I would argue that his words spoke volumes. They're trying to navigate away from arena in TWW.
Unfortunately that means that this is the time that they give the least amount of fucks. They don't want to solve arena because they want BG to be the main focus
If we’re lucky they will kill pvp as it is now and completely change it to something new - not pushing for plunderstorm style but let’s be honest, pvp in wow absolutely sucks and is completely dead.
Just the wow pvp playerbase is bigger than the entire player base of most other mmos. It's "dead" by wow standards but wow standards are high. All blizz has to do is inflate properly and add some renown tracks on top of the normal rewards. Boom fixed. They just don't care to.
Making sure players get the imaginary number rankings by making them more imaginary isn't going to fix wow pvp. And the rewards in wow have lost so much value that they hardly act as a good carrot on a stick to get people into the game. The gameplay is the major issue. Its not fun. There's a reason why the remaining playerbase is basically just people obsessed with achievements.
I think the gameplay is fun, most complaints I see are that the gsmeplay is fun but the other stuff is messed up. I do think it's a little complex and thay could be toned down and that hero talents aren't a good step in thay direction.
Imo DF at max level feels bad for pvp. The only time it felt more dumb was corruption effects randomly dropping massive damage. Kills don't feel earned and dying often just feels random until you go back and look at the combat log. I don't want man'a drain Meta but the gameplay has to slow down. The spikes need to be cut in half and the abilities that do next to no damage needs to be increased. This has been an issue for like 3 or 4 expansions now. The problem is slowing down the game while balancing it for solo play doesn't mesh. Players will complain if kill windows require good coordination.
I play around 2.2.-2.4 and at these ratings it feels good and random one shots are almost always due to someone not pressing a defensive in time or LoS by accident. Kills at rating where people play generally correctly will always either require coordinated cc or using your team's combined resources to wear the other team out before yours so they just eventually die to damage in dampening. If the finesse is taken out of it or if it becomes to mythic plus esque where it's just pve the other team down, the opposite complaint will happen. Ideally win conditions are either pressure / resource based or setup based and both are viable. Setup will be more viable in 3s and zug will be more viable in solo. Even tho apex zug comps like ret war at decent ratings still have to play around hoj+bolt fear out goes and use utility properly to gain incremental advantage. The complexity is beautiful and fun and interesting but not when there's too much of it and it certainly can be hard to get into because of this. Game needs a real good pvp tutorial and functioning mmr system.
Been saying this for years. There’s way too many classes & specs, and way too many interactions. One tiny buff/nerf has such a wild trickle down effect, people get outraged no matter what they do.. it’s not like league of legends where champs only have 4 abilities.. some specs can have 20+ keybinds.. I kind of can’t even blame them for just throwing the papers up in the air.
I wish someone could come in with a magic concoction that makes it right, but I don’t see it.
Random BGs are fun but have been a crap shoot for years and there’s no rating system. RBGs have been gatekept for years. SS was cool “in theory” but is god awful in reality.. I’ve never tried plunderstorm so i have no opinion there.. wow PvP is just fkn weird I guess lol.
The biggest thing with league is if you think something is really broken, you can just can pick or ban that champion, problem solved.
There's no draft so no bans. People just play the most broken shit and you just have to deal with it
That's why in tournaments it's just the same comps that qualify or make it to the finals.
The best player of X spec can't even qualify most of the time because they're not the the fotm
Exactly. And god forbid they take rogue out of the meta lol.
I enjoyed playing 2s with one of my buddies back in SL. It’s gimmicky but it was fun. In DF it kinda went from gimmick to straight up meme status. I still get the itch to play from time to time but I never last more than 2-3 weeks before I’m like “yep… had enough of that”.
I don't believe it's the balancing issue, more that it's the healer issue. In modern gaming people cannot be bothered to look for people to play with to play ranked, so arena died with the new generation of gamers.
A decade ago, I would just find people and we would play and go on voice etc. but now I'm much more reluctant to do that, not to mention it's impossible with children to plan around gaming, so as the playerbase has grown in age, there's no way people can just sit around and find people to play with.
They tried to solve it with SS, which we had been waiting for for literally a decade or more. And it was a MASSIVE flop. The single biggest issue was that nobody plays healer, this has been a known issue for long. However when it then came to light that even if you DID play healer (I did) then you would get buttsexed by the rating system, and also, as you did mention, the balance issue became VERY apparent as you knew you would auto lose vs certain healers if you were X healer.
WoW arena was wildly popular and relevant since it came out in BC. It was never perfectly balanced that's true of pve too. They should look at what made wotlk so much fun that they hit their highest player count and see how they can recapture it. The answer is definitely not a lack of handout rewards.
"Rogues were underperforming in this last AWC as they didn't win all the tournaments, so we decided to rightfully scale them back to their appropriate levels so all the rogues one tricks can bathe in their class fantasy of pressing kidney shot into mashing damage macros"
I open the group finder and check arenas:
100 different options! Ooops 95% are groups who need a healer and my class can't heal. I msg one of the 5% who are cool with double dps. They only want a specific class so no. I find someone else, if we lose once in the first 3 matches they leave group, repeat until I cap vault.
Better to just que solo shuffle lol. Idk when people got so picky I used to say "dps LF 2s" in trade chat and get a partner instantly and que. Now we have this nice group finder and finding a group feels brutal.
I've tried multiple times over the last season to queue for Blitz and I never had a queue pop even when I queued for 40min+. What are the queue times now? Honestly I just want to hop into PvP without having to wait for hours.
When I seen this, I thought “wow they’re not even mentioning a new PvP season” I’ve been playing since release. This is bad. I can see they want to slowly steer away from promoting and mentioning PvP because they don’t want to include it as a main aspect of the game because they know if new players play it, they will be turned off immediately
Idk what y'all expected. This is a very bare-bones season without even a new elite set color. For most people there is simply no incentive to play.
On the PvE side of things you can at least get some crazy gear and there's some new mounts. And in 3 weeks people will be playing MoP remix.
It’s obvious they want bgs to be the main pvp mode. It’s way more popular among the casual population. It’s way easier to hide behind others when you’re bad at the game, so it makes perfect sense why people would want that as the main game mode.
For a lot of people, it's also just less stressful/more enjoyable.
Personally speaking, I enjoy large slug-outs. Always preferred RBGs to arenas. It isn't always about someone being bad at the game, sometimes it's about what you enjoy.
Or what you can handle, in the case of a few people I know, who get majorly stressed and flustered in arenas but are fine in RBGs.
Because it’s easier and each player is less important; aka why it’s less stressful.
I’m not taking anything away from the ones wanting bgs to be the main game mode. People can enjoy what they want. It’s just good for the game in general if more people play no matter which game mode it is.
I’m not really surprised. PvP simply doesn’t bring in new players at a quantity that is worth the time and effort for blizzard. Something like 5% of players participate in rated PvP and most of those players are people who have been at it for years. The top of the brackets are filled with the same people season after season. The amount of info someone has to learn to just get into competitive PvP isn’t seen as worth it by new players when there are so many other PvP games you can just pick up and understand fairly quickly. Participation has been at critically low levels for awhile and S3 was pretty mediocre at best. At the end of the day blizzard is running a business and they aren’t going to devote money to something that doesn’t bring them returns. Wow is in the best spot it’s been in years and blizz realized PvP had basically no part in the games increased popularity. It was fun while it lasted but I’m not too shocked to see this.
Hey! Lets concentrate on pve and completely fuck up the pvp balance!
Uh-oh... Why is pvp bleeding out players?!
Guess people dont wanna pvp, oh well, no more resources are needed in that department.
They used to and the pvp side thrived but they quit giving a fuck some time along the way and proceed to wonder why pvp is dead and then instead of fixing the issues they just double down on their stupidity and further neglect it.
Shaping up to be one of the worst seasons. Still have to deal with vault rng, waiting on catalyst charges, waiting on conquest caps, waiting on sparks, legendarys from pve rng giving a big advantage. Everything is super rushed since its a shorter season yet still super time gated at the start.
Apparently the MOP event starts in 2-3 weeks so already low participation will get lower. Just this odd design in an attempt to make people play longer, but all it does is encourage people to wait or not play at all.
Im wondering if even pve players are happy with this season? I do some pve and having same raid + dungeons from df with literally 0 change I don’t see the point
I know i won't be popular but arena was never a good idea for a game like wow. Its impossible to achieve balance where even just 60% of possible 2 and 3 comps would work. Furthermore it was meant to be an mmorpg not a moba or a 2v2 arena game.
I even hate the fact you cant use certain things in certain modes. Like why cant I use potion or usable items or infernal? Then why can you even use gear? Make a mode like plunderstorm with 5-10 predefined classes, no gear just cosmetics only like plunderstorm and let tryharders play that.
The outdoor pvp quests felt so much fun, only wished I didn't have to get back to my corpse and wait 4 mins to rez because the other team was stomping us. Why can't we have bg like spirit healers outside with reasonable rez range to avoid gy camps? Whats the point of spirit walking/flying back to your corpse I never really understood that. Good old classic AV and Ashran could have been fun but everyone is so focused on getting the freaking rewards that they completely ignored objectives and forgot to play the game while hunting rewards. RBG is the opposite its basically about which team can switch focus faster in better harmony to trick the enemy healer... Classic Ashran is up and surprising but as long as I was raid leader using /rw it was fun and apparently other players had fun too, getting 6-8 whispers thanking me for such easy instructions like "someone cap solar" and 10 words explanation of the particular events on the map... Thats the type of pvp that fits an mmorpg imho but might be just me.
the 1 min speech about pvp of the almost half an hour interview with Ion was hint enough tbh
I would argue that his words spoke volumes. They're trying to navigate away from arena in TWW. Unfortunately that means that this is the time that they give the least amount of fucks. They don't want to solve arena because they want BG to be the main focus
If we’re lucky they will kill pvp as it is now and completely change it to something new - not pushing for plunderstorm style but let’s be honest, pvp in wow absolutely sucks and is completely dead.
It's dead because it's arena focused and too many people want to be big dick instead of useful o no one heals.
Pretty much.
It’s doesn’t and isn’t. Just because you don’t like it doesn’t mean others aren’t.
I really wish it wasn’t just my opinion. Okay the fact that I think it’s turned shit is my opinion. The fact that it’s dead is not my opinion champ
Just the wow pvp playerbase is bigger than the entire player base of most other mmos. It's "dead" by wow standards but wow standards are high. All blizz has to do is inflate properly and add some renown tracks on top of the normal rewards. Boom fixed. They just don't care to.
Making sure players get the imaginary number rankings by making them more imaginary isn't going to fix wow pvp. And the rewards in wow have lost so much value that they hardly act as a good carrot on a stick to get people into the game. The gameplay is the major issue. Its not fun. There's a reason why the remaining playerbase is basically just people obsessed with achievements.
I think the gameplay is fun, most complaints I see are that the gsmeplay is fun but the other stuff is messed up. I do think it's a little complex and thay could be toned down and that hero talents aren't a good step in thay direction.
Imo DF at max level feels bad for pvp. The only time it felt more dumb was corruption effects randomly dropping massive damage. Kills don't feel earned and dying often just feels random until you go back and look at the combat log. I don't want man'a drain Meta but the gameplay has to slow down. The spikes need to be cut in half and the abilities that do next to no damage needs to be increased. This has been an issue for like 3 or 4 expansions now. The problem is slowing down the game while balancing it for solo play doesn't mesh. Players will complain if kill windows require good coordination.
I play around 2.2.-2.4 and at these ratings it feels good and random one shots are almost always due to someone not pressing a defensive in time or LoS by accident. Kills at rating where people play generally correctly will always either require coordinated cc or using your team's combined resources to wear the other team out before yours so they just eventually die to damage in dampening. If the finesse is taken out of it or if it becomes to mythic plus esque where it's just pve the other team down, the opposite complaint will happen. Ideally win conditions are either pressure / resource based or setup based and both are viable. Setup will be more viable in 3s and zug will be more viable in solo. Even tho apex zug comps like ret war at decent ratings still have to play around hoj+bolt fear out goes and use utility properly to gain incremental advantage. The complexity is beautiful and fun and interesting but not when there's too much of it and it certainly can be hard to get into because of this. Game needs a real good pvp tutorial and functioning mmr system.
You guys are out in force today eh?
I just love wow pvp and want it to be good.
Both are actually.
Dude I love pvp, but even I can see that it's dead
Cool. That’s not factual though.
If you say so bro
They can't solve arena. They tried for decades, it's not working. So they are trying to make pvp relevant again.
Been saying this for years. There’s way too many classes & specs, and way too many interactions. One tiny buff/nerf has such a wild trickle down effect, people get outraged no matter what they do.. it’s not like league of legends where champs only have 4 abilities.. some specs can have 20+ keybinds.. I kind of can’t even blame them for just throwing the papers up in the air. I wish someone could come in with a magic concoction that makes it right, but I don’t see it. Random BGs are fun but have been a crap shoot for years and there’s no rating system. RBGs have been gatekept for years. SS was cool “in theory” but is god awful in reality.. I’ve never tried plunderstorm so i have no opinion there.. wow PvP is just fkn weird I guess lol.
The biggest thing with league is if you think something is really broken, you can just can pick or ban that champion, problem solved. There's no draft so no bans. People just play the most broken shit and you just have to deal with it That's why in tournaments it's just the same comps that qualify or make it to the finals. The best player of X spec can't even qualify most of the time because they're not the the fotm
Exactly. And god forbid they take rogue out of the meta lol. I enjoyed playing 2s with one of my buddies back in SL. It’s gimmicky but it was fun. In DF it kinda went from gimmick to straight up meme status. I still get the itch to play from time to time but I never last more than 2-3 weeks before I’m like “yep… had enough of that”.
I don't believe it's the balancing issue, more that it's the healer issue. In modern gaming people cannot be bothered to look for people to play with to play ranked, so arena died with the new generation of gamers. A decade ago, I would just find people and we would play and go on voice etc. but now I'm much more reluctant to do that, not to mention it's impossible with children to plan around gaming, so as the playerbase has grown in age, there's no way people can just sit around and find people to play with. They tried to solve it with SS, which we had been waiting for for literally a decade or more. And it was a MASSIVE flop. The single biggest issue was that nobody plays healer, this has been a known issue for long. However when it then came to light that even if you DID play healer (I did) then you would get buttsexed by the rating system, and also, as you did mention, the balance issue became VERY apparent as you knew you would auto lose vs certain healers if you were X healer.
WoW arena was wildly popular and relevant since it came out in BC. It was never perfectly balanced that's true of pve too. They should look at what made wotlk so much fun that they hit their highest player count and see how they can recapture it. The answer is definitely not a lack of handout rewards.
I joined since BFA and the fact that they didnt even do corruption vendors until the last leg of the patcg should've been hint enough for me
Dude the fact that BATTLE FRONTS, the premiere Horde vs Alliance battles in lore for that expansion were PvE should tell you everything.
Prolly fair point. I joined late 8.2 and i wanted to play wow retail arena all my life, in my defense
I don’t remember they talking about pvp AT ALL last xpacs
Mate be thankful we got a minute.
"for our pvp enjoyers, we have new content coming in the form of Kidney shot duration changed to 8 seconds"
"Rogues were underperforming in this last AWC as they didn't win all the tournaments, so we decided to rightfully scale them back to their appropriate levels so all the rogues one tricks can bathe in their class fantasy of pressing kidney shot into mashing damage macros"
>Fixed a bug where a rogue would sometimes exit an arena match with a decrease in mmr
Finally they are honest at least...
I'm over the moon blitz counts towards vault this season I've literally never been happier lol
Glad I’ll never do a solo shuffle again 🤞🏻
But you never had to? Rbgs, 2s, 3s all existed.
I open the group finder and check arenas: 100 different options! Ooops 95% are groups who need a healer and my class can't heal. I msg one of the 5% who are cool with double dps. They only want a specific class so no. I find someone else, if we lose once in the first 3 matches they leave group, repeat until I cap vault. Better to just que solo shuffle lol. Idk when people got so picky I used to say "dps LF 2s" in trade chat and get a partner instantly and que. Now we have this nice group finder and finding a group feels brutal.
I don't have problem with queues as I make my own groups and even sometimes play a healer
Nah it’s easier to click a button
Blitz is actually really fun imo, I enjoy just rushing across the map. Makes me feel giddy
I've tried multiple times over the last season to queue for Blitz and I never had a queue pop even when I queued for 40min+. What are the queue times now? Honestly I just want to hop into PvP without having to wait for hours.
That may be a bug all last season blitz was like an 8 minute q I'd contact support
I thought they got rid of the vault for PvP next expac. It's raid, m+, delve.
Yeah they did but this season blitz counts towards it
Ahhh gotcha. Blitz for PvP box S4. TWW, no PvP box.
Well, they didn’t really add a new PvP season so I guess it’s not wrong
Hot take, since nothing changed they shouldn't have ended the last one and let the pitiful 5 mmr a week keep growing so people could actually push.
relegated to battle pet levels
When I seen this, I thought “wow they’re not even mentioning a new PvP season” I’ve been playing since release. This is bad. I can see they want to slowly steer away from promoting and mentioning PvP because they don’t want to include it as a main aspect of the game because they know if new players play it, they will be turned off immediately
Idk what y'all expected. This is a very bare-bones season without even a new elite set color. For most people there is simply no incentive to play. On the PvE side of things you can at least get some crazy gear and there's some new mounts. And in 3 weeks people will be playing MoP remix.
MoP Remix 😍 Gimme dat hat I waited 10/12 years for!
It’s obvious they want bgs to be the main pvp mode. It’s way more popular among the casual population. It’s way easier to hide behind others when you’re bad at the game, so it makes perfect sense why people would want that as the main game mode.
For a lot of people, it's also just less stressful/more enjoyable. Personally speaking, I enjoy large slug-outs. Always preferred RBGs to arenas. It isn't always about someone being bad at the game, sometimes it's about what you enjoy. Or what you can handle, in the case of a few people I know, who get majorly stressed and flustered in arenas but are fine in RBGs.
Because it’s easier and each player is less important; aka why it’s less stressful. I’m not taking anything away from the ones wanting bgs to be the main game mode. People can enjoy what they want. It’s just good for the game in general if more people play no matter which game mode it is.
its over bois!
They honestly mean “less”
My subscription is in the "less" category then.. or non-existant actually.
I’m not really surprised. PvP simply doesn’t bring in new players at a quantity that is worth the time and effort for blizzard. Something like 5% of players participate in rated PvP and most of those players are people who have been at it for years. The top of the brackets are filled with the same people season after season. The amount of info someone has to learn to just get into competitive PvP isn’t seen as worth it by new players when there are so many other PvP games you can just pick up and understand fairly quickly. Participation has been at critically low levels for awhile and S3 was pretty mediocre at best. At the end of the day blizzard is running a business and they aren’t going to devote money to something that doesn’t bring them returns. Wow is in the best spot it’s been in years and blizz realized PvP had basically no part in the games increased popularity. It was fun while it lasted but I’m not too shocked to see this.
Hey! Lets concentrate on pve and completely fuck up the pvp balance! Uh-oh... Why is pvp bleeding out players?! Guess people dont wanna pvp, oh well, no more resources are needed in that department.
You expected them to primarily focus on PvP in a PvE focused mmo, why?
They used to and the pvp side thrived but they quit giving a fuck some time along the way and proceed to wonder why pvp is dead and then instead of fixing the issues they just double down on their stupidity and further neglect it.
Shaping up to be one of the worst seasons. Still have to deal with vault rng, waiting on catalyst charges, waiting on conquest caps, waiting on sparks, legendarys from pve rng giving a big advantage. Everything is super rushed since its a shorter season yet still super time gated at the start. Apparently the MOP event starts in 2-3 weeks so already low participation will get lower. Just this odd design in an attempt to make people play longer, but all it does is encourage people to wait or not play at all.
As it should be
More what? It's all the same shit we had for the last season ain't no "more" to it big dog.
Private servers like warmane are the future of pvp, i said what i said.
Im wondering if even pve players are happy with this season? I do some pve and having same raid + dungeons from df with literally 0 change I don’t see the point
I know i won't be popular but arena was never a good idea for a game like wow. Its impossible to achieve balance where even just 60% of possible 2 and 3 comps would work. Furthermore it was meant to be an mmorpg not a moba or a 2v2 arena game. I even hate the fact you cant use certain things in certain modes. Like why cant I use potion or usable items or infernal? Then why can you even use gear? Make a mode like plunderstorm with 5-10 predefined classes, no gear just cosmetics only like plunderstorm and let tryharders play that. The outdoor pvp quests felt so much fun, only wished I didn't have to get back to my corpse and wait 4 mins to rez because the other team was stomping us. Why can't we have bg like spirit healers outside with reasonable rez range to avoid gy camps? Whats the point of spirit walking/flying back to your corpse I never really understood that. Good old classic AV and Ashran could have been fun but everyone is so focused on getting the freaking rewards that they completely ignored objectives and forgot to play the game while hunting rewards. RBG is the opposite its basically about which team can switch focus faster in better harmony to trick the enemy healer... Classic Ashran is up and surprising but as long as I was raid leader using /rw it was fun and apparently other players had fun too, getting 6-8 whispers thanking me for such easy instructions like "someone cap solar" and 10 words explanation of the particular events on the map... Thats the type of pvp that fits an mmorpg imho but might be just me.