I miss the days when the PvP community here all knew and respected each other. It was always something to run across someone you knew and flag up, fight, win some, lose some and then salute your opponent because you knew you’d see them again soon.
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Blizzard stopped being a company that simply wants to make a fun game a long time ago. Their goal is to keep you subbed for as long as possible by any means necessary.
Compare that to, say FFXIV where when someone asked Yoshi P what to do if they run out of stuff they want to do in XIV and Yoshi’s response was “please go enjoy other games and come back to us when theres more to do.”
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As a crafter who loathes PvP having my recipes gated behind marks of honor makes me seethe.
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Sounds like we need to #buildthewall between PvP and PvE for good.
Pvpers don’t want to raid for their PvP gear. PvErs don’t want to PvP for their recipes. What’s next, bis gear locked behind 2500 in 3s?
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Sharding and realm merging really chipped away at server pvp communities and it just isn’t the same anymore. I haven’t played in months but I used to love to come to the defense of towns or major cities being under attack by familiar faces. A druid is attacking Stormwind? Must be Rageclaw again. There’s a priest eating the innkeeper in the mage district? Yep that’s Ephie, I’ll go say hi.
Now I don’t care about cities being attacked cause it’s probably an off server zerg I’ll never see again.
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I must admit, I liked the World PvP Quests of Legion because it gave casuals the chance to gain older transmog options. Being an aussie on a us server tends to cause my latency to hover around the 600-1k mark in the red zone, so for me, it was nice to get more moggery options.
That said, I do miss when PvP like Wintergrasp happened, because Horde or Alliance, and you ran up against one of the good players, and they https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ip7QZPw04Ks 'd all over you, it rarely felt quite so bad as getting done in by an off-server character.
Because we’re a RP server, stepping foot into PvP, win or lose, tends to result in you getting grief either way from the ‘real’ players who think you’re either filling up a slot a ‘good’ player could be using or just like to rag on the RPers because we are RPers.
I would like to see PvPers able to entirely gear up through PvP, and PvEers not having to grab PvP gear for BiS or a specific trinket.
With the testing that’s been done with Warmode and the Azurite armor-sets, why not have gear that drops at end-game come with a PvE mode and a PvP mode? Literally you flag up, the PvE stats go away and the PvP stats activate. You’d still have your ‘BiS’ gear, but it’s suddenly not ‘You must do PvP for x weeks to buy y’ or ‘You must raid this raid until the RNGeesus takes pity on you’. You can go for the PvP drop or you can go for the Dungeon/Raid drop. Either works, there’s minimal difference, and if you hate one way of doing it, well you’re not entirely locked out of getting the item you’re after.
I really do miss the community aspect that servers once used to have. For all the problems WoD had, I also had the most fun with random WPVP, especially when World Defense channel was still a thing.
Guess who where the people that came out to defend lowbie zones like Crossroads or Brill? Roleplayers since this was their characters home and blah blah make believe. Which usually resulted in RP after PVP had happened.
Also as a Horde player, I remembered that I couldn’t just go willy nilly kill a guard or two in Ashenvale without Kaldorei Collective and Sentinels coming out of stealth to murder mob me but I’m sure they knew they couldn’t just go over to Crossroads without Southfury or Warband This showing up to kick em in the butt.
I never personally knew anyone in those Alliance guilds but just knowing that some of them had World Defense on watch and ready to jump any ding dong that tried to start a fight really was a fun aspect about being a part of this community. I’ve never been in the guilds Southfury or Shadows but at least I knew if someone was attacking Crossroads or Brill, someone from those guilds would be there to help back me up.
Blizz just needs to get rid of sharding/CRZ and admit their numbers aren’t what they used to be and merge dead or dying realms into larger realms?? or just let their dead or dying realms be desolate wastelands because I’m sure there’s some people that enjoy being alone.
If we have to keep cross realm, I really wish that they’d at least tweak it so RP servers could only group with other RP servers. Sure Horde would still get crushed by Moonguard’s overwhelming numbers but at least I’m being crushed by a nerd that pretends to be an elf on the internet.
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Not a chance in hell they ever admit this.
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TBH I’m kind of with them on sub numbers being irrelevant. It’s not an accurate gauge of how the game is performing, but it would be used by dissidents as evidence of failure. As you can see, people don’t need to know how many subs are active to speak of the coming doom.
In fact, total sub numbers probably never worked for their advantage. It showed popularity in Wotlk, but since then it has really just been a flippant point at the beginning of expansions and telling of dire times anytime else. I can’t blame them for not caring to release that number any longer. So long as the stock is in the green, what else do you need to know?
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I agree, but as the playerbase ages and has less free time and the model becomes less about keeping subscribers and more about time spent playing, it’s natural that Blizzard isn’t going to make a system that doesn’t have rewards.
Heck, they had to bribe the Alliance with a 30% bonus just to play. And once that bonus goes down, they’ll go chill for awhile until it’s back.
It’s not just a player shift, but a developer shift, and that’s way beyond our ability to tackle.
Scuze me but aren’t you always saying we need to be loudly critical of the story because that’s the way to get some change accomplished?
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You know what I miss? Back in the day, whenever someone would attack UC, Cole would rally the Forsaken community, the PvP community and anyone in Trade chat who was bored to come out and defend. While we were waiting for that defense raid to form, we’d get our butts handed to us and run back inside 3-4x. But then when the defense finally came, man was it a fight!
And then afterward, we’d do some IC/not-completely-IC roleplay of patrolling the city to clean up anyone who escaped.
Once the cross-realm raids started in, it was no longer fun. And it was harder and harder to get anyone to want to come to defend.
Losing the world defense channel, sharding and cross-realm killed world PvP in so many ways 
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Wasn’t that an idea they used in WoD? Entering PvP upped your item level by 30 and activated PvP power or something like that.
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And I maintain that’s the most effective thing we can do, since we’ve seen its impact later.
But, realistically, criticizing Blizzard only gets us a Good Expansion to counteract the Bad Expansion (criticism of Cataclysm got us MoP, criticism of WoD got us Legion, etc.) And then we’re right back to where we started with the next one.
I still think criticism is worthy and what we should be doing, but if anyone else knows of a better way to change a developer’s slothful mindset, hmu.
I think the core problem with criticism as a method of exerting meaningful pressure on Blizzard is that they have curated, over the course of two decades, a community which expresses itself chiefly by screeching virulent invective. I can totally understand how the devs can hear any criticism of their choices and interpret it as more meaningless caterwauling.
Which is not to say that I have a lot of sympathy for them because I can point right to Blizzard’s decisions and actions that have led to its fandom behaving that way. But still, it is what it is.
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Make the dev industry more competitive and relentless so that no one is ever comfortable and is always working their hardest to make great entertainment.
That would be great if it would work. But unfortunately, since Blizz is a corporation that answers to shareholders, they have to try to make every quarter look reasonably profitable. And nowadays, that means cheap programming with high returns - like royales with loot boxes, or mobile app games.
I’m actually shocked that we haven’t seen a Diablo royale yet.
I mean, that’s possible and if the leak about “we don’t let negativity enter the dojo” is at all accurate, it’s probably what they’re actually doing.
But we’ve seen firsthand that criticism gets results and praise gets us bad expansions. So perhaps there’s nothing we can do and every thing we attempt to control is merely an illusion designed to make us feel better about the money, effort and care we poured into a company that views us solely as a metric.
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See, I’m not sure if it’s criticism that gets us better expansions, or if it’s a kneejerk reaction to falling sub numbers and knowing that if sub numbers crash, then the shareholders will be mad as profits sink.
Weirdly, we’re kind of in that position? WoW is still top dog, but that dog is old, shaking and pees on the floor. FFXIV is thriving and seems to be doing better each expansion. And, against all odds, ESO is somehow still kicking.
Compare this to a few years ago where any MMO would be lucky to last a year against WoW and the market’s a little better now than it was. But again, the developer mindset at Blizzard doesn’t seem to weigh in the fact that other games are doing well.
Negativity, dojo, etc.