This Persistent Life: 7 Things that Suck About World of Warcraft

In the first edition of THIS PERSISTENT LIFE, Miguel Lopez identifies seven key mistakes of World of Warcraft, and how Blizzard can fix them. Check back every week for a new installment!

The future of our civilization? The only place where your imagination can fly unfettered? The internet's toilet? The vast, diverse worlds that comprise the MMO scene are all of these, and more. This Persistent Life is our weekly jaunt through this messy, exciting world. Tune in each week for previews of upcoming games, opinions on where things are going, and much more.


Now, it's no question that World of Warcraft is doing a whole lot of things right. Eight million players, by the latest estimate, can attest to that. But it would be delusional to say that the climate isn't ripe for change. And by that, I mean that there are at least two compelling reasons coming in the near future that might make some of those loyal subscribers reconsider their persistent world of choice.

In this, the inaugural installment of This Persistent Life, I'm going to examine what WoW needs to do in order to best insure its continued relevance in a world where its overpowering influence is just starting to be felt in earnest. I write this not as a WoW-hater; quite the contrary. Much to the consternation of my real-life friends, I spend waaaaay too much time on this shit. So know that I love WoW deeply, and the harsh things I say are uttered for that very reason.


1. Talent respecs are too expensive

With the launch of the arena system and the accompanying seasonal tournaments (not to mention the inclusion of a 3v3 ladder at the recent World Series of Video Games invitational in Wuhan, China), World of Warcraft seems well on its way to becoming a real-deal eSport. Currently, however, the competitive pool isn't as wide as it could be. You see, in order to really compete on any real level, your character has to be built from the ground up for PvP. This naturally excludes players who tune their characters for defeating big bad internet monsters -- for instance, those in serious raiding guilds, or players who simply want to do their best when they run dungeons with their close-knit group of friends. While there's nothing stopping them from forming an arena team and queuing up for some matches, they're gonna get their asses handed to them quite readily the moment they encounter a team that have built itself around PvP.

Some say this is fine, their logic being that serious PvPers sacrifice PvE viability in order to whoop ass in the arenas. I call bullshit, though; as Guild Wars has proven, the ability to retune your character's ability loadout without restriction will by no means break the game. Now, due to the inherent mechanical differences between it and GW, I don't believe that WoW needs adopt such a loose policy in regards to respecs. But it needs to be a lot less restrictive than it is now. Currently, a seasoned character will have to pay 50 gold in order to reallocate its talent points, assuming it's done so a few times. That equates to about at least an hour or two of "farming"--probably the least compelling way to spend one's time in-game. Let's be honest: there's enough of a sense of work associate with playing these games. There's no need to make players trudge through tedium in order to experience everything that WoW has to offer.

The Solution: Give players the ability to choose two different specs for their characters. Enable them to switch between them depending on what they want to do, but implement a "cooldown" to prevent them from doing so willy-nilly.



2. Gear shouldn't be a factor in PvP

Blizzard has done a great job of creating a distinction between PvP and PvE gear in The Burning Crusade. Essentially, outside of a handful of stop-gap pieces of equipment, a strict PvPer isn't going to want much dungeon or raid gear. On a very basic level (with a few exceptions), PvP gear is designed to make you live long in a PvP encounter, while raid gear is tuned for killing bosses. Bravo, Blizzard. I'm leveling a new character, and I'll take the blue High Warlord set over Karazhan gear any day (again, with a few exceptions).

But this brings us back to topic discussed above. If WoW is going to be taken seriously as a competitive game, then all comers need to start on equal footing. Contrarians can argue, they already do--everyone starts as a level one character, blah, blah, blah. But that's bullshit. I'm almost afraid to say it, but if in order for WoW to reach its competitive apex, the notion of the gear advantage has to disappear entirely. How will this work? It makes me a little uncomfortable to ponder...

The Solution: Maybe allow players to -- again, in a nod to Guild Wars -- create max-level, geared-up PvP-only characters. Either that, or make arena gear much easier to get than it already is, but only useable in PvP settings.



3. Classes need a PvP rebalance

If you look at the top 5v5 arena teams (and make no mistake: 5v5 is the "only bracket that matters"), you're going to notice a few consistencies. Two, actually. It's altogether frightful, though not very surprising, that a sound majority of the top teams feature at least one paladin, and one warrior. Individually, these classes aren't necessarily unbalanced. On the contrary, they each have their share of hard counters. But when put together (and spec'd properly) on a PvP team, they become the foundation for a formidable steamroller of Teh Win.

If you look at the aforementioned statistics, you'll notice a few other things. Specifically, some classes are conspicuously absent from the winning rosters--rogues, certain flavors of druids, most notably. Yes, straight up, this is because these classes aren't as useful in 5v5 teams, and no, it ain't fair. Blizzard has a lot of work to do in regards to balancing its classes for PvP, and now more than ever. Before the arena system, you could credibly argue that WoW wasn't necessarily balanced around PvP. But now, it has to be. Blizzard needs to get on the ball, and make the competitive game fair and fun for all comers.

The Solution: There's a lot of work involved in balancing classes around a competitive, team-based game, and I don't envy Blizzard's designers the task of making this work. But they had better, or else the current trend of fielding "plate-heavy" teams in lieu of pretty much anything else will only get worse.



4. Attunement requirements should be less stringent

Look at this chart, and tell me it doesn't give you a headache. To all the old school EverQuest raiders that say that WoW is "too easy," well, I'd like to print out that chart, wheat paste it around a baseball bat, and take it to their faces. In order to get a pass to experience WoW's coolest content (read: the 25-man raids), you're going to have to jump through some serious hoops. And that's fine, I think--that sort of content is meant to be a bit more exclusive than the rest.

The real problem, I think, comes when a relative newcomer joins an experienced group. Chances are, unless you're part of a big, active guild, you wouldn't have had much of a chance to knock out some of the more serious requirements. And if you study the chart a bit, you'll notice that access to some of the higher tiers of content requires you to have progressed deep through some of the earlier (though still advanced in its own right) content. It's a no-win situation for both the newer players, who may have "missed the boat" so to speak, and the high-end guilds, who are going to have trouble recouping from the losses-by-attrition that inevitably happen in those sorts of organizations.

The Solution: Blizzard has to rethink the current attunement requirements, and perhaps slacken them a bit. The elitist will throw hissy fits, but the game will be better for it. See: the planned extinction of 40-man raids.



5. The spam needs to stop

Now this is a first--unsolicited spam in an online game. It's not a completely new phenomenon, but damn! Even the most casual WoW player will attest to the insane frequency goldseller spam these days. It's gotten out of control in the past month or so; you literally can't go 10 minutes without someone with an unintelligible name offering you piles of in-game currency for pennies on the dollar. (Well, the rates aren't quite so favorable. Like any dutiful journalist should, I actually follow the links, and despite their relentless solicitations, their prices aren't anything to write home about.)

On the one hand, it's amusing to observe how WoW parallels the more irksome features of the internets. But on the other, it's annoying as shit to have to sift through yet another channel of spam while I'm trying to pwn things, get lewts, and what you have. General chat is, um, demanding enough.

The Solution: WoW is like (at least) the fifth biggest thing on the internets. Why can't Blizzard come up with some futuristic solution that nullifies the spam?



6. We need guild housing

The need for guild housing--and the playerbase's incessant cries for it--has been around since the game launched, and frankly, it's astounding that Blizzard is yet to give in. Even if you put quaint notions about collecting furniture and decorating your space aside, there is a practical need that is being unmet as a result of this lack: namely, a functioning system for guild banks. Currently, guild leaders have to rely on mule characters to hold their group's collective largesse. This can create a multitude of problems, not the least of which is the one that can arise when a disgruntled bank-alt holder decides to ditch the guild, and vendor its hoard.

Not that a client-supported guild bank will necessarily prevent this, but if Blizzard is smart, it can implement some sorts of checks and balances to make it a little more difficult. Anyway, it's just boggling that such a huge game has existed this long without this kind of basic feature. It's about time.

The Solution: Blizzard has to be working on this already. They just need to fast track it, and make it happen.



7. Too many dead servers

This is a tricky problem. Every other day, a new series of petition posts pop up on the official boards, detailing, in all sorts of inflammatory language, just how underpopulated / Alliance-skewed / Horde-dominated a certain server is. That these sorts of posts pop up so frequently belie a potentially serious problem with WoW: that there are entire servers full of players who aren't having as much fun as they could be.

I've tried playing on one of these underpopulated servers, and I was on the wrong side of the faction divide, so to speak--I was an Alliance player on a newly-minted, Horde-heavy server. The halls of Ironforge were bleak, believe me. It felt drab and vacant, and while I wasn't high-enough level to really feel the sting of the human dearth, it wasn't as vibrant as the elf-laden metropolis I remember stealthing through as my Horde rogue. From what I gather on the boards (and from reading third-party census sites), the problem is even more pronounced on the newest batch of servers--the ones launched alongside The Burning Crusade. I can't remember off the top of my head, but I remember seeing one whose total population was over 30 percent Blood Elves. Now that's frightful.

The Solution: As much as it pains me to say it, this is one situation where Blizzard has to give in the whining masses. These dead servers need to be merged. Their forlorn populations deserve nothing less. That, and there needs to be an immediate moratorium on creating new realms. This suggestion won't win me any brownie points with the realm-hoppers, but it's what needs to be done.

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