Additional suggestions to fix arena, on top of MMR fix which was GREAT (thank god)

PVP Arenas
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Context - I’ve been playing wow for 10+ years, pvping, pveing, collecting, even playing twinks (19s). Been gladiator many times, couple of CE’s, even banned (for 6 months) through using afk macros to farm stuff. Not saying I’m good at the game, not even close, just experienced.

I love wow, and I love wow PVP, high end. Always dreamed of getting rank 1 but I’m aussy so trying to perform on 300ms is kinda hard :).

Anyway enough with the excuses.

PVP atleast around my range, imo is REALLY FUN, but there is no insentive to play 3s or try push rating (prior to MMR fix annoucement you’d just sit to end of season and push gladiator when the inflation was high enough).

Previous expansions (BFA,Shadowlands) introduced the change in achievements for titles and introduced progressive pvp gearing into pvp, imo a great test and while the hiccups of (some) PVE gear that could outshine it made an atleast somewhat importance on trying to push rating and upgrading gear to play the games, atleast in 3s which was one of the easiest brackets to get the rating to upgrade the gear.

Incomes Dragonflight (great expac, love the game, apparently pve is amazing) and gives the more casual PVPers the no more gear grind back scaling up to bis for pvp god teir pvp days of WoD/Panda. Fantastic, we no longer have to feel like we gotta perform to well… perform correctly.

But, the changes of titles/achievements never changed back.

This leaves the players, old and new, to pushing ratings of a flat number, not really worth your time anymore due to inflation etc (IE itll be easier at the end of the season to get 1800 transmog, gladiator, titles, etc.) So why would a loving player of pvp like myself want to well… pvp?

Solo shuffle, love the concept - quite fun when you have nothing else to do, no mates on etc. - has completely taken over the summation of 3s that takes place. With over 72hr from Drustvar (website) it takes up about 1/6th of the amount of solo shuffle games that occurs.

So as a dps main myself, with an alt preist, I have 3 options,:

  1. try play 3s at a lower mmr than my solo shuffle rating with lfg which takes forever to find people because why bother with lfg you can just afk q solo shuffle.
  2. afk q solo shuffle on my dps or get instant qs on my healer
  3. Ideally q with my mates in 3s and feel hardstuck when we are used to playing at top 5% of players qing into rank 1s at 2100 in 3s.

So, for me, and I’m certain for others, this creates a sense of huh, mates aren’t on why bother being on or present until my solo shuffle pops, I can play another game before my 40 min solo shuffle pops or get instant qs on my healer. And using lfg for alt rating isn’t worth it because I’d feel sad that I cant carry some guys on my alt when we’d no voice at 1600, might as well be doing that EXACT same thing in solo shuffle.

(If you have read this far thank you I noticed I’m rambling. TLDR at the end.)

So, possible solutions for this problem. Add back in percentage ratings for titles, use a different or add different names for gearing titles for pve (or world pvp) itemlvl. This will make it so for the new people who enter pvp, them achieving the old Challenger (top 35%), like back when I played this game at age 12, was an achievement. I used to remember striving for rival and duelist. That’s what got me hooked onto the game, proving that I’m better than a set amount of people, not just a Phantom number which is dictated based on how blizzard implements inflation to the MMR.

Okay, my SECOND issue.

Incomes patch 10.0.7. Ret gets reworked and becomes a god among men, ret OTPs telling blizzard on PTR that they’ll be OP in arena. No response ret comes out being god teir. They become so strong certain classes are no longer played till the very end of the season when they are fixed. They stay so strong for SO long that over 1/3rd of the world of warcraft population in rated pvp was a ret paladin.

So, everyone makes a ret, if you didnt you got gimped, during that time I dropped 700mmr on my hunter losing to rets till they got fixed, got that mmr right back ( solo shuffle mmr, like that matters).

Huge sum of rets take all the mmr from other people who play the game and don’t rly want to FOTM reroll. ALOT of them, which were 1300 hard stuck in 3s are playing 1000 rating above their hardstuck points previously.

All the rets yoink the brackets MMR from the game.

This leads to rets getting nerfed, 3 times, over a few months, plenty of time for ALOT of people who have never played ret before to play it well enough to get gladiator and NEVER log on the toon again.

That’s what exactly happened. MMR at the end of the season feels very deflated, people with 4-5 rets (for example - vanguards, love the guy) have toons so high rated hes helping other people get rank 1s because he has SO many rets to high mmr.

Getting off topic, Rets become gods and get their glads/whatever done and the mmr around the 2400 bracket gets yoinked out, you either got your gladiator earlier or people already have it and trying to push rank 1, most of which rets arent playing the game they got their glad over a month earlier.

The spec is so powerful elemental shamans, warlocks and spreists were unable to play due to judgement of the pure. Alot of people, including my mates who ive been getting gladiators with since legion season 7, stopped playing the game till that spec got nerfed.

This should not be happening. and hence I would like to offer a potential solution to major changes/rework introductions when they enter the game. Blizzard will not like to hear this but lets take a note out of riot games notebook with new champions/major reworks. The champion is UNABLE to be played in RATED pvp games for the first 3 days of the release. This is to allow for bug fixing, balancing and potentially any errors which may have occured with the release of such a champion.

This exact same thing can be done in wow. If a major rework is added to the game, im not talking minor fixes to attonment healing numbers etc, I’m taking BIG changes to a class/spec make it so it cannot enter RATED arena for the first 2-3 days.

This will allow for opinions to arise from the spec itself, you know rank 1 players will form skirmishes to test it out and see its potential ability. People will still q up skrims and normal bgs all the same. But this allows for Blizzard to truly access the situation of the spec/class rework before completely exnihilating the season for many players. This will allow for those “minor” patches to not have any cheesy impacts on the rating.

Now when it comes to the start of the season and a rework occurs, these godteir op specs won’t matter because of the eventual fix and mmr inflation removing it to be a problem. But when its a point 7 patch, last patch before end of season, changes this massive can make a huge impact on the games health.

TLDR; Love game add these 3-4possible changes to improve pvp health.

  1. Boost mmr (thank god they are doing this already) but ideally more in 2s/3s and lower in solo shuffle so achievements/rating cuttoffs for titles/transmog matter and encourage interaction with other players through lfg (people may hate the lfg but it encourages interaction, solo shuffle does not).

  2. Alternatively, add back percentage cuttoffs to 3v3 arena/rbgs only. This would GREATLY encourage people to wanting these titles and striving for an achievement of greatness and improving with a set of mates, encouraging social interaction. (Notice how the first two want the MMO to feel like… and MMO.)

  3. Add a 2-3 spec delay in entering RATED arena/bgs for MAJOR mid season reworks, allows for bug fixes. Allows for kinks and potentially godteir errors from not occuring. Reworks at start of seasons are fine their OP power will be squashed before the abuse can get to the point of well… abuse.

  4. (Blizzard is going to HATE me for stating this one). Hire a team of 3-5 higher end PVP players who understand statistics, these people can be literal consultants who are contacted for like $100 bucks to describe the state of wow pvp, look at basic trends on which specs are overperforming and then they can look into which spell is overperforming or why certain classes have far too much offhealing/dmg.

This implementation is the hardest as it requires extremely unbiased people reviewing the basic statistics and actually playing the game/multiclassing. This means anyone in a team/have a potential career in competitive pvp cannot be considered as there may be bias.

Thanks for reading my rant lmk if it was bad or not.

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Lets be honest, the ONLY reason we got MMR to get increased (which they could have done WEEKS ago) is because twitch chat during AWC was spammed nonstop about MMR.

Literally the only way we’ll get any other improvement again is if they get spammed again like that for another specific change or likely will have to wait until 10.2 or later for them to even consider another change.

Btw, still waiting for their BIG improvements to RSS they promised in January that they’re still radio silent on.

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Even your TLDR was a TLDR for me :woozy_face:

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SERATOX SERRRRAAAATTTOOOOOXXXXX

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Yeah… I rant alot, part of having passion for the game

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Don’t see how glad and mount back at % again would entice people to play, quite the opposite really.

The game is like 90% PVE playerbase. The goal is to get all those tens of thousands of people on ladder. Most of them abhor PVP. Low hanging fruits to coax them into trying it and perhaps enjoying it is the better option.

Inflation being dumped in is nice, but having 100-200k more players on ladder would be fantastic too.

The games base UI should be the tourny UI, skills/abilities need visual reworks to be more clear.

Ideally if you decide to arena without any addons it feels informative and you know whats going on.

Requiring a good ui and half a dozen addons and mesweakauras to have any clue whats occurring is gonna keep people away that have no prior experience or enjoyment with PVP.

Also having focus macros, and 123 macros already in your macro list for CC of your class and and in game tutorial that points people to them and how to use them

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^100%
Accessibility and being able to have actual access to relevant info are some of the biggest barriers to arena for most new players.

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I get youre just parroting what you hear but this would not change anything

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As a young teenager first getting into pvp, knowing that I managed to achieve being better than a set amount of people as a percentage felt like an achievement on its own, not just going after a number but knowing I had the ability to prove I was getting better and improving.

I’m certain many people recall this feeling, when you first got into pvp back in those expansions your drive to play the game was improving and finding out what you were missing.

So I’d have to disagree with you on this topic, as a new player entering the game, would you feel achieved that you reached an arbitrary number at the end of the season? Or that you bested your mate managing to squeeze out duelist while he couldn’t etc.

It breeds competition, that’s what an MMO’s love doing. Striving for world firsts, striving for the best gear, striving for a title only a SET amount of people could ever imagine to achieve. It brings back the fantasy of respect to the pvp ecosystem.

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is that why this forum is up to its eyeballs in complaints that all the good players between johnny dumbass and 2.1 cr are unfair roadblocks

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Whole post reeks of boomed out cringe