Couldn’t it be possible that most people come back at the end of an expac to prep for the next expac? Are people going to come back for Cata Classic? Perhaps there are other reasons but that is the first one that came to mind. We don’t know what type of players each of the 40,000 are so it’s a bit of a mystery and guessing.
It’s not like 40,000 players quit overnight, they have been leaving since week 1 of wrath classic arena but we haven’t seen the numbers until now. Any teams that had placed over 1000 rating were counted in last season’s final cutoff calculations, even if they just hit 1001 rating on Sept 29 then uninstalled the game.
I assume this is why the lower cutoffs were stagnant and the only inflation in the final weeks of S5 was seen above Duelist cutoff. The people above duelist were still playing the game, many characters below those cutoffs had simply stopped playing arena
The gameplay probably has a lot to do with it. In TBC “Turbo” was not respected, and considered a comp for people who refused to learn how to play the game. Now almost every comp plays like Turbo did, or relies on the overtuned Ele/Holy combo. An Ele/Holy comp won the 2022 wrath classic arena tournament, unsurprisingly. Everyone who played Warmane knew this would happen
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That should have RBG, never know till out though with the classic team lol. A decent selling point there.
Besides the above stuff the big elephant in the room is also some people really just don’t like arena. rbg is a 2nd way to get rated. And for some the much-preferred way.
So that could be a draw. I know I will most likely lapse this sub as interests take me elsewhere. But 3 chars are honor capped now. If I get a leveling hunter done before sub lapse, 4.
As I walk out the door as summer comes…I ain’t closing it on the way out lol. The honor is there for future gears. That door is slightly ajar lol.
Add RBG’S NOW! What is taking so long?
They started quitting pretty early. The records show that Challenger was actually decreasing for most of the season until Blizzard made their inflation patch and before that even dipped below 1400. I believe week one was around 1450~ so it was still short about 25 points at the end from where it started even after Blizzard’s “help.”
So not only did they make it so that sub-challenger players couldn’t get any main set items, they also had to feel like they were getting WORSE each week and stepped in way too late.
I stopped doing 2s for 3 weeks saving points at 2200, no games, went up 150mmr. Seems to be 50mmr added every week from what i noticed.
yay for the scummy boosters
If you look at OCE players on the ironforge leaderboards their ratings are greyed out still. This makes me wonder if OCE players are not counting towards the cutoffs.
I know this wouldnt account for the 50% dropoff but just something to point out.
I mean sure, fine, make those changes to make gearing the same as in TBC with just shoulders/weapons ratings locked.
Even if you do, I’m not sure that’s going to bring people back.
I’m talking about well geared players with 5k GS and full Deadly Gear that basically aren’t PVPing. They’re just gearing alts in Ulduar.
Most of the players that I know that aren’t PVPing anymore but are still playing.
Of just my main 25 man raid; around 15-17 queued PVP every week in S1. Around maybe 6-8 are queuing PVP weekly right now.
Two healers in my guild that got Valynr in the past week and used to queue on those toons every week in S1 aren’t playing those toons for PVP in S2. Gear doesn’t have much to do with it; they just don’t want to PVP anymore.
This doesn’t have much to do with gear imo; just people aren’t queuing for their own reasons (and I suspect the main one is they’re just gearing alts through Ulduar and ignoring PVP since there’s actually good PVE content).
It’s worth noting that assuming it is correct even with the injection of OCE teams into our ladder we’re still down 60%. Without them it would be significantly worse
tell me more about the safespotting of pets
please i need to know this
yeah for sure, just havent seen anyone mention this. hoping someone will check into it
I’ve already talked about that earlier in the thread that it’s probably too late to bring people back. They would have to focus on damage control, but while the answer was clear on what to do six months ago to staunch the flow it isn’t now. There may not be anything they can do to stop it, because at some point the low population is in itself a reason to quit.
And on the other side of the anecdote coin, most people that I know that aren’t PvPing anymore AREN’T still playing. There is no way to get a poll of everyone so we’re just left with “at least some PvP players are still playing PvE and some quit altogether.”
I mean, if I had to pinpoint one thing that could justify both sides of the coin, it’s the gameplay instead of the gear (though the 2 are intertwined).
The gameplay of PVP feels a lot more stale in WOTLK than it did in TBC. The comps feel even more cookie cutter, etc.
Part of it is that resilience is way weaker in WOTLK than it was in TBC in relative terms. So the burst classes (esp casters) are doing stupid amounts of damage in PVP.
A big resilience buff would be one solution to get people to actually want PVP gear. Feels like a lot of people are wearing more PVE pieces (esp 252 ilvl) in PVP. The weapons are almost always gonna be PVE weapons, but no reason for the rest to be. Resilience getting back to as strong as it was in TBC would help.
You completely ignored BG gameplay in favor of arena gameplay because, as it turns out, you appear to know no one that prefers playing battlegrounds over arena.
It is VERY easy to hear the top 35% of arena side of the story. These are the people who were getting gear and titles last season, and I know you and probably much of your guild are part of that.
A common side effect of arenas being touted as the “serious” pvp is that people who play them discount the opinions of people that prefer battlegrounds. You can’t imagine they don’t care about the same things you do. Plus, you want things you care about changed, so it’s tempting to say these are the most important issues to everyone. They’re not.
People below 65% who preferred Battlegrounds only cared about comps in so much as they realized they needed to reroll an entirely different class along with their friends to even have a shot at getting the gear they wanted, but then that STILL wouldn’t get them the gear on the character they actually wanted to play in battlegrounds (only on the forced new char/class). When they hear “more comps viable” they hear “buff my favorite battlegrounds class so that I can get 2k in arenas as easily as an hpal.” They agree it would be a good thing, but they are not actually going to play unless they get the gear on the class they wanted. Some of them do like multiple classes, they find one that has a viable spec, find enough random strangers that make a comp and they make it… but a lot can’t coordinate a reroll with their friends or have lives and just peace out. They raid maybe, or they quit.
Sure, you can think that if it were super fun to play arenas then people would play it for zero rewards, but that is an unrealistic ask of arenas when many people that were on the bottom were not playing them to have fun in the arena specifically, but in a battleground.
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I couldn’t disagree more. TBC had quite literally 5 comps you’d see in 2v2.
Wotlk has some absolutely massive balance issues, but in general there is significantly more comp variety. This will become even more true next season when casters can finally get haste gear
Resil in wotlk is infinitely stronger than in TBC. The current issue is we have 232 ilvl off set PvP gear running into people with 252 PvE ilvl off set gear. The difference is just too large. Next season we will have 245 offset vs 258 offset, so while large the gap will be a lot smaller.
I remember Ian hozafonkastaus said during shadowlands that “ilvl isn’t that important” in arena and that shows you their take on things. It is MASSIVELY important and they don’t really see that. It’s the difference of TSG killing your shaman in 6 seconds while totally immune to CC or living 10 seconds and being able to peel and win the game. It’s really, really big.
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i think a lot of the ideas here are cool but arena is just outright bad
too many irritating gatekeepers for the average player
dealing with a superstressful game like war hpal for a very long time, then going into preg dk to be blast in the opener.
not to mention the amount of bugs like vanish breaking randomly, not being able to sap dks/locks/mages/hunters nelfs jumping,warriors with 2h+ shield wall and the list goes on.
you can value the assets as much as you want, but if the main product is bad, the true will come out one way or another
Dalaran sewers has a side you can jump back up to the center platform from the bottom if youre certain race/gender combos. You jump off zug war follows then you hop back up and he has to run around to the stairs instead.
The pet safespot is on Lordaeron. The starting room has a ledge you can sit on good for protecting you back vs double stealth teams, but also you are immune to pet damage there. So if beast cleave ques into you on that map you just run back to your room when wolves come out and BM pet + wolves will do 0 dmg.
also if you dont put a one hander on your shield wall macro, you can swap back to your 2 hander without your wall fading
Nailed it. Afraid its too little too late now though. Should have listened in tbc.