Website may be up and down over next few months. I'm currently doing a complete overhaul of everything. Going back to simple individual .htm pages, new overall site theme, sanitizing and cleaning up html of all pages and blog posts, attempting to implement a new tooling and publishing system etc etc.

Picking apart World of Warcraft

This page is intended to explore what could be done to improve or fix existing problems with the game and intern provide other game developers a understanding of what I think makes a game good or bad.

Character stats

  • The complexity of both how player stats are implemented and presented are too complicated! Often times a item or gem will state what appears to be better stat bonuses but after equipping the item you discover that it is in fact not as good as your existing item, possibly because the item was intended for use by another class of player (Paladin vs Death Knight plate armor). If an item states it has better stats over another item there should be no doubt about whether or not equipping that item will provide the player with better abilities. 

Levels 1-80

  • Another problem I have is that the game revolves around one thing. Your toons level. The entire game is centered around moving up in levels in order to experience more content. If the game could be made to avoid this leveling paradime or atleast hide it from the player I feel it would make for a better game play experience. But Unfortunatley the entire game at it's very core is centered around this leveling concept.  

Too many abilities

  • The game is designed for use with a keyboard and mouse and often times there are over 15+ abilities that are available for the player to use. Many of these abilities could be made into auto attacks or passive abilities. For example any ability that require you to buff your self every 3-30 min should become a passive ability that can be toggled on or off and stay that way. Myself I often find my self using macros for each of the 12 slots on the main action bar. A player should not have so any choices to choose from.  

Soulbound Items

  • From what I have heard part of the reason soulbound items were introduced was to hinder gold farmers and the like. This of course is a fruitless endeavor. It also based on something else, IE: greed. (See below section) By having soulbound items you artificially restrict in game commerce, and intern force players to work even harder and longer to acquire the items they seek rather then paying with in game gold for the item, gold that they worked to acquire from other means within the game.

Unique Equipped items

  • items are often marked as Unique or Unique-Equipped meaning you can only have 1 of those items equipped at any one time. This should have never been implemented. 

Lack of emotes

  • Another major drawback is the lack of emotes that your toon can perform. I am not a role player as it were but I can understand and see a need for much more emotes in the game. As well as the ability to chain emotes together to perform action sequences. Even something as simple as typing /handshake and have your toon reach out as well as the targets too reach out and shake hands would only add to the games depth and fun factor.

Drop rates

  • Drop rate percentages are a major issue I have with this game. It is ludicrous to kill a animal for it's meat and discover that the meat item your were hoping to drop, didn't drop, even though the animal is made of ... You guess it, Meat! Boss fights are another example of where a boss could be holding a weapon but the likely hood of that weapon would drop after killing the boss could be like 1% - 3%. Again regardless of weather or not you can see the boss holding a weapon or wearing a particular piece of armor the likely hood that the item will drop is virtually zilch. And given that the item is a chance drop you could kill him 1000 times over and still there is the possibility that it will not drop. You do not present a gamer with a desirable item and then betray him by repeatedly preventing him from acquiring that item.

Greed

  • Everything about wow is designed to do one thing. To make blizzard money. Everything from having to kill excessive amounts of mobs, soulbound items, Unique-Equipped items, Abysmal drop rates, are all things that result in one critical thing. To force the player to spend vast amounts of TIME in the game. And for a game based around a subscription modal, time = money. I am not against making money. But I am against making excessive amounts of it at the expense of game play, or a games overall fun factor.

Missing content

  • When the BC expansion was released Illidian did not exist within the game. He was only put in a few patches later. The same is true of WOTLK. People are paying for content expecting to face the final boss only to discover that they are not even in the game! This is something that is unacceptable to me.

Dungeon lockouts

  • With heroic instances you are locked out of a instance for a number of hours after completing it. Some raids will lock you out for multiple days! Excuse me? I payed good money to play this game and have access to this content, and then blizzard turns around and essentially says they are going to artificially restrict my access to that content. Again BIG no no! You do not do that to the people that are paying your salary. 

Missed opportunities

  • I have often felt blizzard should put a real monetary value on the in game gold. So that players could cash in there in game gold for real money while participating within the game. And intern develop a true in game economy that offers a real world value. With all the millions of people playing they should be providing qualified players to participate in the construction and overall expansion of the game world. Players who have earned the right to do so would be people who have proven that they can produce quality content that is on par with the main theme of the game. Almost everything blizzard does is controlled internally within the company. Opening up the game to community participation would allow the world to grow and expand while allowing blizzard to maintain overall quality control. This makes good business sense because you essentially end up with free labor. And allows to game world to develop more rapidly. 

Created by: X

Just another personal website in this crazy online world

Name of author Dean Lunz (aka Created by: X)
Computer programming nerd, and tech geek.
About Me -- Resume