Ask about the ret with 6% vers, could not do anything since SL launch.
Curaso (the old main) would moan to us in WPVP during mop too. Swapped to alts just to do it. 
The point of rating has always been bragging rights, cosmetics, etc. Giving them more power just means they can do carries since now they have more skill and better gear.
MoP and WoD had great participation and the PvP community seems to have loved them, yet there was no rating drama. You could get your gear, then see how far you can go on the ladder. Then you pick another class and do it again.
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Tokens are worth more than a sub. Mathematics.
i know lots of people who have purchased carries, i dont know a single one that did it for gold or a token. i even went looking, and the few that advertise for carries for gold tell you in disc that they want money sent via paypal or venmo or whatever.
unless blizz wants to hire these guys and officially sell carries, this does not make financial sense. most of the whale money is bypassing blizzard entirely and the few whales that buy tokens for a carry are not going to make up for all the lost subs.
the next problem is that blizz selling carries makes the game hard ‘pay2play’ which will drive everyone away but a few. the only viable solution is to solve pvp gearing so that there is no need to buy a carry for anyone.
$75 usd an hr, staff gets $25. 30+ Employees.
During a pandemic.
Do some research around the Candy Crush methods of extracting payments.
Same team, different game.
are you saying the 3rd party carry sellers already work for blizzard?
$1000’s an hour. I am sure employees make more than that. Right?
I agree with you 110%, unfortunately Blizzard don’t seem to care what we like.
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what do you think of this theory:
i’ve been thinking about the decline of wow’s population, how players play with each other, and what i noticed is that wow’s population decline started with the introduction of hardmodes and progression by increased difficulty. prior to that raid bosses were relatively tame mechanically and the hard part of raiding was the logistics of getting everyone together, fed, buffed, and getting them geared. what stopped progression was mainly getting everyone geared enough to do the next raid. you can see this in bosses like the safety dance in naxx, that was a legendary fight back in the day, but today is relatively easy to the point that the modern take has a ton of additional mechanics.
the thing is, safety dance was hard for guilds because raiding isn’t easy for everyone, and you move at your slowest member’s pace.
so in wrath they started experimenting with hardmodes and multiple raid sizes, the difference in ilvl drops meant that a clear line of progression was implied. what makes wow great is that its a social game, even if you dont want to raid or pvp or do anything, you can log in and shoot the 
with your buddies while you run circles in oribos.
ilvl progression forces you to play with people of a certain caliber in order to keep progressing. if you want to play with your friend but he sucks at the game, you must choose between limiting your own progression and therefore being unhappy with your character not meeting your expectations, or you can not play with your friend and instead pug some random, or you can quit and find a game you can both play together, another possibility the game allows is to raid multiple times, but that drains people to the point that they quit, so its not really viable.
i think that over the years, as each player reaches a raid with a new mode or a new breaker boss, friends have had to look at friends and make that very hard choice, and its slowly been killing the game like cancer.
so now look at shadowlands PVP, in order to play in pvp at all and not feel like the game is complete trash, you need to do rated in order to boost your ilvl up. well, this means you need to play with competent people, this often means that if you have been playing casually with someone, and now you need to reach 2100 with them, if they can’t do that, and are a 1600 player, your choice is to not play with your friends, not achieve your goals, or quit and find another game to play together. a lot of people have been choosing the last option.
many still have been bypassing this choice by purchasing a carry, however this is unsustainable without year long seasons as paying an extra $1000 a year in carry fees is going to separate people very quick.
TLDR: ilvl progression as a system is killing the game and why pvp started dying immediately as soon as it was introduced to pvp.
7 Likes
This is a huge factor. I play casually with my friends, some are better than others but we still play together, this limits us all getting 2.1 easily and can end up like last season where I never get 2.1 on the toons I want to play.
With that said, I play for my friends, if I cannot play with my friends, I have no reason to play this game. This system has made me realize this and why I have come to the forums. I hope they fix this or many more of us will leave.
Rating gating ruined competition in PvP IMO and is the reason I will eventually give up and let go of this game if things don’t change.
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Yup 100%. Like I’ve said before, my PvP guild died in one season of legion. The instanced PvP power differences were meh but people still felt the need to climb (also for wpvp).
Wod, during the biggest content drought ever, the guild grew?!? Legitimately was awesome. Everyone played every form of content, with every spec and every comp and played it with absolutely everyone from the guild. Only time people went hardcore was for end of season pushes. Was amazing. RIP.
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I’m sure that’s part of it, but I’m guessing a bigger reason for the decline is the playerbase is just getting older.
And also, the game itself is legit “old” now @ 17 years old, and young gamer’s tastes have shifted over into other low-investment “jump in and go” games like Fortnite and CoD.
WoW is a high-investment, time-intensive game and today’s teenagers/young people seem to shy away from that in favor of these modern “jump in and go” titles.
Younger people are just not as interested in the MMORPG genre and the trends/twitch metrics show this. I have various male family members/cousins/relatives in the 16-26 age bracket and not a single one plays WoW 
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when you were 16-26, did you listen to your parents music or watch their tv shows? why would they play their parents games?
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The problem, is that WoW did most of this to itself, by condemning casuals to a horrible experience and my doing the same to the average rated player.
They make the game miserable for us (seems intentional at this point…) and don’t ever heed our feedback. It grinds my gears they are throwing away such a great game by not listening to the players at all until it’s too late. Over and over again…
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Trying to upgrade my dks gear is a whole mess rn I’m having to farm so many epics . I’m not even halfway done yet.
I didn’t even know WoD was considered bad. I was playing too much and having the best time I have ever had in this game.
You see, all three of my boys did play this game, and they did come back for this expansion. All three of them has quit playing wow and playing some other game because PvP is so bad.
I guess I’m too old, and I’m just hanging on, but if I ever quit wow I’m going back to Xbox.
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I did, haha.
Music and television that is. My parents didn’t have video games.
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I dunno man… All of my RL friends that played wow back in the day still play other games. They came back for tbc. They’ll come back for the next patch. None of them have played retail since legion turned the game into chorecraft. Let people play what they want to and they’ll have fun.
I mean the whole reason I play wow is my dad lol… He got me into wc1/2/3… He never played wow but he got me hooked on the universe.
Lol I was kinda upset at the start… The class design from mop to wod took quite a big hit. Was kinda jarring to go from amazing to pruned. Compared to now though, hindsight is 20/20 lol. Also there were some garison complaints that I coulda cared less about. All in all though, PvP wise, our guild actually grew from mop to wod. We were never a mass recruit guild, had an app and interview process, and we still got fairly huge in wod. I definitely played the crap out of it.