Oh my. Um, what would save WoW? I'm pretty sure that all depends on what you want. For me, saving WoW would mean bringing back everything the community voted away with years of "this system is unbalanced! Balance it or we leave!" The current WoW is sterile and flavorless. All uniqueness has been flushed away. Priest skills for each race? Well, that's unbalanced, one race is going to get great skills and the other ones will be awful. Horde/alliance having different classes? That's unbalanced too, better make both sides equal.
Not to mention: everything is a competition now. Everything. I play cooperative games to have fun with my friends, and to possibly have fun with soon-to-be-friends. It's really not that fun to go into a dungeon with random people at level 30 and be told that I am a worthless piece of meat because I'm not doing as much damage as the person on the top of the list, who has a full set of heirloom gear (someone mentioned it all boils down to gear now: it does. Painfully so. Not having enough gear = being a bad player, making your personal competency as a human essentially a derivative of how many good random numbers you've produced over the course of playing your character). Really, this sort of thing is a community issue, but if you make everything a competition, everyone will get competitive. Pretty sure if working together was more important than who could make the largest number without mobs falling off the tank, this game would be vastly more interesting. Then again, that's probably why I like Guild Wars 2 at this point: it's hard to be pissed at someone for being around when it would be more detrimental for them to not be there, regardless of how well they're doing. Even if they make brick walls look like Nobel-prize winning physicists, they can still soak hits or deal 1's to the big scary thing.
Not to mention: everything is a competition now. Everything. I play cooperative games to have fun with my friends, and to possibly have fun with soon-to-be-friends. It's really not that fun to go into a dungeon with random people at level 30 and be told that I am a worthless piece of meat because I'm not doing as much damage as the person on the top of the list, who has a full set of heirloom gear (someone mentioned it all boils down to gear now: it does. Painfully so. Not having enough gear = being a bad player, making your personal competency as a human essentially a derivative of how many good random numbers you've produced over the course of playing your character). Really, this sort of thing is a community issue, but if you make everything a competition, everyone will get competitive. Pretty sure if working together was more important than who could make the largest number without mobs falling off the tank, this game would be vastly more interesting. Then again, that's probably why I like Guild Wars 2 at this point: it's hard to be pissed at someone for being around when it would be more detrimental for them to not be there, regardless of how well they're doing. Even if they make brick walls look like Nobel-prize winning physicists, they can still soak hits or deal 1's to the big scary thing.
