I’m not a very serious, hardcore or even big pvp player. My most recent experience in pvp is probably new world which had a very attractive world pvp content with also battles over city control (50vs50). I’ve played arenas, mostly 2s. I did some rbgs for Legion appearances and early in SL. But, the most time spent in pvp for me was world content.
World content has gotten way easier understandably over time and for me world pvp kept it alive and dangerous. With the addition of warmode it slowly incentives people to turn it off most of the time which means that if you want to see people in the world you better turn it off. The addition of incentives worked for most of it but then people would simply turn it off after doing their dailies or weeklies.
There is also this problem with community event that it is much easier to find a group in a warmode off realm than in a warmode on realm, which I feel is both a problem with most people turning it off when done but also how those events scale way worse with less people which they shouldn’t. Moreover, those events are prone to pvp which in itself can be problematic. I think it would make more sense for community event even with warmode on to be safe zones from pvp.
Considering all this, I think adding significant incentives to gathering, gold, reputations and adding back conquests events like in BFA would be a great boon to try to revive world pvp. I think also that a better compromise on being able to turn off warmode would be to add a cooldown to turn it back on, so there is a small cost to deactivating it which I think 3 to 5 days cooldown would make sense (or even simply locking it until next reset).
As someone that does mainly pve and that has seen people reacting whenever pvp might be better for something I understand that this might not be best for pve players. But, I consider this a better compromise on warmode going forward and would help revitalize it so it’s not empty and mostly used to get to a different phase to complete achievements/find rares because nobody is in it.
Now unto the more unrealistic part, but something I’ve enjoyed in new world and even guild wars 2 was node/city control massive content. I think this kind of gameplay can add a lot to how pvp is felt through the game. Being able to claim a city or a node like a lumberyard for resources or small bonuses in the area can feel great. I don’t know how this could work in world of warcraft but this would definitely add a lot if this was done in the open world.
This previous idea of controlling cities and nodes would probably require the existence or return of some type of pvp server which there has been also people asking for their return which I think with how the modern game works you could have pvp servers as the main problem that was talked about them was how you couldn’t raid with your guild crossrealm which isn’t a problem in TWW even for mythic raiding.
There is certainly another big problem with massive world content which is how it cause significant issues in term of lag/fps drops which is also probably another problem that is probably even bigger. I remember in BFA how the pvp event in Nazjatar turned out and how unplayable it became. It feels somewhat that maybe 40 man raids shouldn’t be allowed to be sharded together when it comes to world content or that it should be optimized better to allow it.
This was my feedback/opinion on world pvp. I understand that with the new expansion coming out soon it won’t have time to add most if any of this but I felt this topic was still important to me.
I think this provides a solid foundation for more to be developed in the future on top of this.