While thinking about the hypothetical WoW reset, I’ve just heard about, and about the possibility of a WoW2, maybe I have a suggestion for questing.
First, I preferred the low amount of quests and the longer time it took for quests in Classic. It had more of an adventurous feel to it. Secondly, I really dislike the questhub design with tons of kill/fetch quests I don’t even read.
Solution, have us make our own quests.
Preamble. If you were to recreate WoW. F.i., you want to restart with Classic revamped, redesigning the zones and towns (upgrading the art etc., but keep the style ofc). I would enlarge all the zones 10x and just like in Classic have travelling be a thing. I know that modern youth grows up in an instant world, where everything is accessible now and your reward is never more than 10 seconds away, but I assure you that taking in the sights, listening to the sounds and music, and actually chatting with your travel companions is so much more rewarding, if you open yourself up to it. Instead of leveling up to 100 in Diablo 4 within a week and now starting to chew up the carpet because you have nowhere to go, pauze, breathe, “stay A WHILE and listen”.
How questing would work.
First, there would be story quests, just like you do now, that take you through the story arch. They could include attunement quests.
Secondly, you would have bounty lodges. You can turn in many different drops from mobs (ears, paws, tails, scales, scalps, medallions, etc) from mobs all over the world for other resources of your choosing (gold, profession mats, etc) and turn ins would increase your faction with a particular lodge.
The other thing you could do in a lodge is negotiate contracts. You could choose to do something (kill certain endbosses in dungeons or raids, gather a certain amount of resources, kill a certain amount of mobs, etc), and negotiate a reward to complete the task and even set a timeframe for an increased reward. If you complete it you are rewarded with x, if you fail the timer f.i. you are rewarded with x-1, if you excel you are rewarded with x+1. A reward could be gold, but could also be an item (f.i. an item you would nowadays be able to buy from the faction vendor at a certain standing) that you would be able to define (“I want an axe for an orc prot warrior”).
You would start off by choosing the reward, then that reward would get weighed towards the task you’d need to perform to get it. Let’s say you want an epic axe at your lvl, and you want to kill boars for it. Well, weighed, the game would suggest you’d need to kill 10.000.000 lvl 1 boars for it, with no timer set, or only 2.000.000 if you manage the task in an hour. Surely, you know that’s not reasonable, so you would look what else you can do. How about killing mobs at my lvl? The game would suggest you kill 500 of a certain mob at your lvl with no timer, or you can slide the timer bar to where it says 150 mobs within 2 hours. A bit risky, a tight timer if solo, but could be done. You get it done, the axe is yours, you have half an hour to spare and the axe will roll +1, you fail the timer, the axe might turn out rare instead of epic.
The goal is that you can set up your own game however you want. You can choose where ever you want to go in the world, explore (exploring contracts could exist), and do whatever you feel like for however long you choose. You want to go grind 10 hours in a desert and clear all the burrows of gnolls, get a contract for a 1000 gnolls and reap a reward for what you choose to do.
Increasing in faction standing would open up more choices, as would your knowledge of the world. F.i. while you grinded gnolls for 10 hours in the desert, you came accross minibosses or rares or elites. When you discovered them, your travel log made a note, and now when you visit a lodge, you can open contracts for kills with those specific mobs, or maybe they just unlock at a certain faction standing.
The rewards get also more interesting with higher standing, and the highest standing would open up very interesting rewards (maybe dropchance buffs for legendary raid gear or specific epics).
Now, you no longer need to go back and forth to a questhub. You can plan your day, get a few contracts, set out, play all day, come back after a days hard work and reap in all the rewards.
No longer is any reward obsolete to you or not interesting, because YOU choose it.
No longer are you locked to the same zone, or competing for the same spawns, because you choose where you go and what you do.
The world is your oyster.