World events feel bland. There’s no real challenge, no room for skill expression, and the rewards rarely justify the effort. Guild Wars 2 has had zone-wide, rotating events in every end-game area for years, proof that a dynamic system can work at scale. Why is WoW still relying on short, predictable timers and simple “kill-x, click-y” tasks?
These events could do so much more for world-building. Give us branching objectives, puzzle mechanics, scaling difficulty, and tangible zone impacts when players succeed or fail. Rotate the events more frequently, or overlap them, so the world doesn’t feel empty between spawns. Tie in faction reputation, environmental changes, and narrative updates to keep people invested.
6 Likes
I’d rather they abandon them since the servers catch fire whenever they release one
2 Likes
It is all well and good to have many engaging objecvtives when lots of players are doing them. Not so good to have so much when you can count the amount doing the event on one hand.
I suppose they could make the events dynamic, scaling the objectives to the amount of players present, or something.
I think it would be nice to design World Events in such a way as to have the player base make a choice. For example, have the Nightfall incursions take place in two separate locations, and have whichever location receives less support over the season be more damaged in the next patch, or have its NPCs die. Alternatively there could have been a version of this event where individual players must choose to side with either the Arathi or the Nerubians, and whichever succeeds in more objectives during the season conquers land from the other. This last one also could allow Warmode enlistment for uninstanced PvP battlegrounds, which I bet world PvP players might enjoy.
To be fair, the servers catch fire even when they aren’t releasing one.
2 Likes
that would require blizz to hire more devs and testers
This is a really good idea. Everyone else will say that its too ambitious, but Blizz needs to fix “seasonal WoW” and this is exactly what would start making the world alive.
I mean, after copy-pasting expansion after expansion with little to no innovation in the genre, don’t expect Microsoft Blizzard and their “shareholders first” philosophy to re-invent the MMO scene or take any meaningful risk. They have a good recipe to keep people sub and with their occasional 100$ mounts pop in in the Shop. They won’t change their slop until numbers are going down, so enjoy your bland content for years to come.
GW2 Meta events tend to be Trash Run followed by essentially an LFR Boss.
WoW did exactly that multiple times during Dragonflight.
And it kind of sucked anyway. The games play differently.
I also kind of think a lot of people play GW2 very short term and don’t give it time to get stale. I love the Tarir Meta Event. But I’ve also only done it like 4 or 5 times ever.
World Content is inherently easy, and making it hard or at least allowing room for skill expression doesn’t really work, because the nature of world content is that if you are struggling, you can just throw more bodies at it instead of learning anything or getting better.
Even Oondasta, maybe Blizzard’s one attempt at a kind of difficult world boss after like Classic or something, was just a sea of corpses because player reaction to difficulty in the open world is to swarm it, not to git gud.
Which is why world content in general kind of sucks across the board in almost every MMORPG.
It has to exist. It’s the game. That’s the world.
Otherwise just put us in matchmaking lobby for dungeons and call it a day.
But it sucks and probably always will unless we’re willing to bend on what makes an MMORPG an MMORPG (ala Destiny having like 6 people per zone instance).
Currently, they feel like just another renown track you’ve got to fill in. Perhaps they could forgo the renown track once and a while?
There are ways to make world events in MMORPGs actually feel good. Of course there are!
I don’t accept that it’s not possible to make a fun world event that scales with how many players there are doing it, something that can still feel a bit hard but obviously still be completable by anyone.
The Nightfall event could have been so much better. I did it and it just felt kind of meh. Like I have no desire to do it again. It didn’t feel very exciting or fun or dangerous or anything.
I think that assault on the dragon keep place in DF was more fun and exciting than this.