Put the RPG back into MMORPG

(The following is my individual feedback regarding changes to World of Warcraft that have had a negative impact on the game’s identity as an RPG. I speak for no one but myself. To anyone posting in this thread, please feel free to agree, disagree, or post anything you feel has detracted from the game’s identity that I haven’t.)


World of Warcraft is an RPG, not an E-Sport.

While I can only speculate on what has led to the changes to World of Warcraft that we’ve seen over time, from my perspective most of them seem to derive from a need to make the game into an E-Sport by designing it for increasingly competitive gameplay. Unfortunately, RPGs have rarely, if ever, been a competitive gameplay experience. The two gameplay philosophies often-times conflict with one another.

What changes have been made to WoW to detract from it’s RPG identity:

  • Scaling
  • Timegated Content
  • Borrowed Power Systems
  • Exclusivity/Removed Content

Scaling

Of all the changes to this game that have been the most damning to it’s RPG nature, Scaling is the most egregious and damaging one.

Think back to any classic RPG you’ve played in the past. Perhaps it was a Final Fantasy game, or Super Mario RPG or one of it’s spin offs such as Paper Mario. Perhaps it was a JRPG such as Chrono Trigger, Suikoden, etc… A common aspect to any RPG is developing one’s character in terms of power. The steady progression of power is important and vital to the character the player uses to experience the story.

Imagine for a moment you’re playing a game of D&D. Your party has been playing for years. Everyone is level 20. You’ve killed gods, you have equipment and spells and such that makes your characters borderline gods. You’re about to start a new campaign that is going to deal more in politics. On your way to the capital of the kingdom you’re currently in, your party stumbles upon a small village being raided by a bunch of level 1 or 2 goblins. You all smile at one another, remembering that one time in the past your group almost wiped to them, before you got a solid grip on playing together as a party. You prepare to unleash cathartic hell upon these unfortunate creatures.

Your DM suddenly says, “Okay, you’re engaging the Goblins. Every Goblin is now level 20, is assigned a prestige class, and is given powerful equipment. Also, the Wizard and the Paladin, you two have some really OP stuff so for this fight I’m making it weaker.”

Does anyone think the people at this table will be anything other than outraged? Justifiably so, at that? Players worked hard for their levels, their gear, and the DM has decided to invalidate all of that. Why? “Because this makes it more interesting! You’re not just going to wipe them out and move on, the fight will be more fun!”

Except it’s not fun. It’s tedious.

That’s World of Warcraft thanks to Scaling.

We play in a game where you’re more powerful between levels 50-54 than you are at levels 55-60 while leveling, that you grow weaker as your level increases. Worse, we play in a game where a piece of gear that is an upgrade might cause all enemy NPCs to also upgrade, making you weaker for equipping that superior piece of gear.

I don’t know if Scaling was implemented to keep players bogged down to increase the /timeplayed metric by increments, or if it was because people were complaining about enemies dying too fast to tag, but it’s been extraordinarily harmful to the game. Scaling needs to go. If enemies are dying too fast, let players tag a corpse for up to 10 seconds after it dies to get credit.


Timegated Content

This is a subscription based MMORPG, a game where we pay for time to play. There is nothing more disrespectful to your customers than timegating content.

Imagine for a moment if you’d be so kind. You’re playing Super Mario RPG. You’ve just defeated Mack, gotten the first of the Seven Stars, and have been instructed to head for the Kero Sewers. You leave the Mushroom Kingdom and… you can’t go to the next map. A little window pops up saying, “Sorry, you need 5 hours of game time on this save to continue.”

Absolutely absurd, right? Welcome to World of Warcraft.

The main focus of an RPG is to tell a story which players can immerse themselves in. Stopping that story abruptly with a, “stay tuned for next week’s installment of Dragonball Z,” breaks that immersion. Imagine reading an E-Book and your app only lets you read one chapter a week.

Yes, an MMORPG is not the same as a singleplayer RPG or a story, but you won’t find other RPGs (or at least successful ones, especially those with subscriptions) doing this. Take a look at your top competitor right now, FFXIV. When they release a patch, the main story quests with it have a very definite beginning and end which players can go through on their own time. They can complete it in a day, or spread it out over a week. They pay for the subscription, and how they choose to pace their play is respected.

It’s time for WoW to stop breaking apart the content of every patch into tiny crumbs. Yes, we’ll all be aware of just how little content there is in a patch if you do that. Not being able to put out more content is not an excuse to flagrantly disrespect your customers and spit on the RPG aspect of this game.


Borrowed Power Systems

As noted when addressing Scaling, the power/strength of a player’s character is directly a part of that character’s identity and the player’s immersion in the game.

Borrowed Power Systems are anathema to this. They give your character power, and take it away at the end of an expansion/start of a new one, leaving classes broken and weak until they hit max level and get started re-earning everything they already had with the current expansion’s borrowed power system. Worse, you take away every tiny iota of meaning those systems had when you remove them.

Legion is often remembered fondly as a good expansion, and one reason why is because it actually touched on the RPG elements remarkably well. Class Order Halls, Artifact Weapons, these are borrowed power systems, but they were implemented so well that they became iconic to how players identified themselves and their characters. To this day many players happily transmog those artifacts because of the meaning they had. It’s only a shame those whom never got to play Legion will ever had a chance to understand that love, because the system for Artifacts was removed to make way for the Heart of Azeroth.

As more and more expansions are released, it becomes a tricky balancing act to make each class have new skills/spells to keep them growing, but this growth is necessary. Borrowed Power Systems aren’t growth; they’re artificial stagnation that ruins any attempt at growth or immersion because no one expects them to remain anymore. No one allows themselves to grow attached to them.

The very least that could be done here would be to make some kind of, ‘Legacy System,’ where players can select one or two active abilities and three to five passives that have existed in past borrowed power systems. At least in that way no one needs to feel as if there is no point being invested in these systems, and who knows but that maybe, just maybe, classes won’t start an expansion hopelessly broken and unplayable until they earn back old power through new borrowed power systems.

Ideally, just stop borrowed power altogether and give players options to change the effects of spells/skills to provide new gameplay options. Maybe let fire-mages have some variations of fire spells that do less immediate DPS but focus more on DoTs or such, just as an example. But, these are choices; they can choose to remain with their current immediate DPS payout options if they want.


Exclusivity/Removed Content

Playing on consumer’s Fear of Missing Out (or FOMO as it’s commonly known), exclusivity and the removal of content necessary to artificially generate it are a major detractor to the RPG experience.

The legendary Cloak from Mists of Pandaria, the legendary Ring from Warlords of Draenor, Artifacts from Legion, etc… experiences and stories largely removed from the game. Content that has been removed from an RPG, leaving gaping holes in the story. Why? To make players who were there while it was current feel superior to players who either took a break or hadn’t even starting playing during that time?

This game’s story is hard enough to follow what with multiple Warchiefs and a leveling experience that does too little to properly help a new player understand the narrative of each expansion properly. For those whom are interested enough to try and play through this, in order, they find major gaps in the experience because of removed content.

Worse, you might have players who see a piece of transmog someone else is wearing, love it, and wonder how to get it. It doesn’t show up in their collections tab, and only after using an external website such as wowhead do they come to learn that it’s no longer available to obtain.

That’s nothing short of frustrating for a player, and for a new player who hasn’t even gotten thoroughly invested in the game, that might be enough to turn them away.

This is an RPG. I’ve already discussed how the individual’s character is paramount to their experience in this genre through power, but the same holds true in how one customizes their character, whether that’s by racial aesthetics at character creation, or the gear they wear.

Put back the removed content. Goodness knows this game has little enough new content to enjoy with each patch, spread out over fifteen weeks, at least give your players something to do while waiting for the next episode of Warcraft Z.


It’s time that this game reconnected with it’s identity as an MMORPG. WoW is not an E-Sport, no matter how profitable E-Sports may be. Trying to make it into an E-Sport just changes it from it’s RPG roots, and what we’ve seen over the years with declining interest and subs, and more players going to other MMOs for a true MMORPG experience, should be evidence enough that this design direction has failed.

Drops two coppers onto the table.

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This one peeves me off the most.

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No

I mean, i don’t get what are you saying with scailing, but if it’s about the endgame zones scailing to level 60, it’s good.
Without scailing you just go back to a early zone and 1-shot everything. Where is the gameplay on that? And after the level cap our ilvl grows like, twice, so we get more powerful anyways.

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I tried to explain with some examples, but I’m not sure if those helped at all if you’re still uncertain.

The point of getting levels in an RPG is to get stronger, but because of the way Scaling works in World of Warcraft, you end up getting weaker. Perversely, the same is true when it comes to getting better gear. At some point your ilevel gets high enough that enemies scale, getting more HP, etc…

By getting stronger, you actually end up weaker. That’s the antithesis of what an RPG is.

And that should always be an option. If someone wants to go back to an early zone and grind resources or mob materials or what not, then if they put in the time and effort to grow stronger by gaining levels and equipment, it should be easy for them. Grinding to get stronger has always been a key part of the RPG identity.

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I like your formatting :slight_smile:

Thanks for not going in here and making a wall of texts with no paragraphs. You even went the extra mile and made

headings! Wow!

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Thank you. I’m glad it made it easier to read.

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Idk, I disagree with this one already. FFXIV has scaling and is pretty great because it keeps old zones and content relevant. I feel scaling is the future of MMORPG’s to keep the world alive, and not funnel everyone to be stuck only in the endgame zone cause the rest of the world has become trivial / pointless.

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And yet, very early on they introduced achievements for “World First”. So there was from that time (and probably before it, just without the achievements) a race to beat other guilds to killing raid bosses first. I imagine that as soon as there was a decent system for broadcasting raids, they had races between guilds showing online. Even if Blizzard had not supported such stuff, it would have been done by players for the prestige value.

Oh I will seriously disagree with that. There have been far worse things done than scaling.

Perhaps you dont remember playing in the world before scaling. How you would create a new character, probably equip it with a number of heirlooms that boosted your exp gains, and go out to quest. Within a very short time your experience went rapidly into grey territory so you had to move on to another higher level zone to continue levelling. I doubt very much whether there was any positive RP aspect of being able to wipe out a bunch of gnolls because you outlevelled them. Who even worries about that? Players have always been concerned about levelling up in the most effective (and generally fast) ways possible.

And as far as RP goes, because you outlevel those zones so fast you never get time to finish the story of the zone because there is no benefit for you in staying there. I’ve levelled characters now through entire zones, completing the story of it, because I still benefit from doing that.

Timegating is often mentioned as an issue - whatever you see timegating to be. But I ask you this - if all the content were released in the first patch, what would you do for the next 9 months of the game once you’d completed it?

As for ‘borrowed power’ while I agree the systems are often badly implemented, nobody has ever come up with a satisfactory alternative to it. You cant just have layer upon layer of talent systems, it would become hideously unwieldy. They need to address the way characters function in the game each new expansion, I’m just not sure how they will do it to both provide fun gameplay and keep the whole system ongoing through expansions.

Sure, but if you do, put it ALL back. All those TBC pvp mounts, the Black Qiraji Battle Tank, the MoP challenge mounts and gear, everything. Dont cherrypick, put it all back. Just be prepared for the outrage when you do, because sometimes having something special because you earned it at the time isn’t a sin.

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2 things here.

First: Getting weaker as you level has less to do with scaling and more to do with exponential ilvl growth during expansions. You get patch gear, start a new expansion, patch gear outclasses everything you earn from questing / leveling dungeons until toward the end of the process, but each level you gain, you need more raw stat to get that 1% increase on the stat sheet. That’s in place so that gear progression remains a thing instead of everyone just being at max stats at all times after Vanilla. The issue is with that patch gear. Expansions are designed so that people can jump into them directly with only leveling gear they get on their way to said expansion. A player getting upgrades as they go along in this manner will get stronger as intended. A player with patch gear has to wait until the gear they’re getting is actually stronger than what they started with, so they get weaker until they hit that point and can start building up again.

Second: ilvl Scaling isn’t 1:1 unless they changed it without telling anyone. The intent is that mobs gain power as you do, but you gain MORE power than they gain health or whatever. It’s just meant to slow down the rate at which gear totally invalidates any threat the world poses. It’s not meant to eliminate outclassing it entirely. I think there’s room to argue that the rates should be messed with, but I’m not opposed to the general concept – and equipping an ilvl upgrade is basically never going to result in the world being tougher than it was before the upgrade. Exceptions for deliberately dumb examples like equipping an int dagger on your Warrior or something. MAYBE for accessories since they lack primary stats and the minor increase in raw secondary might not be enough to win over a slightly worse accessory with ideal stats. But even then, you wouldn’t even notice the difference – but I understand why the idea of an “upgrade” making the world tougher isn’t great, so I think the solution there is just to bring primary stats back to accessory slots. That’s basically the reason ilvl > stats for most specs in other slots.

Not quite. You can, “Synch,” your level for Fates, but the zones themselves remain the same. If you’re level 80 and walk outside of Limsa Lominsa, you’ll still find the Lady Bugs to be level 3.

That it can be used to good effect does not mean it is being used properly in WoW. In WoW, scaling has become extremely damaging to the game.

I remember a big deal was made of problems back at the start of BFA, something about level 111 players thrashing level 120 players in PvP because of scaling.

Quite the contrary, I always felt that was a positive. You felt the power gain on your character if you chose to complete a zone. You had earned that power, and thus an easier time dealing with enemies in the next zone. It was the reward. And of course, being able to move through the questing experience at your own, faster pace for putting in the effort was also a reward.

Does this not bring up the opposite problem?

You’ll be level 50 before you complete all of a given expansion’s zones through Chromie Time. Ergo, you’ll never finish an entire expansion’s leveling zones anyways.

Personally I’m in favor of a system where players get deviations of class skills/abilities with a new expansion that allows players to engage in a different type of gameplay with each spec.

Using the example I prompted in the OP, let’s take a mage’s Fireball spell.

Right now, it deals damage, and that’s it. Perhaps in BC, that damage was reduced, but a DoT effect was added. Perhaps in Wrath, the damage remained reduced, but an effect to increase damage taken from other sources was applied.

Now, the mage technically has all three variants as different spells, but if you can only pick one to use at a time, it provides a greater degree of choice in gameplay, without having to bloat the action bar unnecessarily.

Absolutely. It all needs to go back.

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Not disagreeing with anything you’re saying about MMORPG’s and other video game RPGs and WoW in particular. I think a lot of your points are spot on.

And sorry this isn’t really your topic, but I couldn’t help but giggle a bit when you did the comparison to D&D and had to do a little soapbox rant here.

Video game RPGs and paper and pencil RPGs are almost completely unrelated. I’ve been playing D&D for over 35 years and the core aspect of it is the role-playing, not the level gaining or power acquiring. A group of high level adventurers running into strangely powerful goblins, and at the same time, losing some of their own power, would likely find that very interesting and a good opportunity to be creative and… well… role play. Dungeons and Dragons has always been more about role playing your character and personality and interactions with others than about combat and finding treasure. Very, very different from the role playing aspect of MMORPGs.

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Im sorry, I disagree. Your title was about the RPG aspect of gaming so let me share an RP moment:

I was in Orgrimmar on my Horde hunter last week and there was a player with the Scarab Lord title on their Black Qiraji mount.

I just stopped and stared, awed to know that the player had been there are the opening of the gates all those years ago, had rung the gong and earned the title and mount. I saluted him and we exchanged a few words and he reminisced of that time back when.

That unique moment of gaming would be lost if everything was available to everyone.

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That’s fair. I don’t have much experience with D&D myself but from what I have experienced, I find there’s two types of players/DMs/groups. The first in the Roleplayer category that focuses less on mechanics and numbers and has more fun with creativity and thinking of unique ways to use their skills/spells. The second group is the min-max types who build for pure power and seem more interested in an Action-RPG experience, not unlike Diablo.

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Perhaps, perhaps not.

After all, if you inspect their achievements it’ll list when they earned that, so you’d have a good idea of knowing if they were part of it back then or only recently earned it.

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You dont get what Im saying. I dont need to do that now. I know just by looking.

I agree that some things should be returned - the ability to do the legendary cloak questline for example, because a world boss should not be locked away because of an unavailable item - but for items achieved at the time from great individual effort, they should remain pure to the philosophy of that player’s work.

If you don’t that’s fine, but we will just have to agree to disagree.

I’ll agree to disagree.

For what it’s worth, I do think something as humble as a Title would be fair game for being an exclusive reward. At the same time, I don’t agree with the idea of things never being earned again.

I think in this specific example, the ideal outcome would be to allow people to earn it through Classic WoW, and apply to their main account. Same with some transmogs that are no longer available.

OK, well we’ll just move on.

Rather than bringing back old stuff, Id much rather see them introduce new achievements, new activities and challenges. Reworking the old just to give someone something out of the past seems retrograde thinking. Its the same thing with people wanting the bear skin from the Mage Tower so they want the Mage Tower back. Just ask Blizzard to give us some sort of new content with a brilliant new druid bear skin. It isn’t necessary to have absolutely every pixel option in the game. It is necessary for the game to move forward into new content territory.

But anyhow, I get you have your passions and thats fine. I have mine, and they are about taking the game forward and being creative and inventive about it - seeking a new age of Wow, not an old one. Not pulling things from the past as if doing that somehow will magically make it better.

I gotta add that the thing(s) I feel that have no place in an RPG of any type is platforms and timed-jump platform mechanics. I might have featherfall or levitation or a glider kit or invulnerability or know when to disengage or blink, etc. and there should not commonly be so many great voids that are 100% fatal and absolute poison to fall into. Those are one-shot mechanics sometimes when someone happens to zone in or port or phase or whatever when a kickback or severe circle-of-bad suddenly materializes under their feet. Or flying through awfully suspect collision detection when you’re flapping and swooping your way through a badly-designed world quest. Or you get a weekly quest where you have to time your jumps to coincide with a quest-item usage (F key for me; I don’t know how clickers can do this) that send you shooting forward into a quest ) to grab quest-fulfilling object from the air you can reach no other way, then glide back to safety if the ledge is too steep. If I want to engage in such activities to advance in a game I’ll play Tomb Raider or old Indiana Jones games or something.

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Scaling is fine; content shouldn’t just turn into "one shot every single mob because I am a higher level.

90% of the game’s world is entirely devoid of any sort of immersion because I can go in, and slap something, and it dies. And this is happening with raid bosses too.

They really need to expand on Timewalking to fix this.
Every single raid should have it available for the week it’s up, and it needs to drop rewards for players that did go in for the past decade and slap the boss with one hit for loot. Recolours, new mounts, low drops on items that were removed from the game, ect ect.

The game just isn’t simply engaging for story anymore.
XIV I go back and can just use the group finder for every raid while leveling, and bring my friends too. Here?
Well.
No.

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That’s fair, although my intent isn’t about pulling things back from the past per say, but rather to undo and prevent the removal of content at all. Like I noted, players can no longer do the quests and learn the story associated with the Pandaria Cloak, or the WoD ring, and Legion Artifacts have largely lost their impact and meaning with players as well. New players will never be able to understand just how amazing those were, how good it felt to work on your weapon as an extension of your character and such.

It’s imperative that WoW grows and adds new content. Old content should not be removed, especially when it’s entirely unnecessary.

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