Let’s get rid of the menus and old frameworks that keep us from getting at the stuff we want! Like what if we squished Strength/Agility/Intellect into one new stat (“Power” maybe?) so we wouldn’t have to worry about three identical stats that you can only use one of? Sounds cool right? Okay, so unfold my boxes to see more ideas like this!
Scaling: Make all zones scale to max level. Okay, that's pretty inoffensive, right?
- To let players have at least the current range of difficulty regardless, let them tinker with:
- Difficulty like in dungeons, but also adding an easy difficulty for what’s now going back to too-low level zones for farming (with the easy difficulty only unlocked at the level where the zone would now stop scaling).
- PvP (or RP!) status so we can fight, RP, or not fight (e.g. cross-faction) without mockery.
- Appropriate phase so we can play with our friends (maybe even with Classic quests!).
- One catch: The players tinkering with the difficulty probably have to either be in a party where those are the party settings or else queuing for such a party to have enough people in one place that you can not throw a fit over lack of massively multiplayer experiences.
- Also, remove the evil max-level guards who spawn in near towns and one-shot enemies, because normal guards in PvP zones would stop being too low level to keep out invaders.
Payment: Remove free trial restrictions and add family subscriptions. More money for you, less worry for us!
Only allowing those with game time / subscriptions to engage with the in-game economy via the auction house, trade chat, mail, Warbank, and so on is silly because you want everyone engaging with it anyway.
- If the point of this is to avoid spammers, just use LLMs to automod for you.
- If the point of this is to try to get more people to pay you for subscriptions, you’d probably be better off just adding family subscriptions.
- Also, while you’re working on player retention, please don’t confiscate our characters if our subscriptions lapse, just scale our level 21+ characters down to 20.
Class: Combine the specs. Or, if you feel daring, maybe even the classes.
- For a safe option, squish all spec trees for each class into one big talent tree. Each specialization is now just a starter build. Pretty similar to right now IMO, but everyone has slightly more choice. Just need to make role bonuses like tank defense part of the tree.
- For a more radical option, squish all classes into one big talent tree, since they’re all pretty similar by now. Classes, or even roles, are now just starter builds.
- If having two spells from different classes would break the game, make them mutually exclusive options from the same talent node.
- Remove armor types, because they’re unnecessary if there aren’t different classes.
Race: Combine as much as anyone will let you. Go crazy!
- For a relatively safe option, move sex to inside the character selector, probably make customizations cross-sex, and maybe even split out voice from the base model selection.
- For a radical option, combine all races into one.
- For power-users, let each character select from all customizations available to any races that the player would have unlocked otherwise.
- Allied races are now incentives to get unusual customizations for all races, like glowy hair.
- For normal users, make filters to only show options that make sense for a given race.
- For all users, make filters to narrow down nearly-identical or even similar options.
- For example: Very fair skin tones, white fur patterns with black patches, light blue hair colors, super long pointy ears, etc.
- This would make it faster to pick a big option (like making your character have (light) blue hair), and then you could either narrow it down from there or reroll within that filter (like getting a different shade of light blue hair).
- Remove racials, as you’ve already nerfed and homogenized them.
- For power-users, let each character select from all customizations available to any races that the player would have unlocked otherwise.
Faction: We know you want to combine factions, so here's how you could do it awesomely!
Let users utilize the reputation system to flip faction, become neutral, start as neutral, or alienate both, replacing important quest and amenity options with special options for those who will pay characters to hate people.
- Characters are now no longer tied to faction by appearance.
- Tabards determine faction for who can hit PCs in PvP (wear no tabard for PvE! This would be one way of implementing the PvP status from earlier).
- Reputation determines faction for what NPCs give PCs stuff (like languages from factions that the PCs are on really great terms with).
- Please please Blizzard you totally won’t do this but if you do the language thing please let us make up our own guild languages if we get to good enough reputation with them.
- Self-defense doesn’t inflict reputation loss.
- Guards just attack PCs if they’re hostile or worse with them (hated increases aggro radius!).
- Other players’ names get fancy colors: green if both players are friendly or better, red if one of them is unfriendly or worse to the other and the other isn’t friendly, orange if one is friendly or better but the other is unfriendly or worse, and yellow otherwise.
So how about it? Would you like to become a pointy-nosed purple human warrior priest who’s running a business farming appearances in Gadgetzan because the dwarves put a bounty on your head and you need to ingratiate yourself with someone who’s not a dragon? Let me know in the comments below!