There are a lot of people who get upset when content isn’t easily accessible to everyone and is too difficult for casual players. There are also a lot of people who are upset when content is too accessible and easy for everyone to complete.
I say… create disparity. Make extremely difficult content that the elitist community and drool over with extremely rare and difficult to obtain rewards that are really over powered.
I’m terrible at this game, but I’d be alright with this. Getting smacked down by someone who has an actual, no joke, legendary item wouldn’t be so bad. It would be interesting.
And you know what. It’s even okay if the stuff is so hard that no one ends up getting it. It’ll just go down in history as an unobtainable, mythical item.
That’s okay.
It’s a part of the mystery.
A part of the allure.
The best players then proceed to roll the worse players harder and since there are more average players than good ones (and people who think they are good) it feels like trash when you get stomped and dont learn anything other than ‘well skillmoune lets keyboard turners beat your average player with ease in pvp and there is nothing I can do about that but to x to get that specific weapon to not lose’ or ‘skillmourne means the owner can one button rotation and ‘outskill’ the average player on the meters’
Creating disparity through skill requirements is fine though as long as there are many other paths of skill expression/dedication to get to the end goal as well though.
The game doesn’t have to be fair. If someone has an op piece of gear that only a few other people on the server (if any) manage to get, let them wreak a little havoc.
This is how the game used to be, but it wasn’t because of machined disparity, it was because the playerbase was overall very dumb compared to today, with vastly less resources and communities for learning your class, learning fights, etc. The infrastructure to allow carries wasn’t as sophisticated as it was now.
People having thunderfury, or sulfuras or glaives or whatever were super rare and when you encounter one of those players in PVP, it was a sight to behold and they would just be shredding through people because they were better, more informed and doing the hightest-end content.
Compare this to TBC classic, where it seemed like EVERYONE had glaives because the greater playerbase was farming BT every week. This isn’t because those old versions of the game got something right about the formula, it’s literally just because we were all dumb.
If you make content with like a higher level than mythic raids or something, it will still be gamified to death and then carries will be sold. And you’ll see more people with elusive mounts and gear that aren’t supposed to have them because they were carried.
This is a good point because of carry culture. The people who you would think would be informed like KSM, Mythic Raiders, Gladiators or whatever could at any point bought their status instead of earning it and are just a hyper-collector who just has a lot of gold from token selling.
People don’t see this as a problem typically, but I really don’t like how you can buy your way into difficult content.
There’s no way of knowing who is good based on merit anymore and it feels bad to me. I know most people don’t mind it.
I mean when it got outed that method or limit or both were using real money transactions to buy the best gear in the game, I don’t know why anyone gives a grob about the tippy top 1%, they paid to win, that’s all that “mythical gear” means now
Blizzard needs to cater to the 99% of people actually giving THEM money not these mythic raiders that buy their way to victory through 3rd parties.
Many players like the ability to customize their gear (allowing them to better fit what they want out of a character) and PvP was quite dead when it was a full template like in Legion because some classes just couldn’t adapt to the meta due to the set stats. WoD PvP OTOH was solid when you were geared but hot garbage when you were not and still likely saw middling numbers overall even though this was offset by the reasonably gearing process pvp had at that time.
This sort of signals to the devs that gearing is an important part of the power fantasy in the game even for PvP players. Hence why it is being designed the way it is currently and will, over time, continue to see adjustments till the finally find a system that feels good… or not
A system that could have been improved on, but at the least, ilevel should be the same for everyone. Have the vendor carry stuff with different secondaries so people can tweak, but the biggest gear advantage would be neutralized and everyone would have the option to pick bis secondaries out of the gate.
doesn’t change that gearing is a part of the power fantasy in wow though (and why that is important to the player)
While yes that could have been a significantly better system for competitive PvP it would have also upset players who ‘worked hard for x trinket or y weapon and don’t like that they dont work as they do elsewhere’
It’s incredibly hard to balance the PvP system and allow players to use their characters and the gear they have earned as the gear is designed
