Hey Blizz,
I really hope you will be reading this, as I love the Warcraft franchise and the games, and I think you have some low hanging fruits to pick to improve the engagement with WoW.
Your character designers and writers spends a ton of time on building this amazing universe with a bunch of cool characters, and I think on a fundamental what WoW is about, is to let us players participate in thIs world, with our own personal uniques characters that fit into this lore. However, you don’t really truly allow this in your systems.
For every cool character your team designs, the players can only make a watered down version, because of all these limitations.
First, there are the names. Players can only use single word names and no special characters. It seems weird, when I don’t know how many NPC’s have names composed of more than one word, like Jaina Proudmoore, Anduin Wrynn, Sylvanas Windrunner, and the list goes on.
In addition, it Is almost the normal to have apostrophes in the names of elves, demons, gods, etc., and again this is not possible for players.
Then when it comes to races, again players are very limited, compared to the multitude of awesome races in Warcraft lore.
It is not possible to play undead types like Nathanos, Sylvanas or Calia, but only possible to be the basic half-rotten Forsaken.
I think there are a ton of players who love to be able to be one of those undead types that the really special NPCs are. It also seems weird to me that all the really legendary Forsaken NPCs are of a different kind than what the players can be. One could almost think the designers don’t like the standard race design, because they build characters on everything else.
Same goes for High Elves and Mok’Nathal. Where you have amazing characters like Alleria and Rexxar, but players cannot build characters like those, we can only get some of the way with a lookalike race, that kind of is, but still isn’t.
Same case for the Tinker class, that I think players have been waiting for since forever. You have NPC’s like Mekkatorque in their awesome mecha-armor, but we can only have it as a mount, or be an engineer to get somewhat close to that class. I don’t think anyone would disagree that a very cool class design could be based on the Tinker, and yeah I am still waiting on it.
My point is, you are designing and developing all these great things within the game and lore, but a lot of this is not getting out to the players, for us to play with. It only becomes something we can look at, but not play with. Which is kind of sad, because this is a game, not a movie.
In the end, what I just want to say is. I love your stuff, and I would love if it became possible to engage even more with it. Without having to wait 6 years for you to release it over three additional expansions.