Horde For Life

While enjoying the sheer greatness that is the Cataclysm expansion, I have noticed a nice but albeit short lived bye-product of all the new green and blue items that are filtering into our world and this has really got my thought process spooled up. Currently when I step into Orgrimmar and see 50 [insert class here] they do not all look EXACTLY alike.

Unfortunately, I know that this will not last long since everyone will soon be marching toward the singularity that happens each and every expansion where every individual class will eventually look EXACTLY alike in their Tier 11 gear. For a game that is so rich, vibrant and diverse this is a real sore spot with me. So while many are divided (including Blizzard) on the need for “Wardrobe Tab” functionality (why I do not understand since it is an incredible idea), the fact remains that it gets very tiresome seeing the repetition and lack of individuality.

So Blizzard, here is my idea; an mechanic that would provide increased diversity, flavor and customization at a low developmental resource cost. A mechanic that would be easy to implement and thereby make the “that feature would take away from X feature” argument invalid:
Put all the old Tier gear back into the game (Tiers 1-10) and then do a simple database copy of the existing and current (tier 11 today) gear stats over to the older gear art assets on a piece by piece basis. Now create an new NPC vendor in Orgrimmar and Stormwind that stocks all this gear (or create a drop down tab on the NPC vendor if you have the tech) and let the players select from the various looks from seasons past.

Simple huh? Tons of upside… little to no downside.

The bottom line is some of the current Tier 11 stuff looks medicore to horrible (my personal opinion) and no one will agree globally on what looks good and bad, so give us choices! Provided that the stats, processes and impacts of the gear are IDENTICAL (and not retroactively applied to old sets already in player possession) then there is no balance issue, just the ability to look different than the other 1,000 [insert class here] on my server. There is so much incredible gear and weapon art work in game from both a PvP and PvE perspective that it pains me to see it is no in game and sitting on a flash drive in accounting (or in actually, being “unflagged” on the DB server).

I just cannot see a downside here. If I reach deep maybe you can say that PvP players are used to sizing up opponents by their gear, but I would argue vehemently that this is a positive, not a negative and I by all acounts, a pretty hard core PvP players. In the end, Blizzard needs to understand that maybe I do not want my Paladin to look like he is about to enter dancing with the stars… hell he is already a Blood Elf, can you not understand that I do not want to make him any more “flamboyant”?

This entry was posted on December 14, 2010 at 11:26 pm and is filed under MMO, Role Playing, World of Warcraft. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.