-> Feedback thread with the goal of increasing Arena Participation in Classic expansions! <-

Community General Discussion
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This is a copied post from the EU forums. I am not the orginal author of this post.

Minpojke is the original author of this post but since people from NA can not comment on the EU forums, I decided to post it here as well.

Original tweet.
https://x.com/Minpojke_/status/1896355175134310629

Hey guys!

I’ve taken on the task to create a huge feedback thread on things that both me and the community wants to see change with the goal of increasing Arena PvP participation in upcoming Classic expansions.

I’m a fan of the game and I’ve been playing it for 20 years with Classic being my main focus since the release of TBC. I stream Classic Arenas and have the unique possibility to interact with the Arena Community on a daily and I would consider myself to have a well educated opinion on what would be good for the game mode.

I have good knowledge as I’ve played at the very top of the PvP leaderboards for 15 years straight and I’ve had wide success in both AWC & CAT tournaments since 2013. I probably have some of the most Arenas played in the entire world so hopefully that qualifies me as a person that knows what I’m talking about.

This post will be long because I want to be elaborative. I’m passionate about Arenas and I’ve never seen somebody with influence in the community making a post similar to this so instead of me ranting about that “they don’t care about PvP” I’m now trying to be the change that I want to see.

I also want to highlight that this is OUR thread and I want to encourage every single one of you to say your piece about what you think of my suggestions in a CONSTRUCTIVE manner but also what changes YOU would like to see.

I’ve gotten a promise from the Classic Devs that they will read this post and monitor the thread so if you want your voice to be heard then this is our chance, and if you like what I’m suggesting then make sure you communicate that because they wanted me to post on the forums to see what you guys think as well.

Here’s my suggestions:

Two things that I think MUST change.

End of Season Rewards (Titles) returned for 2v2 and 5v5 Arenas:

Before Cataclysm Classic came out the higher-end of PvP players vouched for titles to be removed from 2v2 and 5v5 in order to encourage more people to play 3v3 “the skilled bracket that the game is balanced around” and this turned out to be a great mistake because it’s a change that’s only appealing for the higher-end players but more discouraging for the casual players that has a harder time finding dedicated partners for 3v3 and in this day and age, what truly is the downside to not allowing titles from each bracket? It’s ONLY positive because people love rewards and to have a carrot to chase, and in this case - end of season rewards.

Dampening to start earlier:

Dampening is introduced in MoP and I believe it’s on a 10 minute timer? In the 2v2 bracket this literally feels like a lifetime. The nature of 2v2 is slower paced so I think it’s very important that dampening kicks in after 3 minutes in the 2v2 bracket otherwise you run around with the feeling of that the game hasn’t started until dampening has kicked in and the average player is good enough for games to literally not end without the help of dampening in this bracket. I think a 5 minute timer for 3v3 is appropriate since it’s more action-packed and if two teams play well, the game will go to dampening and that’s fine.

This can single-handedly be the most impactful custom change.

Custom slots for End of Season Reward Titles:

This means that instead of having the traditional 0.1% of the ladder obtaining Rank One Gladiator and the top 0.5% obtaining Gladiator I think there should be a SET amount of spots available per bracket that is eligible for titles and an example of this could be that the top 100 of each bracket will be eligible for Rank One Gladiator and top 250 is eligible for Gladiator.

These goals are reachable for the average player and it would greatly encourage them to play and practice PvP. If you use Cataclysm s10 as an example, only 8 people were eligible for Rank One Gladiator and when people see that then they realize it’s too far out of reach so they don’t bother playing in the first place.

I personally really like this idea and it’s been discussed for months in the Classic Arena Community and I guarantee that it would make a lot more people PvP.

If that doesn’t sound like a good idea then I’d like to propose the Retail Gladiator system where people above 2400 Rating with 50 wins earns Gladiator but the issue with this is that people wait until the MMR has inflated, which means they start late into the season when it’s easier to climb rating and then they grind out their Gladiator title and stop there because there’s no incentive to keep going. The next goal is too far out of reach as the jump from Gladiator to Rank One Gladiator with this system is usually a rating difference between 600-800 while on the contrary if you have custom spots then it’s realistic to reach as the rating difference between Gladiator and Rank One Gladiator is usually between 100-200 rating and you can achieve that by networking, practicing and building team chemistry throughout the season to ensure that they’re a contender for End of Season Rewards and that’s what Arenas should be about in my opinion.

Individuals not taking up several spots:

Something retail does well with the End of Season Rewards is that a Player despite having X amount of characters eligible for the End of Season Rewards till counts as one opposed to taking up five slots if he has five characters eligible. This is a great system and an absolute no-brainer, Classic should adopt it!

PvP Power on s12 Gear:

The s12 PvP gear doesn’t have PvP Power on it and this might cause a huge imbalance. I’d encourage adding it.

Solo Shuffle/Support System:

Finding partners for Arena is one of the biggest issues and obstacles that people are facing today. People spend hours in LFG searching for a teammate just to be met by people lying about their Arena experience and general toxicity and impatience.
The “solution” to this is usually people saying “Just add Solo Shuffle to Classic” and while Solo Shuffle increases participation in PvP (Retail is evidence of that) it usually means people stop trying to play the other brackets just because it’s easier to queue Solo. I’m not against Solo Shuffle but I think creating a system to help people finding teammates would be a much better solution and especially if you’re going with my suggestion of returning titles to 2v2 and 5v5 as well as adding a set amount of spots for End of Season Rewards.

Unfortunately I don’t have a good idea of what a system like that could look like but returning the PvP tab to LFG would be a good start and have that be cross-realm. Why was it even randomly removed in the first place in WoTLK?

Keep in mind that adding Solo Shuffle to Classic would also mean a lot more work and the necessity to come up with new titles and from what I understand, we don’t have the luxury to have that many resources provided for PvP.

Cross faction Arenas:

In my opinion we should introduce every Quality of Life change that would increase PvP participation. Why not allow for cross faction queueing? MoP is a more modern expansion and I think it would be a great change. (Mercenary Mode?)

MMR inflation from the start:

There’s nothing more discouraging for players to feel like you’re not progressing because MMR inflation doesn’t exist from the start or it’s not influential enough. When you’re playing Arenas it should feel like you’re making progress and seeing your rating go up, it’s validating and fun. We’ve seen both on Retail and Classic what happens when there’s no inflation, the average player ends up facing Rank One Gladiators on their usual MMR and that’s discouraging and makes them not want to play because they want to be matched against people within their skill group. This also makes the average player not play until later into the season when the higher rated players are finally within their own MMR range.

On retail we’ve also seen it taking weeks or even months for some of the best players in the world to obtain Gladiator and that’s not a good thing. If it takes that long for some of the best, then what chance does the average player stand? We don’t need to see crazy inflation to the point where people get 3800 rating by the end of the season but it should be there from the beginning and gradually increase.

Disable Class Stacking in Arena:

Class stacking should be disabled for the same reason double healer compositions isn’t allowed. It promotes stale and lame gameplay and for the most part it’s overpowered. Double Rogue compositions in TBC and WoTLK are good examples of this or Double Healer X compositions in both WoTLK and Cataclysm. By the way, you’re still able to respec inside of Arenas in Cataclysm which makes people able to play double healer.

Random side note:

One of the biggest issues in Classic has been that we’ve had to PvE in order to collect our PvP BiS and thankfully that problem goes away with MoP so that change alone is going to encourage a lot more people to play, including people from retail that is already used to a good gearing system because that was likely a big discouragement for them.

Thank you for reading and once again I want to emphasize the importance of discussing everything in a friendly and constructive manner whether you agree with me or not. If we’re being negative and hateful towards each other or the developers then how could we expect them to listen?

Let’s work together and show that we’re a strong and passionate community that is worthy of having our game mode cared for.

Much love guys,
Jon/Minpojke

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As an EBG player, I’m kinda jelly of arena players constantly getting new arenas to play in. When’s the last time a new EBG got added? I think it was roughly 3 centuries ago? Maybe 4?

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Wall of test. I pressed ctrl+f, and searched for these words:
CC
Crowd control
Stun

And there was no mention of any of that. Why?
The main problem keeping people away from pvp is because people enjoy playing the game, something they cannot do if someone else pressed a zero-skill stun ability on them, or whatever other CC you can imagine.

In PvE, people are allowed to play virtually the entire time. It’s been extremely obvious over the years that most people dislike being forced to watch their unresponsive character getting bashed on, they would rather just actually play where they can play.

Remove most CC from pvp, rebalance numbers around this, and I guarantee you, you willl see PvP participation skyrocket, because it would make this game mode objectively better.

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You should edit the title to include “Classic”. I thought this would be a topic about retail, which is the only version I play/am interested in currently.

For retail, I only rated PVP when there is an elite set I want. Like the warlock S3 set from DF.

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Honestly the focus on titles and glad isn’t going to do anything. The vast majority of players won’t get to that point at all.

2s was probably people’s first introduction to rated pvp but with blitz and solo shuffle those are probably where people start now.

The two major frustrations players have when they’re new to pvp are having a feeling of “I can’t do anything” and “wtf just happened?”

The I can’t do anything comes from many sources like being cc’d constantly. Which is made worse when you’re not positioned well, don’t get help from your teammates etc. It also comes from teammates line of sighting you when you’re trying to heal them or support them.

The wtf just happened comes from when something happens too quickly and you or a teammate just falls over. People don’t know they put of range of their healer, that your other teammate is cc’d and the enemy team just hit cooldowns.

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Makes sense.

As stated, I’m not the author of the text, but this covers basically all expansions except retail ^^

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Hey, I only said that so it might get more traction with its intended audience. It might be worth posting it in the PVP part or Classic part of the forums too, so it gets more views. I wish you luck on your crusade for Classic PVP!

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Having PvP without any CC would be useless. Then you have zero skill involved and it all comes down to who has the best PvE rotation and who kicks.

I should have made it more clear in the title but this is directed at classic expansions and not retail

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It has been posted in the EU Classic parts, but then people saying “It doesn’t belong here because classic doesnt have arena” aka, vanilla.

Could post in the Cata one though!

Thanks for the feedback!

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I think the best thing they could do for arena classic players would be to add Solo Shuffle to classic expansions

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Easy, give us a proper solo experience and you will get more people involved.

The squishy classes, the scapegoat who gets yelled at, the healer issue, the tank issue, the rating issues (I’ve gone 6 wins for zero rating increase because of the class and spec I was playing at the time), the queue times, it’s all just not worth the effort.

When we asked for solo, this is not what we envisioned, we didn’t want the worst possible experience, but we got it, and it’s a turn off. And the same issues we experience in solo, we also experience in premade, mostly it comes down to if you are playing the wrong class and spec you may as well not play.

PVP is the most unbalanced thing in this game.

But it gets worse, too many players decide to play ring around the rosy instead of doing actual PVP and it’s god, damn, annoying.

I’ve had arena games where it took over 10 minutes because someone was running around a pillar the whole time, you can’t catch them, they can’t catch you, and worse even is that they are a spec that can res, so if you stop chasing they will start ressing. And if you start ressing they will start chasing again and you just go around in circles all day.

Riveting stuff man, really great game play.

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100% that there are issues within retail PvP.

Minpojke who wrote this mainly focuses on Cata/Classic expansions as it gives him better PvP than retail does. So this is wall of text is made for Classic expansions.

However, I do agree with you. Either you sit in queue for 30-40 min as DPS in Solo or you sit in LFG queue.
We asked for Solo shuffle but did it really make things better? Yes we can queue alone without LFG but are the games actually of high quality? No.

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See the problem is we asked for solo, not whatever this is that they gave us, this isn’t solo, this is a queue system that forces groups based on numbers that mean nothing.

As for classic arena, the actual PVP taking place is certainly better and definitely helps keep that alive, but the issue with classic is that it is classic.

Chances are there are less people playing, and for players like myself why would I bother, it gives me nothing to add to my collection, it’s not like I can get a glad mount over there and it adds to my retail collection.

If they had some plan to merge classic and retail collections I might think about doing some classic.

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I haven’t played PVP in Classic since MoP times, however I do think that the PVP in MoP is way better than what we have in retail. Of course there is QoL stuff in retail that I would like to keep, but the overall gameplay feels way better.

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Is this a thread or a book ?

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Can’t threads be long? :slight_smile:

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I’d suggest to post it on the Community Council but that’s a dead subforum :grimacing:

Also, there’s a GD specifically for Classic, maybe there’s a bigger response there:

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This was posted on Classic one for Europe, but a lot of people there got a bit “upset” because they want that part ONLY to be about Vanilla and since there is no arenas for Vanilla, I was a bit confused where to post.

I could post here and on the cata forum. It’s a bit iffy since it’s a post from TBC and onwards.

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This is classic stuff. It needs ot be in classic zone.

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It is classic stuff and I’ll prob repost it on Cata aswell