Please fix R14 grind with Rated BGs

WoW Classic WoW Classic General Discussion
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Almost everyone who heavily participated in PvP during Vanilla and Classic agrees: (1) the R14 grind is garbage, and (2) R13/R14 gear should be incredibly hard to get because it is so powerful early on.

The biggest drawbacks of the original design included: (1) it rewarded raw time invested, not skill, allowing bots to achieve Rank 14 and requiring real people to play the game 10+ hours a day, 7 days a week, (2) it resulted in premades consistently going up against (and usually stomping) PUGs, and (3) it forced players to coordinate to establish a bracket system, which spawned both bracket breakers and incredibly toxic attempts to control breakers.

To fix these drawbacks, Blizzard should implement rated battlegrounds. These battlegrounds should reward players ranking points based on their weekly standing relative to other rated battleground groups on their server. Those who achieve standing 1 twelve weeks in a row should receive enough ranking points to hit R14, so that it takes the best skilled players roughly the same amount of time from launch to achieve R14 as it would in the original honor grind system.

To make these RBGs competitive (and to also discourage gold buying), consumables used during Rated Battlegrounds should not diminish, but players obviously should not be able to use consumes they don’t bring initially (i.e. if I start an RBG with 0 faps, I shouldn’t be given any, but if I start an RBG with 5 faps and use 5, I should still have 5 faps when I zone out).

The benefits of this system would be massive, and include:

  1. Allowing players to achieve R14 while still having a job, provided they are skilled enough to climb a rating ladder

  2. Eliminating the meta of having Premades stomp PUGs

  3. Eliminating the incentive to use botting software to grind Rank 14

  4. Decreased gold buying within the PvP community (which, to be frank, was the meta given that players did not have time to grind 1,000,000 honor a week and farm gold or consumes)

  5. More interesting game play, which will draw larger audiences on sites like Twitch and ultimately promote the game to more people

  6. Increased incentives for PvPers to socialize and form groups, which will lead to more connections and friendships along the way

Most importantly, I believe this change is philosophically consistent with Blizzard’s stated goal of making Season of Mastery “more difficult.” The truth is the R14 grind was easy to complete if you had the time (as demonstrated by bots achieving it). Implementing a rated battleground system will create an actual skill cap on the gear, and reward only the best players with the most competitive groups with the best items. Ultimately, this system will likely lead to fewer people achieving R14 gear, and those who hold the title of “Grand Marshall” or “High Warlord” will have truly deserved it.

Thanks for reading, and good luck in the new season <3

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Turning Classic WoW into an e-sport is such a horrible idea.

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You lost me at consumables that don’t run out, literally ever. Sounds like a horrible idea to be honest. Also you lost me at still having brackets. Standing 1, whatever that is, sounds like a bracket system (it wasn’t every well described).

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Having consumables that don’t diminish is how you make sure Rated Battleground wins aren’t determined by the size of a team’s bank account. Players wouldn’t have endless consumables in world PvP, or in non-rated battlegrounds.

If you’ve watched competitive battleground tournaments in Classic, you’ll know that almost all them were hosted on PTRs for the specific purpose of allowing players to endlessly copy characters over for limitless consumables. Those that weren’t hosted on PTRs were usually hosted on private tournament realms where, again, players had limitless consumables.

And standing 1 in this case would be based on an individual’s/team’s MMR, similar to how arena leaderboards are calculated in TBC.

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Ok consumables may work. I just don’t see the need for standings. Stomping PUGs doesn’t mean you are good. How would you handle AV? You can’t make a full team. How do you calculate MMR in AV? What happens when there aren’t enough teams near your MMR to match to you in BGs that actually work with MMR?

I think the whole bracket/standing idea has to be thrown out entirely. In the R14 grind the brackets are basically meaningless. They don’t represent skill and are not based on MMR.

In the system you propose, I don’t see how you handle all the BGs properly and assign MMR properly.

Classic BGs are not designed for a MMR system. So I think they don’t need one.

I posted a PVP redesign idea on the SoM forum here. It would use tokens to purchase gear directly. Tokens would be awarded each week based on honor and marks from various BGs. Honor and marks reset each week and are capped as well. Tokens are also capped each week. Gear is organized into tiers and you progressively unlock the tiers with tokens and your lifetime token total never resets. If you unlock a tier you can always buy gear from it for enough tokens.

Also the weekly caps are high for honor and marks and adjusted based on classic data so that only a small percentage of people will hit caps each week and be able to get the final tier gear in 12 weeks.

You should go check out the post. It is long. I summarized it here but the details are in it if you are curious.

This system is vastly superior to any kind of bracket system in classic.

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the people who grind high warlord/grand marshal through retail play the game just as much as the people who grind rank 14 in classic. if you think otherwise i think you’re vastly underestimating the time investment people put into these grinds.

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Of course the gear should require a large grind to get. But the R14 grind is a continuous grind you can’t stop at any point or you lose massive progress. The bracket system also causes a lot of toxicity and childlike behavior, as well as players targeting other players so they get better bracket spots. It is really bad.

There is no grind in retail more difficult than the R14 grind. The R14 grind is on another level and it is DUMB, because of the requirement that you can’t stop playing for 12 strait weeks and you have to play insane amounts of hours per day.

It was bad in original WOW and it is still bad.

There are tons of ways to accomplish sorta the same thing (make gear hard to get and cost a lot of time investment) without a lot of the problems of the R14 grind.

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100% agree on stomping PUGs, in a rated BG system players would only be matched against other teams playing rated games, not against PUGs.

The AV question is probably the most difficult to answer. Compared with WSG and AB there will be way fewer groups for rated AVs because of the need for 40 people and also the fact that the game takes longer, on average, in a competitive environment. One possibility is to have rated AVs set at 20 v 20 players, but if Blizzard re-implements earlier forms of AV the NPCs alone may be hard to kill with only 20 people, especially in the first few weeks. At the end of the day, it’s possible that having Rated BGs will significantly reduce AV’s popularity overall, which is a price I’m willing to pay but I understand others would not like.

In terms of MMR, the matching could be similar to TBC, with teams being able to match cross-realm for a larger pool. There would definitely be times when queues for games are longer, especially as you get higher rating, but that is already what happens in TBC arena.

I’ve read the PvP design post you wrote, and believe I threw a like on it at the time. I 100% agree that system would be better than current ranking. But there’s an actual competitive interest in rated battlegrounds in Classic that I think would draw a lot of high level players back, to the benefit of all.

1 Like
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it should just be a static time investment but also the gear should be released slowly or repurposed for only use for pvp not pve.

When you add a competitive element people are gonna tryhard and do all sorts of dumbs*** to get ahead that spoils it for everyone. Look at arenas now have people gaming the system.

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Interesting ideas here. I will say no avid pvper will rank on SoM though, as it is DOA.

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DoA ten char

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I got Hero of the Alliance last season and have been HW/GM multiple seasons. I can tell you for a fact that the Classic PvP grind to r14 is much more demanding of your time than retail GM/HW/Hota. The difference being there is no rating decay and you learn through the seasons so the things you learn last season don’t vanish. You can use what you learned next season and push again. The best way I can describe the time investment in classic is this: 80%+ of your time over the course of 3-4 weeks where as retail is 25% or more of your time over the course of a much larger span of time; it differs depending on how quickly you learn.

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Unfortunately the current honor grind already has a competitive element, with players forced to mindlessly compete against members of their own faction to grind the most honor. This system spawned incredibly toxic behavior (playing a video game more than a full time job, irl death threats against bracket breakers, etc.) that is way worse than what we’ve seen in arenas imo.

Ideally, though, Blizzard would fix some abusive safespots in WSG and AB along with implementing rated BGs, but dealing with cheaters on the backend through reports is also a viable alternative (see, e.g., the large number of players who didn’t get their gladiator title after end of season review).

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One issue with this is that honor is gained from not just BGs. On era people are grinding r14 with silithus sand turn ins.

Another is that if you think bracket breaker toxicity is bad, every team based mmr rated game I’ve ever seen is toxic af. People will be taking the rated bg very seriously and not everyone copes with that pressure in a…nice…way.

Also most mmr rated games nowadays deliberately don’t award performance enhancing rewards. Giving the best players the best gear only widens any skill gap between them and others.

Token based r14 is the way to go if you change it up. Make it expensive as hell but at the end of the day people can grind the tokens at their own pace but still feel they accomplished something awesome.

If they do MMR style gameplay they should just add arenas to SoM and make it so it awards r14 tokens too…then people can choose how they pvp their r14 up.

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How would casual players be able to rank if they don’t have consistent teams or prefer to pvp solo? I could see maybe doing a solo queue that puts you with/against pug groups or something. I feel like this would be far too drastic a change to the game though, and would still alienate some of the player base. There are simpler and/or more effective changes that can be made, like lowering/getting rid of decay and/or increasing the number of slots available per bracket.

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OK one I do completely agree that the rank 14 grain is garbage however Is I think you’re going a little bit in the wrong direction.

See I’m on the other side the page I don’t think rank 14 should be super hard to get I just think it should take some time.

That’s why my idea was an honor cap system however there are some caveats one you make a rank 15 That can be for the competitive people that want to go for that but it only gives a mount entitle that’s your prestige.

On top of that Is we only have the blue set at launch until aq Is that way the gear isn’t super over powered Is on top of that we add in weapons equivalent to ZG.

This way pvp Gear is still good But it’s not better than the stuff in rate thus Is making people only want to PVP and not do the raids at all.

On top of that 20% Decay That’s gone we replace it with an honor cap system On top of that you can only get to rank 10 in 1 setting.

After that You can only get one rank per week Is those that really want to push the hard core though yeah congratulations you can go for that rank 15.

Make the mount really cool Is on top of that make the PDP gear tailored for the spec not just generic Is on top of that buff The gloves and boots

And when they come out the epic chest and helm And then we make a pvp set for naxx.

As far as the honor Go obviously these numbers can be altered however by default I would say.

1-10 10k 11-12 50k 13 200k 14 500k 15 Bracket system.

with these changes This would be a much better way to do things that way Is the hardcore players are just going to get it really quick grats.

They’ll have the blue gear However they’re still incentivised to do raids because that’s where the best gear is.

I don’t see what the problem with this is Is and for thee people that want that per stage well they have a rank 15.

There all the problems are solved