do.

If you want group activities which are challenging, they exist. Its just not in the open world.

1 Like
18

Because I would have to talk to strangers. Random content can stay random. If I do something challenging, it is with someone I know in Discord. The importance of friends and guilds. I don’t need to end up in a communications moment with someone who might like to throw slurs and troll. :woman_shrugging:

19

And yet you are here on a forum, with strangers, how scary.

I’m hearing a lot of “im afraid the people might be rude” “im afraid to have a challenge I didnt plan for”

Cowardly. This is WARcraft, conflict is supposed to be part of it.

20

Because I enjoy the setting, looking at other players in the main cities, and the cozy game play. I do play other games from time to time but I enjoy WOW the most.

1 Like