WoW Strategy I: Introduction

WoW made an attempt to add a property system with the introduction of the garrison. Due to the overwhelmingly negative backlash, this content was pretty much 90% scrapped and replaced with the Order Hall which avoided most of the shortcomings of the garrison, but ultimately amounted to little more than being a mostly cosmetic change: one might as well remove the Order Hall and replace it with a few NPCs in Dalaran and it wouldn't really have changed the gaming experience of Legion that much. Certainly better than WoD, but still a rather unsatisfying conclusion considering the potential of that part of the game.

But what were the issues with the garrison?

• It killed socializing: due to the absence of an actual capital and the (material) importance of the garrison, many players stayed inside the confines of their garrison when they weren't roaming the world - which, as usual for WoW, was the norm during the endgame. This killed the MMO vibe for most of the playing time during WoD.
•  It took up disproportionally much time: this was in no small part due to fact that players were practically forced to stay inside their garrisons most of the time. At the beginning of the day because the daily tasks had to be completed (harvesting resources, blowing daily crafting cooldowns) and during the day because the follower missions required nigh-constant supervision.
• It outsourced content: the harvesting opportunities in the garrison practically removed resource gathering from the game, and the follower missions offered equipment and gold without any input from the player, thus destroying the feeling of achievement coming with it.
• The follower system wasn't interesting: the follower system was poorly executed - players were given a zoo of non-customizable generic NPCs who mostly looked silly in their patchwork armor. Also, outside of missions the followers were good for nothing except tailing the NPCs as guards or improving the output of the crafting huts.
• Outposts weren't interesting either: the outposts were another wasted opportunity since they amounted to little else than providing players with one additional action button for the respective area and that was it.

This ultimately amounted to the following problems: It wasn't interesting, but it wasn’t really optional either - it basically forced players to deal with content that was neither funny nor interesting (that was the huge difference to WotLK’s vehicle combat – that wasn’t well received either, but at least it wasn’t mandatory for most of the game). Why? Because it was too lucrative to ignore. The typical dynamic that has been researched in behavioral theory time and again kicked in: at the beginning, it was well-received because everyone liked freebies, but once they took over, it sucked the fun out of the game because the sense of achievement was gone.

What is especially egregious about this is that Blizzard actually made several well-designed and successful build & conquer RTS games which, in fact, were responsible that WoW came into existence in the first place. So why wasn't the whole system designed to be more like a general build & conquer strategy game to try to catch the charm of the original series?

The following are ideas on how to manage an updated "WoW property & real estate"-system by picking up all the in theory really cool ideas WoD has introduced and refining them so the aforementioned problems are at least partially avoided. Most of these ideas I have come up with during WoD (i.e. before Legion took a step back in that regard), but I wanted to share them nonetheless.