I’d add systems such an honor system, and people who predominantly PuG would have badges and stuff on their profile to indicate they’re someone that not only runs PuGs a lot, but doesn’t abandon them and stays to completion.
Basically, an honor system like what Overwatch or League have, along with some rewards.
If you’re someone that goes the extra mile for other players, I want it to be known.
Pets/cosmetics/mounts would be an incentive for players to be nicer to each other too, under this system.
After the dungeon/battleground/whatever is done, you can honor other players you thought did well, obviously can’t vote your duos or premades.
Yes that would be a really good idea. The place I remember this being a problem is in professions where as you approach a level and the thing you are trying to make goes from yellow to green, it becomes a massive grind to make those last few levels.
That’s what drove me away from professions after a number of attempts.
Retail is lazy, instanced content. Leveling is too fast, the expansions and Chromie time created a fractured mess for continuity, the writing and story is dreadful, there’s next to zero player interaction or community.
professions died in WoD. i played for years before wod and enjoyed the professions aspect of the game, wod turned everything into a chore everyone could do, then they nerfed the actual tradeskills themselves to the point where crafted gear, enchants, and gems were rendered useless
I’m relatively new, but when people complain about the WoW community, I’m reminded of the announcement in WoD that they were would be no flying in WoD and no flight going forward, which caused well over half the player base to jump ship.
So, I think about what kind of players are able to part ways with a game that they no longer enjoy because of a change they don’t want. And what kind of players would continue to stay, despite having a change that they don’t want.
Because, let’s face it, no significant number of players wants flying removed from the game.
But when you think about the players that stay with WoW, despite this change, but stay due to the “sunk cost fallacy,” it’s little wonder that the community we have left has become toxic. The secure player were able to move on and find something else to play. The ones unable to tear themselves away are the only ones we have left.
I can see part of that being true. But the biggest discrepancy we’ve had in the game in recent years has been the addition of mythic plus. There was a time when you could occasionally stumble across an elitist raider, but it was few and far between. Now with the advent of mythic plus being full on popular since Legion, there’s an entirely new category of players who hold other players to an extremely high standard and when they don’t meet that standard, their opinions all of a sudden just don’t matter. The Proof is how they cherry pick other players from the custom group finder so that they can have the absolute best possible chance to do a +10.
And to prove that-- it’s something I’ve been saying since Wrath! lol
What’s worse, the formula as it pertains to Raiding in terms of the gear-treadmill, is so obvious now that they’ve embraced it to now call it “seasons.”
Which all but admits it NEVER will evolve, we’re just stuck in an endless, “seasonal” rotation of stagnation that allows for zero growth. It will always be “the next season…”
And in business, if you aren’t growing, you’re dying. This is not the right approach for WoW. We shouldn’t embrace a boring dynamic.
Professions used to be there for players, but now are just another Blizz cash grab. The weekly quests for 3 KP have often been 5-10k gold for the mats, and that’s only for gathering professions since I quit all the non-gathering profs. I quite them all when I saw the patron crafting orders were going to cost 10-50 thousand gold for the first month of the expac.
WoW’s biggest problem is people who can’t play well with others. Without a time machine to go back and teach parenting skills, that’s difficult to fix.
The biggest problem on Blizzard’s end is they aren’t very good at subtlety. They cannot moderate themselves. Whenever they have a good basic idea they keep adding “improvements” until it becomes a big complicated mess.
Garrisons were supposed to be fairly simple like what garrison outposts were, but they kept adding stuff to them until they consumed most of the development efforts. Even after they were aware of this problem they doubled down with shipyards. A lot of content people looked forward to was sacrificed for this.
Borrowed power systems that went from being an enhancement to being the focus of the entire game.
Late BfA where we were no longer playing an RPG, but jumping through a million hoops in a blatantly obvious attempt to keep us busy and distracted.
Everyone owning more “legendaries” than greens in Shadowlands.
Professions needed to be improved, but having multiple qualities of everything just made a huge unfun mess of them.
Yet, after making the same basic mistake over and over again, they keep repeatedly overcomplicating so much of what they create, and ruining things in the process.
