You want 9.0 to succeed? Revamp character progression

Community General Discussion
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TL ; DR All you have to do is give us a fun, customizable treadmill and we will happily fork over money while plodding along forever.

We already know they need to get classes right for 9.0. That’s a must. If they fail at that the expansion will be DoA. But getting that right isn’t enough. If they want loyal players spending big dollars, then we need to be invested.

You invest us by allowing deep progression, like we had in vanilla. I could choose to be an enchanter, and it would take hundreds of hours to find all the recipes. I could be a pvper, and grind BGs until my eyes bled. I could farm mooncloth for four hours a night until I got my moonsaber.

In BfA if I decide to become a miner or herbalist I can be done with the skill in ~2-3 hours, and that includes most of the tier 2 quests. If I love pvp I can do exactly one win a day, and then it makes no sense to even play. If I want to grind a faction rep I can do like 4 quests, and then I have to wait 24 hours.

You can no longer lose yourself in this game. Timegates break immersion, and immersion is the core of an MMO. I will buy every last expansion Guild Wars 2 produces. I will binge the crap out of it, beat it, and then quit til the next one.

But I’ll keep coming back.

After BfA I will never preorder another WoW expansion. Hell, I will never preorder another Blizzard product. Gone are the days where we can just assume it will be awesome.

You want to restore the damage to your brand? Give us fun. You know what’s fun? Pouring a meaningful amount of effort into an achievement we find meaningful, then moving on to another achievement.

You know what else is fun? Finishing a story. Do you know what artificial timegates in movies are called? Commercials. How do you think most people feel about commercials? Sure, you can use them, and they’ll get you some ad revenue, but eventually Netflix comes along and we give the cable companies the middle finger.

Don’t be the cable companies.

Let us progress. Don’t timegate story. Instead, make a GOOD story and give it all to us. Then, give us meaningful subsystems that will keep us engaged until the next story drop.

  • Make tradeskills deep and useful

  • Provide PvP vendors, and a system of progression.

  • Remove titanforging but keep warforging (I’d rather ditch it, but warforging is livable)

  • Continue benthic-like systems, refined until you’re happy with them

  • Continue M+ to keep the hardcore players happy

  • Make heroic and Mythic dungeons worth doing by not invalidating their gear with world quests. Make them steps leading up to M+ and raiding.

Basically, you want every type of player to have a means of progression. Casuals can work on benthic gear, or heroic / M0 dungeons, because their loot isn’t invalidated on the first day of a new expansion.

Veteran players and raiders can get a gear edge. They keep this gear edge. It isn’t eroded by doing a warfront every 3 weeks.

If you do this you will have set up a linear progression. I can take a new character through the whole thing at whatever pace I want, and odds are really high that the second I finish I’ll repeat it with an alt or three.

This is what fosters a healthy game. It’s why the game excelled during expansions with rich trade skills. People of all walks had a reason to play, and their collective efforts all fueled the same economy and culture.

You’ve removed pretty much all investment in BfA. I was so excited that guild #6 looked like a good fit, until I realized they log on for raids and nothing else. Why? Because investment is actively punished.

Fix that. Give us the tools to make an awesome experience, and you’ll see a renaissance in this game.

But be forewarned. If you do this by the numbers, and if timegating is the name of the game…you’re setting yourselves up for failure. Look at your competition. You are an MMO, not a mobile game, or a MOBA.

All this is just my opinion, obviously, but I remember what I love about classic. I know what I love in other MMOs. Please reward our investment, instead of punishing it.

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You know, and real fast I just want to say that this is a very well written thread. Good stuff.

Personally, I would LOVE to see progression in a “non-gear” related way. Right now the only real form of end game character progression is ENTIRELY gear related. I think that the Heart of Azeroth is a good first step back in the right direction but also kinda falls short.

What I would like to see, just to add on to many of the things you suggested, would be to see Spell Ranks come back in a way. Keep gear progression tied to what they are now but maybe make some epic, long, class EPIC questlines for each season that upon completion reward the player with new spell ranks for specific spells and then in the next expansion, for those who didn’t get them through the EPIC questlines, they can train them at max level as the next expansion starts it over again.

That’s just one example, I feel, on how to create more character progression outside of just gear.

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WOAH!

You have good ideas. Can we remove the LIES?

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Without the need of doing PVE to get gear that i can use on PVP.

Amem

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Well, isn’t this the cornerstone of RPGs?
I think it’s more ilvl related, this is the problem. ilvl is boring, and there seems to be no need to even pay attention to the item attributes, just make sure ilvl X is greater than y.

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Not all, in fact I can point to a time when this most certainly was not the case for WoW with the fact that the best ranks for some spells came from end game content.

The “cornerstone” of RPG’s is “Character Progression” which comes in many ways, some not even forums of direct power game. A good example would be things like getting access to mounts back in the day, more specifically faster mounts. Having access to new profession recipes, enchants (which I will expand upon in a second), ect. Even story progression can be character progression if it’s impactful to your character, going back to the focus on “RPG” or “Role Playing Game”

The cornerstone to RPG’s at the end of the day boil down to progressing your character if we are going to simplify it.

While I agree that homogenization is certainly a problem in many aspects I would also say that its a little more complex to pin upon such a specific singular point. I think “Character Progression” is a big focus but I would say that ilvl, gear homogenization to the point of basically only caring about ilvl, is certainly a part of that issue as a whole that has gotten worse over time. I can at least agree with that.

I do think that “Character Progression” as a whole should be looked at and that Blizzard should ask themselves internally what “Character Progression” means to them and to players.

Personally, it comes down to actively improving as we move forward. Always feeling like my character is growing in some way instead of being stuck in this back and forth boomerang of a loop that we are in now where each patch basically just resets the progression with gear being the literal only path of progression currently.

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These discussions always make me sad, because (to the best of my knowledge) the OP is not a game developer. These ideas, while succinct, are not unique. You cannot tell me that the company that made one of the most revolutionary MMO’s… EVER… don’t understand and agree with these points. That leaves you with 1 of either 2 options:

  1. Decisions about the greater aspects of the game are being made with bad information, and we are playing the results - Not likely, as I have no doubt Blizzard is more than capable of think-tanking these issues like none other.
  2. These facts are understood, and are being intentionally ignored in order to pursue a more lucrative (but only in the short-term) design approach.

What makes me as about these discussions is that, deep down, I know it’s option 2…

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No, but I feel that a lot of people can make the arguments that the leadership that existed in the early days is most certainly not the leadership that exists currently. That the viewpoints of the leadership has certainly shifted quite a bit.

I also think that really, at the end of the day, all we can do is speculate on that. I do think that making opinions known in a constructive manner, such as TC’s very well made post, doesn’t hurt anything and that discussion like these are good for the game to help show where the pulse of the community is.

That’s how I view it at least.

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Flying, stirrups, and hoofplates my dude. Would probably take 5+ hours without flying, but if it takes any longer you’re doing it wrong.

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The people currently running WOW are simply hitch-hikers on the success bus of WOW from vanilla to WotLK. Sure, it’s still coasting, but the teams there now have little insight into MMORPGs and why they used to hook people.

Just look at how little regard they have for the psychology of gaining power in an MMORPG: They’ve scaled everything to meet the player at his or her level. If people don’t understand how big of a deal this is, they’ll never understand why modern WOW is so tepid and does not feel epic or adventurous at all.

It’s a shame really.

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I am, actually. And a full time author with a fan base I answer to.

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Id like more RPG flavor brought back, yeah.

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Well, it’s good to see 2-3 turned into 5 hours.

Also good to see you added FLYING to the conversation which wasnt available until recently.

I feel like you’re catfishing me.

OHHH THAT’S what you really look like (1st date)

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Your misunderstanding isn’t on me, that’s on you.

My point was that professions are super easy to max out, and don’t build at all on what came before in previous expansions.

Are you trying to refute either one of those points, or just arguing to argue?

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But that’s my point though. What made Vanilla ↔ WotLK so good are, essentially, what Arkaad said.

  • Don’t needlessly gate story and lore
  • Allow for meaningful character progression
  • Introduce grinds that actually result in something tangible

It doesn’t take a genius to realize these aspects in a game. The groundwork is already there. They have a literal blueprint available to them to refer back to (Vanilla, BC, WotLK)!

Again, my issue is that it certainly appears as though the game is being intentionally self-sabotaged in an effort to maximize short term profits.

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So, here’s the thing.

Blizzard gives us timegates because they don’t want us finishing all the content at once. Whether you believe it’s because of that, or the whole “time /played” metric for investors, it both comes down to the same thing.

If you remove timegating, people will burn through it.
But they will do it again. And again. And again, all on alts.
It still all comes down to the same amount of time /played for the metrics, if not more because people want to do Professions on multiple characters, or finish questlines, or achieve goals on each one.

Timegating makes me feel nothing other than “I’ll finish it on one character and be done with it.”, because I get so salty about having to wait for weeks in order to finish it. By that time I’ve even forgotten half the quest line.
I’ve touched one alt this expansion, and that’s because I wanted to change my main, and this is due to all of the gating and horrendous per-character unlocks (Essences, Artifact Power).

If you remove timegating and let people grind their asses off with mobs or tabards for rep, or professions, or whatever goals you may have relating to transmog, titles, mounts…
They will play.

I want to play this game to have fun.
I want to play this game to achieve goals.
I do not want to play this game to finish my “WoW chores” (ie. Limited number of Rep quests) and log off because there’s nothing else to do.
And yes, I really do refer to them as chores.
I just don’t have any goals at the moment other than to raid.

No meaningful Professions, no Mage Tower-like scenarios/unlocks, Mythic+ has no rewards attached to it like Titles or Cosmetics, nothing.

They timegate the content they have because there is no content. They simply stretch it out to make it feel like there’s content.
I would have no issues with repeatable daily quests like we currently have if there were alternatives.

For something like Professions specifically, I leveled Cooking the other night on this character from 1-174 in 20 minutes.
That’s wrong.
If you can level up a Profession to max in twenty minutes, not only does that flood the market of the best items, but why even do it at all if I can just go buy the now cheap and worthless Food from this stupidly flooded market?
It’s a vicious circle.
Examples: See food and gems, which now cost essentially 10 gold each.

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There are two ways of doing it and both come with important restrictions.

Character progression tied to experience vs gear. The important restrictions apply to both.

  1. Succeeds expansion-dated content.
  2. Not subject to overhauls.

Why are these restrictions important? Because people feel like their progression has an expiration date which makes it pointless to pursue. Also they are overwhelmed by temporary gear additions that overhaul their rotations. I can tell you for sure as a 5 boxer I HATE expansion launch because it always means revisiting hundreds of macros. Then throw gear-related changes on top of it and it becomes a job. It’s not fun to keep track of.

Whether the progression is tied to gear or character it really needs to be long term, not subject to overhauls and certainly not expansion-dated content.

Then people would be fine with it. As stated prior if azerite gear were instead base items you got at level 10-20-30-etc and you simply improved on them and they were optional nobody would have a problem. The issue with azerite gear is it lasts a few days / weeks, completely changes rotations and is dead at the end of BFA.

That’s the worst kind of character progression model.

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Actually no, I just got my pvp friend on herbalism. Luckily I had made him a sky golem back in the day and it legit took him less than 3 hrs to lvl his herbalism and get up to rank 3

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Picked out a few statements there… This is why I go more for transmog and achievements these days. Everything else feels really pointless. I’ll run content as long as it’s fun but will absolutely not grind out the gear treadmill. There’s no point.

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I think they should look at alternate ability points like Everquest and Everquest 2 uses. Thats why both of those games can release an expansion without a level increase because they add new AA’s that give players power progression. Start off small simple things like purchase extra stats for AA points and can have them work into more interesting things. Some of them can simply be QOL improvements like permanent run speed increase (speed stat) or lower CD on hearthstones.

Also can incorporate them into tradeskills. Have AA’s that increase your chance to produce higher tier item (armor/weapons) or maybe chance at refunding material.

This would give people something worthwhile to grind for at max level. Oh and don’t take these away at the end of each expansion.