We’re into the end of week 3 here entering week 4 and we’re still running into 2700+ players in the 1800-1900+ bracket.
I’d wager that at any given moment, we’re anywhere around 500 - 1.5k players queuing for games (and this might be a generous estimate only really applying during peak hours). There aren’t enough players to beat to continue moving up. This issue is exacerbated further now that we’re broken up amongst 9-10 (including R1) separate brackets. You may be very well queuing into under 100 teams at your skill level. It is for this reason you start seeing repeats and MMR mismatches in favor of quicker queue times.
I think one of the glaring issues is just the total player base currently in PvP; at the end of week 1 we had approximately 50k characters queue for at least one arena game which has only scaled to about 65k today - we are currently only looking at a little over 1,000 players above the 2.1k bracket (representing about 1.5% of the top players) a month in now. I suspect that the gearing flow and amount of PvE work required to stay competitive is pushing players away from the game, awaiting the .5 patch instead once catch up mechanics are implemented. This has happened in my friend group.
The amount of people consistently queuing is quite low and LFG has become a bit barren as well. This issue becomes even more apparent looking at the AWC viewership only hanging around the 5-7k mark, in what is effectively the largest tournament of the year.
Is the WoW team doing enough to stimulate growth/participation into what is near end of the expansion?
Why are such strong powers (tier sets) locked behind RNG mechanics? Surely this encourages one player to stay, but another to leave. Is it not better to remain neutral and retain both? It feels like these retention strategies were designed for a decade old gaming landscape and simply don’t work current day when the numbers are already dwindling. @WoW team, I’m assuming you see your growth percentage comparatively to churn and understand that it’s a negative value. Why are decisions that push players away being made? You do not have an endless pool of customers to burn through.
Do no product strategists or data scientists work on retention, or is a design team making arbitrary decisions based on Astrology?
But also we’re just going to stay in the low rating until eveyrone starts pushings. It’s early season in one thats prob gonna last until like Sept/oct/nov
They really did a number on the lower end of the ladder.
I’m still surprised that they haven’t backpeddled in some capacity by letting people unlock vault slots in random battlegrounds (you get vault progress for LFR or +2s), removing rating restrictions from conquest gear, or letting people upgrade it by just grinding honor, etc.
Or buffing health pools. Or nerfing crits.
Matches are lethal enough without the gear disparity.
i mean, i think a lot of the casual base like myself play 2s since we dont have more than 1 friend. and at 1800-1900 we’re pretty tired of watching 2 glad mounts walk out of the gate and queueing into nonstop hpriest DH and rogue mage. also getting resonatored in a 7 second kidney, after they burn all your defensives in 2 minutes, for 35k feels fantastic. that being said, blizzard doesnt car about 2s, or pvp for that matter, so i dont know. they are actively trying to get people to quit maybe?
Besides the fact, the playerbase is currently around 65k characters in comparison to WoD’s 250k in PvP. Based on this fact alone reinflation of the ladder is going to take substantially longer when the only players actually playing at about 1.8+ are all ex-glads. We’re talking about 10% of all players spanning across 4 brackets. The distribution is out of whack - reinflation will take longer than before.
Totally valid - there’s a few websites that scrape WoW’s player rankings, however I’ll post luduslabs link here as I find they do great research and deserve the recognition
historically 50k in the few few weeks isn’t uncommon at all
you’re comparing week 2 to wods week like 38 when the seasons gone on so long that pvpers have like 5-6 up to date alts and raiders are so many months into farm that they try pvp because there’s nothing else to do
I agree. Me personally, I am sick of the excuses. They knew from past expansions that things like HIGE barriers to entry and rating gates was bad for pvp. They had it working well in Mop and Wod. I don’t know a anyone that thought they needed to “FIX” gearing at that time. Its all for boosters and token sells.
There’s also all the million PvE things that come before that. I’m sure plenty of casual BG or arena players just want to level up and play without going through the storyline, torghast, memories, conduits, soulbinds, covenants, renown, anima, stygia, etc.
I think that they’d benefit from keeping things simple, for both PvE and PvP
During the one arena session I’ve done so far, I mustve ran into 9 - 12 glad players. Hell, I ran into some of you that post here and got my sh*t pushed in at like 1400 rating lol. I’m sure the amount of glads that lower rated players run into will decrease in the next month or so as glads and their alts reach their appropriate ratings
conduits, tier sets, forced dailies for double leggos, obtaining the double leggos, keeping up w/weekly cap for vault (if you don’t do this you’re super behind)
just don’t really feel like going through all of those hoops tbh
Just make solo shuffle rated this season and let people get their gear. Other brackets may see numbers drop temporarily but I think there would be much more people willing to start in 2s and 3s whenever they have whatever they think is good enough.