Actually the old system had devolved to less than 100 active participants. The new system is being enjoyed by more than 1000. So what blizzard did was a complete success. I actually only re-subscribed to wow because of this pvp release was coming. And if you think 500k honor for 5-6 weeks is something “Everybody” is going to do you’re out of your mind.
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I’ve noticed the same thing.
They also don’t enjoy the game for what it was, and they are often Retail players who would be paying for a sub regardless.
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Both of you ignore the cold hard truth on the ground. Weekly participation up by 1000 players per week and climbing since the release of the patch. So actually most people are happy with the new changes. Only in your imaginary worlds and the shattered hopes and dreams of control freaks was the old system better than the new one.
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If it’s a success past the honeymoon phase, I’d be very surprised. But I’d absolutely admit I’m wrong. It won’t last past that tho. Guaranteed. The moment people see how half the field is rank 14s just griefing anyone trying to start ranking, it will be over. No more games.
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Honestly both systems sound like putting gear behind excessive pvp makes people not play for the fun of it.
Guess it just comes with the part of MMO’s being games of progression and power gain. S’pose at 4am I should not be ruminating on people’s intent and instead go to bed.
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There weren’t enough rank 14s to do this griefing in the old system. And most of them quit after the achievement anyway. It was a much more fair battlefield. Now it will be half rank 14s griefing. This is a direct result of this very bad change. Like I said, those that decided this and support it do no know what makes the vanilla honor system tick. They just broke it in favor of everyone getting a trophy “equity” mindset.
The only question I have now is if they’ll choose to revert it (unlikely) or apply more bandaids to even further bring it closer to the retail pvp system. That’s where my money is.
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Griefer Turtle Teams are far less of an issue than they were in SOM and prior. The reason being is the % of player base that can rank, especially to rank 10-11 is much higher. On Saturday did a 140k honor grind and only saw 2 Turtle teams the entire day. Two afk’s in a full day of AV is amazing. The increase in player-base capable of participating at higher levels comes with all sorts of benefits. Turtles becoming even more unpopular is a big one!
Yep.
Personally, my concern more than anything is about fresh/a new season. That’s when I really plan to play again versus just messing around in Era.
If the kinks can get ironed out things might be ok. We’ll see what the future holds.
What’s going on right now is a fair amount of people who felt “gatekept” are playing again and they are playing in the most boring way possible. So much so that they’ll proudly talk about being more interested in watching movies than playing the game.
I’ll be honest in that I’ve been queuing for AV too with my poorly geared druid to see how this all played out - and have been grinding the AV rep and some early ranks. So I guess I fit into this made-up “1000 player” number because I also wasn’t PVPing in Era before this. Has this been enjoyable? Not really, I’ve had more fun camping Prince Nazjak for the tidal charm in total honestly (two kills and no charm yet). I tend to get addicted to the grind and get my toons up to R14 even but this time it’s pretty boring and therefore a waste of time. So I’ll stop at the AV exalted and R10 from this coming weeks AV weekend.
I think calling this a honeymoon phase is very accurate. I’m curious to see what happens in two months. I might not be playing but I will be watching.
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Great post and not to side track, but I love(d) this. Getting that thing to drop is almost as huge as ranking to your goal itself. If not better.
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You’re missing the most important part of the pvp patch. Sure it is easier to get rank 13/14 than it was but not that much easier that its going to open the door to a large % of players. That being said, the 90g Epic Mount (Rank 11) is pretty easy and will make battlegrounds the first go to after reaching level 60. AV will be populated indefinitely as long as that is the case. FYI, I kept Honor Spy installed to see how much participation there has been the last two weeks. So yeah the numbers are real and aren’t made up like they were when bracket boosting was the meta.
This would be a great middle ground.
I’ve had this thought too, in fact, it was my initial reason to rank this toon, but it “feels bad” to have a slow mount in AV or any other BG for that matter. Most people buy the epic mounts once they ding 60 and I can say this as someone who has been doing AV without a fast mount and have noticed almost all the “slow boys” are sub-60s.
I was going to do it because 900g on a server with no AH is a pain but I wanted to have the fast mount. I’m going to get the AV wolf instead and just go to R10.
It’s way faster for someone on Whitemane or Mankrik to farm stuff and sell it on the AH for the gold and then get the mount.
Did you run honorspy back before Blizzard said to stop PVPing because they are changing the system, but after the population boom? As in February 2023?
Also, did you run it on both your cluster (where people may not have had an interest in PVP because they are on a PVE server after all) and Whitemane?
I got rank 11 on my Shadow Priest alt a few months ago. Aside from AV weekend, boosters were the only reason we even had a GM bracket every week.
Sure. What honor did you get weekly on your way to R11?
Yes, having more bracket spots has always made the middle ranks easy to get.
I don’t think most people are going to actually rank for the mount. Maybe more people will for the blue gear but it’s really not that great compared to what you can get by spending less time elsewhere on most servers.
Anyway, again, I’m interested in seeing how this plays out in 2 months. I know you think that things are going to be static, but that’s rarely the case.
Depended on the week. During AV weekend the honor needed for bracket 13 would go above 700k. When there was no AV the numbers were very low. So much so that people were actually running sand in Silithus (Brotherhood of the Sand) instead of doing wsg during the week. WSG was also the only bg available and 99.9% of the games were flaming mismatches so I couldn’t really blame the under-geared for not participating in wsg. Although I did begrudgingly still run wsg during the week and eventually got to rank 11, without running any sand, I soon after canceled my subscription noting that I wouldn’t return until something was done to fix the pvp system.
I’ve always thought they need a pug only “league”. And get rid of factions; just auto organize teams by average rank or even ilevel. Perhaps just make premade ranking for separate titles or something. I think pugging is probably the most popular way to enjoy ranking anyway.
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I honestly think this would solve a lot of problems, a matchmaking system where groups are matched against groups of equal size. I also don’t hate the same faction games they added in wrath or tbc, which would help queue times.
Also need to heavily nerf AV honor gains and buff AV NPCs. The vast majority of players AFK-ing it should be an indication that there’s obviously a bit of an imbalance.
I will also add @partyrock that I have to agree with pretty much everything you said above - you really hit the nail on the head.
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Yeah, I mean let’s be honest. Premades don’t want to face other premades, they just want to steamroll pugs. And that’s a bad meta. Pug should always be vs. pug. Pretty simple way to do it. Now that would be a huge success imo.
Hey thanks! I think a lot of people have some blindspots here on the pvp honor system change issue.
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I agree with most of what you said. However, nerfing AV honor returns the game to the state it was prior to the patch. The reason for the patch was to increase participation. Reducing mark turn ins I don’t have an issue with. The moment you mess with in game AV honor gains you’ll lose most of the participation gains that have been made since the patch.
Is being AFK in AV really participation though???
Is rushing base in AV really PVP though???
mhmmmmmmm
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