What would you do to make WOW better?

[kandrathe]

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.

I do too. The one problem with Tyr's hand was that once you complete the quest chain you can no longer farm the Crusader enchant formula. Ergo, I would suggest they stop putting recipes as rare world/dungeon drops. More realistically, rare recipes should require some out of the way hermit who has some stringent quest chain requiring some hours of work to earn the reward. Better than hanging out in Tyr's hand killing one type of Scarlet mob for those same number of hours. So, take those average equivalent hours (it took me about 1.5 hours of farming over a couple days to get it) and put them into something more interesting. I guess the way around the grouping with friends issue would be that the world/dungeon reflects whomever is the group leader (founder). I would actually see less of an issue for transmogrification since you'd be more likely to find a group your level willing to go back to an appropriately leveled dungeon with loot tables that would benefit your level. In fact, you could then design dungeons around a particular theme... If want pirate stuff, then head off to Deadmines. If you like the garish blood elf gear, then head on back to the Isle of Quel' Danas. But, kudos to them for changing the Frost Saber/Venomhide Ravasaur mount grind into something more fun -- and it still takes a minimum of 20 days -- it's just that you need to remember to go do a daily quest instead of repeatedly kill mobs that other people need for their normal PVE quests.

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?

They have the mechanics already with the beige BOA equipment -- They could cut down vastly on the number of items for loot as well if it leveled with you. Seriously, who ever uses anything with the suffix "of the Wolf" (Agility/Spirit)? You could still be motivated to improve on it with a tier system based on difficulty. For difficulty, I'd make it more complicated than Normal/Heroic too. Use the difficulty to amp up the mob stats and corresponding loot table. The gear problem that I see with either raiding or PVP is that eventually you don't really have much choice in equipment either. You need to run this particular raid, or grind up some reputation by repeating the same thing over and over, or save up tokens to get a particular piece of gear. You should WANT to repeat content, not be forced to repeat it.

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'd mostly agree. I do think it would be better for the game if more attention were paid to better enabling, and encouraging people to group up more.

But contrary to my last point... I would toss out a #5 idea; It might be useful to add a variable NPC option for dungeons to fill in a sparse group with a directable AI. Not ideal, but for smaller groups who just need an assist damage spammer, or a heal spammer it might work. For 5-man group, needing 1 or 2, or 10-man groups needing 2-3 bodies it would help more groups to form. Maybe when back when I was in college I could find 10 people all available who want to do the same thing at the same time (it usually involved a keg though). But, for me, speaking as an old codger, finding 3-5 available friends who can be cajoled into a dungeon or raid is an accomplishment.

Ok, one more idea. #6; I really liked what they attempted to do in Skyrim with repeatable Radiant Quests (bugs aside). Why not use this idea for those repeatable quests for earning rep. Make the quest relate to your class -- so, if you are a healing priest, rather than go off and "kill" mobs, you go off and assist in healing on some somewhat random mission some for an NPC. If you are a rogue, perhaps an infiltration without being seen -- or an assassination. Again, for grouping, have the focus of the mission generation be based on the founder/leader of the group -- everyone can participate in the mission (healing or fighting as needed) and scale the difficulty up slightly based on group composition. For example, Argent Dawn rep in EP. Rather than just the repeated killing of either of two dungeon bosses 20 times, why not randomly send the player off to take out something (undead and elite) equally difficult?