What classic WoW and the recent hardcore trend have highlighted is a gap in the market for Blizzard.
Players want more influence and nuance over their experience. The reason why private servers are so popular for specific communities is that they offer granularity i.e. deeper roleplay elements, harsher experiences, and/or the ability to play around with things that aren’t usually possible.
World of Warcraft, after nearly 20 years, is the perfect sandbox game for custom content. Blizzard should focus on catering different experiences to different player types/styles OR allow a sort of open development kit for making specific server types all under the same subscription costs.
I think giving players the opportunity to shape their own experience is a really novel and interesting approach that could easily become an overnight success. In fact, I do believe that given enough time, A.I. will be able to create and/or facilitate the ability to make designer experiences for specific players – whether Blizzard decides to implement this or not is up to them.
It’s hard to find even 2 players who want the same, how are you going to find enough players with the same preferences to fill an entire custom server?
Are you willing to pay for a specific server (to the tune of thousands of $ + running costs) for just yourself or a handful of others and how they want to play?
Are you also going to pay for the dev time for blizz to implement the features wanted? which ultimately takes away from main wow?
Also how many ‘versions’ of wow do you want? 10? 50? 20? 10,000?
Its a non starter i think. While some features should be implemented for things like deeper RP it shouldn’t take away from other and more important developments for he overall game.
Let’s say we give the ability for open development by the player base – you could implement server lists that highlight certain metrics and features. The most popular and/or inventive creations will of course rise to the top over time and thus, create specific categories that players find exciting.
It’s sort of why Argent Dawn is the most popular RP server – people know that they’re going to find certain elements and a living breathing world that they can enjoy.
You could easily issue an option for crowdfunding your favorite server and/or monetization options – I don’t think it’s as hard as you would imagine.
Like I say, if Blizzard doesn’t do it, A.I. will eventually allow players to make hyper-focused games. Its a case of whether Blizzard want to capitalise on that or not.
Pretty sure laws will be implemented to give carte blanch ownership to the IP holder when AI develop content on the back of it.
A game like wow (i.e. an mmorpg) should not and i dont think will ever be an ‘open source create what you want’ game. If you want that stick to to minecraft/arc/rust/skyrim and all the other games that were specifically designed to be moddable.
I want a survival server. No major links between the player and the macro-story. You are little more than a murder-hobo NPC trying not to starve on his way to Ironforge from Stormwind.
Even if they rent out servers to streamers they still would have to stay under blizzards rules if they are official servers.
After all otherwise goverments might start to blame blizz for the 18+ servers despite the 13+ rating. Or other degeneracy wich might occur on private servers wich might not be the image blizz wants