so i’ve been back to playing world of warcraft the last two months. i loved wow for a good while a few years ago. logged in daily for more hours than i can count or care to count for that matter. then i stopped. we hit the end of the current content, most of the folks i enjoyed playing with took breaks and i followed. i realized that 80% of the reason i played was having a bunch of awesome people to bs with as i played. the game was secondary.
fast forward to february. i had just busted my ankle, played most of the single player games i had, and needed something to do. for $15 a month i figured wow would be a good way to consume that time. and it was. some of my old friends were still playing and it was great to catch up with them. the game, in many ways, became secondary. it was more a way to keep my mind from wasting when i was sick of reading or consuming media than anything i truly enjoyed. when i was able to be a real boy again, i stopped playing, even as a new patch with fairly interesting content was about to be released.
november rolls around and i again need to kill some time. not for any reason but to save money. see, when i leave the house my wallet tends to open like a porn stars legs on gang bang day. just how i am. i can’t go out and not want to enjoy the hell out of myself, but i can make myself stay home. $15 for a month of entertainment is nothing compared to spending a couple hundred dollars in a few hours.
i have to admit though, the addiction is almost setting in. there’s enough stuff to make me actually think about what i’m doing and want to get better at it. right now for me it’s playing the market on the auction house for the most part, but there have been a lot of other improvements to the game as well.
looking for raid is awesome. i used to be a hardcore raider but just don’t honestly care enough to do it anymore. sure i’m going to min/max in my own little way, but right now i just want to go in face roll the content and see what there is to see. lfr difficulty is perfect for that. it can be infuriating when you’re in a group where a few people just don’t “get it” but i got to see the fights, the cinematics, get the gear, and for the most part, have fun.
the idea of more conquest points from random battlegrounds is great as well. i’m not good enough, nor do i care to be, for arenas and on my server the folks setting up rated battleground groups have expectations that far exceed “guy just wants to have fun in a semi more structured environment”. it’ll take me a lot longer to get the better tier of gear and i’ll likely have no access to the highest tier of gear, but i’m alright with that. it’s nice to know i’m not at a dead end when i’m finished obtaining the honor gear. there will be further progression for me.
but the post is called feeding the addiction. so here’s my suggestions for how to continue doing that. how to make the game more accessible and fun for me (and i assume others). i play a hunter some of these ideas will be hunter specific. the support classes can deal with that.
- you can do 7 dungeons for 100 valor in a week but still have to log in daily to you your battleground for 100 conquest. change this. i realize you can still earn 50 conquest for each bg win after the first. make it after the eighth.
- make as many things as possible unlocked by or bound to account (at least on a per server/faction basis). this includes mounts, pets, reputation, achievements. hell i’d even go so far as to say you should earn valor and conquest for your account rather than your toon. i probably didn’t have fun doing the same dailies over and over again to get to exalted on my first toon. why the hell would i want to do it again? i obtained a spectral tiger. i want to ride it on all my toons.
- hunter exclusive: i want more, possibly unlimited stable space. there are x number of rare spawns that i can tame? i want to tame all of them. sometimes choices are not fun.
- the next dailies hub should be more like sunwell plateau than molten front. i had fun seeing everything open up as the server worked on it. I am taking no satisfaction from having to trudge through more than a month of the same old grind to unlock everything.
- remove the need to be in a raid for old raid zones or allow me to convert myself to a raid. asking a friend to log off and get on an alt so i can turn a party into a raid is not fun.
- add a penalty like the deserter debuff for those who leave or are kicked from a lfr group. you shouldn’t be able to ditch one group and simply jump into another. if you get booted, you have to be doing something fairly horrible to get 13+ people to say you need to go. both should be punished.
- archaeology needs to suck less. getting more fragments helps. allowing people to pick which fragments they want to focus on will help. any piece of gear that isn’t for max level when it’s released should be an heirloom and function as one. it doesn’t need to give bonus xp but it should scale with level.
- hunter exclusive: tame feral druid. we don’t have to be able to keep them, but like a priest we should be able to mind control them.
- hunter exclusive: camouflage doesn’t have to be good as a rogue or druid stealth but we certainly shouldn’t draw MORE attention from other players when we move. “hey look at the silly hunter who thinks he’s stealthed” is said far too commonly in bgs. maybe it could last several minutes (breaking on damage dealt or received as it does now) and we could get 1 second of truly stealthed movement for every 3 to 5 we stand still.
- an extension of recruit a friend. you gain extra xp or rep anytime you’re in a party with someone who is on your real id friends list. 1% per friend up to 5% maybe? the game is about community after all, right?
my account dies in 10 days. i’ll be moving onto skyrim for some time after that, but is there more wow on the horizon for me? perhaps in 5.0 when the pandas (and pokemon) come out to play. we’ll see how they make the game better…for me.
