I don’t use chat GPT, I use structural grammar & context that’s designed to make it easier to read for people who have dyslexia and ADHD 
Using dot-points and title-points also helps break up large contents of text, so it’s not just a massively big wall of meshed words, along with helping prevent the ordeal of “Oh shoot I lost what line I was on!” – when reading. 
i dont like how they made mekkatorque the king of gnomes
they should have gnome elections. they are enlightened inventors so they should have democracy and every few expansions gnome players can vote for the leader.
also the model revamp made female gnomes not cute so another revamp kthx
Wouldn’t a legitimate meritocracy suit a race of inventors like gnomes? Like they have some kind of annual invention festival and the greatest innovation or contribution to their society nets somebody the High Tinker title.
Funny you say this but since the beginning the gnomes were based more on a Communist type of life style. Workers for the workers and all that. Very Soviet inspired posters for them. Best worker becomes high tinker. You don’t work, you don’t eat.
Their foil, the goblins, were the ultra capitalistic ones with “elections” which just meant rigging votes or buying them. Complete with the uncle sam “we want you” posters around the cities. It is all about the money.
It was very tongue in cheek with blizzard all those decades ago
I don’t think making them more “serious” would work well. Gnomes, and also Goblins, have been the comedic relief races for so long, that most of the people that play them regularly (in my personal experience) are drawn to the more light-hearted and goofier themes as compared to the more edge lord or “serious” races.
As for just improving their lore in a general sense… making Gnomeregan a legitimate city, in-game, would probably be the biggest thing. The Gnomes supposedly retook the city, or at least most of it, during Cataclysm and yet this is not reflected in-game. Making Gnomeregan a proper city hub with all the usual amenities would be a big improvement.
Same with Mechagon. Make an actual city version of Mechagon and then link it with the city version of Gnomeregan through teleport pads. I think these two things alone would greatly benefit the Gnomes and Mechagnomes by giving the players their own sense of place and belonging within the game itself.
well thats kind of the thing, i think people would maybe enjoy those races/their lore if it was more serious but was tempered with a little bit of humor and goofiness. for example the undermine storyline in 11.1 seems to be played straight and isnt like a long string of jokes/irony/whatever
I place the blame entirely on Dragonlance where this trope started.
Paizo’s treatment of gnomes preserves their frenetic nature but gives a serious foundation to it with some pretty steep lore.
From paizo’s open source material:
Gnomes are distant relatives of the fey, and their history tells of a time when they lived in the fey’s mysterious realm, a place where colors are brighter, the wildlands wilder, and emotions more primal. Unknown forces drove the ancient gnomes from that realm long ago, forcing them to seek refuge in this world; despite this, the gnomes have never completely abandoned their fey roots or adapted to mortal culture. Though gnomes are no longer truly fey, their fey heritage can be seen in their innate magic powers, their oft-capricious natures, and their outlooks on life and the world.
Gnomes can have the same concerns and motivations as members of other races, but just as often they are driven by passions and desires that non-gnomes see as eccentric at best, and nonsensical at worst. A gnome may risk his life to taste the food at a giant’s table, to reach the bottom of a pit just because it would be the lowest place he’s ever been, or to tell jokes to a dragon (—and to the gnome those goals are as worthy as researching a new spell, gaining vast wealth, or putting down a powerful evil force. While such apparently fickle and impulsive acts are not universal among gnomes, they are common enough for the race as a whole to have earned a reputation for being impetuous and at least a little mad.
Combined with their diminutive sizes, vibrant coloration, and lack of concern for the opinions of others, these attitudes have caused gnomes to be widely regarded by the other races as alien and strange. Gnomes, in turn, are often amazed how alike other common, civilized races are. It seems stranger to a gnome that humans and elves share so many similarities than that the gnomes do not. Indeed, gnomes often confound their allies by treating everyone who is not a gnome as part of a single, vast non-gnome collective race.
Just give them a cool moment. Gelbin Mekkatorque outshined even Jaina in attack on the Zan’dalar fleet. Monte Gazlowe seems like a written nice characters from what I’ve seen from spoilers, even without the joke aspect. So the solution is simple, put Gnomes in more important story other than funny quests.
What would I improve in lore.
I would focus on their cold mechanical side. Let the gnomes understand the weakness of their flesh, so they start replacing their body parts with mechanical upgrades more and more often. Just like mechagnomes but in slightly different aesthetic. Make them less human.
“From the moment I understood the weakness of my flesh, it disgusted me. I craved the strength and certainty of steel. I aspired to the purity of the Blessed Machine. Your kind cling to your flesh, as though it will not decay and fail you. One day the crude biomass you call a temple will wither, and you will beg my kind to save you. But I am already saved, for the Machine is immortal… Even in death I serve the Omnissiah.”
- Magos Dominus Reditus, Adeptus Mechanicus
Gnomes elect their kings on the basis of their inventiveness. Mekkatorque earned his kingship with everything he whipped up during BFA.
Praise the Omnissiah!
I hate that you’re right, but you’re right. You cannot divorce goblins and gnomes from “wacky antics” and any attempt to do so earnestly would come across as ham-fisted like going “All orcs are now peacenik intellectuals”.
There’s serious elements in them but it’s wrapped in Saturday Morning Cartoon silliness, like “I’m going to make a device that turns everyone on the planets into robots” sounds goofy on its surface, and it’s presented in a silly way, but gets incredibly dark when you learn how they go about doing it-- like that one old gnome spending his whole life trying to uncover the secret of Mechagon, and all of it thrown away to more or less be used as a mechanization guinea pig for an uncaring tyrant.
Then you have quests where mechagnomes are dropped from boxes and you have to catch them with pillows and you can let them fall to the ground and die and it’s played for laughs, like “Oh, what an unfortunate turn of events” [splat].
And Mekkatorque has devices that shrinks people or turns them into chickens. Again, horrifying if it’s done to you, silly as a witness.
Addendum: Potential solution is having them face off against non-wacky opponents rather than it being “goblins vs. gnomes” all the time. Have an orc warlord get his skull ventilated by a gnomish railgun and see if they keep laughing, as unceremoniously as they had that san’layn in Vol’dun make a gnome into a Capri Sun and spike him into the ground.
Do a proper Operation: Gnomeregan.
Give the story some higher stakes and borrow (as WoW often tends to) heavily from pop culture, specifically HBO’s Chernobyl.
Like impress on the player that having an irradiated hole in the ground right next to Ironforge is not to be taken for granted as a stable mishap that can be ignored. Going so far below ground has been poisoning the earth and water for decades now and apparently the initial incident was bad enough that 80% of the gnomish race died, with a large portion of the survivors becoming irradiated leper gnomes.
Like it’s really jarring sometimes whenever you encounter gnomes and they’re all some form of Quirk McChungus that what they lost and what happened to their home just sort of seems like a wacky woopsie daisy rather than a horrifying catastrophe.
So give us a patch where we actually get to retake Gnomeregan but first we have to deal with the fallout, stabilize the site, clear out the leper gnomes with Menethil efficiency and end it in the same way Dragonflight ended