Old Content Relevance

There are a lot of ghost towns in WoW. There is a ton of content that is aimed at level-capped players that becomes impossible to do at that level when a new expansion comes around. Sure, you can complete the Cipher of Damnation quests in Shadowmoon Valley today, but are you likely to? This goes especially for instanced content. Who is going to raid Firelands at level 85 anymore? Probably no one. Pit of Saron at 80? Not likely.

Now, on one hand, this content usually doesn't just go away (though with revamps, occasionally they are changed to such an extent that they don't really feel the same. Shadowfang Keep used to be "the Worgen dungeon." There isn't a single living Worgen inside unless you count the friendly NPCs/Players when you run it as Alliance.) You can still go into Ulduar and mess things up with Flame Leviathan, XT, and hear Thorim's famous "in the mountains" line. But it's really not the same, because you're far more powerful than the place was designed for.

Now, let me begin by playing the devil's advocate here. This content is old, and the nature of the game is to come out with new content for us to focus on. If we were forced to run Trial of the Crusader from now until the end of WoW's life, it would go beyond tired and boring and into excruciating.

But it does seem like a bit of a waste, doesn't it? There are literally 25 raids (of varying size) from the past expansions that are basically just sitting there. Yes, there are battle pets to collect from some of them, which encourages you to go back and solo them, but soloing Karazhan is very different from actually raiding it. You're not going to worry about CC'ing the adds on Moroes, and you probably won't even get to the light-beam phase on Netherspite. These fights are not the fights they once were, simply because of the immense jump in power that players have experienced that allows them to ignore the fights' mechanics.

So what is to be done? Surely, I don't think they should get rid of the raids in their current form. It can actually be quite a lot of fun to go through the old raids and feel like a total badass as you plow through the ranks, defeating Ragnaros, or Kael'thas, or Kel'thuzad on your own (I doubt I'd be able to solo Cataclysm raids just yet.)

But it would be cool to be able to experience those raids the way that they were meant to be seen, not to mention the many level-cap dungeons and heroics.

Given that Blizzard has been playing around a lot with scaling features, such as in Challenge Mode dungeons and the upcoming Flex Raids, I think it would be very cool indeed to find a way to make this old-school content relevant again.

Here's what I would propose:

Allow you to do the "scaled" raid or dungeon difficulty. There would be 10 and 25-person options for raids, or you could use the flex raiding system and apply it to this.

All enemies and bosses would be scaled up to your level. Dungeons would be scaled to roughly where current heroic dungeons are (or maybe slightly harder, but not 4.0 heroic hard.) Raids would likewise be comparable to either LFR or Flex difficulties.

Loot in these instances would be primarily for transmog purposes, perhaps simply using the same loot they dropped originally - either that or transmog-only "replicas," that could be disenchanted for current materials if no one wanted them.

There would be two weekly quests: one for a dungeon and one for a raid. Like the old dungeon quests from BC/Wrath, these would be randomized, picking a particular raid or dungeon from the list of available ones. The reward for the quest would be a bunch of valor (think 150 or 200,) and perhaps reputation with your championed faction. The idea here would be that anyone who wanted to do these old-school runs would be free to, but the rewards would not be so overwhelmingly unique as to make people feel forced to run them.

Obviously the danger here would be that it could pull people away from the expansion's current content. For that reason, it may be advisable to not use a matchmaking system with it, instead working like heroic scenarios and requiring a pre-made group.

One of the unfortunate consequences of a multi-player game is that simply staring over and playing again will not actually yield the same experience as it did the first time. By bringing these old places back, that problem would be mitigated.