Gear Advantages and Customizing are Illusions

PVP Arenas
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Another quarantine night of sleeplessness so figured I’d pass the time with a late night forum rant concerning my perceived misconceptions regarding gearing advantages and customization in PvP.

Regarding gearing advantages:

  1. On average these do no exist. For the average player you are going to be geared about the same as everyone else. That’s why it’s the average. You most likely aren’t a special exception and neither am I. The Jawah’s and Keator’s of this world are few and far between.
  2. There are outliers in each side of the spectrum (undergeared and overgeared-as mentioned above). Chances are you do not fall into either of these categories.
  3. What this means in practical terms is that if you want gearing a character to be a long arduous task in hopes of getting an advantage over other players it will not play out that way. Your power is relative to the power of other players, and if you are willing to put in X amount of work for Y power on average so are most other players.
  4. The reason this matters is because when you advocate for this type of design all it does is increase the amount of effort and time everyone has to put into getting a character to the same point relative to everyone else. If you’re willing to put in the work to get to that point chances are most others are as well so relative to them you have no advantage and all you accomplished was increasing Activsions time played metric, wasting yours and everyone else’s time, and effectively made alts unplayable.
  5. Alts. This is the only circumstance where you WILL gain an advantage. Facing alts on your “main” you will be rewarded for all of that hard work. That is until everyone stops attempting to play alts once they realize they are too time consuming and heavily disadvantaged.
  6. At times you will face an overgeared player who destroys you and it will feel terrible. At times you will destroy an undergeared player and you will take no satisfaction from it. Both occurrences will be few and far between.

Regarding customization:

  1. In reality this doesn’t exist either. The optimal gear, talents, strategies, and comps will be figured out. There is no way around this and it has always happened.
  2. If you are “customizing” it means you are NOT following the above which means you are NOT optimal in which case most players (yes you) will not continue “customizing “ when you realize you will have more success playing an optimal setup.
  3. In the off chance your “custom” setup is successful it will move to #1 on this list and no longer be special but instead become the new norm.
  4. If you could never customize and discover a new “build” (again chances of even doing so are slim to none) it wouldn’t even matter because eventually the “best” is found and an equilibrium is reached. It doesn’t matter if that was given to you by the devs via a template or settled on by the best players and discovered by looking at the front page of the 3’s ladder.
  5. This point matters because when you ask for the ability to “customize” in reality you are again just creating more work for yourself and opening the door for Blizzard to make optimal gearing require PvE as they will inevitably make special PvE items which have no comparable counterpart in PvP.

And that’s all I have to say about that.

2 Likes
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Tldr, outside of first sentence.

Take some ambien

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Good idea.

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I mean, we know. These are all obvious points, albeit true for the most part.

My only point of contention is that while you’re right in that average geared players are more common than not by pure definition, there’s types of players that skew this. Ones who pvp only on principle/lack of willingness to deviate from what they find fun, and those that do both (pvp and pve). In this sense, “if you’re willing to put in time/effort, chances are they are too” doesn’t really fit. I mean of course some will but it’s very easy to gain an advantage in gear early on simply by doing pve content. Many pvpers will not do this, at least not very much. Of course this normalizes as well. One could argue that if “many” won’t then on average “you“ will be amongst them but I’m just saying this is something that goes beyond just traditional gear progression.

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You also have the number of players entering and leaving the pool causing your average to change. Because of the overly powerful pve items, the players that refuse to pve end up leaving the pool. This skews your “average” player to only ones who choose to do both pve and pvp.

This also invites players who have pve’d all patch to then enter the pool because they have all the powerful pve items granting them easier success over the pure pvpers remaining that have refused to pve. The average is then further skewed to players who choose to pve and pvp.

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are you disrespecting #1 NA ret Jawah here?

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Yep good points. This is me.

More good points and I agree.

To anyone else who may have read this extremely long rant you have my sincerest apologies.

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I didn’t see it as a rant. I mean it’s well articulated and accurate. I guess I said it was obvious because I’ve thought of this many times; I just never posted anything or felt the need to. But the customization thing is spot on. People are so desperate to gain every minute advantage that any perceived customization is a fallacy as they’ll all just conform to the “best” build.

To branch off that a little though, deviating from said builds can be effective. For most people, having a .5% or 1% advantage over another person isn’t going to make or break anything. People aren’t robots and the amount of mistakes made add up to a far larger disparity between players than a build will, usually. Take pve content as well. If a dps does a solid 3% more damage than another, instantly every group is “LF DH!” If a feral applya it’s insta declined. Totally unnecessary but, it is what it is. Builds are similar as far as stats are concerned. It’d be nice if people just played what they wanted instead of what other people tell them is best but… yeah.