Dear Blizzard, while you’re working on the next expansion for World of Warcraft, making changeable hair styles and the new über Death Knight class that 50% of players are probably going to pick, take this list of improvements into consideration to truly improve the quality of the game, draw back those players you’ve driven away, and help retain a lot more who are itching to leave for the next best thing.
01. Make helping friends less inconvenient. One of the new class changes for the Wrath of the Lich King expansion included a new ability for Warlocks called “Demonic Circle — scribe a circle on the ground, and then teleport back there when you need to.” What a great idea, but take it one step further. Allow any class of character to purchase an item that they can mark to any location in the world and then combine use with their hearthstone to go there. This sure would make it ten times easier to go help your friend who’s getting corpse camped in Stranglethorn Vale. What could ensue may be some heavy guild vs. guild PvP action since everyone could travel much more conveniently! Imagine that.
02. Change hearth cooldown to around 20 minutes instead of 60 minutes. At the very least, decrease the cooldown for characters who are level capped for less annoying transportation. After the action of helping your buddy (as above) is over, you can hearth back to where you came from without feeling like you are wasting tons of time in traveling.
03. Make world PvP objective areas more accessible. If the idea above about marking a specific location doesn’t fly, then at the very least, hear this one out. You know all those portals in Shattrah to the capital cities and the like? Put some in that go to Halaa or other world PvP objectives and see how much more action you get in those places. Who wants to fly 10 minutes and ride 5 minutes from Shattrah to Halaa day after day only to find out it’s dead empty? No one. And that’s one of the big reasons why world PvP fails.
04. Reward for killing opposing faction in open world PvP, and not only at specific objective areas such as Halaa. If a player of the opposing faction meets certain criteria (i.e. not more than 5 levels below, or not even one level below if level capped at 80), then a player should gain a substantial amount of honor & money lootable from the corpse. Of course some type of system would have to be put in place to stop people from abusing the reward by “rez-killing.”
05. Allow for a character race change for a fee. Name changes and sever changes exist for a fee, so why not a one-time race change? Lots of people have rerolled the same exact character class all over again because they realize too late in the game that perhaps they would be much happier with a different class. Maybe they found the blood elf’s twisting jump spin thing too annoying to live with, or they realized they are getting heavily shortchanged in PvP as a blood elf shadow priest compared to the extra abilities they could have as an undead shadow priest.
I am a 29 year old Navy helicopter pilot and aspiring game designer with an affinity for creativity and writing. I have a B.A. in Foreign Language with 2 years of hard time in undergrad Comp Sci... Read more...
