Sharding/Phasing
Solution: Phasing should be invisible when it doesn’t matter, but locked when it does matter.
a) Lock us in the shard we started a certain activity in, at least until the activity is over, be it fighting a rare, participating in a world event, or mining a node.
b) Alternatively or perhaps additionally, provide us with a phase or layer map where we can see in which phase a certain rare is up.
c) Also, when you get invited to a group, you do not get removed from a phase until you are out of combat or an activity has ended.
CRZ, Toxicity and Facelessness.
Solution: Consolidate servers to encourage meaningful community-building once again.
a) Reserve CRZ tech only for extremely high-traffic events like world bosses or expansion launches.
b) Server consolidation should be done in a way that getting grouped with people from another realm via the Dungeon Finder is an exception and not the rule.
c) Cross-realm invites would still work and manual grouping with everyone you wanted would not be made unavailable.
Arbitrary Timegating
Solution: A new patch should be a banquet, not drip-fed crumbs gated for artificial subscription retention reasons.
a) If staggering content makes sense from a story perspective, tie it to it in a way that makes sense, e.g. Suramar. Having different servers work together to unlock the next phase by participating in different activities would be wonderful.
Counter-argument: “If everything dropped at once, you’d whine there’s nothing to do.”
Prompt Takedown: People should be able to pace their own fun and content cadence should not align with the lowest common denominator. Besides, whining would occur regardless.
Advertisement Overload:
LFG channels clogged with carry-selling bots; newcomers finding themselves amidst the Services channel spam; buying carries (and tokens) as a shortcut to get to the meat of the content being normalized.
Solution:
a) Smarter and proactive moderation, not semi-automated systems depending on report input.
b) Or a better-designed LFG interface that prevents accounts with certain characteristics to engage with it.
c) Disable the Services channel for newcomers until a thematic tutorial has been passed so players know what they are getting into
d) Also disable advertising for trial accounts and accounts below a certain level / threshold
e) encourage legitimate progression by offering optional “mentor boosts” or something similar where after the run the player can rate the guild or group/players that “constructively carried” them. This should probably be tied into a commendation system, which is topic for another day.
Counter-argument: “Carries and boosting has always existed”
Takedown: It is a matter of degree/extent/scale, as well as visibility. It is of course part of each online multiplayer game, but it has become a pervasive issue only in the last five years or so.
Vote-Kick Loophole.
Players can get the boot over the slightest blip or just on a whim, accompanied with a 30-min Dungeon Deserter debuff. Players can also be removed from the instance after combat has ensued.
Solution:
a) At no point should a player ever be kicked if an encounter has already been engaged. b) Even more, implement smart systems that detect whether the player is up to par for the difficulty being run or not.
c) Also implement checklist-based reasons, for which a revisory team or something similar will be appointed to punish false kicks, with increased severity as they keep troll- or ego-based vote kicking other players.
d) A more extreme measure, and perhaps only reserved for repeat offenders, is to provide a visible log of vote-kick actions for accountability. A wall of shame.
e) And something you can hotfix in right now and show us you can do better, is by reducing the dungeon deserter debuff duration to at least half of what it is now.
f) Also, show on the vote kick UI or in the chat who initiated the kick. This could tone down the abuse cases.
Counter-argument: “Blizzard representative literally said on this very forum that I can kick you for whatever reason possible, get over yourself, it is not a loophole.”
Takedown: That doesnt make the behavior healthy or fair. Just because a blue post confirms a feature that can be weaponized and keeps being weaponized to troll and harass others, or because you personally are not happy with the way someone is playing, doesn’t make it eternal or immune to revision.
Counter-argument: “But others in the party clicked yes so they agreed they should be kicked”.
Takedown: Yes is often clicked just to get the UI element out of the way, or to avoid drama and just continue the run. It all ties perfectly into earlier points about anonymity and treating other players like means to an end instead of opportunities to show great character or build lasting connections, which the abolition of CRZ would also encourage returning to, as mentioned above.
Bugocalypse.
Solution:
a) Invest in QA, rehire the guys you fired if they are not employed right now and double their salaries.
b) Slow down the content release cadence and release patches only when stable with as much polish as possible.
Botting and RMT
Solution:
a) Investments in smarter pattern recognition to detect all sorts of bots.
b) Make use of machine learning and utilize anomaly scoring to prevent actual players getting suspended.
c) Issue immediate bans for confirmed bot activity instead of waiting for “another wave”, a narrative you can stop hiding behind.
e) Hire an actual team responsible for bot deterrence and elimination. Upscale.
Communication.
Developers only really interact with “influencers” and streamers and Youtubers etc. This means that legitimate complaints are swept under the rug unless a streamer blows up about them. There is also reason to believe they have struck public-private partnerships.
Solution:
a) Commit to honest and frequent communication with the players.
b) Post reliable updates, highlight less viral issues and actually follow through.
c) Hire a developer for each class and have them communicate on the class forums.
d) Bring back communication to your own platform.
e) Reveal to your players the full extent of the public-private partnership deals.
Economy and Gold-making.
Repair bills keep rising, gold is more difficult to come by and alts are seen as a natural part of it, all the while token purchases are being blatantly incentivized, making it harder for players to sustain themselves in-game without paying real money.
Solution:
Obviously I would not implement all of these at once, but the solutions are aplenty.
a) Bring back emissary-style quests that can be hoarded (up to 7 for example, or 4) so players have predictable gold income.
b) Make all world quests reset daily again, barring some exceptions.
c) Increase the number of gold-awarding world quests across the board.
d) Increase the number and variety of world quests by 100-200%.
e) Restore gold rewards from Dragonriding Races to pre-nerf values.
f) Make raid and dungeon bosses, as well as M+ end-of-run chests drop substantially more gold and/or consumables so engaging in the content I choose to engage in covers most (not all) of my expenses.
g) Disable AH addons and discourage the AH-minigame and whaling at others´ expense.
Counter-argument: “Gold inflation will destabilize the economy”
Takedown: Bots and AH addons and whatnot already do it. I would argue the problem is worse than it was when we had command tables and emissary quests.
There is more but that will have to suffice for now.