And the higher your ELO rating, the better your pieces.
Needless to say, doing so would break competitive chess forever.
But that’s exactly what Blizzard has done this expansion.
Absolutely nonsensical competitive game design. Blizzard’s AWC competition doesn’t even follow it, where everyone has access to the same gear.
Better chess players don’t get better pieces. The Super Bowl winner doesn’t get to draft first. They get a trophy and a title. Those are the rewards for PvP competition in every competitive activity on the planet. Zero competitions make the counter-productive decision of giving the best gear to the best players. Why? Doing so ruins the game.
Unlink gear from rating while you still can, Blizzard. Your design defies all logic, all common sense, all competitive game theory, the history of all person-vs-person competitions.
Yes, give the best players their mounts and their trophies and their titles — well deserved! — but do not break the game by making the best better, especially in an expansion with no scaling, no templates, no PvP Power, no PvP resilience.
I fear the truth is not what people are willing to accept. Most of them want to beat lower geared players to a pulp and flex because they have a better sword.
I honestly don’t see the problem with higher tier loot requiring a higher tier rating. It’s on the same level as mythic raid loot, why should it require any less effort?
Giving everyone the same gear would break the RPG progression of the game.
You’re SUPPOSED to get stronger, which allows you to get better gear, which allows you to get even stronger.
That’s how the game works.
People with worse gear actually have to play better to achieve the same results.
You can get stronger by having better gear or by becoming a better player. However, there is a point where being a better player is far less important than having better gear.
The pvp aspect of wow has no rpg elements in it. At multiple points we’ve had peace between both factions and pvp still continues with war between horde and alliance.
The idea of rewarding better gear for higher ranked players is completely asinine in a pvp setting. The difference between a high level player and a low level one is the skill and knowledge, gear should not be a factor.
I disagree, the fundemental drawing point of an mmo is reward vs challenge. The greater the challenge, the greater the reward. This is reflected in the pve scene, there’s no reason why it shouldn’t be reflected in the pvp scene.
You know all those posts fawning over classic wow because they saw some beastly dude ride past on an epic mount and thought “wow i want to be him”, that’s what people want & blizzard is giving it to them.
The reward/ challenge in pvp is fighting an opponent who differs from the last and beating him. It’s adapting to their playstyle, countering it and coming out on top, the reward from that is the victory.
Acquiring better gear for a challenge is a pve and rpg aspect. It does not mingle well in pvp because it’s overall, a very stupid design that increases the gap between players.
This is why all successful pvp seasons and pvp games do not reward superior players with special gear.
The PVP aspect of WoW has ALWAYS had RPG elements in it.
Even during legion, when we had templates, increasing item level did give you a 1% buff to your stats per ilvl.
Your vision of how PVP gearing should work has never been a part of WoW.
The experienced players have always had access to better gear than the casual/inexperienced players.
Otherwise, it throws the risk v reward off, and doesn’t reward people for their time/ability.
you sound right on paper but this is not how it is in actual arena queues… people under certain rating say 1800 won’t even fully know the basics… and 1800 gives 220 already…
Also the extreme gear min-max is for those rank 1 pushers… for us it barely makes a difference… i am fairly sure people > 2500 can beat people < 1800 with 10 less ilvl
That’s not RPG, progression is not limited to rpg. PVP requires personal progression, that is the player has to improve. RPGS have story progression and are story focused, WOW PVP has no lore development.
Most of the issue stems from, if your gear is trash, you have an extremely hard time winning against better geared folks so your journey to the rating required to get that better gear is probably more difficult than intended.
It will encourage people to go pve for better gear to stomp weaker players with a stat advantage rather than gearing through pvp. Which makes gear from pvp redundant, because it will always lag behind what you can get from relatively easy pve.
In BFA for example, by the time you could get normal level pvp gear, you probably had a full set of heroic ilvl gear maybe with a smattering of mythic ilvl gear.
Either pve gear needs to be trash for pvp, pve gear needs to be on parity with rate of acquisition to pvp gear, or pve gear should just be disabled for pvp.
You do realize they have matchmaking in arena right? Like the gear sparsity for your bracket isn’t going to be much so more than likely it will come down to skill at some level.
I hope you’re not judging this based on bgs because HOO-HOWDY, no one should be judging anything based on bgs.
You realize people will come in late to a season, start up alts, ETC… There is no valid reasoning to award superior gear to higher skilled players in a pvp setting.
You make a decent point. But it was doomed from the beginning. WoW =/= chess.
I think it would be better if PvP mode equalized everyone’s item level. Pretty much every good pvp game does this. But then the whales would cry that they don’t have a gear advantage to stomp people with.
That’s great, guess what, you’re going to get matchmade with other people in your rating. All the people with the top tier loot will be sitting in the top tier rating, matching with other top tier players.