Tof's gaming ideas: World of Warcraft

This is hopefully the first of a series of articles about videogames and thoughts on how to either fix, or improve them.

I've tried myself to make 2 games in the past, but stopped after making the basics because I've realized that just making a game with good gameplay won't make it fun. And since then I've started analyzing what makes games interesting and/or fun.

Maybe it's because I majored in software, but I always think of ways to improve apps. Games are no different.

Comments on these articles will be appreciated.

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World of Warcraft: Intro


WoW is pretty much the Guideline for all MMORPGs out there. The proof is that most people will instinctively compare any new MMO to it as reference.

When it came out, WoW was surprisingly well made and deep. Maybe they borrowed ideas from other MMOs, of that I can't be sure, but it was the first MMO I played with a job system, crafting, auction house, reputation system, factions and instances just to name a few.

There's really nothing to fix, It's a very complete MMO. My ideas for it are more towards making it "interesting" again.

As I may have mentioned once before, I used to help manage the database of a private WoW server. Those were really fun times because we, the admin team, spent most of our time customizing the server, making our own instances/bosses/mobs and even adding camps/towns to the game.

These ideas come from those times, but also from the nostalgia I often hear from players who used to player vanilla WoW.



Idea 1: More than 2 factions.


This is something we really wanted to do on the private server, but knew it was impossible.

Basically, at the time I still played Warcraft 3 a lot, and the most fun maps always involved more than 2 teams. That's something that surprises me in online gaming to this day is how almost no one does games involving 3 or more teams fighting it out.

So even though we couldn't do it, we started formulating how we'd do it if we could. This was during the "Burning Crusade", when the new races were the Blood Elves and the Draenei.

Default lineup for Alliance and Horde

One of our ideas was to have a Scarlet Crusade faction, which is an actual NPC faction. It basically was the alliance before WoW, as such, it contained humans, dwarves and high elves. And as most people might know, Blood elves are High elves.

We had various lineups for these factions, and I will admit, all lineups we came up with had issues in some way gameplay wise. However coming up with a better lineup nowadays with the new races and class changes would be considerably easier.

Possibly one of the lineups we liked best was the one where humans, under a new ruler, leave the alliance and the undead (Forsaken) just become non playable because they made very little sense to begin with.

Our Scarlet faction was tweaked from the original though, it was more racist in general. However, the New Alliance lineup was really poor and barely made sense. The actual lineups are besides the point, this is just an example.

Much like the Pandaren in the new WoW expansion, some races could be part of either faction. So in my example above, you could have humans in both the Alliance and the Scarlet faction.

At the time we also wished we could replace races with other models, as such, this was a lineup we liked:

A 3 way conflict is always more fun than just 2 way. A 4th one wouldn't be out of line either. Events and battles would be so much more complex.


Idea 2: Territory Conquest.


This is something I'm just taking directly from Dynasty Warriors Online because I thought it was actually really good. It also works really well with multiple factions.

Basically, the entire world would be separated into regions (It already kinda is), and every 1-2 weeks, players would have to fight to defend their faction's towns and cities but also to conquer their enemy's.

In short, it's like playing "Risk".




In essence, it'd be going back to the initial days of WoW where the Horde used to all gather up to invade Stormwind, or vice versa, and kill the enemy faction's leader for the lolz.

The difference is, when the leader of an area is defeated, the opposing force will now own it and gain perks from it.

Depending on who owns the town, the NPCs in it would change, certain props would change (flags, banners, things like that). and barricades would be placed alongside the borders between towns controlled by different factions.

The more territories a faction owns, the more it benefits it's players. An example would be more items available in shops and overall cost at all shops reduced by a small percentage.

Now, this, unlike the 3 faction thing, is actually something you can pull off in a private WoW server, So it's most likely you could pull it off on the official version too.

All it would require is simple database operations to switch towns into specific layouts, and store these into a routine. Town leaders could be made, and scripted to inform the dev team who won the battle without having to directly supervise it. It wouldn't be too complicated, but would still be a lot of work.

There are logical problems/questions to this sort of system though, such as:

• What happens when the capital of a faction is captured?
• What happens when a faction loses?
• Are all regions eligible to be conquered?

There's many ways to handle these issues, but personally here's the set of rules I'd use:

When a race's main city is captured, They're moved to the nearest friendly main city as refugees. When a faction ends up losing all of it's main cities, The faction who eliminated them is declared the winner. This prevents 2 factions working together to eliminate another one, but also makes it so that they won't let another faction get eliminated by the stronger enemy.

When a faction win over any other, it's declared the winner, and the "campaign" is over. So it's reset and starts all over. Players from the winning faction would gain some nice rewards and the faction itself could start the next campaign with an extra territory.

Only bordering regions would be eligible to be conquered, and only 2 from each faction at a time. Each bordering territory would have guard captains (or equivalent), and depending on how many time those are killed will influence the next territory battle. Basically, the battle will take place between the areas with the most activity.

The battles would need more rules to avoid such clusterfucks.

If for whatever reason an area is cut off from allied main cites, it will fall under enemy control. That would make going for the enemy main city in a straight line a risky tactic.

Honestly, the battles for territory is what made Dynasty Warriors Online actually very interesting. There was a feel of camaraderie in the game, and those battle weekends were taken very seriously by some. Rival guilds from the same faction would work together on those weekends to help their kingdom, it was rather amazing.

We're talking about thousands of players frenetically killing each other on 12 vs 12 matches for 2 hours. It was pretty intense and rather fun.