I don’t understand folks who think like that. WoW is an mmorpg, notice the three letters at the end. RPG as in stuff like D&D or Pathfinder, you do stuff like killing monsters and doing quests, you get gear and levels: you get more powerful. You start off by saving the goat of Joe the Farmer from the local goblins, you end up defeating a lich or something.
Like it or not, rpg are built upon a reward system. Beating ennemies make you stronger, which allow you to move on to greater challenge, and so on and so forth. And that’s this core design principal that was then translated into video games when they started to make rpg for PCs and consoles.
And eventually, this same principle was applied when making mmorpgs, gaining levels and getting loot to progress to the next, biggest challenge. And maybe you don’t like it, and it’s fair to each their own, but why are you here ? Why play a plateformer if you don’t like to jump around ? Why play a shooter if you don’t like aiming and shooting ? And most of all why try and change a game into something else entirely just because you don’t like it, ruinning it for those who do like it in the process ? Why not just stop playing ?
“I don’t like aiming, so I am gonna go on the destiny forums and ask the dev to make it so I can get the best gear by playing football in the tower.” Go play fifa my dude.
Now you may reply that you would prefer different reward structures, something more akin to a single player game like skyrim for example. But that woul be forgetting a few things. For once, wow’s gameplay doesn’t really fit that type of game. It’s a tab targetting system, it has almost no mechanical skills involve, things like aiming for example. You click on the mob, you press a button and the mob goes dead. You want to parry in skyrim ? You have to press the parry button at the right time, you want to parry in wow ? Press a cooldown.
That’s not to say wow is easier than single player rpgs, more that their difficulties are different. WoW’s difficulty is mostly based on knowledge. Knowing your class, knowing the encounter and it’s mechanics. Even in pvp, which would be the closest thing to a more mechanical difficulty most of your skill depends on what you know. Knowing the ennemy’s class, it’s composition, what kind of set-ups they do and how to counter them, knowing how to best do your own set ups against them. To use my previous example, in skyrim the difficulty is in how to parry (doing it at the right frame), in WoW it is in deciding when to parry.
So where am I going with this ? WoW gameplay is at it’s worse, most boring when it requires no previous knowledge. You just walk to the mob, click it and press a button and it goes dead. Literally a point and click adventure, in fact you could argue point and clicks are harder than world content since you can actually loose in them. What makes an encounter interesting is the mechanics, learning them and executing them properly. You may not like that type of gameplay, and it’s fair, but putting them on the same level as killing boars in Elwynn is disingenuous and simply wrong. Dungeon and raid fights are games you can dislike, open world content is a non-game, it’s moving around on a map and doing a few clicks here and there like some idle mobile phone game.
So you can’t really make a reward structure like in a single player rpg, at least not in the current form of the open world. Because at this point you might aswell ask for mythic gear from mission tables (hello WOD), that’s pretty much the same thing in terms of challenge and difficulty. Fel with the current mission tables you could argue they are more difficult than world content because there is some degree of strategy to them.
So the open world would have to be changed, like by giving it soloable bosses but with actual mechanics. Like mini mage towers. But then we would be back to square one with people unable, or unwilling to do that content and complaining about it.
You will never get high end pvp or raiding gear by killing boar in Elwynn, no I don’t care how many emissaries you did it doesn’t mean you should get Sylvannas’ bow. Because doing so would go against everything that makes rpgs what they are, and why people enjoy them. I often read those people saying stuff like: “you only play for the rewards” and it’s partially true, doing harder content to get better rewards is one of the main reason I enjoy this game. And I am playing the right game for it, an rpg played with large groups of other people. You are asking for another game, and trying to ruin it for those who actually enjoy it. You are trying to take away the ball from the fifa soccer field because you don’t like running.