When I was a lot younger and had more time I would spend a lot of my time on WoTLK private servers back when it was more popular than it was today and I would obsess over Arena, I had found some mage partner through just networking in PvP lobbies and we had climbed to really high ratings doing R/M.
Almost a decade later now I cannot stand the thought of having to sit through LFG and find an Arena partner.
Out of 10 people who I find, 7 of them will quit at the first loss and won’t even respond to anymore whispers even if it’s about asking how to improve/etc. while the other 3 show promise only to never slowly log on again or they end up raging and ruining the vibe as you slowly get to play with them.
I don’t have the time anymore to find that “perfect” Arena partner where we’re both in sync, I am not a streamer either who can pull from pools of other streamers to get into queues and it’s just not realistic as time goes on that this can happen for a lot of people.
I genuinely believe Retail moving to a more Solo Queue oriented style is the only way to salvage MMO PvP, and I should be able to organically find people I vibe with just by doing solo queue so maybe down the road I can see myself queueing 2s ors 3s with them outside of solo queue but this idea that I have to sit in LFG chat for hours to find people in unreasonable and outdated.
With that being said, Wrath Arena scene is a complete let down and it’s already dying really fast due to low participation and massive rating gate keeping with gear/etc.
I am looking forward to DF Arena just for the sake of never having to manually find people again.
The booster thing might or might not be real depending on the type of player saying it, but is undeniable that 90% of Arena LFG listings are boosting ads to RMT sites so it’s kinda clear that a lot of boosting is happening now than ever before.
But Wrath scene is dead, the problem isn’t Wrath Arena itself. There’s a ton of fun comps you can do, more variety than TBC so i’ll give it credit but the community itself doesn’t care about PvP much less Arena and with how gated Wrath Arena is and how absurd the power is between iLevels and the random rating requirements for different pieces it is easily off putting to a lot of people to even want to try.
The meta is just to run 5s win or loss just to grab weekly 10 wins Arena points, it’s also faster to climb there than both 2s/3s so people cheese it as a way to get pieces without actually climbing in a “real” ladder since you can meme it pretty hard.
Carries peaked during early-mid Sinful then fell off a cliff.
Yes, it really is horribly dated. I can’t imagine Shuffle won’t be extremely popular provided they do gearing stuff well, at least for season 1 of Dragonflight. Fingers crossed.
Lfg just needs a major update, it’s completely obsolete at this point. The last 2 seasons a friend came back and I was having an ok time in arena but he didn’t bother with s4.
Going back to Lfg is just digital Auschwitz, it is just so f… terrible. Boosters do have their share of blame but not for the reasons people usually state.
In most cases you can tell who is getting boosted and just kill it, my main issue with boosters is how they basically corrupt the pool of available players, mostly in the case of healers. People like to berate 2.1 (thx Dozer) but I don’t think a healer that quite literally doesn’t know he has a dispel button, or does less healing than a ret, or gets sanced out of a pet stun only to walk into the follow up trap 2 times in a game, etc. can get there and are not boosted parasites that just make the whole lfg experience a lot worse.
Same, honestly if gearing is relaxed then solo queues will 100% be a massive success in bringing in a ton of people.
I know for a fact a lot of people who played Wrath just to PvP are also just waiting for DF to drop, they’re all hoping Blizzard doesn’t ruin yet another expansion or they might just move on from the game in general.
Boosting seems to be a double edged sword, on one hand it seems innocent to make some extra side gold boosting people or even helping your low rated friends but it also is toxic like you put it in that the pool of existing players become irreversibly worse off because of it.
You throw in mass RMT boosts and you have a whole new evil to deal with.
Yeah, WoW lacks a competitive form of content you can really “throw your body at” without a premade. Like, if I wanna do arena or keys then I float around in the finder and depending on spec, mmr, etc, it can be 30-40+ minutes just to get to MAYBE play the game.
These modes will still exist of course, but it’ll be cool to be able to hit a “throw me in a game” button.
There’s pros and cons for sure with shuffle, but I believe people are more ready to deal with those cons than just doing parkour in town and looking for queues half your evening.
Lets be real, most of the SL arena experience was terrible and its a larger problem than just poor balancing.
Boosting won’t ever go away as long as the WoW token exists, so its a constant to expect in arenas. Solo shuffle doesn’t solve the problem if its not on par with 3s content like gladiator and r1 gladiator.
Unfortunately you can be punished for ‘playing the game wrong’ through no fault of your own in today’s WoW so I wouldn’t expect solo shuffle to be immune to this. There’s going to be builds that are shamed upon enough to cause reports/false flags and disquals that won’t get properly reviewed and reverted, no matter how honest of a player you are.
You’ll find people trying to sell solo shuffle boosts in ridiculous ways, people accusing people of throwing matches, etc. I don’t think the design of modern pvp in WoW can work when such dishonesty is allowed to occur, even in solo shuffle.
Unfortunately the market exists because there’s enough dishonest people buying boosts to allow it to exist. Blizzard enables that through allowing gold boosts, then profit off of it with wow tokens.
You know how hard it will be to be lucky to match with the person you are trying to boost?
As far as reporting people for bad builds, who cares? and you will 100% get troll players in solo Q so just expect it and re que, this ain’t league, matches last 10 mins.
Here’s an idea for boosters: charge for x time queuing at x mmr with a flood of boosters. Have designated times and mmr brackets with dozens of boosters. When someone who’s paying them is matched with them, they tryhard. If they’re against said bostee they’ll throw.
So far if you have an mmr delta, winning 3/6 should net rating. Boosters just have to fix the game enough to create this, even if there’s multiple boostees in the match they happen to get.
I wouldn’t expect participation at certain times and mmr to be high enough to prevent this sort of win trading. Probably be easier to sell carries in that than 2s or 3s.
I found a multi-glad & R1 TBC Classic rsham to play with literally the first day of WoTLK arena on classic. And this is considering that there were only 3 groups listed at the time lol.
Technically my overall xp is slightly higher then his because R1 CR requirements are always extremely low in the 5s bracket (2200-2300ish), and retail inflation is insane now with people almost always hitting 3k+ by end of season, but you would be surprised what kind of friends you can make if you just try.
Week 1 I added 8-9 new people to my btag, all friendly and 2500+ xp. You just have to actually be a nice human being. Following up and talking with them about PvP, WoW in general, RL hobbies, work, etc and hitting them up to just say what up is also a good idea to maintain potential partners. The reason people play once and then never queue with each other again, even if added to btag, is usually because no one fostered the relationship.
I’m glad you found a great arena partner but my situation and many others is not the same, for example a lot of people don’t have XP or a resume of rating ratings they hit and most people in Classic arena expect you already be good or know what to do or they won’t even give you a chance or look your way.
From my experience being a pug in Classic only gets worse and worse because a compound of issues of having no experience with a smaller and smaller playerbase that wants to PvP over time will just lead to a very stagnant scene similar to TBC arena
One thing I will say is look for groups that have that tag “new players welcome”. It’s a little green icon and txt in the group listing.
I’ve seen it quite a few groups already with that tag line and a few of them had higher experienced players just looking to queue with anyone. Be friendly, reach out, try to not rage and keep it fun and ask as many questions as you can that revolve around you gaining the knowledge you need to succeed. You might just be surprised to find people who like teaching newer players the ropes.
Yeah you’re probably right, I’ll try to find those.
Personally I’m kind of over Wrath and SL PvP haha, im kinda waiting to see if DF is any better with SoloQ before I kinda decide if I have time for MMO PvP in my life or not because this whole process is taking too long for my liking.