I'm making a direct plea to Ghostcrawler and the other designers: take a hard look at the other games out there, and look at how everything is just the same. You start with no gear, you get some starter gear, you get better gear, and you kill a boss. Rinse and repeat. The story plays itself a thousand times in a thousand different worlds.
WoW tells the gear story better than any other game on the market. No game has the balance that
WoW has, and no game as the ability to gear up in the overall fun way
WoW lets you. However in my opinion, that story is getting old. The gear grind needs to be ground to a halt, and a new era focused on skill and teamwork needs to be ushered in.
WoW is ripe for this kind of dramatic change. Blizzard isn't afraid of taking risks, and taking such a step like this would be a risk. After all, the game would be placed not in the hands of time players spend grinding gear, but instead in the skill that they have. Gone would be the unskilled player with great gear getting into raids over the skilled player with bad gear, elevated would be the overall discourse on encounters, and gone would be the endless problems associated with finding the perfect balance of loot.
While I'm under no impression that Blizzard will actually take these suggestions and use them, I do have hope that they can adequately contribute to the discussion of
WoW's future.
What is the current gear model?
As I
questioned yesterday, the current model is one of confusion between gear being functional (used for increasing stats), formal (making you look more aesthetically pleasing), and psychological (you must have the better gear, because your brain says so). While lately the trend is to have truly functional and aesthetic gear, the psychological factor still creeps in there. Many players still need that best piece of gear to feel complete.
And in the current model, we never feel complete. There's always something better, something more advanced. The grass is always greener on the more heroic side. So we do strange things.
Such as...
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Filed under: Analysis / Opinion