Except for the majority of r14 it wasnt just them putting in work. Even then, I feel that the vanilla system is far better than what we’ve had since legion/bfa, but it’s not without its extremely glaring issues that tarnish what is otherwise the system in which pvp gearing should have always operated.
Certainly wasn’t healthy. It wasn’t a perfect system, but can you think of a system where there will only ever be 3-4 Rank 14s on a server and required some serious commitment?
Every suggestion I’ve heard made Rank 14 possible for everyone.
First off, I achieved rank 12 once and rank 11 twice back in vanilla. It was never hard to do, it just took an immense amount of time and you had to play the political game if you wanted to climb higher. You were often given a slot in a queue and it was understood who would be getting rank 14 on any particular week.
Now, PVP in vanilla was never about skill. It was just a test to see whose character could grind the most honor in the most efficient way possible. Often times the rank 14 players were really not very good players but abided by the rules set forth and thus obtained gear that gave them a huge advantage over everybody else which made them look like gods.
I say all of this knowing that almost nobody who achieved rank 14 played their own character 100% of the time. Almost everybody I knew was sharing accounts with friends, had custom bots that they were running, or literally paid Chinese farmers to play their character almost 24/7 (this was until Blizzard started really cracking down on this and tracking IPs). It was funny to see the reaction from “new” players who were pushing for rank 14 when they realized what was happening. And you know what? Nobody cared because the grind was so stupid and so absurd we all understood it. It’s the reason I never went above rank 12… as soon as I saw what people had to do, it was obvious how stupid it was (I really only wanted the mounts anyway).
Rank 11 is achievable playing solo… any higher, good luck. I honestly see the PVP grind being easier in Classic because nobody wants to do it anymore. It wasn’t competitive, it wasn’t fun, and it wasn’t healthy.
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I think this time around getting to rank 13-14 will be much easier since blizzard is better equipped to tell when somebody is account sharing. You won’t be able to pay some 3rd worlder to play while you sleep and your friends would have to be closeby. I suspect the grind will be time consuming, but I doubt it will be a 12 hour a day grind. probably closer to 5-8 hours a day since everybody is playing solo and people have jobs and stuff.
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I in a perfect world, the limited high warlord/grand marshal system would promote probably the most fun local server competition amongst faction members. But the world wasnt and isnt and will never be perfect, so the system devolved into "Be the chosen few in the very best pvp guild that farmed bgs 24/7 and gamed the system to essentially pick the current high warlords/grand marshals. So to avoid that scenario the best thing you can do is just remove the limit on HW/GM and make it a grind that you will eventually hit. Let it decay slowly as you’re higher in ranks so you need to keep playing to at least stay plateaued, decaying faster the higher rank you are and longer you dont play.
But if it’s not special, it’s not special. There are a lot of things in life that are supposed to go to the best but instead go to people in the right sociopolitical situation. That’s more a side effect of the human condition than a side effect of the honor system