lol pretty accurate description of what deters a ton of players from rated pvp - and for a lot of them it never goes away, as they never come remotely close to playing enough games for it to fade
wow pvp is just a trivial entertainment to most players, ‘conquering’ stuff like this means literally nothing to them. They are more like 'why would I ever play thousands of matches when I could be doing something 10x more fun"
the current wow pvp system design doesn’t even try to compete for a player’s time, it is out of touch and only targets the players it assumes will be there regardless
slands also not the best for players in bottom half of the ladder, as a ton of the bottom half participation isn’t even there - combined with a meta that is one of the toughest on healers in the history of wow
I’d say this one and then also not being able to find a good team to Q with.
Blizzard wants those time played metrics but what they don’t understand is players including myself aren’t going to look at a huge honor grind and waste time. We’re just not going to bother playing.
Don’t listen to none of that. Do what you feel comfortable with and what you like. You have numerous people who are entitled and very toxic if things don’t go how they want they finger point and scream. Don’t worry about them. Just focus on getting better and having fun. Most of your problems stem from working with Pugs. Many pvper’s don’t do that and could care less about your struggles. With the cross factions coming to, your likely to find more people to play with. As the Horde has more people than Pugs using the LFG tool. The Alliance side will no longer have a disadvantage here.
Your right about the game not being new player friendly. It just isn’t. The unrated BGs and Skirmishes are looked at by the Devs as solely as honor farms for higher rated players. So if you try to practice there, you’re going to get dunked on quite often by people with much superior gear. The devs see no value in leveling the playing field when doing unrated content for practice for Alts or new people. Which is I think is unfortunate. Which means that you are probably going to get matched up more evenly in rated content. But, your also going to get the toxicity as your partner(s) is not likely to enjoy you learning the game at the expense of losing.
It’s simply a matter of getting better the more you play. You just have to jump in and not give up. Might even want to wait for the Solo Shuffle next patch and try that. If someone starts yelling at you there you can just ignore them and be done with them once the match ends.