The “Killer” player archetype is not the only player that may enjoy world pvp, which is a fantastic thing about the two faction system in the first half of wow.
The killer player archetype is defined by their enjoyment of griefing and is often called “The griefer” in different interpretations of Dr. Bartle’s taxonomy of players.
i love wpvp, i spend more time figthing outside than in arenas or rbg.
i dont know but people usualy beliebe than the enhanse shaman is weak, and they atack me alone, i respet that, becouse the most of the allys atack in group, but a vs whit a enhanse shaman is suicide. i spend all my day figthing there while im farming world quest.
You clearly never played during MoP and WoD. BFA was a semi mediocre 3rd, but we had assaults. Even the new zone is dead mostly, as if no one cares. (and yes I sharded to other servers trying to find anyone, no luck)
The sharding problems is one of the REAL issues. Separates everyone and we cant find anyone.
Indeed.
doubtful.
Alliance easily outnumber 10 to 1 at crates.
You should really, really take me up on my offer that I made a few weeks back…
Seriously, add me on btag. WilloWisp#1275. I’ll invite you to my shard. You said you sharded to other servers, but I’m very doubtful. My shard and a few others that I get into occasionally are filled with Alliance, Horde are outnumbered every single time.
Crates are such a pitiful example of Wpvp. Korthia simply existed in SL and provided non stop, exciting pvp all over the zone and especially just outside the sanctuary. If you wanted, at any time of the day you could go jump into the fray.
Any argument for warmode being “ok” that includes crates is IMO a failure.
Crates are a bandaid for the pitiful state of Wpvp. It’s a box to open that MAY have people to fight, and grants pvp rewards as a consolation prize for the otherwise unexciting content.
This is a super green flag comment and I applaud you for being solution oriented. But it doesn’t win as an argument for the current state of Wpvp actually being ok.
People were only in Korthia during Shadowlands because of the kill quest, and once they completed it, they’d leave. It’s no different from the current Sparks of Life quests in The War Within zones. The PvP activity is tied to the quest incentives, not because the zone itself inherently fostered nonstop PvP.
War Mode is “okay” in the sense that your experience largely depends on the shard you’re in. If you’re on the right shard, War Mode can be fun and engaging, with plenty of action in Sparks of Life areas or PvP WQs. But if you’re in an empty shard, it can feel boring or dead.
That’s why I find it hard to believe that Âctioncat has supposedly gone around different shards and still found War Mode completely dead. It feels like all he does is complain without making an honest effort to explore or engage.
Trust me, I’m not saying War Mode is perfect—it needs a lot of work, like Blizzard addressing the awful sharding—but when it works, it can be fun.
I mean I was on Cat’s realm during Korthia. Nobody was out there either on Emerald Dream.
I just remember people sanctuary hugging. The AOO stuff was interesting though.
That’s not ok.
Again, I appreciate your positive attitude about it and communities need more of that, but if sharding exists (at least in part) to kind of homogenize the experience, (which it does) then having a dramatically different experience depending on the shard means that shards fail (at least at that specific objective.)
However, War Mode sucks even if it is fun (which for many people it is not). PvP is most fun when it has stakes. World PvP is most fun when the reason for engaging it is not letting the enemy win and a sense of tribalism and community that comes from making sure your allies are not being bullied by a group of enemy gankers. Pvp should be its own fun. If you need to convince people to do it by dropping crates with absurd rewards, it’s a good indication that your design has failed.
South shore v Tarren Mills had no rewards. It happened organically because it was fun. It SUCKED to be losing that fight, at the moment. And if I had the option of fleeing to org and turning off warmode and going back to turn in my quests to quest givers who were not dead, I would have taken it. And my experience would have been lesser for it. It’s a case of You think you do, but you don’t.
“It’s not the same game” one might argue. And that’s true. War Mode does not exist in a bubble. But I would argue that the modern game is not even in the same class of game as the pre-warmode game. Gaming History will consider wow, up to and possibly including cataclysm to be one of the greatest games of all time. Modern wow may still be successful. Heck, BFA and SL were some of the best selling expansions in WoW’s history but few people are arguing that they are some kind of golden age.
Retail WoW could easily be put on an arcade console in a huge arcade, with very few changes. Just pull up your account and jump into a random raid group. No more questing, no more gearing. No more Wpvp. Just kill a boss or do some arenas or a BG. Insert more tokens to resurrect. The experience would be approximately the same for a great many players. But that is a far worse game, as far as the art of game design goes. Worse than Wrath… Not worse than TWW. Pretty much the same game to retail.
In my experience that was really only a problem if your only objective was getting that specific honorable kill.
Those fights were enjoyable tugs of war. We fought for control of the road outside the sanctuary. People jumping into the sanctuary was a win. If all the enemies retreated it meant they surrendered control of the road. You’d wait then for a new group to show up or one really crazy fury warrior, to start the fight back up, or for the enemies who retreated to lick their wounds and regroup. It might have been frustrating if the only reason you were doing it was to complete the pvp weekly.
I agree that sharding is a significant problem and, to some extent, it does fail at homogenizing the experience. I’ve acknowledged in many of my posts that sharding needs fixing—it does too much, creating empty shards where there’s no one to fight. However, this isn’t a War Mode problem—it’s a sharding-specific problem. Ending War Mode because of sharding wouldn’t solve anything; instead, Blizzard needs to focus on improving the sharding system so that it creates more populated and engaging shards. Fixing sharding would go a long way toward improving War Mode’s overall experience.
War Mode is a great idea on paper but has been poorly implemented. I’ve said it before, and I’ll stand by it—it’s a solid concept that needs continued investment to reach its full potential. PvP servers didn’t survive for good reason—they were a terrible experience for many players due to extreme faction imbalances. Most PvP servers were either overwhelmingly one-sided or completely dead, and only a small handful of servers maintained a decent balance.
That said, I don’t think you need PvP servers to foster tribalism or a sense of community. Even in today’s War Mode, I frequently recognize specific players, and there’s definitely a sense of rivalry and camaraderie. I wouldn’t say crates and Sparks of Life quests are failures of design—they’re incentives to spark engagement in WPvP.
You’re right—it’s not the same game. But if your argument is that PvP servers should come back, I don’t think that’s a viable solution, especially since we already have War Mode. PvP servers on their own (without War Mode) could work, but only if Blizzard actively monitored faction populations and kept them balanced, which historically they haven’t been able to do effectively.
I don’t want to repeat myself too much, but I’ve said this before: bringing back PvP servers today would split the already small WPvP player base and create more logistical problems for Blizzard to manage. Modern WoW has complexities like cross-realm zones, sharding, and War Mode incentives that weren’t factors in earlier iterations of the game. While I agree that the “golden age” of WoW feels long gone, the solution isn’t to revert to a system that failed for the majority of players. Instead, they just need to focus on fixing War Mode, starting by fixing sharding.
I don’t know that I would argue that they should bring pvp servers back because I kind of think that WoWs overworld is beyond repair. I would have to suck on the copium pretty hard to think just fixing any one thing would repair the experience even for that specific thing.
The psychology that the modern game leverages to trigger a reward response in players has no room for the virtual world. And as a result, anything they do for world pvp is like a vestigial aesthetic feature on cars or men’s overcoats. They keep it around because people like the way it looks, but it no longer serves any function, like a lapel, or a ticket pocket, or the fake engine vent holes.
The only thing the modern game could do for Wpvp in future expansions is a wintergrasp-like zone with a major event every hour or so and smaller events like the mantid and black empire invasions from BfA on a rotation throughout the day. Since the game is mostly a hub for compartmentalized experiences, being able to log in, port to winter grasp and participate in pvp events at any time and reap rewards from that, would feel more relevant and satisfying than trying to guess where people are and jump shards to find activities.
You’re not wrong that WoW’s overworld has a lot of issues, but it’s not War Mode that made it this way. Features like Chromie Time have played a huge role in separating levelers from max-level players, which completely removed any semblance of the organic PvP experiences of the past (like Tarren Mill vs. Southshore). Chromie Time is great for making a better leveling experience by scaling NPCs, but I don’t see why it has to put levelers in their own separate shards. That decision alone has taken a lot of life out of the overworld. After that, another feature that could help bring life back into the overworld is restoring World Defense.
I don’t necessarily think it’s a bad thing to have players fight over crates or the Sparks of Life quest. It works in the sense that it gets players out in the world and creates opportunities for engagement. But I get where you’re coming from—after players are fully Conquest-geared, rewards like Bloody Tokens lose their purpose.
I’m one of those players who still goes out for WPvP even without a reward because I enjoy the fights themselves. That said, it would be nice if Blizzard added more things to spend Bloody Tokens on or gave us new achievements and cosmetic rewards to keep things interesting.
I think it depends on how Blizzard implements it. If it’s something like the original Ashran, I’d be completely on board. But if it turns into something like Battle for Nazjatar from BfA… no thanks. That zone became a nightmare when massive raid groups like RUIN would shard in with multiple raids and lag the entire zone into unplayability.
That said, I don’t think anyone is against Blizzard adding more world PvP events, like the Hellfire Towers or Halaa. The key is making sure they fix the sharding system to prevent one-sided fights where one faction vastly outnumbers the other. If they can strike that balance, events like these could bring a lot of life back to WPvP.
You’re right, technically.
I am referring to the whole system as warmode though. As opposed to the pre-sharding PvP. And there was definitely a transitional period and there have been things that they have tried since, that weren’t so bad. But the system (and not just the feature of warmode on/off) is characterized at least in part by warmode. Pvp talents. Gear that scales in instanced pvp and warmode. I think it is bad as a whole, not just because you can turn it off. And I think if it weren’t for sharding and the death of the overworld and the rise of the dungeon finder/raid finder/random BG/solo queue etc… warmode wouldn’t exist. If you fixed everything wrong with the other parts of the machine there would be no need for warmode.
Absolutely. Shame all the potential there is and nothing changes.
You’re not wrong. The first week or so yes. But then it got to the point people running in and out of safe areas. Blademasters would switch from horde to ally to mix things up but mostly died soon.
SUPPORT !!’ 100%!
The game of a shell of its former self