I’ve been seeing a lot of posts about the phase 2 environment, and a lot of dismissive attitude toward players that are not enjoying phase 2’s environment. I wanted to take the time to address some of those things.
1st: You chose a PvP server / Why are you mad that PvP is happening on a PvP server?
PvP was happening on the servers prior to phase 2 without complaint. Phase 2 brought about an extreme increase in the frequency of PvP, which some people quite enjoy, and others find quite frustrating.
Due to how the system runs, the mass ganking by roaming raids doesn’t stop, and there isn’t anywhere to hide from them, as they exist in every zone that players 50+ exist in. If you want to focus on leveling, professions, etc., you need to hope that you can do it in instanced content, and will probably die a half dozen times on your way to it.
It overly highlights faction imbalances, which is something that players also had no control of, and Blizzard actively hid from us by breaking census mods that gave us an idea of how bad things were. My server appeared close to 50:50 when those were working, but now that layering is gone and PvP is turned on, it is clear that alliance are hopelessly outnumbered. Players couldn’t predict this during their leveling process on many servers because of Blizzard’s actions against WoW Census and layering making the problem less visible.
The spy classic addon, as a smaller issue, has made it even harder to stay hidden. I frequently have priests in a raid using it to mind vision me to find my exact location when they did not even have a line of sight on me. I get that players could read the combat log to do this with the /target command, which is why I don’t find this to be a major problem, but it does make the process much easier for them, and increases how often the roaming raid finds you.
There are also many reasons that players end up on PvP realms, such as wanting to play with their friends. These players generally had no idea of how extreme phase 2 would be, and many did not sign up for that when they chose it.
2nd: Just reroll if you don’t like it
Players shouldn’t feel pressured to reroll and erase days of played time because Blizzard decided to release a temporary and extreme world pvp environment. Without pvp->pve transfers available, people are far more likely to unsubscribe than to start over from scratch. The longer this phase lasts, the more damaging it will be to WoW’s subscriber numbers and on faction balance on PvP servers. Players are not going to stick around as perpetual punching bags.
Unsubscribing is really the best option that many players have.
3rd: This is what PvP was like in vanilla
It was, but only for a very short time between the honor system release and battlegrounds (i.e. current phase 2).
After battlegrounds came out, roaming raids were no longer the most efficient means of gaining honor. They still existed from time to time, but they were NOWHERE near as prevalent as they are now. PvP servers were not a death trap to the underdog faction wherever they decided to step foot.
Phase 2 is not normal PvP. It is the only tiny segment of WoW’s history that world PvP was big. Battlegrounds killed it, and Blizzatd’s later attempts to bring it back in specific zones (Silithus) mostly failed to do so.
Most players never experienced this phase of WoW (even those that played most of vanilla). It is unsurprising that many dislike it, and want the phase to pass quickly.
At the end of the day, phase 2 is not normal PvP server behavior, but a temporary and tiny segment of WoW’s history. It is not wrong for players to dislike it, or for them to be demanding that it is short lived or to transfer away from it. This wasn’t even a large portion of vanilla’s life span, so even veteran vanilla pvp server players like myself are turned off by it.
I personally can not wait for battlegrounds to siphon most of these players out of the world gank raids.
Small scale PvP out in the world is sll in good fun.
Being hunted down by a raid and camped for having the audacity to try to do anything not instanced on a server you are outnumbered on? Not fun at all.
Thanks for reading