Maybe once me and my partner get our furious chest and legs we can gain higher rating for that stuff. I hope. God I hope lol
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My main concern about rating and titles is that thereâs significantly less people queuing/playing arenas and therefore less spots per title than previous seasons, at least if Ironforgeproâs site is somewhat accurate. For example, using rank one title spots in 2v2 this season thereâs ~40 rank one spots, whereas S5 there were ~69 rank one spots.
Looking at the TBC 2s trend, there isnât a huge drop off in participation. S4 TBC 28 team spots (so anywhere between 28 players and 112 players, 56 players if only two people were on each roster would get titles). S3 TBC 30 team spots, S2 TBC 28 team spots, and S1 33 team spots.
There was a decent dip in TBC from Season 1 to Season 2 in regards to population, roughly ~5000 teams/players, because there were five less rank one title spots. WOTLKâs dip from Season 5 to Season 6 is roughly 30,000 though, and this is also in addition to NA and OCE being combined for titles, so those two regions now share the same pool of players for titles.
Probably a result of a lot of things: no PvP balancing, rating requirements to buy honor and arena point gear, increase in raiding difficulty (raiding 3 times a week makes it less likely that casual players will try arenas/bgs), bots in battlegrounds being rampant. The inflation doesnât really matter, people will grind regardless whether gladiator is 2400 or 3000.
I definitely do agree with Dacro though. Make arenas more accessible, whether itâs dropping rating requirements for gear, implementing retailâs gladiator/rank one title system. Adding more cosmetics/titles/things. The more people queuing the better. Itâs definitely a feedback loop, people want to get their title or mount, they see 200 spots and Gladiator being 2800 and then give a token attempt then they get discouraged and stop queuing.
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glad cutoffs are going to go over 3100 and thats fine i guess
itâs not the rating, itâs the amount of spots
but glad being over 3100 because of a bandaid mmr fix is super silly
I have to be honest, I really donât think the lack of players has as much to do with rating requirements on gear as the fact as thereâs finally a lot of PVE to do in WOTLK.
As compared to classic or TBC, my guildmates with multiple toons are more busy than ever before.
Running multiple 10 and 25 man Ulduars a week takes pretty much all the time that they have for the game, so many have stopped queueing for PVP.
My guild typically had around 20-30 weekly PVP queuers in pretty much every week across all TBC seasons and the first season of WOTLK.
Now we have maybe 10-12; numbers absolutely cratered after Ulduar came out⌠By far the lowest #s; I run a lot of random 2s/3s/5s with outsiders that I never had to do before. Itâs not really because of gear; itâs because of lack of free time with some Ulduar 10 or 25 man raid going for a main or alts every day of the week.
Gearing for PVP is easier now than at any prior point in classic/TBC/WOTLK. Literally just a couple hours at 80 and you can get a solid set of gear. The current BIS (Furious) offpieces are all easy to get now. You still get pieces out of VoA if you care to do that.
Making the 1800-2000 rated gear like Helm/Shoulders easier to get is not enough to get people to come back.
Maybe stuff like cosmetics might get some people interested, but I just donât think this has much of anything to do with the rating requirements.
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You canât really compare S1 to S2 for WOTLK.
S1 PVE was 2 single boss raids and NaxxâŚ, literally the easiest and most boring content update of classic/TBC/WOTLK. There was plenty of free time after getting toons up to 80 given the ease of the PVE content.
S2 PVE is Ulduar, which is probably the most time consuming content update that weâve gotten since the start of classic/TBC/WOTLK.
People just donât have much free time if theyâre trying to do 10/25 man Ulduar raids for multiple toons every night.
Can only use myself for an example, but as I said in my previous post, my guildâs arena participation is way down this season compared to any other, and the main reason is a lot of the PVPers are trying to gear their alts in Ulduar 10/25 man runs, so they dropped out of PVP.
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Not surprising considering blizzard have been holding their hands over their eyes screaming lalalalala while people ask them to address major pvp bugs.
Then they ban people from the forums for giving feedback for âharassmentâ and wonder why literally half the game quits. Gee I wonder if the two things are related
/sarcasm
But you arenât allowed to just freely buy Furious main set pieces on your own accord with points like you could for 4/5 of the gear in TBC seasons.
If you canât spend the points you earn, a lot of people feel slighted. Demoralized. They leave. Rewards are part of an MMO you know. You say everyoneâs in Ulduar, but how many people would still be in Ulduar if the bosses dropped nothing?
And furthermore, it isnât that everyone is in Ulduar, itâs that everyone thatâs still playing the game is in Ulduar. At least some portion of the 40,000 that are not playing in PvP are not playing at all.
Edited for clarity.
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Sir, Copium is dangerous in high quantities.
it was phase 1 so we had less player drop off, retail tourists who were waiting for dragonflight, and players who came back took one look at blizzards attitude towards bugs in pvp and said screw it Iâll go play a game with developers have a pulse
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Brother they didnât even bother giving everyone their points this season.
apparently doing 10 games no longer entitles you to points and blizzard simply do not care enough to address it. Gms advice: Talk to devs. then devs ban you for asking them to address it because thatâs âharassmentâ
noone wants to pve to compete in pvp. its time consuming and rng and half the playerbase are all on different serverâs unable to pve with their friends. itâs just all around a bad business model that theyâve used for 8 or so years and didnât fix until mop
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Yea the Resto Druid pvp bis wep, valanyr, is basically unobtainable through normal play, without spending $500 in GDKPs or being a guild leaderâs wife. Yet itâs default loot for Holy Paladin who are already the strongest heal in pvp? Shams can get it then become ele for pvp and have the strongest caster wep in the game.
This tier is a big yikes for pvp druids and priests.
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I want to point out that things like your statement here donât apply to the vast majority of players. Remember, challenger is 1600 and titles are only calculated above 1000. That means 65% of the playerbase that is counted for title is between 1000 and 1600.
These playerâs are not min maxing arena. These are the guys who get their friends together and queue up for some fun with the idea of getting some gear to help out either in PvE or for BGs.
These are the casual players that make up the backbone of the arena ladder. Without them the top players have to fight for even less spots, which just totally discourages the middle tier players from even trying to compete and improve themselves. This leads to even the higher end players quitting due to lack of variety in the ladder. Qing into the same team over and over again gets unenjoyable very quickly.
I really need to stress that the casual players are completely ignorant to things like this, and just play depending on if it feels rewarding and fun to them. Obviously with how things currently stand they think itâs not worth their time.
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I want to point out that last season 65% were between 1000 and 1424. The people who quit did it before this season so they never saw the 1650~ Challenger rating change.
I donât have hard proof of this, but in my experience a lot of arena casuals loved battlegrounds. Now that battlegrounds are entirely bots, it makes me wonder ifâbesides there being a ton of botsâa lot of the people that played batlegrounds are just gone now too so the bots are more visible.
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This is important. Challenger has always been ~1440 give or take. Thanks to the ridiculous MMR inflation it is now 1600. This change was to allow more players to gain access to arena gear, and I doubt it even remotely accomplished its goal of doing so considering the most common title didnât even change enough to allow anywhere near helmet or shoulders.
And yeah, the casual arena player is playing to gear for battlegrounds. Itâs doubly discouraging when you do queue for a BG and itâs just 90% bots. It feels like the game is being abandoned
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heres hoping for meaningful change
Even if they swap to easier title handouts, that could drop participation in its own way now that the half that are left still playing are desperate for prestige.
How do you get back players that left? With big announcements like an expansion drop or a raid releasing. They wonât do a big announcement for this judging by all past history and the more recent footnote on MMR inflation adjusting.
Releasing the rating gates now wonât do as much as it might have five months ago. Things are looking real bad.
It does not make sense to have had OCE merge with NA yet our cutoff allows for half as many title slots⌠indicating we went from 40k players queâd all the way down to 20k given the .05 = 1/200 and there are just over 100 slots for gladiator in 3v3. That means there was MORE than a 50% drop in players queing from NA and the OCE players brought it back up to near 50%. Especially as the content ramps up in gear/fun throughout the seasons. Can we see the actual numbers?
For some like me its the x-realm came for this jsut too late.
Slower servers were harder to get for this, if at all. OB was the latter. If it has arena people, they werenât playing when I was.
So when x-realm offered finallyâŚwe settled on no arena plans anyway.
Walking into an arena filled with people geared up, yeah, no.
SL left a bad taste with me from that. Git gud only gets you so far when gear disparity is that much a factor.
X-realm should ahve come much sooner. basically when they rolled in all the othere changes like x-realm pug bg latter tbcc.
More would have done the pugs to go to arena to play there Iâd wager.
WG control being a mystery also not of help. One more weapon chance is in VOA. IfâŚyou can get in. also when arene dreams were kind of dumped by many Iâd say. an issue only fixed every 2.5 hours. Assuming your server faction has winning participants in the instance that determines this.
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Word of mouth. Players know that arena isnât as cursed and everyone can play.
Think about the end of an arena season or expansion where everyone is spamming BGs to get gear. Itâs like that.
Also, if players get their gear then quit for the rest of the season then that is OK too, as theyâre already counted on the ladder. Itâs obviously not expected for everyone to play the entire season, but this also encourages alts.
Iâve got an 1800 rogue that has 8k arena points that I canât spend. I donât really play it much other then to cap every week, but it still feels bad logging onto it and looking at it.