A Solution: Cooler achievements, Cooler loot

Yeah, this one’s pretty obvious. If the problem is lack of rewards that affect your character, add rewards that do so.

Learn new abilities. For example, take the trinket for teleporting to respective sides in Alterac Valley. Maybe after so many kills/wins/losses you’ll gain the achievement “Don’t tell me where to go!” with a new skill in your general tab “Teleport: [Dun Baldar/Frostwolf Keep].” Another example might be a passive skill to add 1% to some gathering proc rate. Maybe killing bosses will give additional hate rating on a diminishing return basis: 10=5hr, 25=10hr, 50=15hr, 100=20hr, etc. Of course, you’d have to scale that by level, but it’s a solid example – call it “Not you again!”

Loot quest items in the mail. I’m not too hot for this idea – I’d rather see characters advance by ways other than loot – but it’s still a valid solution. Gaining certain achievements should send you a quest item that you could turn in somewhere to claim a reward. Maybe if you pickpocket 1000 items, you’ll get mail from Ravenholdt (another rant entirely) with a quest item that you can turn in for some cool gloves with a property to increase pickpocketing range (like the glyph). Get creative with it.

Access to secrets. Maybe there’s a secret room in Dalaran for people who’ve completed every heroic dungeon, a room where they sell discounted Emblem of Heroism items (like 10% discount). Maybe completing all the lore-related quests would grant you access to a library with all of the game’s books – nothing you can’t do anyway with legwork, but all in one place. Little secret locations /exclusive content that anyone can get to with a bit of work, but make you feel like the achievement was really worth the effort.

I’m sure that all the Blizzard folks can think of even more enjoyable rewards if they can get over the “achievement rewards should not affect gameplay” nonsense they seem to have in the rulebook. You can always disable the bonuses in arena if the character advancements are a threat to the (laughable) PVP balance.

25 Ulduar: Emblems of Conquest
10 Ulduar & 25 Naxx: Emblems of Valor
10 Naxx & Heroics: Emblems of Heroism

What this implies: Next major raid content patch will drop Conquests in the 10-man and something new in the 25′s. Don’t have enough people to run a 25? Your options are either a) abandon your friends in favor of an impersonal “pro” raiding guild, or b) wait half a year for the next raid patch so you can get your hands on that next set of emblems.

Adding insult to injury, you can convert emblems downward, (Conquest -> Valor -> Heroism) but not upward. Cutting off folks from these rewards ultimately just sours the game for them and shows preferential treatment toward raiding.

A Solution: Make the Exchange Work Both Ways

You can already convert Conquest to Valor and Valor to Heroism on a 1-to-1 basis. What could be the harm in allowing the reverse with a steeper price tag? Say, 5 to 1? Let’s examine the prices that’s result from this.

Breastplate of the Wayward Vanquisher (T 8.5 chest)
Cost: 58 Emblems of Conquest

For a 5:1 upward exchange rate, that’d be 290 Emblems of Valor. That might even be a bit too much. Let’s make it 3:1, or 174 Emblems of Valor. Woould it be worth making a lot of 10-man raiders happy at the cost of a few 25-man raiders getting a little bit less exclusive content? It’s not like they’d be losing all the dropped content, and it’d even give ‘em a good reason to do that old content. 174 is pretty steep, but those that feel stunted by that 25-man barrier would probably be glad for the opportunity.

It’s easy to implement (2 item entries in a couple vendors – that’s like, what, 30 seconds of work?), and potentially makes a lot more people happy than it angers. It should result in more heroic runs, and more low-end raiding. That’s a good solution in my book.

I realize a lot of these solutions are obvious, probably even implemented elsewhere (as I’ve been informed), but it just baffles me that they aren’t implemented in an MMO with such vast resources as WoW’s.

Forcing people to do absolutely nothing for extended periods of time is an odd choice. I’m not saying it shouldn’t be a choice, but rather that it shouldn’t be the only choice. We all know how irritating it is when you have to take that flight from Winterspring to Silithus (or whatever the Northrend equivalent might be). “Gee, what shall I do while in flight? Perhaps discover usable cold fusion?”

Seriously. It’s boring. Offer some alternatives to just waiting it out.

A Few Solutions: Free Hands, In-Flight Entertainment & the Express Lane

Solution one: Allow crafting and such stationary things mid-flight.

Solution two: Add an optional mini-game to the flight. Maybe if you help the (gryphon/wyvern/…copter?) catch some snacks mid-flight (…or motes?), it’ll refund some of your fare when you land. It might still be boring, but at least it adds some sort of control to the situation, even if it’s just to save a few silver. Maybe add an achievement for amount of gold saved / things snacked, which would yield the BOE recipe for…

Solution three: A gnomish air-fueled wormhole generator (or, FlightZapper 9001). Equip this trinket before flight, and it starts casting when you take off, and after 10 seconds it creates a wormhole that teleports you to your destination, about 10 seconds before you land. Maybe even have a Stargate-esque animation between locations. For a mere 2,000 gold, your flights can go from 6 minutes to 20-30 seconds. Make it 3,000 gold for an heirloom version so the player can switch mains / use it on new characters.

Man, that third solution would be higher priority than dual spec, flying mounts, and northrend flying combined. It’d probably even save on bandwidth from the servers having to send the player every single item on the route…

The thing I hate about blogging about this stuff is that I end up craving the solutions I post. It’s kind of like discussing donuts, and thereafter having a deep and almost spiritual need for tasty donut goodness.

If a creature drops 3 kinds of trash loot, I should have 3 stacks of trash loot after an hour of farming. I should not have 35 stacks and an unwanted trip to go vendor it all, just so I can go fill my packs with vendor trash again to get a few more items.

Warlocks know this pain all to well, in a much more acute form: Soul shards. They already have a unique tag, limiting the number you can have at once, yet they still don’t stack. Hunters can stack arrows up to 1000, but soul shards? One to a slot. I could understand this if the shards had some unique properties: “Contains Soul of PVPBob, a Warrior” would be pretty cool, particularly if you could use that to influence the spells that consume the shard.

No such luck. Your pack is full of a bunch of little pink crystals, each one the same as the last.

A Solution: New Stacking Rules

If it stacks, it should really stack. None of this 5/10/20 junk. Set a standard stack maximum of 250, and let the Unique tag take care of any special cases. This should free up your pack for loot you actually want, like magic items.

“But, Seditia,” you say, “Wouldn’t people stop buying larger bags?”

Probably not. With dual spec added, some folks need to carry 2, maybe even 3 armor sets. Then there’s quest items, a few hundred kinds of crafting ingredients, and flavor items. I don’t know about you, but my priest doesn’t go anywhere without her Bloodsail Pirate outfit (complete with dual tankards, and Corsair’s Overshirt ’cause red is superior to white).

Freeing up inventory slots means freeing up space so the player can have more fun with it.

Because, as much as it wants to be, inventory management will never be Tetris.

Then there’s pieces you just wish were something—ANYTHING—else. As I primarily play a rogue, the most relevant example is the Terrorblade Helmet. I saw this item and was immediately baffled, and shortly thereafter progressed to horrified. The same butt-ugly model is used for the lore-related Garona’s Guise, which just makes my inner rogue weep. Other examples are very easy to find.

C’mon guys, I know you’re aware of the “don’t show helmet” option, but why on earth would you make it mandatory?

To be fair, taste obviously varies from person to person. There are most likely people out there that actually want to wear a screaming bald zombie head as a helmet. For those that don’t, they’re screwed.

A Solution: the Illusionist NPC

Here’s a solution: Create an NPC or skill that will bring up an interface with 2 slots: the Target item, and the Source item. Pay a hefty sum (say, 500 gold) to copy the model and skin of the source item to the target item. Reverting to the original look is free.

All of the sudden you’ve got a very attractive gold sink, and players can look however they want. I can stop wearing this flaming piece of junk in favor of, say, something a little more fashionable – assuming I have the original item to throw in the Source slot.

I’d be first in line to cough up a few grand to make my outfit look the way I want it to.

And this guy wouldn’t have to wear a dress.