Boosting reality

PVP Arenas
1

TL:DR below.

This topic of boosting has had a lot of action in the past few weeks. The issue I’ve taken with it is the amount of exaggeration surrounding it. We’ve all seen the “nearly every game has a booster” posts. Saturday night i did a count in 2v2. Almost all of my steady arena friends have quit and I’ve been trying to gear an alt, and until this weekend I’ve tried to avoid lfg when possible. At around 8pm on Saturday night, there were 19 2v2 lfg groups.

19 people looking for 1 partner.
2 months ago that number would’ve been 2-3x that.
Of the 19, 5 were boost ads, some with websites for real money, some were gold.

This is an issue, but the direct solution isn’t to stop boosting, bc how do you do that without damaging the ability to play with lower rated/geared friends?

The real issue, is arena desaturation. 1/10th the amount of games were tracked last week than were in week 1, and most of that decrease was recently, meaning it’s still dropping like a sack of potatoes. If there were 190 2v2 groups, people wouldn’t be as encouraged to pay for boosts.

Increasing arena participation is much easier than regulating boosting services.

Increase conquest gained rather significantly, and decrease honor required to upgrade all pvp gear pieces by 75%~.

The back end of the pvp season is for alts. If people don’t play alts you have the iron will type players still trying to hit X rating b4 the end of the season, that will likely burn themselves out and give up, and alts. But we have no alts bc the thought of gearing from 180ilvl to 226Ilvl over again is awful, so 90% of pvpers are just sitting on rating on their main, and playing other games.

This is a side solution to removing rating gated pvp gear. A simple numbers tweak, and easy hotfix. If there is a concern for pve players having less equal footing should pvp gear become easier to obtain, simply do the same adjustments for valor earned/needed.

TL:DR

Blizzard, you need to encourage alt play, by motivating players to play on alts, and saturate the arena q with fresh experiences.

4 Likes
2

I have seen people suggest that sending honor/conquest earned on mains to alts, which in general I think is a step in the right direction.

However, and this is just descriptive of WoW in every expansion beside Legion (?), recruitment of new/returning players who do not have any geared character is difficult and that’s just inherent to the game. If I want to play league of legends right now having not played this season, I can begin immediately. However, if I am 18 weeks to Shadowlands PvP S1 (which is actually more accessible than BFA S4 was), it is always going to suck.

So while I agree with the people who advocate sending honor/conquest between characters, this solution seems a bit narrow if our goal is to increase arena participation, especially with respect to new/returning players, throughout the latter half of a season.

Side Note: I don’t know this, but I remember being in this situation a lot during Cataclysm and for some reason the painful grind to gear a character late even through just BGs felt much more accessible. Again, I’m not sure why.

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Yeah i don’t think allowing people to send currencies would be a better fix than the 2 mentioned. It would close the doors on any potentially new pvp players or converting from pve.

The true fix is to remove the rating gating, but if that is such a dramatic change that it needs to wait for 10.0. Simple tuning could go a long way.

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4

See I am not totally on board with rating requirements being removed, especially with the tiered system they have now. I think part of why SL S1 felt so populated to begin with and what made me want to sweat for the first month or so was trying to make rating thresholds to by my 226/233 pieces. I doubt that’s a unique experience, and without a PvP stat, you can’t make PvP gear significantly lower in ilvl compared to PVE or else sweatlords will just do that and we have the same issue.

That being said some alternatives might include decreasing the ilvl differences between rated pieces or making existing pieces of conquest gear upgradable to within a few ilvls of Duelist/Elite gear during the latter half of the season. That way, the try hards can still be motivated to get the best gear early, populating the latter, and the catch up-grade players will be able to revitalize the ladder later.

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Or just make one set of pvp gear per season. Let it be bought with either honor or conq. Once bought thats it no more grinding or needing to upgrade gear until next season comes out.

1 Like
6

Do you think, especially in an MMO, that appealing to the lowest common denominator of pvper is a good idea for the overall competition/interest in arena in general?

With your suggestion, I would personally worry that all but the players who just play WoW for PVP exclusively would lose interest quickly without some form of grind, especially in the first half of a season. Personally, unless you’re in love with the game and are totally okay with the variance between balance, match up spread, etc., I could see this leading to people having no reason to stick around and continue playing if they became even slightly annoyed with how the current season played.

So at very least, this would need to be accompanied by more frequent balancing by blizzard which I don’t see happening.

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All they gotta do to remove boosting is to move the rating requirements around. Duelist and KSM are not the same level of difficulty, specifically because the challenge of climbing to 2100 is not static. At one point this season, 1800 in 2s was top 1%. Raiders would scream bloody murder if bosses were tuned so that the whole raid had to orange parse to get loot.

Rating requirements are probably fine, if they get moved around, or the CR formula gets tweaked.

8

The only way this would work is if the pvp gear had a dramatic decrease in ilvl outside of pvp. Or pvp would be were 100% of people geared for pve/pvp.

Some of us like to occasionally play other content with friends. I don’t want to have to farm 2 sets of gear. So many people don’t like the idea of gear being useless cross content.

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Sadly Blizz won’t listen to you because they are driven by greed. I am starting to believe Blizz indirectly promotes carries. I wonder if they have their staff working for carry companies, lots of money to be made.

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Balancing would have to be a requirement, I just feel PvP is a hard content to satisfy a large group

It is also a people issue, some like gear progression, some like to be OP and crush players some think they want gear equalization thinking they are not climbing due to gear

It is hard to maintain high participation when you have a large player base that loses motivation after getting crushed once and then blaming spec, partners, gear, internet speed, hacks, bots, their stepmom.

Well, you get it, a large community will always complain because the alternative would be to accept they are not as good as they think they are and need to actually practice to get better.

1 Like
11

Tbh mythic sire kill is likely top 1%

Agree about ksm tho

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I think that all of this thread needs to also consider that if you are a lifetime ~2k or lower player, there is still so much you need to learn and can improve on to win more games. It’s frustrating to join late and have no gear, but there are so many people I’ve met over the years within 10 ilvls of decent gear for the current season who think they’re losing because of gear and not because of some individual reasons. And those are the one’s that can be addressed most readily and most steadily, unlike Blizzard intervening and revolutionizing a gear system.

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13

I don’t disagree. That’s rather off topic tho.

Quick fix, increase gains.

Long fix, redesign the structure of the ladder and how pvp gearing works. Bc the current design is garbage.

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I personally don’t really PVP for gear. I PVP for fun and it would be nice to be on equal footing with everyone regardless of what alt I’m playing. Just my two cents.

4 Likes
15

Do you think PvP fell apart in MoP, WoD, and Legion? It didn’t. If you think it did I would disagree based off of this:
https://ibb.co/LQcjXNL
MoP released in 2012 so at this point we were 2 years into PvP gear not mattering much.

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That’s your preference, and largely mine as well. However, I do find myself more driven to play to keep pace with the other sweaty PvPers and there is some genuine enjoyment derived for fighting against people in casual PvP and being rewarded for your time spent.

But yeah, if I found myself at the other end of the spectrum without any gear, I definitely understand why this formula isn’t always conducive to fun.

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17

I don’t have reaaaaaally have an issue with what I understand MOP gearing to be, although I think cataclysm was similar with added power on specific elite gear right? That would probably be my preference because I do enjoy progressing into more powerful gear as a reward that is additional to my rating gains. That’s my MMO brain rather than my competitive game mode brain I suppose.

MOP also was famous for having some of the best PVP balance too did it not? Or at least all of the classes felt powerful/good to play. My fear is that we haven’t had exceptional seasons very frequently since in terms of community wide perceptions of balance (assuming similar gear across the classes compared in any given season). With Blizzard doing as infrequent tuning passes as they do and downsizing recently, I would be hesitant to implement the MOP system if only because it could have mixed effects on ladder health/population in the current game.

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18

Wish Legion templates would come back, but with a customizable scale so some classes like frost mage aren’t left in the dust with poor stat priority.

In terms of gearing, as of right now I have glad on two toons, and gearing a third through 10,000 conquest cap, and something like 80,000 honor seems absolutely ridiculous. There needs to be a conquest catchup mechanic for new players, returning players, and alts.

1 Like
19

They’ve also thoroughly discouraged healer play by not dealing with this ridiculous burst meta for this long lol
Almost nobody wants to play healer when someone on their team can easily can go 100-0 in a GCD or a wind shear duration.

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Agreed. Specially hard on rshams that need 4 globals to push out a good surge. I think they could just scale the gear based on it’s current stats giving players the opportunity to choose their stats. That’s what i hated about legion the most.