What would you do to make WOW better?

[Bolty]

I'll just play Devil's Advocate here and address your points:

1) Make the world change as you do things in it, and make the world change incrementally according to an overall story arc. They've begun to do this for some quests where you would see something different during, or after a quest chain because you affected a change to the world. Tyr's hand is a good example. You go in and help eradicate the Scarlet zealotry, and then they are gone. You do get a sense of accomplishment.

The obvious problem here is that too much of this prevents you from questing with (or in some cases, even seeing) other players. I recall times waiting outside of the ICC raid with my guild and only being able to see 5 or 6 of them, because the raid was split up into different questing phases. Also, it starts potentially removing farming locations. If you need to kill monster X because they're a great source of leather, and your phase removes those monsters from the game world, you can't farm them anymore.

I like what they did with Hyjal somewhat. Your progress there is visible in that the trees that were burned and destroyed start to grow again; you can see that you're visibly affecting the environment, but it doesn't phase out anything that's there.

2) Make dungeons and dungeon loot variable based upon level (or ranges). I would make the dungeon variable depending on the average iLvl of the party. Rather than restrict who can go where, when and then never to return. I'd make every mob scalable in abilities, health and damage over the full range of player levels, and attach an appropriate leveled loot table.

2a) same for zones. I would look to ways of making zones more useful for all levels of characters. Rather now, it's a big world with very few things to do at your particular level.

Well, similar to point #1, the problems come in when you want to farm something in particular - either transmogrification gear or older crafting materials. You'd then have to have a stable of alts at specific levels, with exp gain turned off. How do you get around this without adding a lot of complexity?

3) I would cut back on the number of items and instead create more synergies for crafting -- e.g. cloth, herbs, dust, etc. Every time they bumped up the level cap, they added whole new plethora of level based items. It creates odd commodity issues where copper, the low level ore sells more than higher level ores because fewer people are mining it anymore. They do some synergy stuff with metal, e.g. bronze, steel, felsteel.

A good idea. The economy becomes more vibrant when the professions have a greater reliance on each other.

4) I would cut PVP out of the skill tree into it's own separate talent option. You would still have your main build skills as well, but then be able to augment with selected PVP skills from the PVP talent tree (something like the simplified MOP choices -- every 10-15 levels choose a skill from A, B or C). They've already created most of the separation with penetration and resilience, and separate gear. If they would allow a clear separation in the skill tree, it would simplify both PVP and Non-PVP builds. You might even get rid of the Horde/Alliance thing and instead allow people to choose sides more 3rd party allegiances (e.g. Scryer vs Aldor). Make it possible to switch sides (and it doesn't have to be easy to gain rep -- but falling to neutral should be fast). I would also make PVP vendors offer BOA gear that is leveled and very average to enable people to jump into PVP more easily. Currently, you seem to either be a raider, or you do PVP -- I'd try to open it up to make it more accessible and fun for everyone to participate (both raiding and pvp btw).

They're basically doing this in MoP, as you mentioned. The talent trees are being simplified so there's once choice allowed every 15 levels, and some of the choices are very obviously PvP ones. As someone who participates in both high-end raiding and Duelist-level PvP simultaneously, gear homogenization would be welcomed. I don't see it happening, though, because people who only have time/desire to play the PvP part of the game don't want to be forced into raiding in order to gear up. The top PvE'ers will always then be the top PvP'ers (vanilla WoW model), because the gear gap becomes pretty significant between normal mode and heroic mode gear.

The thing with WoW is that it tries to please everyone, and does a fairly decent job of it throughout. As a result, it also irritates everyone equally, because each particular piece of the game could be improved at the cost of other pieces. That's the sick beauty of it. If you focus intensely on just one aspect of the game, you'll be upset with it to the point of quitting. If you enjoy more than one aspect of it, you'll likely stick around because no game really wraps everything together as well as WoW does. Just my opinion, of course, but that's why I've had a steady subscription to the game for 7 years.

I've known countless players who log in, do their one thing they're interested in doing, and log out. I don't know if I'd stay subscribed if that was my interest level. Let's look at all the different ways people play this game (I'm sure I'll miss a few):

1) Social interaction players
2) Auction House players
3) PvP Battleground lovers
4) PvP Arena / RBG lovers
5) Alt lovers - plays tons of characters without focusing much on one
6) Achievement hunters
7) Content seekers (LFR-only raiders, for example)
8) Normal mode raiders - may dabble in heroics, but mostly just want to hang out with their guild and kill stuff
9) Hardcore raiders - consider normal modes a speedbump, push heroic/competitive raiding for gear, ego, or other reasons
10) Hardcore pvp'ers - gladiator-level players who compete in tournaments

There's something in WoW for everyone there. I think #8 is where the vast majority of WoW players sit, but I have no evidence except anecdotal to back that up. I know I'm a #3, #4, #6, and #9 player. I wish I were a #10, but I can't seem to do both #9 and #10 simultaneously. The truly top PvP'ers don't want to play with you if you can't arena every day.