A couple of months ago, I asked what you’d change if you had the ear of Blizzard’s dev team for a day, and I promised my own answer to the question – which I am now, finally, getting to.

My top three wishlist:

1. Achievements. Done! I’ve long lamented the lack of recognition in-game for non-mechanical achievements – exploration, world events and the like. Star Wars Galaxies, my first real MMO experience, handled it very well; LOTRO does a good job with it too. I’d hoped for something similar in WoW, and it’s good to see Blizzard are answering my prayers!

2. Meaningful Crafting. I really enjoy tradeskills. I like working on them, improving them, learning about them, and spending time on them. Unfortunately, in WoW there’s little reward for doing that; one crafter is much the same as another. I compare this with Star Wars Galaxies or EQ2, where a dedicated crafter could produce items that were better – in terms of stats or effects – than the items produced by other people.

The trouble is, even if Blizzard introduced a ‘quality’ differentiation, they’d be likely to make it a reward for time expenditure or a random uncontrollable reward (like alchemists learning recipes via discovery, or the new random ‘perfect gems’ for jewelcrafters). I want a system that rewards knowledge and good decision-making, not spending four hours a day on profession quests or random luck.

3. Web Chat Interface. This is something EQ2 did from launch, nearly four years ago; logging into the EQ2 website allowed you to talk in guild chat, custom channels and whispers.

As a guild leader, this would be a godsend – I have a certain obligation to be online and available for my guildies, at least to talk to, if not to play with. Web chat would allow me to stay in touch easily without having to be logged into the game itself, which would be incredibly handy.