I want player housing, guild halls, a better guild recruitment system than what’s in place, more customization, built in RP tools like profiles (City of heroes did it).
I want flying. I want more meaningful content and less daily quests and time gating.
I want things to be alt friendly, such as the achievement for building all the covenant hall stuff, make it account wide.
I would like to expand on this idea. The assaults or invasions that we had in BfA and legion were sorta like an event. Everyone could be a part of it and it made for some nice world pvp. These should not be limited to one expansion, they should happen everywhere. There should always be one event or assault going on somewhere in the world of warcraft. Any level can be a part of it ( unless it’s in a new zone that requires level 50 or higher ) and the rewards are useful for any level, including progressing to end game.
It’s quite clear what players want—Blizzard is trying to reinvent the wheel all the time and they just forget about stuff they do well.
Blizzard has the best hot key tab targeting combat around. They also have the best dungeon and raid designers in the market. What they fail to do is have a system that invites players to learn how to do that content and then a system that rewards players for teaching or helping players in that content.
Blizzards issue right now is the casual player is getting trashed. Every single content creator is acknowledging this simple fact; that once you’re at the end of your covenant story, once you’re at the ilvl 200, if you don’t have a guild or RL friends to play with the game is pretty much over for you.
Want to go farm legacy content for legion gear? Well you can’t, WoW devs say you need a high ilvl to go do that, the casual player doesn’t have access to that. Want to go do the harder levels of Torg? Well it’s acknowledged that you need better gear, and again, ilvl comes into play.
Retail WoW is hands down the least player friendly MMORPG on the market and not in a good way. Think about for a moment—Classic WoW, Classic Mf’in WoW is a better casual experience vs Retail because of the time it takes to get to max level, and the simplicity of the content.
Retail WoW has a massive massive casual player content issue. The covenants system is supposed to give “Meaningful Choice” but we all only choose what yields the highest DPS. Players are meant to feel like the story is moving them along, yet WoW seems to only care about what high end players with the AoE cap are doing. WoW had become a game whose dev team looks at it and sees multiple problems but the only ones they address with any urgency are ones where if you’re in 227+ gear the content will get fixed faster.
Meanwhile things like Torg, Covenants, and Conduit power, things all claimed to help and be centered around a casual experience are rolled out and it’s clear there was no additional effort into developing those systems.
What WoW right now needs to figure out is they need to sit down and say we have good Dungeon, Raid, and sometimes PvP content. Okay how do we reward guilds and players for taking on new players or taking on players who struggle based off these stats and how do we incentivize them to want to try that content.
Guild finder—Trash.
LFG tool—Trash
Endgame content tutorials—Non Existent
The list can go on forever but it’s literally very clear right now the Dev team and the company as a whole doesn’t understand how to pull average Joe’s and new players to stay with their product. That applies to all of the blizzard properties and not just WoW. They need to go back to the drawing board. Look at what other games have done for their multiplayer experience, and try to figure out how to get new and struggling players into content they have a passion for designing. Otherwise it’ll be the same cycle again and again.
I’m not talking about a queable instance or any kind of combat necessarily. I’m talking about legitimately meaningful, one-time events. Like we could watch as Jailer raises Galakrond, or watch as Jailer literally pulls Korthia into the Maw, or he betrays and kills the Primus before our eyes. It feels real, since it only happens at that moment. People that don’t care for lore don’t have to show up, and there’s no requirement, but it’s just a cool new way to showcase the story of what’s happening
Things that are new are exciting. Things you have been doing for a long time not so much.
Disclaimer* Yes, there are things in life that just never get old but a game… Unless there are changes from time to time to spruce things up it does get stale.
edit: Another thought would be. I don’t think sliding the difficulty to harder would make the game more exciting. Maybe slightly more annoying? Trying to get to the world quest or flower\ore node and having to fight endlessly and to the top of your game every time? I’d have to strip off my gear and give it a whirl to see.
Change, development, fine.
Total upside down by retconning 20-year-old world and characters, no.
If it’s just Shadowlands and afterlife of Azeroth, adding more Titans, w/o retconning entire cosmic system or Sylvanas/Uther problem, I would be feeling fine. 
Honestly it sounds like you need to visit classic, it has some of the things you miss
I would but it lacks many of the things that were vast improvements.
All of those things were massive permanent additions to the game that made it better and provided tons of content. This is what we need more of in retail (new permanent systems that are not tied to raid, pvp or M+ progress.) Not reinventing the wheel every expansion.
This sums up everything I feel right now about wow.
If your not a Mythic raider or pushing 20+ keys then your problems can wait till next expansion or at best next patch. This is a company that makes billions annually how is it possible that they can’t find enough people to fix problems now. Especially when a CEO gets a 200 million as a bonus.
The mismanagement of WoW is so clear to everyone that the constant denial by the company is just baffling and face plant worthy.
Yep and across the board I’ve never seen video game content creators agree in unison about anything and they’re all on the same page that the interview Ion gave doesn’t really offer much for casual players and the biggest problem right now facing the game is how does WoW’s Dev team figure out how to do meaningful content for casual players that’s not using the current system of organized play, because currently it’s clear that the system works for a few but not for all and that’s reflected in the constant drop of players from the launch of the expansion.
I think part of the problem is that the devs who were willing to buck the system and wanted the game to head in a different direction left, whether willingly or not. Whats left is yes men, or those so burnt out they just don’t care anymore.
A dev team on a project this large and with this diverse of a player base needs to be diverse. They need casuals who never step foot into a raid but are passionate about pet battles and transmog, someone who is willing to devote the time it would take to create entirely new and independent systems. They need devs who solo que to +15’s and pug heroics as their end game.
They have had tons of brilliant ideas in the past that many of us casuals would love that got dropped because there wasn’t enough dev time. Which sadly points yet again to casuals being an afterthought to their true target audience.
WEE WOO WEE WOO
Excuse me, sir. You think you enjoy it, but you absolutely do not! Now carry on grinding RNG upgrades and snuff those dreams out this instant!
Judging by the forums, what players want is be able to teleport anywhere in the game, get mythic raid gear from world quests, and never die in PvP.
This is by far and away not the problem I have with current overworld in WoW. You can come across this on an under-geared character easily. Especially on a class that sucks.
The overworld in Shadowlands feels bad to me because it’s small, condensed, some things have you be dragged through a pack of elites to get. Having to fly through Oribos to get anywhere (I did not in anyway miss Vanilla flight point times). And the areas are instanced. Not open world. There aren’t a lot of quests.
If I want more challenging in WoW, I know where to find that easily.
no it aways upgrade the lowest ilvl one
Or you know just be able to fly there as its more engaging then a 10 min flight path that I AFK and then forget that I was supposed to even be playing as I’m now more interested in whatever TV show or movie I’m watching on my second monitor.
The possibility of random upgrades was nice. Now that there is no chance of that there is no reason to do WQ’s. They invalidated an entire area of content because some people felt like they were forced to do content that was beneath them. My primary problem with gear is the massive ilvl difference in gear, between any tier its not bad but comparing someone in WQ’s and mythic gear of the same spec and you are doubling their dps, add in the spec imbalance and it can be almost 400% difference.
Or just be able to have a fair fight instead of facing off against people in 226 gear. If I played against people of my own skill and or gear then it wouldn’t be a problem. This is how the ranking system was supposed to work, unfortunately its completely broken and you can expect to be farmed.
You can engage in reductio ad absurdum but it tends to read poorly.
I think MMO in general have this issue of the game starting at max level. I don’t have the solution to the problem but if you look at most AAA titles. The playthrough is the bulk of your game time. In MMO, that middle point is what is considered the grind which automatically pushes the majority of the player base to react negatively.
Watched a friend play for 10 minutes, was extremely bored and had no desire to try it. Just not my style of game. I’ve lost friends to it, but it’s ok. We still friends.
Didn’t really see similarities to early wow except learning a new game. I love learning curves but it didn’t interest me enough. Maybe another will come along, but not that one. Heh
Copy/Paste the LK formula.
That’s what this player wants.
You will get your wish soon enough. BC servers?
Next is LK servers