I am really curious as to what your ideal MMORPG (read: WoW 2/“fixed” WoW) would look like?
Just some ideas/questions to get you started. Feel free to answer in your own way/add stuff:
Players
Can they be changed or should they stay the way they are? Can you somehow control the min-maxing? Some of the more agressive behavior? What kind of enviroment is needed to forster “good” players? (hard? easy?)
Classes
More? Less? Skill, spell and talent earning the way it is current or different? Evoling skills? Elite classes/Evolving classes? How do you deal with the min-maxing or “antifun” mechanics in classes?
World
Layers fixed the “waiting for a questmob” stuff, but make the world feel rather empty. How do you get people outside in your world? What kind of biomes are missing?
Gear/Items
Is it necessary/the only goal of an MMORPG? Can you go without or with everybody having similiar gear?
Story
Good? Do we need better writers? Not too many different people with different ideas? Maybe a professional author? What should be done with the named NPCs? What stories are still not fixed?
Players:
A “fixed” WoW would enforce very strict rules against toxic/aggressive behavior. Like in Final Fantasy (so I heard, they give bans quite easily so ppl learned to behave and be polite). However, knowing that Blizzard cares more about toxic players’ money than does Final Fantasy, I kinda doubt a fixed WoW would go that far so to sacrifice their beloved money so to create a friendly non-toxic community.
I don’t think min-maxing should be controlled/limited, but the game should also give a better environment to the “middle ground” types of players, casual but not that much casual, if you get my meaning. M+ would have been the middle ground environment, but it being timed and keys downgrading, it instead creates anxiety and toxicity.
Classes
Here I am pretty much OK with how things are currently.
World.
Completely agree with Keyur. Immersion is not created by forcing people to ground mounts. It’s created by giving them something interesting, engaging and fun to do in the open world.
Gear
For me it’s very important. I just love the feeling of getting gear upgrades and becoming stronger. That’s why games like GW2 are not for me. Gear is not the only goal but is one of the major goals of an MMORPG. Gear = power.
Story
Do we need better writers? I’d say we need writers, not that which we have currently. I think this sums up well what I think of the current story.
But in general, for me a perfect MMO would be WoW on the level of quality of woltk, with the graphics like Black Desert Online.
Min/maxing Exist in every MMO at some point tbh, if you think its not that you are a casual.
that is good enough in wow.
Gear is the only thing that players only want to play an mmo. so yes Gear must be their dont be that guy that says ‘stop being prejudice about gears.’. pretty normal people want the best but i do think the best gear needs to come from Raiding, M+. PvP
f you cant make good story - dont butcher story. In wow lore most thing copied from LOTR and all. Initially dev made a good lore(warcraft, starcraft 1 2 3) even without good writers. Then they hired professional writers - butchered lore completely. Freaking lore experiment every where - "hey guys lets make Sylvanaas bich and lets see how fan reacts? "
Every MMO Copies something from another MMO and tbh its pretty normal because some other company has maybe a better approach to a system like Gearing, Classes, or Instanced PvE gameplay.
EvE online basics but fantasy setting with no micro transactions.
You die you loose all your gear, players can steal all your stuff, ransom you, scamming is legal, players make 90% of everything in the game, players can make guilds, guilds can form alliances and alliances own land, players can fight over this land.
Classes arnt a thing really, you train into what you want to do, mold your character to what you want to do rather than pick exactly what you are from the start.
This is so easy question to answer. Everything comes from good story, that’s the basis of a good game.
Sorry this came a bit short.
A good story is like a seed that you plant in the ground and wait for it to grow. A good story grows leaves on a tree and its roots spread far into the production of the game. The creators of the game are able to pick up many kinds of things for the game. The table of contents of the game, especially at the beginning of the production phase, is a really important formula to show the direction of the game’s development.
I don’t think a direct comparison to FFXIV is really fair in this case.
FFXIV’s playerbase is kept apart for most of the game - there is no universal chat channel and after you leave the new player channel that’s it for any group chat outside of dungeons/raids. FFXIV is in essence a single player game which funnels you through the story with occasional 4 man on-rails dungeons.
There are strict rules on harassment (and add-on use) etc - but they are maintained by a very twitchy player base who will report you for the slightest of grievances meaning that it is prudent to just not engage with anyone.
Also all of the LFR/LFD equivalent content - i.e most of it - is designed to be incredibly easy and there is absolutely no need to engage at all with anyone.
You could argue that this is a good thing - but it shows how difficult it is to maintain a player base that has to interact/want to interact vs one that doesn’t need to.
Also, before the Shadowlands/Blizzard implosion FFXIV was a much smaller game than WoW… the migration of players a year or so ago really did upset the balance there. Having to manage more players will be a challenge and require a different approach to the status quo - though that said the player retention of those who ‘left’ WoW has been a bit overstated imo.
Interesting what created such a player base then? In WoW if someone is verbally attacked (not saying about real abuse, but for example being called bad, noob, etc) rarely others react to defend the person, what to say about reporting.
FFXIV was never dealing with the numbers that WoW was - the community was much smaller, insular and the content that the majority of people engage with doesn’t really have any consequences for failure and failure rarely happens.
I’ve never seen anyone being called out for anything because the majority of content (outside of pre-formed groups for the harder content) doesn’t create a situation where there would be a reason to.
This changes as the player base grows… it’s just the way it is. The mood changes the more people you have in a given space.
Players
They could kill min maxing by having many viable options for different gameplay ?
We also need a welcoming, non burned out community.
Classes
Make sure the ones we currently have feel good to play and aren’t left behind. Looking at you shadow priest…
Also low actions per minute options for players with arthritis.
3.World THIS is critical ! spacious, immersive, FULL of players at all levels finding interesting stuff to do, gather, interact with npcs/scenery and explore.
eg) I love cooking in GW2 (even tho game advised not to) always something to gather and recipes are intuitive. Don’t need to read a guidebook to get started and feel some progress.
Would like to see profession villages where players can interact with each other/npcs and create items for quests, selves or slowly upgrade each village appearance (only shard the buildings not the players).
Make crafted items have a limit on player to player sales to discourage bots, but able make plenty for own account alts to use/wear.
Seasonal regular quest markets or fayres ?
Option to join a travelling group of npc ‘actors’ and help with mini shows at villages maybe ?
Scribe/Herbalist crafted dyes to use with self crafted armor (only).
Gear/Items
I am not a fan of the loot focus in Wow, as long as an item prevents me from getting constantly flattened or looks nice, all good.
Unusual/rare looks are nice to get, but not if it impacts and pushes unhealthy game play. Less FOMO not more !
Story
I like the clear organisation, occasional choice and on demand access of the main basic storyline in GW2.
In contrast Wow is messy, convoluted and requires a degree in Wowhead to navigate complex questlines.
I like side stories if there are interesting things to do. WQ are great for quick play, but the limited choice makes it boring and causes burnout imv.
Open World - Events/World events & World Bosses(on a timer), Jumping puzzles, Ground racing, Glider racing (gw2 does these 4 great. It has the best open world)
Instanced PvE content - solo content (mage tower/brawler’s guild), dungeons (Time Walking/M+), 15 men raids
PvP - It must be scalable. I love how gw2 did it.
Realm VS Realm VS Realm - Battle between 3 servers
Vanilla WoW didn’t have a big epic story, and that’s why WoW’s story was the best back then. In an MMORPG, the game world should make the players feel like they’re living in it. That doesn’t work if everyone’s THE CHAMPION / THE MAWWALKER. The epic stories that Blizzard added to WoW and forcefully shoved down everyone’s throat in the last few expansions felt terribly out of place. The way Jaina, Thrall, Sylvanas, Anduin, etc. stand in the same location for 2 years, repeating the same cringey lines over and over again, teleporting around and never ending a battle, completely breaks immersion and makes it obvious that this is just a silly video game story.
In vanilla WoW, stories were mostly just told via quest texts. They didn’t get in your face. They weren’t annoying. It was background decoration that made the world feel more Warcrafty. Even though the stories were just as static as they are now, they didn’t feel so stupid and artificial back then because Blizz kept the stories simple and didn’t try to force out attention on them.
Most importantly to me I’d say would be to make the world feel more alive and not static like we have today. Doing things out and about should matter more and we should be able to see the difference. Loved how the Molten Front worked where you’d progress and the nature would expand the higher your rep became. Something like that but on a MUCH grander scale, zone-wide even.
The world feels underutilized. But I’m glad Dragonriding seems to be using it which is nice.
For me a good MMO is one that has a lot of content I can do on my own. And now you might be like “Well play single player games then, MMOs are meant to be played with others”. Sure and I love doing dungeons and other group content in every MMO I play… but if all I can do is play when other people have the time the game isn’t worth my time.
They won’t change, WoW has become more performance orientated than for entertainment. The min-maxers won’t stop also for the same reasons. Aggressive players can’t be stopped entirely but making suitable punishments would be a good thing. Blizzard stepping in too much would cause for the game to be so bad that coughing at the wrong time would be deemed ban/silence worthy, given how they moderate the forums (when they do) its apparent that they have no clue on how to fix things like this.
It’s always nice to get new classes (whether needed or not) but you don’t want so many that spells/abilities are homogenized when they should feel unique to the class. As for the talent trees, the original style and the incoming style are far better than the ‘pick one out of three’ trees that we have at the moment, even though meta/cookie cutter builds will always exist the new trees give more customisation than the current ones too.
The outside world needs more unique content, the most unique stuff that has happened in recent years has been assaults but WoW needs to go further than this. Even though I say this there will be players who won’t do much open world content still because they’re into content like Arenas/M+ etc which is all instanced.
We currently have too many different levels for gear, mainly because there are 4 difficulties of raids and numerous levels for M+. There needs to be more simplicity to how many levels of gear there are per season.
Story needs to feel like it’s a part of the WoW universe, its why Shadowlands didn’t feel good to many people especially when they suddenly decided “Everything happened because of the Jailor” which killed the story for many people. As for the writers, replacing them doesn’t guarantee that the story will be good in the future. The writers just need to utilize and add onto the lore that the Warcraft universe has built over many years rather than adding things that completely ruin the previous lore.
In-game leaderboards, like a billboard in each capital city, and or one that you can access via your UI, it has Rank one players, Top guilds, best Pet battlers, and anything that has a competitive element to it you should be able to find the players’ names that are best at that thing on the leaderboard.
Weekly quest and not dailies, so players don’t feel like they are falling behind if they don’t do everything on that day.
Let’s say a patch last 6 months, the first 3 are for the hardcore players and the last 3 are for casuals, the goal is to have every player experience their class/spec at its best, so time-gate the gear so casuals get it at the back end of each patch.
