Been thinking over what is really lacking in WoW, at least for me there is 2 major factors in why I do not play it like I used to.
Community. WoW used to be all about community. You basically needed to have a guild to run content. People who were kind, helpfull, etc were known to others on the server. You’d build relationships with people in chat, etc. To this day I not only talk to friends I made back then on WoW but we still remembers others, or things like certain people in chat etc. This stuff doesn’t happen anymore because of CRZ and the ability to just transfer/rename etc whenever. Honestly I don’t know how this can be fixed because it would mean losing a ton of QoL. I think they could push community content/events but don’t have much in terms of specific ideas.
As for the other major issue…I have a lot more to say.
What happened to the WORLD in World of Warcraft?
We have not really had any reason to go back into older zones since Cataclysm. You level a character, which these days you may get through 2-3 zones and you’ll out level that content and move on to ‘current’ content. Sure sure, i can go back and do all the quests. 1 shotting every mob. Really boring. Why not scale up old world content to give us fresh ways to go back and re-explore old areas, factions, stories? Take the Maruuk Centaur moving quest hub for inspiration. Could have a traveling quest hub that goes around to older zones and helps the factions there resolve issues, could be old ones or new ones. We have this GIANT world, and even have new ways to travel around it. But, no reason to go anywhere besides the latest zones. We’ve seen this done, but they only do it for one off events for some reason. Legion/primalist invasions. The Nzoth thing (patch number is escaping me). This game has so much lore, content, and world that just gets completely ignored. When I talk to newer players, many of them do not even know some of these places exist, never mind the story to them. They may run through a dungeon and never even know why they were there.
Chromie time is a step in the right direction but once you hit 60 it forces you out. Which is lame lol I had forgotten about Fiona, yeah that kinda thing could be expanded across many zones.
It doesn’t have to be the caravan thing either. Could simply have a quest giver in a main city. Could be the new content city like Valdrakan, or perhaps at the Stormwind/Orgrimar embassies, which makes a lot of sense lorewise. These groups would appeal to an embassy for aid. Then weekly or perhaps bi-weekly have a quest pop up there like "the scourge have been acting up in the plaguelands, go there and help the Argent Crusade get things back under control. This could lead to a new/reused quest hub with some scaled questing and a little way to get old reps up without mindless farming outdated content. So much could be built up around this idea. Mini dungeons/scenarios involving long forgotten characters/factions and so much more.
When I saw the two paladins as expedition guards I was hoping the Caravan would get back on the road but I haven’t found Fiona in the isles
Also I feel like a compromise position where you unlock Chromie time to the current level cap for your alts after either hitting 70 on your main or finishing the new expansion MSQ would make sense.
I’ve tried. But with dungeon finder, and cross realm groups no one really bothers with guilds anymore. Like I said that isn’t really an easy fix because that is on the players.
I miss the days of Fire Mage radio and all the content creators around WoW like Nyhm and Oxhorn lol.
We’ve got from two distinct continents to some kind of archipelago.
We could connect with the world by holding content in it. If every new patch takes us to a new pocket dimension, the world will never be bigger than 1 patch.
That’s not a problem with World of Warcraft, that’s just the cultural shift of the internet as a whole. The internet was a large online chat room back when massively multiplayer online games like World of Warcraft became popular. There was downtime in play to allow chatting. But as the technology and gameplay evolved, the direction shifting to faster and more active gameplay leaving less and less room for chatting. The social aspect has also moved off online games and onto social media and other third party websites like Discord and these very forums.
We’re exploring a new part of the world in every expansion, sometimes multiple parts and multiple worlds.
And Cataclysm is the reason why; constantly updating the game world to reflect the current in-game time takes a lot of time and effort which would take away from developing new areas in the game world.
tbf the island expansions are, for the most part, not to scale on the world map, and three of the four big continents were known since 3. Pandaria almost ended up being a small island chain too (but iirc that didn’t happen because Samwise Didier didn’t like the idea of Pandaren being faction exclusive)
