Two weapon ideas for WoW

In my desperation for blog material that I can etch within the white electrons of this editor, and within ten minutes of spare time, I offer this not-so-compelling entry.

Two easy ideas to improve World of Warcraft:

[1]  A weapon trophy case.  This would contain an image of all of your weapons, including your past weapons, and for each weapon you can point at it with your cursor to see a list of weapon stats, like number of kills, number of hits, number of misses, number of critical strikes, what levels you used it, and your average DPS per engagement.  Other stats might be good, too.  Weapons only appear in this case after you've sold them.

As it currently stands, when you've outgrown a weapon you sell it to a vendor for a giveaway price, and that's the end of it.  No sense of history.

[2]  Here's the idea I like the best of these two.  Weapons should level up through usage.  For example, a level 20 sword with a DPS of 16.5, should level up slightly after every 100 kills, maybe by one tenth of a point.  This would reward players who stick with weapons for a long time, and simulate the act of becoming better and better with the weapon, as would happen in real life.  Perhaps the most a weapon can level up is 2 DPS, but it would still make a difference for the player to see his or her weapon improving through continued battle usage.

There's my two cents on how to improve WoW.  Sure, there are 5000 other improvements that can be made, but I haven't seen these two mentioned anywhere yet, so there ya go.

Comments

[pmk]

The weapon trophy case sounds cool, and yes it would give u a sense of history, say u reach level 60 and then look back and remember "old times", bosses u fought, etc, all by looking at the trophy case.
The secound idea i like more, it was done in Planescape Torment, Da'kkon's Katana became more powerfull as u gained experience. Perhaps weapons should level up based on experience not on kills, because 10 easy kills do not compare with a boss fight. Another cool thing would be having an "special" connection with your weapon, talking to it, having the weapon make remarks regarding your progress, your current quest, maybe 1 or 2 one-liners, like in duke :P. A weapon with PS:T's Morte's sense of humor would rock.

[Robert Howarth]

Idea 1 - That sounds like it would take up a lot of unnessesary storage space and server resources.

Idea 2 - They have that in Dark Age of Camelot, they're called Artifacts and level up to 10. Each level unlocks a new power or ability.

[Anon]

Idea two is already in the game in the form of pets. Why increase the similarity of the classes? I quite like idea 1 tho.
Personally I think they need to do more to induce grouping. It should be such that you never have to group but you always want to. Currently you have a bad experiance with a couple of groups of idiots and you're not going to wana group with any randoms, some kind of reputation system perhaps.

[Blake Grant]

I like both ideas, but there are definitely more pressing things that need to be added/fixed :)

The reputation system is a good idea. I've thought about it in the past, but I'm not sure how to work it well. You could let party members give you a reputation vote, but that requires trusting the opinion of the anonymous players who have partied with him/her before, which isn't really all that useful. Not sure how else to do it...

While we're dreaming about cool things to add, I would like a quest history. I'm constantly asked how to do a certain quest, or if I want to help on a quest, etc. and it would be nice to be able to look it up without going to Thottbot. Also, the quest text is nice to read, but you don't always have the time to do it. It would be nice to be able to go back and read old quests, books, etc. while you're on Griffon rides, etc. And the books shouldn't take up inventory space. Just some ever growing log of things you've "read". This would be especially useful for some of the books which are in instances that you can't take with you. Who wants to sit and read 18 pages while their party is waiting to go kill the next boss?

The auction house could use a lot of little improvements. Like the mail that gives you back your money when you're outbid or the item when you win it should tell you some information so you can remember what happened. Likewise (and actually even more important) with items you're selling. I would like to know what my prices were on items that didn't sell so I can figure out what to try next time. Another auction house idea is to have a saved set of searches. I always do the same 3 or 4 searches when I go to the auction house. It would be nice to be able to macro them into one big search. Oh, and some other things that definitely should be fixed: option to not show recipes of things you already know, and the ability to filter recipe by type.

Hmm, I'd better stop now. I could go on like this for a few hours :)

[Scott Miller]

I totally agree about a quest history. I personally never grind, and therefore I have done a ton of quests in order to level up to 45. It's be nice to be able to review all I've done.

Another part of my trophy case idea that I forgot to mention is that you'd be able to look at anyone's trophy case, simply by entering the Hall of History and typing in the person's name. This is really no different than inspecting someone's gear, but you'd be inspecting their history of weapons.

[Mark Ventura]

I think the quest history could be done with a UI mod. Try suggesting it to the Cosmos people.

[monty]

I'm wondering if the reason he has so little time is because of WoW ;)

I like the first idea, and I believe something similar was mooted during development but didn't make it into the game (yet - hopefully with player housing). The second, as someone has said, was done in DAoC and was actually a royal pain in the butt because it meant that not only did you have to win an item, you then had to level it as well as yourself. I'm sure it could be implemented better, but it turned into just another time sink.

Re. Cosmos, I doubt a UI mod could achieve the item record, because all the character information is stored on the servers and would be lost to the UI everytime you logged. I also don't like running mods like Cosmos because, apart from introducing unknown and possibly malicious code (which Cosmos has done in the past), it actually impacts your frame rate and breaks everytime there's a patch.

Welcome to WoW though. It's always a pleasure when other developers discover the genre. Grumpy Gamer seems to have been bitten as well.

[steve]

Love the first idea.

As for the second, you can already add enchantments, but I wonder if a bigger issue is that it might screw up the economy a little by giving people less of an incentive to buy newer, better weapons more frequently. They need some money sinks to keep inflation down.

[Mark Ventura]

I didn't say you could do the item thing with a UI mod.

And personally, I don't play without Cosmos.

[Blake Grant]

I personally couldn't play WoW without Cosmos (or at least some other UI mods to do the various things that I am dependent on it for). The extra item bars are 100% necessary to play efficiently. Buff timers are really useful, especially as a paladin. Map notes are really, really nice. Its nice, but not essential, to have the extra stats like DPS, time to next level, etc. As a paladin, I LOVE their Divine Blessing addon. The quest minion is pretty handy.

I agree that it can be a pain in the ass at times. It breaks every time there's a patch, but so do all UI mods. It's not Cosmos, its the bizzare way they implemented the version checking. There's a utility that will go through and update all version numbers for you which I just used yesterday after the "emergency patch" (which by the way caused some serious problems). There are a few annoying things it introduces sometimes, but the alternative (plain vanilla WoW) pretty much means I may as well quit playing the game.

[Raph]

Every MMO with housing already effectively has the trophy case. :)

[Duoae]

I like those ideas. My friend and i often have ideas of this type. A similar idea we had was kind of a combination of the two ideas you posted.

Each weapon has a history. To begin with a weapon would just be a tool and would have basic stats and no name. Then, at some randomly determined point (maybe this could use your luck stat combined with the number of enemies that you've slain with a weapon) your weapon would become named (either through player naming or the game picking a name against the enemy that weapon has killed the most - eg. "Troll Slayer") and "sentient".

At this point, along with the normal stats of how many and which type of enemies the weapon has killed, the weapon is now historically entwined in the game world and also may gain benefits. Say (as above) you had the weapon Troll Slayer. This weapon has a benefit against trolls, maybe causing fear to trolls that see you wield it.
Or maybe, a weapon might be created sentient shortly after being hit by a spell from an agressive spell-caster and take on some of the attributes of that spell or the type of magic that hit the wielder. For example you could have flame swords, void axes, etc...

Once a weapon is sentient and entwined in the world it can be sold and lost (destroyed etc), but it's history will remain and could even be added into the world's evolving history. eg at certain battles etc.
It would also be possible for weapons to "level up" by becoming more powerful, either from more spell absorption or through killing enemies.

Weapons must be repaired and kept in good condition otherwise they will degrade and become "disenchanted" or worse - destroyed.

I think that kind of system would be more beneficial to a player's experience. Both in MMOG's and single player RPG's as well.

[PG]

Please try to keep this blog's quality up. This stuff belongs on a forum.

[mike]

i had an idea for an epic weapon. you get your weapon for doing some epic task. now say for a rogue its a dagger. now you can go do 4 or 5 more epic quests and each time you come back to the guy who gave you the dagger you can choose 1 thing to add to your epic dagger. like if you wanted all 4 or 5 times you could choose +1% to critical strike, or speed the weapon up while leaving the damage the same(offhand), or raise the top end damage all 4 or 5 times +10 dmg each to get it to 140 or 150 top end damage

each class would have different epic type weapon with different stuff to choose to add

[Pearson]

The ideas sound cool,especially the first one.

[Game Producer]

Hmm, these ideas could be worth *stolen* :)
I'll scratch them down on my own list...