My first comment would be that there is still "epicness" and whatnot in the game, it's just a question of whether you're looking at it with new eyes or not. I started playing less than a year ago (Dec 2006 to be precise) and I think the game is exciting. I definitely got the epic feeling the first time KT went down, first of all because it was an amazing fight, and also because it was the only 2nd horde side server kill at the time and coming back to Shattrath with the world buff people were congratulating us. But of course I play on a server with only 4 MH/BT guilds overall (horde+alliance) and one of them disbanded. So all of this is quite new for the server. I will make a bad analogy but most people are amazed the first time they drive in a sports car - much more excited than all the Formula 1 racers when they drive their state-of-the-art car on a weekly basis. It's normal.

Second, I don't really play for recognition or loot. If course it's always nice (see above), but I mostly play for fun and to beat the content. I'd rather kill a new boss than kill a farm boss for loot. But recognition comes in many different ways to many different people. The first (and main) element of recognition I can think of is the name of the guild that everybody can see attached on my profile. I'm sure the players who paid for a server transfer and got the <Elitist Jerks> tag above their head were extremely excited about it, because peer recognition is the best you can get.

Third, I think Blizzard is doing this, maybe not in the way (or at the level) that people posting here are expecting. Some ideas mentioned in this thread are already in the game right now, for example if you are Revered or Exalted with the skyguard the NPCs will ahev emotes depending on your rank. I can't remember them exactly but I remember stuff like "They say Anathor was never shot down" or "Hey ace, how is it going today?". This definitely adds flavour to the game, and they could probably extend that to other NPCs. Re: titles, they are good if they are meaningful, here it's a real elitist debate in the sense that if everybody has a title, it dilutes their value (much more than epics for example). And re: world buffs I think they really missed something by not attaching one to Archimonde or Illidan. In TBC there's only one for Kael'Thas, maybe confirming the fact that this encounter was expected to be (or considered to be) the hardest and most significant.

Things I would like to see in regards to the original topic of the thread:

1) Epic PvP items changed in color from purple to something else. Dark brown perhaps, or dark green.

2) Unique models/set graphics for the arena weapons and amor. To cut down on the extra unique art, make the models evolutionary from season to season, like the blacksmithing weapons, getting increasingly more ornate and badass each season until you get totally new set models in the following expansion.

3) Titles and unique flavor abilities/emotes/auras for killing major bosses. Like if you've killed Illidan you can use an ability that radiates green fire from you briefly.

There are two categories of concerns here. I guess the OP focused mainly on status symbols and a lot of the discussion has tracked that course. There's a certain demand for more titles, achievement, rare pets and trinkets, and other flashy visual gimmicks that serve to distinguish one's character or otherwise commemorate past achievements.

On the other hand, you have concerns that go to a core mechanics level. I probably fall more in that camp, myself. I don't so much lament homogeneity in terms of people having shoulders that all look alike, so much as I do worry about the fact that you can boil down the entire difference between a t5 shaman and myself to "he has 1800 healing and 160 mp5 and I have 2000 healing and 175 mp5." Or the fact that you can boil down the difference between two typical 2000+ warlocks as "none at all unless one is UA and the other is SL/SL."

Yes, in a game with millions of players it's going to be hard to stand out, but a lot of recent game design actively encourages homogeneity on a substantive level. As a bit of a thought experiment, consider this alternate model for how arenas might have worked:

You sign your arena charter and start a team. You're given a class-specific plain-looking set of green armor and armaments that is the official gear of gladiatoral combatants. You can mix and match rings, trinkets, cloak, etc. from elsewhere, but your 5 main armor slots and your weapon slot(s) may only be filled with arena gear while in the arenas. Arena points are earned the same way they are now, weekly based on rating. But instead of being used at a vendor to buy whole pieces of gear, you instead take your points to the arena blacksmith, who will upgrade and customize each of the pieces you've been given, for a cost in points. Basically, you are spending arena points to increase the ilvl/budget of your items. You can then spend that budget on a variety of stats, in accordance with Blizzard's itemization formula -- every point of a stat you get makes the next one cost slightly more, stats have the same relative weights that they do on items now, etc. You can also purchase sockets or even choose from a list of procs or passive bonuses (obviously priced accordingly, and appropriately expensive). At a certain point, you can't improve your item any more, and you can exchange it for a higher-quality replacement (i.e. green --> blue, then blue --> purple eventually) that has a higher budget cap, and also different and flashier graphics, so that you can quickly identify the rough quality of someone's gear at a glance. And finally put a cap on the maximum allowable budget/ilvl an item can reach over the course of a given arena season.

The end result: Meaningful choices that almost ensure that no two characters will be the same, without permanent harsh consequences (if you experiment with an unusual stat allocation and it doesn't work, just get a clean item and start upgrading that one -- sure you've lost some arena points, but you can keep earning those). People who start on a fairly level playing field, and who can distinguish themselves visually and functionally based on their skill and their choices from that point forward.

But instead we have clones running around with identical gear and slight variations such as S2 mace vs. Stormherald vs. BT mace. It doesn't have to be that way, though.

Whatever happened to the long, individual quest lines?

I know very few people who actually completed their teir .5 set. I did it on my alt and I was very impressed by the quest line, special bosses (the final one even being somewhat challenging, especially if you did not already outgear the encounter), and accomplishment as a whole. Given the gear wasn't amazing, it was somewhere in between MC/ZG/AQ20 gear. However, getting the entire set meant that you actually put in the time and effort, yet it could be done by ANYONE who achieved level 60.

This is very similar to the AQ mount (which was probably a step above the tier .5 line as it required your guild and even server cooperation). It's something that you could work for days, weeks or even months at with a very definite end and a sense of accomplishment.

Yes, there is the prospect of people quitting the game (the AQ mounts on my server are all gone I think), but this is inevitable, and shouldn't really affect Blizzards reasoning for putting this sort of quest or item in the game. We were promised artifacts, but this will probably never happen because of the potential for quitting or xferring with these items.

Imagine if there was a teired quest that started as a solo but moved to 5 mans, heroics, 10 mans, 25 mans and through the teirs of 25 mans (or even separate lines for solo/small group or raid quests) with an extremely rare item at the end as a reward. It doesn't even have to be game breaking. AQ mounts were not game breaking, but they meant something. Hand of rag wasn't game breaking but I remember the day in IF we got our server first.

Nowadays, you beat Illidan and you get a new neck that lets you port to BT so you can... kill him again? Something is missing.

Wouldn't that be incredibly harsh after some people min/max incredibly and get particular item builds nerfed unless you offer free 'respecs' for items?

People who design their character around the overpowered stat/talent/build of the day will always be let down by a nerf. This is inevitable. Check out the recent "QQ on the forums" from dwarf priests for a specific example. Playing to the "spec of the day" will always end in disappointment. This shouldn't affect blizzards ability to implement new and unique items/talents/skills etc.

Nerfs could come in between arena seasons, when people start from a clean slate anyway. If someone comes up with a broken setup, then people will emulate it, and otherwise will try to counter it -- that keeps things interesting, I think. If someone breaks your game, kudos to them, they can enjoy the fruits of their ingenuity for a while, and then you nerf/fix it for the next time around. Anyway I realize it's a bit silly trying to talk seriously about my random idea that I had while walking to work this morning, but my underlying point remains that I think real character customization (not fluff, not pretty graphics or flashing lights, but real substantive decisions) is rather lacking in many areas of the game and in PvP in particular. The fact that people have to turn to having a rare mount or a title over their heads to feel different from everyone else is an outgrowth of that reality, and isn't necessarily a positive thing.

Personally, I don't really care about status symbols. I was never one to check out the skins on new loot, to chase after rare pets, to care about item skin or titles. As an officer in my guild, I care somewhat about our position in the server, but that just as a means of keeping players interested - "Kill this boss and we'll be #3 on our server" or something like that.

What I do care about is fun and challenging content. And so I am very displeased with the new "epics welfare" approach that blizzard has taken recently. Before someone cries "ELITIST, if you care about seeing content you shouldnt care about gear," (as often is the case whenever a raider expresses interest in loot), let me explain.

Raid encounters are only really challenging, and therefore only really fun, when you are at the appropriate gear level for it. Brute-forcing an encounter because you severely outgear it is not much different from watching a video of the encounter on youtube. Of course, there are encounters that are challenging no matter what gear people have, but those are the minority. When blizzard makes it so the difference between loot from vastly different zones is not that different, it makes it hard to have encounters that are really challenging. Its no wonder half of BT and Hyjal is so easy: even if the devs assumed that everyone was in t5 level items when they were tunning the encounters, t5 is not that different (and sometimes its worse) than t4.

So much so that, as my guild starts on Kael, I am really hoping blizzard doesnt take out the attunment for hyjal and BT. Because I know that if that happens, it will be really hard to convinve guildies to spend more time on Kael. And since this would be true for most guilds, you would basically have SSC and TK becoming a ghost town like MC, only it would happen months before the expansion.

What kind of difference did you want instead? "I've got 1000 healing and 500 MP5"? "I've got 4000 healing, and no MP5"? I see the problem you're pointing out, but I'm not seeing any sort of solution to it. As a healer, you want a mix of recovery (mana regen) and throughput (+heal) stats. Other stats just aren't as interesting to you. DPS players are similar. AP, Hit, Crit, Armor Penetration, Haste. Casters want hit, crit, damage, haste. Tanks want hit, HP, armor and some mitigation. You've only got a finite number of stats to work with. Even if they allowed you to create your own items, the min/max groups out there would pretty much do the exact same thing they are doing now... finding the optimal mix of stats, and then build the gearset to match that. Customizing just makes that easier.

If you want a significant jump between tiers, then you're opening the doors wide for mudflation.

I don't think this would do all that much. City of Heroes had a ton of customization options for their characters, and yeah... not very many people looked alike. However, since everyone looked different, nobody seemed all that special (if that makes any sense).

I have been playing this game for over two years now. I never leveled a character to 60 in vanilla WoW. The reasons for this are many, but I guess the most appropriate one was because I went off to college and had "other priorities." I remember grinding naga outside Southshore and Defias rogue and warrior mobs while my friend was in MC (which was a big deal at the time, to be in "EMCEE OMG") comparing his damage as a dagger rogue to our other friend's damage as a sword rogue. Back then there was a sense of wonder (to me anyways) to the game that seems like it has been lost.

Occasionally on Riv I see a warlock (a transfer from Dunemaul) with the HWL title. I don't know how good or bad warlocks were back then, but I have a pretty good impression. I remember sending this guy a tell saying something like, "Wow, a HWL Orc Warlock. So you played when Blood Fury sucked for Warlocks." When I see just a regular warlock I think, "That guy helped someone grind HWL. Cool." While this distinction is probably meaningless to new players it certainly isn't meaningless to me.

I think WoW is really just trying to be too many things to too many people. How much of Karazhan, Gruul's Lair, et al. were "retuned" to allow everyone to have a shot? MMO game design, in my opinion, shouldn't espouse this 1990s American "everyone gets a trophy" mentality. That approach is unrealistic, I think.

The release of TBC is mudflation. A L60 TBC green is ~iLvL 90. The jump is just assinine in terms of going from non-Outland to Outland - with no real increase in terms of difficulty (thus the mad rush to L58 for Outland). I realize the need for a "clean slate", but FFS, the clean slate didn't have to start at 60. You could reduce so much mudflation by having it start at 70.

Come early retail TBC, you had iLvL 115 blue's in normal L70 dungeons versus iLvL 105-110 epics in Karazhan/Heroics (which, ironically also have L115 blues). Since Karazhan gear has to be better, Blizzard needed to balance it out. Instead of nerfing the L115 blues (to say ~100), which would have caused a massive upheaval, they just buffed Karazhan epics to L115+, which in turn would buff every other raid instance after that. So basically Blizzard's philosophy was, we're gonna buff everything, but we're going to buff some things more than we buff others. It's happening with the Arena vs PvE weapons (buff SSC/TK... and soon Hyjal/BT!) and is an endless cycle of buffing and mudflation that stems from poor design implementation.

Max DPS and no survivability? Yeah, that'd get you far in arenas. I'm specifically using PvP as an example because there is no clear single narrow role to optimize. I could easily imagine a very low-damage stam/resil/armor-stacked gear setup for a mana-drain team, to use a random example. Raiding obviously lends itself to extreme specialization and that makes min/max'ing easier, but PvP is a different matter.

On the one hand, you're saying that things you haven't experienced are mysterious to you (no surprise there), and on the other hand you're saying that even entry-level raid content should be so hard that almost nobody gets to experience it. I kinda sorta see how the claims you're making are related, but it's a silly connection to make.

It's a game..... and Blizzard is in the business of making money. You honestly think people are going to keep paying them if the entire endgame is impossible for the vast majority of the population? Blizzard knows they need to cater to the people who pay the bills.

And then you'd have some very unhappy players if their team falls apart of some aspect of draining gets modified. And certainly Blizzard wants to avoid situations where players suddenly realize that their extreme specialization results in ruination of time and resource investment. Even the (rather misguided) socket bonuses indicate that Blizzard doesn't want people to min/max themselves into 4000 hp/4000 mp/1500 +dmg gimmick characters. Nor do they want people to have to delve deeply into item budgeting mechanics. Create-your-own-item would result in uniqueness to an extent, but very, very few people would stand out, because not only would a stat allocations be typically very homogeneous (either all survivability, or all damage, or a completely even division of stats), but the artwork would still be limited in variety (unless they started opening up the artwork for "framework items" to include level 30 green sorts of stuff). Heck, they don't even implement dye kits, because they want items to be distinctive.

Never mind that would it take out all of the significance to gaining one item or another. Associating great items with exotic names like "Ashkandi" or "Thunderfury" adds an element of mystique to itemization, not to mention lore tie-ins, and that's something I really doubt they want to commoditize. They really want these items to be unique, and if all the items are too generic, then that's more of an issue with stat budgeting than it is inherent to the system. They've provided sockets as a way to add some level of customization, and if we've learned anything from that, it's that a huge number of players choose *exactly* the same gems as everyone else.

Create-your-own-item might seem like a dream to hardcore players who analyze exactly what they (think they) want out of a character, but in the long run it does nothing but detract from the game.

I don't think you read my post. The sum total of my hypothetical was a different way of handling the 5-piece Gladiator sets and associated weapons.

Well, when you said "I'm using PvP as an example", I implied that you were proposing a more sweeping change. I apologize for that.

Nevertheless, aside from the "unique lore/drops" angle, most of what I said remains true. You'd end up with everyone looking pretty similar unless they somehow changed the look of the item based on what stats you chose, and people would be going survivability / damage / half-half in pretty uninteresting ways. And if they suddenly realize that the approach they've chosen really isn't panning out, due to poor strategizing or simply outright mechanics changes, then it's not just an item or two that they'd have to replace.

This is pretty much exactly the process that competitive TCG's (ala Magic/WoW TCG) follow for Deck building. Basically, people experiment to try to 'break' the format to find a really powerful deck. And the 'preparation' part is a lot of the fun. Right now, as it stands, the preparation part of Arena is pretty minimal.

Basically, in TCG terms, every player gets handed a preconstructed deck (i.e. for your class and spec) and you play it to the best of your ability. But you get no real creativity since you have 1 set of premade gladiator gear.

Vanilla WoW there were Tiers to the items and as you went up in the Tiers you literally were more powerful then the guy one tier less then you.

What is taking away the status now of that is people are becoming equal to Tier 5/6 players by literally doing very little at all. If I had to share first place with someone in a 40 yard dash when I ran it in 3.7 seconds and he ran it in 10.7, I would feel my accomplishment was being fully appreciated.

And that is quite literally what is happening now.

Yes, people should be able to get gear regardless of skill. Everyone wants to advance their character.

The way I see that Blizzard should have fixed it was to make it so thar there are tiers of arena gear in one season. If you are 2000+ rating, you get access to the highest tier. If you have 1800-1999, you get access to the next one. And each season, you move it down so that people with 2000+ get the new gear and 1800-1999 get the next level. So on and so forth. Everyone still gets gear but people who deserve to be rewarded do so.

Also for PvE, they should have tiered it more extremely as well. Tier 6 should be a next power level up from Tier 5. Just like T3 was a step up from T2. Would this break the game? No, because Blizzard would implement challenging 5 mans and 10 mans that would provide gear one tier less then what the raiders are getting at each new level.

Raiders get T6 in BT and MH. 10 Man Raids get equivalent T5 from ZA. And Blizzard would release a challenging and long 5 man that drops gear equal to T4. And when Sunwell comes out, Blizzard would release a new Tier of each of the contents and move it up.

Everyone is happy except for the people who think they should be equal to the T6 player because they pay $15 a month just as they do. But those people will never be happy anyway.

The reason T2-->T3 was such a large increase in power is that T1/T2 items were poorly and wasted budget on splash resistances on almost every piece. Most T3 was only a few ilvls above Nef loot but it was min/max'd. In TBC, our blues are min/max'd. I can get instance blues with a sta/int/heal/mp5 split, because that's what resto shamans want. T4, T5, and T6 all offer the same sta/int/heal/mp5 split, just with larger numbers. As a shaman, going from T2 to T3 I went from a set with spirit, +dam/heal, +crit, and resistances, to one with pure sta/int/heal/mp5, and the difference was amazing.

I'm seeing a trend develop in this thread. More stuff. More abilities. More killing. That system is already in place. If you do more of the same, then you will simply have more of the same results. Especially if you make the gear/abilities "better". More people going to go for the "best" gear, which will once again make everyone look the same. Problem is NOT solved. Think about it, if a player gets an aura for killing a high end boss, then what's to stop a guild from selling raid spots to get a person their aura? Nothing. Everyone will do it. Uniqueness is gone.

Why should a "status symbol" system be solely based around killing? A player who is proud of having revealed every inch of his map should NOT be allowed to brag about it?

Even the top TCG decks have archetypes. Since you mention MtG, there's a lot of similar archetypes that show up. Dralnu du Louvre, Ghazi-Glare, Red Deck Wins, Dragonstorm, Goblinstorm, etc. The basic formula for these tournament-winning decks is the same; they all have the same basic combo for each archetype. Some of the particulars may be different (this deck has THREE remands instead of FOUR, or I splashed in green for Tarmogoyf!), but the overall deck plays essentially the same.

This is much like arena teams. The "balanced" team of warrior, paladin, shaman, priest, mage might swap out the mage for a warlock. The 4x DPS team might have a hunter or a rogue. But they're all just variations on an archetype. Magic has the benefit of having thousands of cards to pull from, and of arbitrarily changing their rules whenever the hell they feel like it (See how Animate Dead didn't work on creatures with Protection from Black, then did, then didn't again). WoW doesn't have that luxury.

The only difference is that it feels like Magic has more win conditions available than the arena (Lifegain, mill, lockdown/stasis, etc.), so the amount of viable decks is wider in comparison. If you could win the arena by healing X amount of damage, then you might see 5x healer teams crop up.