I dream of a world where Blizzard takes the Team Fortress 2 approach and just … lets their community make assets for them.
Sure, Valve have left a lot on the table (some of the Workshop content making it to the game lately was from 2011), but it’s still such an incredible idea, and engenders a ton of goodwill with the community, for almost zero effort on their part.
All Valve really had to do was request their creators clean up their creations before release to fit within a few style guidelines, and code in some sort of bonus for whatever weapons they happened to add.
There are SO MANY creatives within the WoW community. The sheer amount of fanart should tell you that alone, they’re leaving so much on the table by not making use of that creativity.
I’d post a picture of dump trucks full of money being off loaded to Kotick and the shareholders while the devs are standing in the foreground with patched up clothing saying “Sorry we just don’t have the funding to make the content you’d prefer right now”.
“You should be happy we got a ton of customization in the expansion”
Sorry I’m not happy with jewelry that’s honestly ugly to me that I’m not using. It’d be nice if they took suggestions from the community. I’m so sick of people claiming I should be happy with something I’m not. Quality v. Quantity. And it’s not gonna get me to play more. I don’t bother to log in anymore because the story is horrid to me as well.
It boggles me why the game is still using fixed color selections. I wonder what it will take to have one of these (or similar) in-game instead of having a fixed selection:
If this was put in for skin, hair, and eye options, Blizz wouldn’t have to worry about dealing with character colors anymore.
That’s the one thing that likely isn’t’t possible in wow. It’s how the game is build. The skins and textures are pre-coloured images placed upon a skeleton. You cannot adjust the colours with sliders unfortunately.
That is the biggest dream I wish would come true. It wouldn’t have to be that players just upload their work and done, to the point where the customization are super wacky and out of control. A player can submit their work, they have one or two people watching over all the work the players submit, and by the time the next .5 patch hits, they will then release all that work to the community that got submitted and approved.
They could even have a dedicated section on the website to see which works got approved and what’s to come so that players can be all hyped about the fancy new stuff. It will be like the player submitted fan art section they used to have in the website, except it’s player submitted customization.
Customization does not add direct play time. (even though it kinda does)
Now I think this is what they are going to do. They are going to break them down then attach the new customizations to various different long grindy achivements. This truely making that new haircut a status symbol.
Now I would probably hate this and curse this every day. However I could see them doing it because we would all be-grudgingly do the achevements.
But MY GOD I have enough friggen mounts and pets to last a lifetime.
Community driven character customization updates would have been amazing! Especially if they did like Cow said, showing off each accepted submission as a teaser for what to expect for the next patch.
Also that thing about the layoffs? I’m not even freaking surprised.
It’s almost like Blizzard is just self-destructing willfully at this point. And it’s looking to be a slow, painful death.
I mean, it worked for the flower crowns. They are hugely popular even though getting the permanent ones makes you trek all over the old world. I would be ok with achievement styles if they are doable by all or most players.
I haven’t touched this thread in 17+ days, apparently, but I’m just chiming in to mention that I think this is another nail in the coffin of WoW for me. At the very least, I don’t think I’m gonna resubscribe 'til they add more customization or class/race options, whenever that might be. Most of my friends have moved to FFXIV lately, but its style just doesn’t appeal to me that much.
My total time played over the past month is probably about 3 hours from logging in, doing a couple dailies, and logging out. I just feel zero drive to play when I have no interest in the dumpster-fire of a story, no interest in end-game progression… And I’m an altoholic, and there’s nothing new coming for customization to flesh out the unfinished changes.
I don’t know what alternate reality’s version of FFXIV you’ve been playing, but this… is something.
The devs don’t have specs, talents, set gear, trinkets, etc. to worry about tuning content or the classes themselves around, you’re right. And this is a good thing. What separates you from the other people that play your job is how well you play against how well they play.
They don’t fill endgame quite as hard, but then how much of each raid tier on WoW is usually filler/rehashed? How long has the current tier been out? How long is the last tier of a given WoW expansion usually expected to last?
The endgame in general is more accessible in FFXIV to what you would call the “casual player”, and the content in general is designed to encourage doing what you want at a given point in time. I’d rather play a game that has a bit less content where I’m encouraged to play because I want to, as opposed to a game with more content where I’m encouraged to play because I’ll be punished if I don’t.
Which gated AFK grind is this? I haven’t found this yet, sorry.
Yes… and no. Here’s what was actually said:
"It’s alright not to play it everyday. Since it’s just a game, you can stop forcing yourself if it’s hard on you to keep that up. Rather, it’ll just pile up unnecessary stress if you limit yourself into playing just that one game since there are so many other games out there. So, do come back and play it to your heart’s content when the major patch kicks in, then stop it to play other games before you got burnt out, and then come back for another major patch. This will actually make me happier, and in the end, I think this is the best solution I can answer for keeping your motivation up for the game."
I guess you have a point there. The “painted-on” armor models is one of the few remaining things that reflect the game’s age.
We know Blizz isn’t obviously interested, but the only thing I see possible now is doing what a couple of other developers are doing with their MMO:
NCSoft is in the process of upgrading BnS’s engine from UE3->UE4 (and before anyone says anything about HW specs, UE4 came out 2014 and UE5 is about to be released)
Sega created a new version of PSO2 titled “New Genesis”, which is the same game with a new client under a new engine running parallel to the original client (they use their own in-house engine like Blizz). Players can still play both versions with the same account and together in the same world.
Runescape had done an engine upgrade some years ago
From their summary, these changes will update the graphical detail, improve on combat mechanics, expand on customization, make future updates easier, and a bunch of other things.
That’s what I did, basically. I ended my sub because there is nothing in wow I want to achieve, collect, or create. I don’t CARE about collecting sets, about completing weeklies and dailies, about increasing my stats, about playing a story I can see in a 30 min youtube video,… I want to be able to create a character, with a certain role/background in mind. Being able to customize that character is a huge part of it. Having lackluster customization really takes some of the RPG out of MMORPG. For all it’s many faults, BFA kept me playing because I could collect these allied races: new character concepts to play around with. There’s just nothing of that in Shadowlands… So I’m letting my money talk, for whatever good it will do, because blizz sure as hell isn’t listening to the community.
…and I don’t even particularly like them, but I have all four. Which means that I had to run the quests to get the temp ones, and then run the four additional quests to get the permanent ones. Every time I try one on in Transmog, I don’t like how they look, but I made sure to unlock them while they were available the first time around.
I would do the same for customizations, as long as the questlines made sense. I wouldn’t want to see them drop from random mobs, like in Fable (for haircuts and beard styles). It could be an entirely separate quest series for your selected race, in which you help the barbers with supplies, maybe give a few “haircuts” while they need to go attend to family, or something (like the Hillsbrad questgiver quest with Dumass, Johnny Awesome, and Orkus). Then, add some customization bundles to the Barber NPCs, so that you can buy them… or something.
Uh it’s absolutely not, that was disastrous to Blizzard’s image beyond anything else that happened to them.
With that being said, they should be adding in more customization options with every patch, no reason they shouldn’t now that they streamlined the process.
Couldn’t agree more! It’s possible we could even take it a step further and not even need to wait until a major patch.
From my experience playing other MMOs, additional customizations could come in the form of a scroll you can learn to add/unlock additional customization options for your character or account. Those could be:
A drop from a dungeon or raid
Sold by vendors for gold
A seasonal item you can earn seasonal currency to purchase
A quest reward (WQs, dailies, a quest chain)
Received participating in the Darkmoon Faire
By doing PvP
In other words, take the concept idea they did with the Night Warrior nelf skin and expand on it. There’s no need for customization additions to feel “separated” from creating PvE or PvP content. No need to give up on expanding on PvE or PvP content and dedicate a whole patch solely on it. Working on a new dungeon or raid for the next tier? Just throw in a few customization scrolls here and there as drops. New seasonal items for the next event? Add some to the vendor. Rinse and repeat for the life of the game.
Seriously, it’s been out ever since micro-holidays became a thing and been stuck on Season 4 since …what… late Legion? I think? I can’t seem to remember how long it’s been out for now, but, there’s been no further updates to it at -all-. It’s terrible.
Night Elf Sentinel armor as a reward for Trial of Style? Nope.
Night Elf Warden armor? Nah.
Any number of the Nightborne outfits as a transmoggable set? Heh, no.
HD Bikini armor? Nupe.
Any kind of new armor at all? Eh…nah.
Just …the few sets that have been added as rewards, while nice, aren’t quite enough anymore. Most people, if not everyone, who’s done Trial of Style, have all those rewards already. What’s the point of going back to it anymore? Sure, you can still have fun with it but, without new rewards, and with it only occurring TWICE a year…
The kinds of outfits they could have added for rewards over the past few years…
