Hello! I’m here to compile some of the thoughts and ideas I’ve had while making my own expansion ideas, as linked by Talanor a day ago. I’ll try to avoid delving into other aspects of the game like raids, PvP, or dungeons that I covered in my expansions, and keep it all aimed towards things relating to RP and how it benefits the community.
I’ll start with something a little more general purpose, though.
Open World Talents
So basically the idea behind open world talents is to provide players with an alternate progression path. They farm it up by doing open world content and it provides them with a secondary talent system exclusively active in the open world. It comes in three specializations: combat, utility, and RP.
Combat basically provides changes to a class’s rotation in a way that can be a little sillier and less balanced than you’d find in competitive content. Utility would include travel improvements, material collection improvements, and other such non combat benefits. Then RP would be giving players silly little abilities for RP’s sake that have little impact on the player’s power. Examples of this might be the ability to soothe and speak to animals in the wild as a druid.
I believe this is an important addition to the game because an RPG needs a living world. As it stands currently, the open world has slowly been aimed towards a system that prepares players to enter instanced content. Hence why it always feels like you’re doing chores. Giving players a little something more to work towards in the open world that is self contained makes the open world itself more exciting to be a part of. Ideally, there’d be more content in the open world to do and use this new toolkit on besides dailies, but that’s for another topic.
Class/Race Halls
This is very simple for RPers. We like to have story developments around our characters, both new and old places to affiliate with our characters. I didn’t like the main story of BfA, but it’s the most fun I’ve had RPing, and that’s because my character was a part of something. She joined the Horde hoping to be part of a good cause since she’d previously worked for the Legion in Suramar. It was her attempt at atonement. Then I got to have her reacting to events around the Fourth War. She fought night elves, had opinions on that, went to Nazjatar, and even contended with the mindbending dangers of Ny’alotha. My RP was very involved.
RPers want that kind of connection. A great way to provide such a connection is through the use of class or racial halls. Those will provide personal bases for characters to jump stories from. If there was a campaign for blood elves where they cleaned up Ghostlands of Scourge, imagine how many RPers would be able to spin stories off that. Characters facing the ghosts of loved ones, unleashing rage at the Scourge, finally being able to go to the villages they called home when they were kids. Suddenly you have a ton of engagement from one race’s community. Imagine that for every race, or class.
This is, in my opinion, the best way to breathe life into the RP community. We make our own content, certainly, but progressing the communities our characters are part of do wonders for giving us new routes to explore with these characters.
Another opinion of mine is that the races and organizations of the world are what people are invested in in WoW, not characters. There’s a whole political landscape that lives, grows and changes. People wish to see how that happens. We would like to know where the night elves end up now that their capital has been destroyed. We’d like to see how the Forsaken shape themselves after losing the person who’s set themselves up as their messiah. The Frozen Throne was a great expansion to Warcraft III because that’s what it explored, how the high elves reacted to the loss of their Sunwell, how the Kaldorei were trying to fix the aftermath of the Third War, and what a post-Scourge Eastern Kingdoms looks like. Class/race halls are ways to facilitate these stories and very important for maintaining an immersive world.
Personally, I think class or race halls should be a baseline thing for each expansion, covering how the organizations of Azeroth are reacting to events. Plus who doesn’t love worldbuilding?
Customization
I believe there’s tons of input already on this. Given our personal relationships to our characters, RPers will always adore more customization options. What I’d personally love to see is more simple HD sets and weapons. Also, remove the faction restrictions on the Exile’s Reach weapons! There’s no reason a Horde elf cannot wield a sword.
Then in the realm of more experimental ideas, I was thinking of more unlockable character customization options, similar to the night elf Night Warrior eyes. It might run alongside a race hall where you unlock interesting character looks for your race. It may even help explain more controversial appearance additions, like if worgen had to go through some wild god shenanigans in order to gain tail options. Or imagine if mechagnomes could find a new pair of arms in a dungeon. People would be scrambling to run it for that purpose alone!
In a similar vein, I’d be interested in seeing race/class customization combos. It’s cool being a nightborne, and it’s cool being a warlock. But what if I had visual ways to indicate that I’m a nightborne warlock? I’m talking about green eyes, green handy glowies, and green tattoos, of course! That would go miles for RPers, who suddenly get to really show off their character’s backstory through such visuals.
Last thing I want to offer in the customization field would be more experimental armor pieces. I keep thinking about this idea I had where for demon hunter tier sets they could have armor that is reminiscent of classic demons. Get a wild felhunter mane for a helmet, or succubus wings for a cloak, a pointed tail that comes in the belt slot, or hooves that come as boots. You don’t even have to mix it, just give demon hunters a felhunter set in 10.0, a succubus set in 10.1, and a felguard set in 10.2. Or something like that. Then you let the players decide how they want to mix and match it. Players generally know how they want to look, just give them the tools and they’ll go nuts.
Class Skins
RPers are pretty creative. Their characters’ backstories don’t always follow the norm for their class, and class skins is a great way to help them express that. It also safely allows Blizzard to grant us new classes without the nightmare of having to balance new classes. People have been dying for necromancers. Replace warlock fel spells with necromancy spells and demons with undead and bam, you have necromancers.
The way I’d do it is I’d treat it like transmog. You can add individual spell effects that can be slotted in on its own, or you can have full blown “sets” which are the class skins. This adds a lot of freedom, and it also streamlines the process by which players can change their class’s effects that are already in the game. Glyphs can be reworked to simply be ways to learn some of these effects, while other skins and appearances can be found through various means. Adds more reasons for people to go out and play the game, too!
Allied Races
Allied races are a bit of a nebulous concept and this could work massively to Blizzard’s advantage. They are not beholden to making a subrace specifically, they can do whatever and it isn’t stuck with the rules of a core race either. What I’m talking about is more bizarre, niche races. Someone in another thread around here said to add dryads, an exclusively druid race. That could work! Many RPers play less conventional races and currently have to take some liberties to do that, either by using their imagination or tricky reflective prism shenanigans. I myself have a Nerubian character and I’d be delighted to play them how they look.
Housing
This is another popular topic so I don’t feel like I’d have to delve too deep into it. It’s another way to express ourselves. It’s also another progression path that encourages people to play the game. You can also link the basic housing appearances to professions, adding another market that makes professions worthwhile. Could even use old world materials to give it a little more relevance.
I think the most important thing I want to address out of housing is how garrisons worked. There’s this philosophy behind it that every new feature introduced in an expansion needs to have endgame ramifications. Look at Torghast, for instance. It could have been a cool other form of content to play around with, but it had to be tied to legendaries in order to make it relevant instead of just letting it be its own thing and allowing the players who find it fun play it for fun.
Some content should exist for the fun of it. It doesn’t need to affect how you play the game in all respects. Otherwise people will feel forced to do it and resentful of the fact.
Bonus: Languages!
I think faction divides are less decisive these days. The dangers that come from cross faction communication really don’t quite exist in the open world. As such, let races know cross faction communication. Undead don’t forget Common, let them know it. High elves were part of the Alliance for ages and well integrated into the Eastern Kingdoms community, let blood elves speak Common too. Let Shal’dorei speak Darnassian. If PvP toxicity is a problem, just disable the ability to hear from enemy players while flagged.
Final little nugget I think would be neat: Add the ability to learn languages! There would need to be a system in place to prevent players from learning languages they don’t want to, but I think it’d be fun for, say, Altielle to learn demonic through study. My idea would be to have tomes around the world that you can read once every week to “enable” learning a language, so all you’d have to do after that is start listening to it. Add another way to forget your non-native languages and bam! RPers have a fun progression system to be immersed in. Add non playable race languages too! Learning Kalimag would be rad, same with Draconic.
I’m sure there’s more I might think of later. That’s all the compilation done for the time being, though! If any of this is unclear, check out the full expansion concepts where I outline it a little more concretely. I like to think the posts are very neatly organized for smooth browsing.
Edit: Also I’m well aware a problem I have as a writer is that I tend to have more in my mind’s eye than what I put down on paper. Please feel free to ask specific questions about any of these topics and I’ll gladly clarify.
Also, add the ability to hide the upper and lower halves of robes separately! I want to see legs, Blizzard. LEGS!