Blizzard needs to stop pushing us to raid.
In short, the history of WoW can be explained as the history of making raids and dungeons more accessible to the masses.
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Why did they do this? Because they spent huge quantities of time and money on making raids and dungeons and that is/was the end game of WoW.
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The only way to fix the issues that we have with WoW are to fix the focus on raiding. Give us more things to do and stop using gear item level as the only reward for doing them.
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I've been following the classic vs. retail thing for a while now. I quit WoW for at least 6 months and have been playing Elder Scrolls Online off and on during that time. This is what I've realized after recently coming back to Retail - all the quality of life features that Classic players don't like were put in to funnel players towards raiding. It permeates everything. I was looking at crafting some engineering goggles until I was reminded that one of the materials to make them comes from raiding and is soulbound. The Mythic + system is about the only thing they have done as an alternate path to raiding, but that has its own issues.
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At this point, I hope Blizzard starts to steal ideas from other popular MMO's because what they are doing isn't working. The popularity of Classic is a prime example.
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Make crafting relevant! Uncouple it from raiding.
Open level scaling to the entire world. I should be able to quest anywhere I want and have it scale to my level.
Give us player housing and the ability to craft items to put in our houses. Add housing items as rewards to end game content.
Add solo capable, but challenging, mini-dungeons everywhere.
Make world exploration meaningful.
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The weird thing is that WoW has had a lot of these things in some form or another in a lot of their expansions. For some stupid reason, instead of expanding on them and making them current, they just cut them out for newer ideas that could end up being garbage.
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The only reason I care enough to make a post about it is that I love the lore and game fantasy of WoW, but if they don't make some drastic changes next expansion, I'll probably be done with it forever and just stick with ESO (which doesn't require a monthly subscription!).