If you have a character at level 80 in the next expansion, you unlock an account-wide progression system for your account.
Every character you create (alts) will contribute towards the same progression.
The first time you log in to your pre-existing characters once this system is in effect, you’ll notice a change to various in-game features such as Reputations and Gold. They’ll be the same as on your main character.
Features impacted by this system include:
Collections (already a thing)
Achievements (already a thing)
Gold
Reputations, Renown, and various sub-systems such as Friendship and Loyalty
Professions (per profession, includes unlocked plans and skill level)
Currencies
Campaign progress and Quests
Attunements and feature unlocks
Legacy features such as Artifacts (per class) and Garrisons
Because players may occasionally want to replay a particular piece of content on a new or existing character, I also propose the following:
Every Reputation and similar feature where it is logically applicable, you can se both your account-wide progress and your individual character’s progress. Simpy hover the mouse cursor over it and (optional) toggle a switch to view your character’s progress.
A new quest marker will appear in the game, highlighting quests completed by at least one of your characters previously. In case you have no interest in re-playing these quests or viewing their markers, you can choose not to track them on your map or hide them entirely in the game settings.
Characters should probably be level 10 before they can take part in account-wide progression. Just to ensure the initial starter experience for new characters remains somewhat engaging and unique.
What this results in, is this:
You can play whichever character you like. They’re all your mains!
Never feel like you’re forced to retread old ground, restart your progress or lose your time investment (unless you want to).
Nah, this isn’t 2004 and the main demographic is no longer made up of 19-year olds with all the free time in the world.
We’re parents, we’re workers, and we’re people who have a ton of different hobbies, games we want to play, and things to do with our time.
Whenever we sit down to play WoW, we should be able to pick freely which one of our characters we’d like to play and still feel like we’re working towards our goals.
More or less fine as is, you can send it to alts, although there are realm restrictions - I suppose to maintain some kind of control on economies? Needs further discussion.
No thanks. a lot of players wish to keep their alts separate in this regard.
Pretty much everything sold by a faction should be Account Bound though, especially Proff recipes. Although I’d conceed to having this be for legacy content only if push came to shove.
Not the Profession Skills. I think recipe unlock being Account Wide could work, maybe.
I do think that Cooking and Fishing could be made Account Wide now. They are a hobby really at this stage and Pet Battles work Account Wide. My fisher and cook are my Pally alt and I don’t want to start doing those on this char so I’m kind of stuck not doing them as by the time I level my alts I usually run out of enthuses for Fishing and Cooking, I will end up going back and doing past expansion cooking as a thing to do eventually.
I do think there should be fewer currencies and the ones we have should be mostly Account Wide or even made Account Wide late in an expansion or when it’s Legacy. I have some many Order Resources etc on some characters and some alts could use them to do Legion stuff.
Not so sure. Does this mean you can only do a quest once? I wouldn’t like that. I want to be able to quest through an area / expac on my alts.
Campaigns should have skips or be opened up so every chapter is available at once to be replayed.
The Linear on-rails campaigns are fine the first time through but are quite tedious upon repetition.
Agreed. These should be Account Wide, mostly are these days thankfully.
Yeah, always bugs me on alts that I have to fork out a bunch of gold to buy Garrison Building Plans every time. These should have been Account Wide. The Achievement for learning all the Plans isn’t account wide either, so I have to buy them all on one character even though that character won’t build those structures whilst my alts want to build those structures but can’t.
I do agree that plenty more could (and should) be Account Wide, it should be the default position for most aspects of the game. The question should be is there a good reason to not make this account wide, and this answer should be no most of the time
Saying that I wouldn’t go as far as you suggest.